Read Guardians of the West for Free Online

talkative boy, but he felt that his position in this affair needed a bit of explanation. "Well," he began, "I didn't really think of rolling off -but I don't think I would have, even if I had thought of it."
    "I'm sure there's an explanation for that."
    He looked at her earnestly. "Everything had gone so splendidly up until then that -well, it just wouldn't have seemed right to get off just because a few things started to go wrong."
    There was a long pause. "I see," she said at last, her expression grave. "Then it was in the nature of a moral decision -this riding the sled all the way into the stream?"
    "I suppose you might say that, yes."
    She looked at him steadily for a moment and then slowly sank her face into her hands. "I'm not entirely certain that I have the strength to go through all of this again," she said in a tragic voice.
    "Through what?" he asked, slightly alarmed.
    "Raising Garion was almost more than I could bear," she replied, "but not even he could have come up with a more illogical reason for doing something." Then she looked at him, laughed fondly, and put her arms. about him. "Oh, Errand," she said, pulling him tightly to her, and everything was all right again.

CHAPTER TWO
    Belgarath the Sorcerer was a man with many flaws in his character. He had never been fond of physical labor and he was perhaps a bit too fond of dark brown ale. He was occasionally careless about the truth and had a certain grand indifference to some of the finer points of property ownership. The company of ladies of questionable reputation did not particularly offend his sensibilities, and his choice of language very frequently left much to be desired.
    Polgara the Sorceress was a woman of almost inhuman determination and she had spent several thousand years trying to reform her vagrant father, but without much notable success. She persevered, however, in the face of overwhelming odds. Down through the centuries she had fought a valiant rearguard action against his bad habits. She had regretfully surrendered on the points of indolence and shabbiness. She grudgingly gave ground on swearing and lying.
    She remained adamant, however, even despite repeated defeats, on the points of drunkenness, thievery, and wenching.
    She felt for some peculiar reason that it was her duty to fight on those issues to the very death. Since Belgarath put off his return to his tower in the Vale of Aldur until the following spring, Errand was able to witness at close hand those endless and unbelievably involuted skirmishes between father and daughter with which they filled the periodic quiet spaces in their lives. Polgara's comments about the lazy old man's lounging about in her kitchen, soaking up the heat from her fireplace and the well-chilled ale from her stores with almost equal facility, were pointed, and Belgarath's smooth evasions revealed centuries of highly polished skill. Errand, however, saw past those waspish remarks and blandly flippant replies. The bonds between Belgarath and his daughter were so profound that they went far beyond what others might conceivably understand, and so, over the endless years, they found it necessary to conceal their boundless love for each other behind this endless façade of contention. This is not to say that Polgara might not have preferred a more upstanding father, but she was not quite as disappointed in him as her observations sometimes indicated.
    They both knew why Belgarath sat out the winter in Poledra's cottage with his daughter and her husband. Though not one word of the matter had ever passed between them, they knew that the memories the old man had of this house needed to be changed -not erased certainly, for no power on earth could erase Belgarath's memories of his wife, but rather they needed to be altered slightly so that this thatched cottage might also remind the old man of happy hours spent here, as well as that bleak and terrible day when he had returned to find that his beloved Poledra had