The Eyes of the Dragon(10)

"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 dun-geon 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?"

Peter also began to giggle. His legs ached terribly, blood was trickling down his right arm, and sweat was flooding his face, which was starting to turn an interesting plum color, but he was also unable to stop. "Yes, that's what he said."

"Then let's hop!"

They didn't look much like jackrabbits as they crossed the finish line; they looked like a pair of strange crippled crows. It was really a miracle they didn't fall, but somehow they didn't. They managed three ungainly leaps. The third one took them across the finish line, where they collapsed, howling with laughter.

"Jackrabbit!" Ben yelled, pointing at Peter.

"Jackrabbit yourself!" Peter yelled, pointing back.

They slung their arms about each other, still laughing, and were carried on the shoulders of many strong farmers (Andrew Staad was one of them, and bearing the combined weight of his son and the prince was something he never forgot) to where Roland slipped blue ribbands over their necks. Then he kissed each of them roughly on the cheek and poured the remaining contents of his mug over their heads, to the wild cheers and huzzahs of the farmers. Never, even in the memory of the oldest gaffer there that day, had such an extraordinary race been run.

The two boys spent the rest of the day together and, it soon appeared, would be content to spend the rest of their lives together. Because even a boy of eight has certain duties (and if he is to be the King someday he has even more), the two of them could not be together all they wanted to be, but when they could be, they were.

Some sniffed at the friendship, and said it wasn't right for the King in waiting to be friends with a boy who was little better than a common barony clod-buster. Most, however, looked upon it with approval; it was said more than once over deep cups in the meadhouses of Delain that Peter had gotten the best of both worlds-his mother's brains and his father's love of the common folk.

There was apparently no meanness in Peter. He never went through a period when he pulled the wings off flies or singed dogs' tails to see them run. In fact, he intervened in the matter of a horse which was to be destroyed by Yosef, the King's head groom... and it was when this tale made its way to Flagg that the magician began to fear the King's oldest son, and to think perhaps he did not have as long to put the boy out of the way as he had once thought. For in the affair of the horse with the broken leg, Peter had displayed courage and a depth of resolve which Flagg did not like at all.

14

Peter was passing through the stableyard when he saw a horse tethered to the hitching rail just outside the main barn. The horse was holding one of its rear legs off the ground. As Peter watched, Yosef spat on his hands and picked up a heavy maul. What he meant to do was obvious. Peter was both frightened and appalled. He rushed over.

"Who told you to kill this horse?" he asked.

Yosef, a hardy and robust sixty, was a palace fixture. He was not apt to brook the interference of a snot-nosed brat easily, prince or no. He fixed Peter with a thunderous, heavy look that was meant to wilt the boy. Peter, then just nine, reddened, but did not wilt. He seemed to see a look in the horse's mild brown eyes which said, You're my only hope, whoever you are. Do what you can, please.

"My father, and his father before him, and his father before him," Yosef said, seeing now that he was going to have to say something, like it or not. "That's who told me to kill it. A horse with a broken leg is no good to any living thing, least of all to itself." He raised the maul a little. "You see this hammer as a murder weapon, but when you're older, you'll see it for what it really is in cases such as these... a mercy. Now stand back, so you don't get splashed."

He raised the maul in both hands.

"Put it down," Peter said.

Yosef was thunderstruck. He had never been interfered with in such a way.

"Here! Here! What are you a-saying?"

"You heard me. I said put that hammer down." As he said these words Peter's voice deepened. Yosef suddenly realized-really, really realized-that it was the future King standing here in this dusty stableyard, commanding him. If Peter had actually said as much-if he had stood there in the dust squeaking, Put that down, put it down, 1 said, I'm going to be King someday, King, do you hear, so you put that down!, Yosef would have laughed contemptuously, spat, and ended the broken-legged horse's life with one hard swing of his deeply muscled arms. But Peter did not have to say any such thing; the command was clear in his voice and eyes.

"Your father shall hear of this, my princeling," Yosef said.

"And when he hears it from you, it will be for the second time," Peter replied. "I will let you go about your work with no further complaint, Lord High Groom, if I may put a single question to you which you answer yes."