The Eyes of the Dragon(12)

Yosef burst out laughing and clapped the boy on his back so hard his teeth rattled. "Your heart is kind as well as brave, my boy, but lads promise quick and regret at leisure. You'd not be true to it, I reckon."

Peter looked at him calmly. "I mean what I say."

Yosef stopped laughing all at once. He looked at Peter closely and saw that the boy did indeed mean it... or at least thought he did. There was no doubt in his face.

"Well! I can't tarry here all day," the horse doctor said, adopting his former brisk and self-important manner. "I've given you my diagnosis. My bill will be presented to the Treasury in due course... Perhaps you'll pay it out of your allowance, Highness. In any case, what you decide to do is not my business. Good day."

Peter and the head groom watched him walk out of the stableyard, trailing a long afternoon shadow at his heels.

"He's full of dung," Yosef said when the horse doctor was out the gate, beyond earshot, and thus unable to contradict his words. "Mark me, y'Highness, and save y'self a lot o' grief. There never was a horse what busted a leg and didn't get blood poisoning. It's God's way."

"I'll want to talk to my father about this," Peter said.

"And so I think you must," Yosef said heavily... but as Peter trudged away, he smiled. He thought the boy had done right well for himself. His father would be honor-bound to see the boy was whipped for interfering with his elders, but the head groom knew that Roland set a great store by both of his sons in his old age-Peter perhaps a bit more than Thomas-and he believed that the boy would get his horse. Of course, he would also get a heartbreak when the horse died, but, as the horse doctor had quite rightly said, that was not his business. He knew about the training of horses; the training of princes was best left in other hands.

Peter was whipped for interfering in the head groom's affairs, and although it was no solace to his stinging bottom, Peter's mind understood that his father had afforded him great honor by administering the whipping himself, instead of handing Peter over to an underling who might have tried to curry favor by making it easy on the boy.

Peter could not sleep on his back for three days and was not able to eat sitting down for nearly a week, but the head groom was also right about the horse-Roland allowed Peter to keep her.

"It won't take up your time for long, Peter," Roland advised him. "If Yosef says it will die, it will die." Roland's face was a bit pale and his old hands were trembling. The beating had pained him more than it had pained Peter, who really was his favor-ite... although Roland foolishly fancied no one knew this but himself.

"I don't know," Peter said. "I thought that horse-doctoring fellow knew what he was talking about."

It turned out that the horse-doctoring fellow had. The horse did not take blood poisoning, and it did not die, and in the end its limp was so slight that even Yosef was forced to admit it was hardly noticeable. "At least, when she's fresh," he amended. Peter was more than just faithful about putting on the poultices; he was nearly religious. He changed old for new three times a day and did it a fourth time before he went to bed. Ben Staad did stand in for Peter from time to time, but those times were few. Peter named the horse Peony, and they were great friends ever after.

Flagg had most assuredly been right about one thing on the day he advised Roland against letting Peter play with the dollhouse: servants were everywhere, they see everything, and their tongues wag. Several servants had witnessed the scene in the stableyard, but if every servant who later claimed to have been there really had been, there would have been a mob of them crowded around the edges of the stableyard that hot summer day. That had, of course, not been the case, but the fact that so many of them found the event worth lying about was a sign that Peter was regarded as an interesting figure indeed. They talked about it so much that it became something of a nine days' wonder in Delain. Yosef also talked; so, for that matter, did the young horse doctor. Everything that they said spoke well for the young prince-Yosef's word in particular carried much weight, because he was greatly respected. He began to call Peter "the young King," something he had never done before.

"I believe God spared the nag because the young King stood up for her so brave-like, "he said. "And he worked at them poultices like a slave. Brave, he is; he's got the heart of a dragon. He'll make a King someday, all right. Ai! You should have heard his voice when he told me to hold the maul!"

It was a great story, all right, and Yosef drank on it for the next seven years-until Peter was arrested for a hideous crime, judged guilty, and sentenced to imprisonment in the cell atop the Needle for the rest of his life

15

Perhaps you are wondering what Thomas was like, and some of you may already be casting him in a villain's part, as a willing co-schemer in Flagg's plot to snatch the crown away from its rightful owner.

That was not really the case at all, although to some it always seemed so, and of course Thomas did play a part. He did not seem, I admit, to be a really good boy-at least, not at first glance. He was surely not a good boy in the way that Peter was a good boy, but no brother would have looked really good beside Peter, and Thomas knew it well by the time he was four-that was the year after the famous sack-race, and the one in which the famous stableyard incident took place. Peter rarely lied and never cheated. Peter was smart and kind, tall and handsome. He looked like their mother, who had been so deeply loved by the King and the people of Delain.