The Eyes of the Dragon(6)

He loved to imagine the tiny people that would fill the house; sometimes they were almost so real he could see them. He talked for them in different voices and invented them all. They were the King family. There was Roger King, who was brave and powerful (if not very tall, and slightly bowlegged), and who had once killed a dragon. There was lovely Sarah King, his wife. And there was their little boy, Petie, who loved and was loved by them. Not to mention, of course, all the servants he invented to make the beds, stoke the stove, fetch the water, cook the meals, and mend the clothes.

Because he was a boy, some of the stories he made up to go with the house were a little more bloodthirsty than the stories Sasha had made up to go with hers as a little girl. In one of them, the Anduan pirates were all around the house, wanting to get in and slaughter the family. There was a famous fight. Dozens of pirates were killed, but in the end they were too many. They made to attack for the final time. But just before they did, the King's Own Guard-this part was played by Peter's lead soldiers-arrived and killed every one of those rotten Anduan sea dogs. In another story, a nest of dragons burst out of a nearby wood (usually the nearby wood was under Sasha's sofa by the window), meaning to burn up the house with their furious breath.

But Roger and Petie rushed out with their bows and killed every one. "Until the ground was black with their icky old blood," Peter told his father the King that night at dinner, and this made Roland roar with approval.

After Sasha died, Flagg told Roland that he did not believe it was right for a boy to be playing with dollhouses. It might not make him a sissy, Flagg said, but then again, it might. Certainly it would not sound well, if the tale got out to the general population. And such stories always did. The castle was full of servants. Servants saw everything, and their tongues wagged.

"He's only six," Roland said, uneasy. Flagg, with his white, hungry face far back in his deep hood and his magical spells, always made him uneasy.

"Six is old enough to train a boy in the way he should go, Sire," Flagg said. "Think you well on it. Your judgment will be right in this, as in all things."

Think you well on it, Flagg said, and that was just what King Roland did, In fact, I should think it fair to say that he never thought on anything so hard during his entire twenty-some-year reign as King of Delain.

That probably sounds strange to you, if you have thought of all the duties a King has-weighty matters such as putting taxes on some things or ending them on others, whether or not to declare war, whether to pardon or condemn. What, you might say, was a decision over whether or not to allow a little boy to play with a dollhouse next to those other things?

Maybe nothing, maybe much. I will let you make up your mind on that. I will tell you that Roland was not the smartest King who had ever ruled in Delain. Thinking well had always been very hard work for him. It made him feel as if boulders were rolling around in his head. It made his eyes water and his temples throb. When he thought deeply, his nose got stuffed up.

As a boy, his studies in composition and mathematics and history had made his head ache so badly that he had been allowed to give them up at twelve and do what he did best, which was to hunt. He tried very hard to be a good King, but he had a feeling that he could never be good enough, or smart enough, to solve the Kingdom's problems or to make many decisions the right way, and he knew if he made them the wrong way, people would suffer for it. If he had heard Sasha telling Peter about Kings after the banquet, he would have agreed completely. Kings really were bigger than other people, and sometimes-a lot of times-he wished he were smaller. If you have ever in your life had serious questions about whether or not you were good enough for some task, then you will know how he felt. What you may not know is that such worries start to feed on themselves after awhile. Even if that feeling that you aren't good enough to get the job done isn't true at first, it can become true in time. This had happened to Roland, and over the years he had come to rely more and more on Flagg. He was sometimes troubled by the idea that Flagg was King in all but name-but these worries came only late at night. In the daytime he was only grateful for Flagg's support.

If not for Sasha, Roland might have been a much worse King than he really was, and that was because the little voice he sometimes heard in the night when he couldn't sleep held much more of the truth than his daytime gratitudes. Flagg really was running the Kingdom, and Flagg was a very bad man. We will have to speak more of him later, unfortunately, but we'll let him go for now, and good riddance.

Sasha had broken Flagg's power over Roland a little. Her own advice was good and practical, and it was much more kind and just than the magician's. She never really liked Flagg-few in Delain did, and many shuddered at his very name-but her dislike was mild. Her feelings might have been much different if she had known how carefully Flagg watched her, and with what growing, poisonous hate.

9

Once Flagg really did set out to poison Sasha. This was after she asked Roland to pardon a pair of army deserters whom Flagg had wanted beheaded in the Plaza of the Needle. Deserters, he had argued, were a bad example. If one or two were allowed to get away without paying the full penalty, others might try it. The only way to discourage them, he said, was to show them the heads of those who had already tried it. Other would-be deserters would look at those flyblown heads with their staring eyes and think twice about the seriousness of their service to the King.

Sasha, however, had discovered facts about the case from one of her maids that Roland didn't know. The mother of the older boy had fallen gravely ill. There were three younger brothers and two younger sisters in the family. All might have died in the bitter cold of the Delain winter if the boy hadn't left his encampment, gone home, and chopped wood for his mother.