The Eyes of the Dragon (5 page)

Flagg thought he might.

Hunting, after all, was the thing Roland did best.

So Sasha escaped—that time—protected by Flagg's fear and her husband's love. And in the meantime, Flagg still had the King's ear in most matters.

Concerning the dollhouse, however—in that matter, you could say Sasha won, even though Flagg had by then succeeded in ridding himself of her.

N
ot long after Flagg made his disparaging comments about dollhouses and royal sissies, Roland crept into the dead Queen's morning room unseen and watched his son at play. The King stood just inside the door, his brow deeply furrowed. He was thinking much harder than he was used to thinking, and that meant the boulders were rolling around in his head and his nose was stuffy.

He saw that Peter was using the dollhouse to tell himself stories, to make believe, and that the stories he made up were not sissy stories at all. They were stories of blood and thunder and armies and dragons. They were, in other words, stories after the King's own heart. He discovered in himself a wistful desire to join his son, to help him make up even better tales in which the dollhouse and all its fascinating contents and its make-believe family figured. Most of all, he saw that Peter was using Sasha's dollhouse to keep Sasha alive in his heart, and Roland approved of this most of all, because he missed his wife sorely. Sometimes he was so lonely he almost cried. Kings, of course, do not cry . . . and if, on one or two occasions after Sasha had died, he awoke with the case on his pillow damp, what of that?

The King left the room as silently as he had come. Peter never saw him. Roland lay awake most of that night, thinking deeply about what he had seen, and although it was hard for him to endure Flagg's disapproval, he saw him the next morning in a private audience, before his resolve could weaken, and told him he had thought the matter over carefully and decided Peter should be allowed to play with the dollhouse as long as he wished. He said he believed it was doing the boy no harm.

With that out, he settled back uneasily to wait for Flagg's rebuttal. But no rebuttal came. Flagg only raised his eyebrows—this Roland barely saw in the deep shadow of the hood Flagg always wore—and said, “Your will, Sire, is the will of the Kingdom.”

Roland knew from the tone that Flagg thought his decision was a bad one, but the tone also told him Flagg would not dispute it further. He was deeply relieved to be let off so cheaply. Later that day, when Flagg suggested that the farmers of the Eastern Barony could stand higher taxes in spite of the drought that had killed most of their crops the year before, Roland agreed eagerly.

In truth, having the old fool (for so Flagg thought Roland to be in his deeper thoughts) go against his wishes in the matter of the dollhouse seemed a very minor thing to the magician. The rise in taxes for the Eastern Barony was the important thing. And Flagg had a deeper secret, one which pleased him well. In the end he had succeeded in murdering Sasha, after all.

I
n those days, when a Queen or any woman of royal birth was taken to bed to deliver a child, a midwife was called in. The doctors were all men, and no man was allowed to be with a woman when she was about to have a child. The midwife who delivered Peter was Anna Crookbrows, of the Third South'ard Alley. She was called again when Sasha's time with Thomas came around. Anna was past fifty at the time when Sasha's second labor began, and a widow. She had one son of her own, and in his twentieth year he contracted the Shaking Disease, which always killed its victims in terrible pain after some years of suffering.

She loved this boy very much, and at last, after every other idea had proved useless, she went to Flagg. This had been ten years before, neither prince yet born and Roland himself still a royal bachelor. He received her in his dank basement rooms, which were near the dungeons—during their interview the uneasy woman could sometimes hear the lost screams of those who had been locked away from the sun's light for years and years. And, she thought with a shudder, if the dungeons were near, then the torture chambers must also be near. Nor did Flagg's apartment itself make her feel any easier. Strange designs were drawn on the floor in many colors of chalk. When she blinked, the designs seemed to change. In a cage hung from a long black manacle, a two-headed parrot cawed and sometimes talked to itself, one head speaking, the other head answering. Musty books frowned down at her. Spiders spun in dark corners. From the laboratory came a mixture of strange chemical smells. Yet she stammered out her story somehow and then waited in an agony of suspense.

“I can cure your son,” he said finally.

Anna Crookbrows's ugly face was transformed into something near beauty by her joy. “My Lord!” she gasped, and could think of no more, so she said it again. “Oh, my Lord!”

But in the shadow of his hood, Flagg's white face remained distant and brooding, and she felt afraid again.

“What would you pay for such a miracle?” he asked.

“Anything,” she gasped, and meant it. “Oh my Lord Flagg, anything!”

“I ask for one favor,” he said. “Will you give it?”

“Gladly!”

“I don't know what it is yet, but when the time comes, I shall.”

She had fallen on her knees before him, and now he bent toward her. His hood fell back, and his face was terrible indeed. It was the white face of a corpse with black holes for eyes.

“And if you refuse what I ask, woman . . .”

“I shall not refuse! Oh my Lord, I shall not! I shall not! I swear it on my dear husband's name!”

“Then it is well. Bring your son to me tomorrow night, after dark.”

She led the poor boy in the next night. He trembled and shook, his head nodded foolishly, his eyes rolled. There was a slick of drool on his chin. Flagg gave her a dark, plum-colored potion in a beaker. “Have him drink this,” he said. “It will blister his mouth, but have him drink every drop. Then get the fool out of my sight.”

She murmured to him. The boy's shaking increased for a moment as he tried to nod his head. He drank all of the liquid and then doubled over, screaming.

“Get him out,” Flagg said.

“Yes, get him out!”
one of the parrot's two heads cried.

“
Get him out, no screaming allowed here!
” the other head screamed.

She got him home, sure that Flagg had murdered him. But the next day the Shaking Disease had left her son completely, and he was well.

Years passed. When Sasha's labor with Thomas began, Flagg called for her and whispered in her ear. They were alone in his deep rooms, but even so, it was better that such a dread command be whispered.

Anna Crookbrows's face went deadly white, but she remembered Flagg's words:
If you refuse .
. .

And would not the King have two children? She had only one. And if the King wanted to remarry and have even more, let him. In Delain, women were plentiful.

So she went to Sasha, and spoke encouragingly, and at a critical moment a little knife glittered in her hand. No one saw the one small cut she made. A moment later, Anna cried: “Push, my Queen! Push, for the baby comes!”

Sasha pushed. Thomas came from her as effortlessly as a boy zipping down a slide. But Sasha's lifeblood gushed out upon the sheet. Ten minutes after Thomas came into the world, his mother was dead.

And so Flagg was not concerned about the piffling matter of the dollhouse. What mattered was that Roland was growing old, there was no meddling Queen to stand in his way, and now he had not one son to choose from but two. Peter was, of course, the elder, but that did not really matter. Peter could be gotten out of the way if time should prove him unsuitable for Flagg's purposes. He was only a child, and could not defend himself.

I have told you that Roland never thought longer or harder on any matter during his entire reign than he did on this one question—whether or not Peter should be allowed access to Sasha's dollhouse, cunningly crafted by the great Ellender. I have told you that the result of his thought was a decision that ran against Flagg's wishes. I have
also
told you that Flagg considered this of little importance.

Was it? That you must decide for yourself, after you have heard me to the end.

N
ow let many long years pass, all in a twinkling—one of the great things about tales is how fast time may pass when not much of note is happening. Real life is never that way, and it is probably a good thing. Time only passes faster in histories, and what is a history except a grand sort of tale where passing centuries are substituted for passing years?

During those years, Flagg watched both boys carefully—he watched them over the aging King's shoulder as they grew up, calculating which should be King when Roland was no more. It did not take him long to decide it should be Thomas, the younger. By the time Peter was seven, he knew he did not like the boy. When Peter was nine, Flagg made a strange and unpleasant discovery: he feared Peter, as well.

The boy had grown up strong and straight and handsome. His hair was dark, his eyes a dark blue that is common to people of the Western Barony. Sometimes, when Peter looked up quickly, his head cocked a certain way, he resembled his father. Otherwise, he was Sasha's son almost entirely in his looks and ways. Unlike his short father with his bowlegged walk and his clumsy way of moving (Roland was graceful only when he was horsed), Peter was tall and lithe. He enjoyed the hunt and hunted well, but it was not his life. He also enjoyed his lessons—geography and history were his particular favorites.

His father was puzzled and often impatient with jokes; the point of most had to be explained to him, and that took away all the fun. What Roland liked was when the jesters pretended to slip on banana peels, or knocked their heads together, or when they staged pie fights in the Great Hall. Such things were about as far as Roland's idea of good fun extended. Peter's wit was much quicker and more subtle, as Sasha's had been, and his rollicking, boyish laughter often filled the palace, making the servants smile at each other approvingly.

While many boys in Peter's position would have become too conscious of their own grand place in the scheme of things to play with anyone not of their own class, Peter became best friends with a boy named Ben Staad when both children were eight. Ben's family was not royalty, and though Andrew Staad, Ben's father, had some faint claim to the High Blood of the kingdom on his mother's side, they could not even rightly be called nobility. “Squire” was probably the kindest term one could have applied to Andy Staad, and “squire's son” to his boy. Even so, the once-prosperous Staad family had fallen upon hard times, and while there could have been queerer choices for a prince's best friend, there couldn't have been many.

They met at the annual Farmers' Lawn Party when Peter was eight. The Lawn Party was a yearly ritual most Kings and Queens viewed as tiresome at best; they were apt to put in a token appearance, drink the quick traditional toast, and then be away after bidding the farmers enjoy themselves and thanking them for another fruitful year (this was also part of the ritual, even if the crops had been poor). If Roland had been that sort of King, Peter and Ben would never had gotten the chance to know each other. But, as you might have guessed, Roland
loved
the Farmers' Lawn Party, looked forward to it each year, and usually stayed until the very end (and more than once was carried away drunk and snoring loudly).

As it happened, Peter and Ben were paired in the three-legged sack-race, and they won it . . . although it ended up being much closer than at first it seemed it would be. Leading by almost six lengths, they took a bad spill and Peter's arm was cut.

“I'm sorry, my prince!” Ben cried. His face had gone pale, and he may have been visualizing the dungeons (and I know his mother and father, watching anxiously from the sidelines, were; if it weren't for bad luck, Andy Staad was fond of growling, the Staads would have no luck at all); more likely he was just sorry for the hurt he fancied he had caused, or was amazed to see that the blood of the future King was as red as his own.

“Don't be a fool,” Peter said impatiently. “It was my fault, not yours. I was clumsy. Hurry and get up. They're catching us.”

The two boys, made into a single clumsy three-legged beast by the sack into which Peter's left leg and Ben's right one had been tightly tied, managed to get up and lurch on. Both had been badly winded by the fall, however, and their long lead had been cut to almost nothing. Approaching the finish line, where crowds of farmers (not to mention Roland, standing among them without the slightest feeling of awkwardness, or of being somewhere he shouldn't) were cheering deliriously, two huge, sweating farm boys began to close in. That they would overtake Peter and Ben in the last ten yards of the race seemed almost inevitable.

“
Faster
,
Peter!”
Roland bellowed, swinging a huge mug of mead with such enthusiasm that he poured most of it onto his own head. In his excitement he never noticed. “
Jackrabbit, son! Be a jackrabbit! Those clod-busters are almost up your butt and over your back!
”

Ben's mother began to moan, cursing the fate that had caused her son to be paired up with the prince.

“If they lose, he'll have our Ben thrown into the deepest dungeon in the castle,” she moaned.

“Hush, woman,” Andy said. “He'd not. He's a good King.” He believed it, but he was still afraid. Staad luck was, after all, Staad luck.

Ben, meanwhile, had begun to giggle. He couldn't believe he was doing it, but he was. “Be a jackrabbit, did he say?”