The Eyes of the Dragon(45)

And the fourth.

For a full week Peter ate nothing, spoke nothing, and did nothing but stand at his sitting-room window or sit in his chair, watching the sun crawl across the floor and then up the wall to the ceiling. Beson was convinced that the boy was in an utter blackness of guilt and despair-he had seen such things before, especially among royalty. The boy would die, he thought, like a wild bird that was never meant to be caged. The boy would die, and good riddance to him.

But on the eighth day, Peter sent for Aron Beson and gave him certain instructions... and he did not give them like a prisoner.

He gave them like a King.

52

Peter did feel despair... but it was not as deep as Beson believed. He spent that first week in the Needle carefully thinking out his position, and trying to decide what he should do. He had fasted to clear his head. Eventually it did clear, but for a while he felt terribly lost, and the weight of his situation pressed down on his head like a blacksmith's anvil. Then he remembered one simple truth: he knew he hadn't killed his father, even if everyone else in the Kingdom thought he had.

During the first day or two, he grappled with useless feelings. The childish part of him kept crying out, Not fair! This is not fair! And of course it wasn't, but that sort of thinking got him no place. As he fasted, he began to regain control of himself. His empty belly peeled the childish part of him away. He began to feel cleaner, husked out, empty... like a glass waiting to be filled. After two or three days of eating nothing, the growlings in his stomach subsided, and he began to hear his real thoughts more clearly. He prayed, but part of him knew that he was doing more than praying; he was talking to himself, listening to him-self, wondering if there was a way out of this prison in the sky where he had been so neatly put.

He had not killed his father. That was the first thing. Someone had blamed it on him. That was the second thing. Who? There was only one person who could have, of course; only one person in all of Delain who could have had such an awful poison as Dragon Sand.

Flagg.

It made perfect sense. Flagg knew he would have no place in a kingdom ruled by Peter. Flagg had been careful to make Thomas his friend... and to make Thomas fear him. Somehow, Flagg had murdered Roland and then arranged the evidence which had sent Peter here.

He was this far by the third night of Thomas's reign.

Then what was he to do? Simply accept? No, he wouldn't do that. Escape? He couldn't do that. No one had ever escaped from the Needle.

Except...

A glimmer came to him. This was on the fourth night, as he looked at his dinner tray. Fatty meat, watery ale, salty bread. A plain white plate. No napkin.

Except...

The glimmer grew brighter.

There might be a way to escape. There might. It would be horribly dangerous, and it would be long. At the end of much work, he might only die in spite of all his efforts. But... there might be a way.

And if he did escape, what then? Was there a way to bring the murder home to the magician? Peter did not know. Flagg was a wily old serpent-he would have left no evidence of what he had done to damn him later on. Could Peter worm a confes-sion out of the magician? He might be able to, always assuming Peter could lay hands on him in the first place-Peter guessed that Flagg might disappear like smoke if he heard that Peter had escaped the Needle. Would anyone believe Flagg's confession, even if Peter could get one out of him? Oh yes, he confessed to the murder of Roland, people would say. Peter, the escaped father-killer, had a sword to his throat. In a fix like that, I might confess to anything, even the murder of God!

You might be tempted to laugh at Peter, turning such things over in his mind while he was still imprisoned three hundred feet in the sky. You might say he had gotten the cart quite a bit forward of the horse. But Peter had seen a way he might escape. It might, of course, only be a way to die young, but he thought it had a chance of working. Still... was there any reason to go through all the work if in the end it could come to nothing? Or, worse still, if it were to cause the Kingdom fresh harm in some way he did not see now?

He thought about these things and prayed over them. The fourth night passed... the fifth... the sixth. On the seventh night, Peter came to this conclusion: it was better to try than not to try; better to make an effort to right the wrong even if he died trying to do so. An injustice had been done. He discov-ered a strange thing-the fact that the injustice had been done to him didn't seem half so important as the fact that it had been done at all. It ought to be righted.

On the eighth day of Thomas's reign, he sent for Beson.

53

Beson listened to the speech of the imprisoned prince with incredulity and mounting rage. Peter finished and Aron Beson let loose a gutter flood of obscenity that would have made a horse drover blush.

Peter stood before it, impassive.

"You murdering snot-nosed hound!" Beson finished, in a tone that was close to wonder. "I guess you think yer still livin' in the bloody lap o luxury, with yer sairvants to run scurrying every time you lift one o yer perfoomed little fingers. But it ain't like that in here, my young prince. No, sir."

Beson leaned forward from the waist, scruffy chin jutting, and although the stench of the man-sweat and thick cheap wine and great gray scales of dirt-was nearly overpowering, Peter did not give ground. There were no bars between them; Beson had yet to fear a prisoner, and certainly he felt no fear of this young whelp. The Chief Warder was fifty, short, broad of shoulder, deep in the gut. His greasy hair hung in tangles around his cheeks and down the back of his neck. When he had come into Peter's room, one of the Lesser Warders had locked the door behind them.