But Roland was away again. He seized his mug, drained it, then whirled with brew dripping from his chops. He hurled the silver mug across the room, where it struck a stone angle of the fireplace hard enough to leave a dent in the metal.
Now his father came down the room toward him, throwing another chair out of the way, then kicking a table aside with his bare foot. His eyes flicked up . . . and met Thomas's own. Yes--they met his own eyes. Thomas felt their gazes lock, and a gray, swooning terror filled him like frozen breath.
His father stalked toward him, his yellowed teeth bared, his remaining hair hanging over his ears, beer dripping from his chin and the corners of his mouth.
"You," Roland whispered in a low, terrible voice. "Why do you stare at me? What do you hope to see?"
Thomas could not move. Found out, his mind gibbered, found out, by all the gods that ever were or shall be, I am found out and I will surely be exiled!
His father stood there, his eyes fixed on the mounted dragon's head. In his guilt, Thomas was sure his father had spoken to him, but this was not so--Roland had only spoken to Niner as he had spoken to the other heads. Yet if Thomas could see out of the tinted glass eyeballs, then his father could see in, at least to some degree. If Thomas hadn't been utterly paralyzed with fear, he would have run away in a panic--even if he had summoned enough presence of mind to hold his ground, his eyes surely would have moved. And if Roland had seen the eyes of the dragon move, what might he have thought? That the dragon was coming to life again? Perhaps. In his drunken state, I even think that likely. If Thomas had so much as blinked his eyes on that occasion, Flagg would have needed no poison later. The King, old and frail in spite of the temporary potency the drink had given him, would almost surely have died of fright.
Roland suddenly leaped forward.
"WHY DO YOU STARE AT ME? he shrieked, and in his drunkenness it was Niner, Delain's last dragon, that he shrieked at, but of course, Thomas did not know that. "WHY DO YOU STARE AT ME SO? I'VE DONE THE BEST I COULD, ALWAYS THE BEST I COULD! DID I ASK FOR THIS? DID I ASK FOR IT? ANSWER ME, DAMN YOU! I DID THE BEST I COULD AND LOOK AT ME NOW! LOOK AT ME NOW!"
He pulled his robe wide open, showing his naked body, its gray skin blotchily flushed with drink.
"LOOK AT ME NOW!" he shrieked again, and looked down at himself, weeping.
Thomas could take no more. He slammed shut the panels behind the dragon's glass eyes at the same moment his father took his eyes from Niner to look down at his own wasted body. Thomas crashed and blundered down the black corridor and slammed full force into the closed door, braining himself and falling in a heap. He was up in a moment, unaware of the blood pouring down his face from a cut in his forehead, pounding at the secret spring until the door popped open. He rushed out into the corridor, not even thinking to check if anyone was there to see him. All he could see was his father's glaring, bloodshot eyes, all he could hear was his father screaming Why do you stare at me?
He had no way of knowing that his father had already fallen into a sleep of deep drunkenness. When Roland woke up the next morning, he was still on the floor, and the first thing he did, in spite of his fiercely aching head and his throbbing, bruised body (Roland was far too old for such strenuous revels), was to look at the dragon's head. He rarely dreamed when he was drunk--there was only an interval of sodden darkness. But last night a terrible dream had come to him: the glass eyes of the dragon's head had moved and Niner came to life. The worm breathed its deadly breath down on him, and although he could not see that fire, he could feel it deep down inside him, hot and getting hotter.
With this dream still lingering fresh in his mind, he dreaded what he might see when he looked up. But all was as it had been for years now. Niner snarled his fearsome snarl, his forked tongue lolled between teeth almost as long as fence pickets, his green-gold eyes stared blankly across the room. Ceremoniously crossed above this fabulous trophy were Roland's great bow and the arrow Foe-Hammer, its tip and shaft still black with dragon blood. He mentioned this terrible dream once to Flagg, who only nodded and looked more thoughtful than usual. Then Roland simply forgot it.
Forgetting was not so easy for Thomas.
He was haunted for weeks by nightmares. In them, his father stared at him and shrieked, "See what you've done to me!" and threw his robe open to display his nakedness--old puckered scars, drooping belly, sagging muscles--as if to say this too had all been Thomas's fault, that if he hadn't spied . . .
"Why do you never want to see Father anymore?" Peter asked him one day. "He thinks you're mad at him."
"That I'm mad at him?" Thomas was astounded.
"That's what he said at tea today," Peter said. He looked at his brother closely, observing the dark circles under Thomas's eyes, the pallor of Thomas's cheeks and forehead. "Tom, what's wrong?"
"Maybe nothing," Thomas said slowly.
The next day he took tea with his father and brother. Going took all of his courage, but Thomas did have courage, and he sometimes found it--usually when his back was to the wall. His father gave him a kiss and asked him if anything was wrong. Thomas muttered that he hadn't been feeling well, but now he felt fine. His father nodded, gave him a rough hug, then went back to his usual behavior--which consisted mostly of ignoring Thomas in favor of Peter. For once, Thomas welcomed this--he didn't want his father looking at him any more than necessary, at least for a while. That night, lying awake for a long time in bed and listening to the wind moan outside, he came to the conclusion that he had had a very close shave . . . but that he had somehow gotten away with it.
But never again, he thought. In the weeks after, the nightmares came less and less frequently. Finally they stopped altogether.
Still, the castle's head groom, Yosef, was right about one thing: boys are sometimes better at pledging vows than they are at keeping them, and Thomas's desire to spy on his father at last grew stronger than both his fears and his good intentions. And that is how it happened that on the night Flagg came to Roland with the poisoned wine, Thomas was watching.
29
When Thomas got there and slid aside the two little panels, his father and his brother were just finishing their nightly glass of wine together. Peter was now almost seventeen, tall and handsome. The two of them sat by the fire, drinking and talking like old friends, and Thomas felt the old hate fill his heart with acid. After some little time, Peter arose and took courteous leave of his father.
"You leave earlier and earlier these nights," Roland remarked.
Peter made some demurral.
Roland smiled. It was a sweet, sad smile, mostly toothless. "I hear," said he, "that she is lovely."
Peter looked flustered, which was uncommon with him. He stammered, which was even less common.
"Go," Roland interrupted. "Go. Be gentle with her, and be kind . . . but be hot, if there is ardor in you. Later years are cold years, Peter. Be hot while your years are green, and fuel is plentiful, and the fire may burn high."
Peter smiled. "You speak as if you are very old, Father, but you still look strong and hale to me."
Roland embraced Peter. "I love you," he said.
Peter smiled with no awkwardness or embarrassment. "I love you, too, Dad," he said, and in his lonely darkness (spying is always lonely work, and the spyer almost always does it in the dark), Thomas pulled a horrible face.
Peter left, and for an hour or more not much happened. Roland sat morosely by the fire, drinking glass after glass of beer. He did not roar or bellow or talk to the heads on the walls; there was no destruction of furniture. Thomas had almost made up his mind to leave, when there was a double rap at the door.
Roland had been looking into the fire, almost hypnotized by the flicker-play of the flames. Now he roused himself and called, "Who comes?"
Thomas heard no response, but his father rose and went to the door as if he had. He opened it, and at first Thomas thought his father's habit of talking to the heads on the walls had taken a queer new turn--that his father
was now inventing invisible human company to relieve his boredom.
"Strange to see you here at this hour," Roland said, apparently walking back toward the fire in the company of no one at all. "I thought you were always at your spells and conjurations after dark."
Thomas blinked, rubbed his eyes, and saw that someone was there after all. For a moment he couldn't rightly make out who . . . and then he wondered how he could possibly have thought his father was alone when Flagg was right there beside him. Flagg was carrying two glasses of wine on a silver tray.
"Wives' tale, m'Lord--magicians conjure early as well as late. But of course we have our darksome image to keep up."
Roland's sense of humor was always improved by beer--so much so that he would often laugh at things that weren't funny in the least. At this remark he threw back his head and bellowed as if it was the greatest joke he had ever heard. Flagg smiled thinly.
When Roland's fit of laughing had passed, he said: "What's this? Wine?"
"Your son is barely more than a boy, but his deference toward his father and his honor of his King have shamed me, a grown man," Flagg said. "I brought you a glass of wine, my King, to show you that I, too, love you."
He passed it to Roland, who looked absurdly touched.
Don't drink it, Father! Thomas thought suddenly--his mind was full of an alarm he couldn't understand. Roland's head came up suddenly and tilted, almost as if he had heard.
"He's a good boy, my Peter," Roland said.
"Indeed," Flagg replied. "Everyone in the Kingdom says so."
"Do they?" Roland asked, looking pleased. "Do they, indeed?"
"Yes--so they do. Shall we toast him?" Flagg raised his glass.
No, Father! Thomas shouted in his mind again, but if his father had heard his first thought, he didn't hear this one. His face shone with love for Thomas's elder brother.
"To Peter, then!" Roland raised the glass of poisoned wine high.
"To Peter!" Flagg agreed, smiling. "To the King!"
Thomas cringed in the dark. Flagg's making two different toasts I don't know what he means, but . . . Father!
This time it was Flagg who turned his darkly considering gaze toward the dragon's head for a moment, as if he had heard the thought. Thomas froze, and in a moment Flagg's gaze turned back to Roland.
They clinked glasses and drank. As his father quaffed the glass of wine, Thomas felt a splinter of ice push its way into his heart.
Flagg made a half-turn in his chair and threw his glass into the fire. "Peter!"
"Peter!" Roland echoed, and threw his own. It smashed against the sooty brickwork at the back of the fireplace and fell into the flames, which for a moment seemed to flare an ugly green.
Roland raised the back of his hand to his mouth for a moment, as if to stifle a belch. "Did you spice it?" he asked. "It tasted . . . almost mulled."
"No, my Lord," Flagg said gravely, but Thomas thought he sensed a smile behind the mask of the magician's gravity, and that splinter of ice slipped further into his heart. Suddenly he wanted no more of spying, not ever. He closed the peepholes and crept back to his room. He felt first hot, then cold, then hot again. By morning he had a fever. Before he was well again, his father was dead, his brother imprisoned in the room at the top of the Needle, and he was a boy King at the age of barely twelve--Thomas the Light-Bringer, he was dubbed at the coronation ceremonies. And who was his closest advisor?
You guess.
30
When Flagg left Roland (the old man was feeling sprightlier than ever by then, a sure sign the Dragon Sand was at work in him), he went back to his dark basement rooms. He got out the tweezers and the packet containing the remaining few grains of sand and put them on his huge old desk. Then he turned his hourglass over and resumed reading.
Outside, the wind screamed and gobbled--old wives cringed in their beds and slept poorly and told their husbands that Rhiannon, the Dark Witch of the Coos, was riding her hateful broom this night, and wicked work was afoot. The husbands grunted, turned over, told their wives to go back to sleep and leave them alone. They were dull fellows for the most part; when an eye is wanted to see straws flying in the wind, give me an old wife any day.
Once a spider skittered halfway across Flagg's book, touched a spell so terrible not even the magician dared use it, and turned instantly to stone.
Flagg grinned.
When the hourglass was empty, he turned it over again. And again. And again. He turned it over eight times in all, and when the eighth hour's worth of sand was nearly gone, he set about finishing his work. He kept a large number of animals in a dim room down the hall from his study, and he went there first. The little creatures skittered and cringed when Flagg came near. He did not blame them.
In the far corner was a wicker cage containing half a dozen brown mice--such mice were everywhere in the castle, and that was important. Down here there were also huge rats, but it was not a rat Flagg wanted tonight. The Royal Rat upstairs had been poisoned; a simple mouse would be enough to make sure the crime came home to the Royal Ratling. If all went well, Peter would soon be as tightly locked up as these mice.
Flagg reached into the cage and removed one. It trembled wildly in his cupped hand. He could feel the rapid thrumming of its heart, and he knew that if he simply held it, it would soon die of fright.
Flagg pointed the little finger of his left hand at the mouse. The fingernail glowed faintly blue for a moment.
"Sleep," the magician commanded, and the mouse fell on its side and went to sleep on his open palm.
Flagg took it back into his study and laid it on his desk, where the obsidian paperweight had rested earlier. Now he went into his larder and drew a little mead from an oaken barrel into a saucer. He sweetened it with honey. He put it on his desk, then went out into the corridor and breathed deeply at the window again.
Holding his breath, he came back in and used the tweezers to pour all but the last three or four grains of Dragon Sand into the honey-sweetened mead. Then he opened another drawer of his desk and removed a fresh packet, which was empty. Then, reaching all the way to the back of this drawer, he brought out a very special box.
The fresh packet was bewitched, but its magic was not very strong. It would hold the Dragon Sand safely only for a short while. Then it would begin to work on the paper. It would not set it alight, not inside the box; there would not be air enough for that. But it would smoke and smolder, and that would be enough. That would be fine.
Flagg's chest was thudding for air, but he still spared a moment to look at this box and congratulate himself. He had stolen it ten years ago. If you had asked him at the time why he took it, he would have known no more than he knew why he had shown Thomas the secret passage that ended behind the dragon's head--that instinct for mischief had told him to take it and that he would find a use for it, so he had. After all those years in his desk, that useful time had come.
PETER was engraved across the top of the box.
Sasha had given it to her boy; he had left it for a moment on a table in a hallway when he had to run down the hallway after something or other; Flagg came along, saw it, and popped it into his pocket. Peter had been grief-stricken, of course, and when a prince is upset--even a prince who is only six years old--people take notice. There had been a search, but the box had never been found.
Using the tweezers, Flagg carefully poured the last few grains of Dragon Sand from the original packet, which had been wholly enchanted, into the packet which had been only incompletely enchanted. Then he went back to the window in the corridor to draw fresh breath. He did not breathe again until the fresh packet had been laid in the antique wooden box, the tweezers laid in there beside it, the top of the box slowly closed, and the original packet disposed of in the sewer.
Flagg was hurrying now, but he felt secure enough. Mouse, sleeping; box, closed; incriminating evidence safely latched inside. It was very well.
Pointing the little finger of his left hand at the mouse lyin
g stretched out on his desk like a fur rug for pixies, Flagg commanded: "Wake."
The mouse's feet twitched. Its eyes opened. Its head came up.
Smiling, Flagg wiggled his little finger in a circle and said: "Run."
The mouse ran in circles.
Flagg wiggled his finger up and down.
"Jump."
The mouse began to jump on its hind legs like a dog in a carnival, its eyes rolling wildly.
"Now drink," Flagg said, and pointed his little finger at the dish holding the honey-sweetened mead.
Outside, the wind gusted to a roar. On the far side of the city, a bitch gave birth to a litter of two-headed pups.
The mouse drank.
"Now," said Flagg, when the mouse had drunk enough of the poison to serve his purpose, "sleep again." And the mouse did.
Flagg hurried to Peter's rooms. The box was in one of his many pockets--magicians have many, many pockets--and the sleeping mouse was in another. He passed several servants and a laughing gaggle of drunken courtiers, but none saw him. He was still dim.
Peter's rooms were locked, but that was no problem for one of Flagg's talents. Three passes with his hands and the door was open. The young prince's rooms were empty, of course; the boy was still with his lady friend. Flagg didn't know as much about Peter as he did about Thomas, but he knew enough--he knew, for instance, where Peter kept the few treasures he thought worth hiding away.
Flagg went directly to the bookcase and pulled out three or four boring textbooks. He pushed at a wooden edging and heard a spring click back. He then slid a panel aside, revealing a recess in the back of the case. It was not even locked. In the recess was a silk hair-ribbon his lady had given him, a packet of letters she had written him, a few letters from him to her which burned so brightly he did not dare to send them, and a little locket with his mother's picture inside it.