The Eyes of the Dragon(7)

The younger boy had gone because he was the older's best friend, and his sworn blood brother. Without the younger boy, it might have taken two weeks to chop enough wood to keep the family through the winter. With both of them working at top speed, it had taken only six days.

This was putting it in a different light. Roland had loved his own mother very much, and would gladly have died for her. He made inquiries and found out that Sasha had the right of the story. He also found out that the deserters had left only after a sadistic sergeant major had repeatedly refused to relay their re-quests for compassionate leave to their superior, and that as soon as four cords of wood had been chopped, they had gone back, although both had known they must be court-martialed and face the headsman's axe.

Roland pardoned them. Flagg nodded, smiled, and said only: "Your will is Delain's will, Sire." Not for all the gold in the Four Kingdoms would he have allowed Roland to see the sick fury that rose in his heart when his will was balked. Roland's pardon of the boys was greatly praised in Delain, because many of Roland's subjects also knew the true facts and those who didn't know them were quickly informed by the rest. Roland's wise and compassionate pardon of the two was remembered when other, less humane decrees (which were, as a rule, also the ma-gician's ideas) were imposed. All of this made no difference to Flagg. He had wanted him killed, and Sasha had interfered. Why could Roland not have married another? He had known none of them, and cared for women not at all. Why not another? Well, it didn't matter. Flagg smiled at the pardon, but he swore in his heart then that he would attend Sasha's funeral.

On the night Roland signed the pardon, Flagg went to his gloomy basement laboratory. There he donned a heavy glove and took a deathwatch spider from a cage where he had kept her for twenty years, feeding her newborn baby mice. Each of the mice he fed the spider was poisoned and dying; Flagg did this to increase the potency of the spider's own poison, which was already potent beyond belief. The spider was blood red and as big as a rat. Her bloated body quivered with venom; venom dripped from her stinger in clear drops that burned smoking holes in the top of Flagg's worktable.

"Now die, my pretty, and kill a Queen," Flagg whispered, and crushed the spider to death in his glove, which was made of a magical steel mesh which resisted the poison-yet still that night, when he went to bed, his hand was swelled and throbbing and red.

Poison from the spider's crushed, twisted body gushed into the goblet. Flagg poured brandy over the deadly stuff, then stirred the two together. When he took the spoon from the glass, its bowl was twisted and misshapen. The Queen would take one sip and fall dying on the floor. Her death would be quick but extremely painful, Flagg thought with satisfaction.

Sasha was in the habit of taking a glass of brandy each night, because she often had trouble falling asleep. Flagg rang for a servant to come and take the drink to her.

Sasha never knew how close she came to death that night.

Moments after brewing the deadly drink, before the servant knocked, Flagg poured it down the drain in the center of his floor and stood listening to it hiss and bubble away into the pipe. His face was twisted with hate. When the hissing had died away, he flung the crystal goblet into the far corner with all his force. It shattered like a bomb.

The servant knocked and was admitted.

Flagg pointed to where the shards glittered. "I've broken a goblet," he said. "Clean it up. Use a broom, idiot. If you touch the pieces, you'll regret it."

10

He poured the poison down the drain at the last moment because he realized he might well be caught. If Roland had loved the young Queen just a little less, Flagg would have chanced it. But he was afraid that Roland, in his wounded fury at the loss of his wife, would never rest until he found the killer and saw his head on the spike at the very tip of the Needle. It was the one crime he would see avenged, no matter who had committed it. And would he find the murderer?

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.

11

Not 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?