Quest for the King Read Online Free PDF Page B

long dress of rose-colored silk. It had long, tight sleeves. Her
fingers sparkled with jeweled rings, while her feet found themselves
inside boots of the softest dark green leather. She stared at herself for the longest time. Then she said, "Wow! I really did it properly!" There
was a strong smell of lavender, and she could not tell whether it came
from the dress or from herself.

    She checked her surroundings cautiously. She was sitting in a forest
glade on a summer morning, with diamond dew still sparkling on the
grass. The sun was behind her, so that as she moved her head she
was aware of pale greens, yellows and an occasional ruby red from
the fractured reflection within the dewdrops.
    Twenty yards away, near a tall tower of pinkish stone, two men and
a young woman sat around a small wooden table. They were too busy
talking to have noticed her arrival, and in any case she was mostly
concealed from them by a low bush. She crouched behind it, peering
at them and straining to hear what they might be saying.
    Who were they? Would they know where Uncle John was? It
seemed unlikely-but one never could tell. She decided to make no
move until she could size them up. She could hear the sound of their
voices clearly, and sometimes the actual words when the breeze died
down. At one point they dropped their voices, leaning toward one
another. One of the men and the woman seemed to be disagreeing
with the third, an unusually big man. Then, after a while, they leaned
back in their chairs again, smiling at one another.
    On the table lay a simple repast of fresh fruits and oat cakes, along
with a silver flagon of wine. Mary's mouth watered. She had not eaten
since lunch-and that seemed hours ago. A little distance beyond the
table a magnificent war horse and two smaller palfreys were munching grass. All were equipped like those horses of bygone days that
carried wealthy nobility.
    One of the men was obviously very tall, even though he was sitting.
He was dressed simply, wearing a sleeveless tunic of purest white with
a leather belt. His legs were bare, apart from the crisscrossed leather
thongs that held his sandals in place. He might have been any age
between twenty and two hundred, yet there was a vitality about him
which seemed to dominate the forest glade. A sword lay on the bench
beside him. "I guess the biggest horse is for him," Mary thought.

    "You could not have chosen a better place, Risano!" the shorter
man addressed the giant.
    The short man picked up another sword and held it in front of
him-a sword with a jeweled hilt and a jeweled scabbard. He examined it carefully and then nodded, as if satisfied. Mary's pulse quickened, wondering if she recognized it, even from twenty yards. Surely
it couldn't be! Yet the hilt, to say nothing of the scabbard, looked
awfully like it! How the stones sparkled in the sunlight!
    A strange nostalgia softened her heart as she remembered how
only months before she had carried the sword triumphantly into the
kitchen of the house on Grosvenor, and of Wesley's awed whisper,
"It's the Sword of Geburah!"
    The man who was looking at it was young, perhaps twenty-five. He
wore his red velvet cape with a dashing air, and was generally a model
of medieval fashion. His hair was long and his beard was neatly
trimmed. He wore a blue satin tunic that (she later discovered)
matched the deep blue of his eyes. Its wide sleeves were gathered
tightly at the wrist, so that the sleeves ballooned elegantly around his
lower arms. The light was so clear that she could even see beneath
the table that he wore blue pointed shoes of soft leather, and wrinkled
plum-colored stockings above them.
    "Bit of a popinjay," Mary decided. "I wonder what his name is."
    Risano smiled, and his smile embraced both of his companions. "I
rejoice that the tower pleases you, my Lord and Lady Nasa of the
Chereb, but this place was not my choice. The Emperor ordered me
to prepare it for you."
    "So