no one after nine, you know that. Much has changed, but not that.”
Arlen cleared his throat. “I know the boy. It is Dennis, son of Brandon. It is the King’s butler who calls.”
Peyna stared at Arlen, hardly believing what he had heard. Perhaps he was growing deaf even faster than he had thought. He asked Arlen to repeat, and it came out sounding just the same.
“I’ll see him. Send him in.”
“Very good, my Lord.” Arlen turned to leave.
The similarity to the night Beson had come with Peter’s note -even down to the cold wind screaming outside-came strongly to Peyna now. “Aden,” he called.
Arlen turned back. “My Lord?”
The right corner of Peyna’s mouth quirked the smallest bit. “Are you quite sure it’s not a dwarf-boy?”
“Quite sure, my Lord,” Arlen replied, and the left corner of his own mouth twitched the tiniest bit. “There are no dwarves left in the known world. Or so my mother told me.”
“Obviously she was a woman of good sense and clear dis-cernment, dedicated to raising her son properly and not to be held responsible for any inherent flaws in the material she had to work with. Bring the boy here directly.”
“Yes, my Lord.” The door closed.
Peyna looked into his fire again and rubbed his old, arthritis-crippled hands together in a gesture of unaccustomed agitation. Thomas’s butler. Here. Now. Why?
But there was no sense in speculating; the door would open in a moment, and the answer would come walking through it in the form of a man-boy who would be shaking with the cold, perhaps even frostbitten.
Dennis would have found it a good deal easier to reach Peyna if Peyna had still been at his fine house in the castle city, but his house had been sold from beneath him for “unpaid taxes” following his resignation. Only the few hundred guilders he had put away over the course of forty years had allowed him to buy this small, drafty farmhouse and continue to pay Beson. It was technically in the Inner Baronies, but he was still many miles west of the castle… and the weather had been very cold.
In the hallway beyond the door, he heard the murmur of approaching voices. Now. Now the answer would come through the door. Suddenly that absurd feeling-that feeling of hope, like a ray of strong light shining in a dark cave-came back to him. Now the answer will come through the door, he thought, and for a moment he found himself believing that was really true.
As he drew his favorite pipe from the rack beside him, Anders Peyna saw that his hands were trembling.
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The boy was really a man, but Arlen’s use of the word was not unjustified-at least not on this night. He was cold, Peyna saw, but he also knew that the cold alone does not make anyone shudder as Dennis was shuddering.
“Dennis!” Peyna said, sitting forward sharply (and ignoring the twinge in his back the sudden movement caused). “Has something happened to the King?” Dreadful images, awful possibilities suddenly filled Peyna’s old head-the King dead, either from too much wine, or possibly by his own hand. Everyone in Delain knew that the young King was deeply moody.
“No… that is… yes… but no… not the way you mean… the way I think you mean…”
“Come in here close to the fire,” Peyna snapped. “Arlen, don’t just stand there gawking! Get a blanket! Get two! Wrap this boy up before he shakes himself to death like a buggerlug bug!”
“Yes, my Lord,” Arlen said. He had never gawked in his life-he knew it, and Peyna did, too. But he recognized the gravity of this situation and left quickly. He stripped the two blankets from his own bed-the only other two in this glorified peasant’s but were the ones on Peyna’s-and brought them back. He took them to where Dennis crouched as close to the fire as he could without bursting into flames. The deep frost which had covered his hair had begun to melt and to run down his cheeks like tears. Dennis wrapped himself in the blankets.
“Now, tea. Strong tea. A cup for me, a pot for the boy.”
“My Lord, we only have half a canister left in the whole-”
“Bugger how much we have left! A cup for me, a pot for the boy.” He considered. “And make a cup for yourself, Arlen, and then come in here and listen.”
“My Lord?” Even all of his breeding could not keep Arlen from looking frankly astounded at this.
“Damn!” Peyna roared. “Would you have me believe you’re as deaf as I’ve become? Get about it!”
“Yes, my Lord,” Arlen said, and went to brew the last tea in the house.
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Peyna had not forgotten everything he had ever known about the fine art of questioning; in point of fact, he had forgotten damned little of that, or anything else. He had had long sleepless nights when he wished that he could forget some things.
While Arlen made the tea, Peyna went about the task of putting this frightened-no; this terrified-young man at his ease. He asked after Dennis’s mum. He asked if the drainage problems which had so plagued the castle of late had improved. He asked Dennis’s opinion on the spring plantings. He steered clear of any and all subjects which might be dangerous… and little by little, as he warmed, Dennis calmed.
When Arlen served the tea, hot and strong and steaming, Dennis slurped half the cup at a gulp, grimaced, then slurped the rest. Impassive as ever, Arlen poured more.
“Easy, my lad,” Peyna said, lighting his pipe at last. “Easy’s the word for hot tea and skittish horses.”
“Cold. Thought I was going to freeze coming out here.”
“You walked?” Peyna was unable to conceal his surprise.
“Yes. Had my mother leave word with the lesser servants that I was home with the grippe. That’ll hold all for a few days, it being so catching this time of year… or should do. Walked. Whole way. Didn’t dare ask a ride. Didn’t want to be remem-bered. Didn’t know it was quite this far. If I’d known, I might have taken a ride after all. I left at three of the clock.” He strug-gled, his throat working, and then burst out: “And I’m not going back, not ever! I seen the way he looks at me since he come back! Narrow and on the side, his eyes all dark! He never used to look at me that way-never used to look at me at all! He knows I seen something! Knows I heard something! He don’t know what, but he knows there’s something! He hears it in my head, like I’d hear the bell ringin’ out from the Church of the Great Gods! If I stay, he’ll get it out of me! I know he will!”
Peyna stared at the boy under furrowed brows, trying to sort out this amazing flood of declaration.
Tears were standing in Dennis’s eyes. “I mean F-”
“Softly, Dennis,” Peyna said. His voice was mild, but his eyes were not. “I know who you mean. Best not to speak his name aloud.”
Dennis looked at him with dumb, simple gratitude.
“You’d better tell me what you came to say,” Peyna told him.
“Yes. Yes, all right.”
Dennis hesitated for a moment, trying to get himself under control and to arrange his thoughts. Peyna waited impassively, trying to control his rising excitement.
“You see,” Dennis began at last, “three nights ago Thomas called me to come and stay with him, as he sometimes does. And at midnight, or sometime thereabouts-”
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Dennis told what you have already heard, and to his credit, he did not try to lie about his own terror, or gloss it over. As he spoke, the wind whined outside and as the fire burned low Peyna’s eyes burned hotter and hotter. Here, he thought, were worse things than he ever could have imagined. Not only had Peter poisoned the King, Thomas had seen it happen.
No wonder the boy King was so often moody and depressed. Perhaps the rumors that passed in the meadhouses, rumors that had Thomas more than half mad already, were not so farfetched as Peyna had thought.
But as Dennis paused to drink more tea (Aden refilled his cup from the bitter lees of the pot), Peyna drew back from that idea. If Thomas had witnessed Peter poisoning Roland, why was Dennis here now… and in such deadly terror of Flagg?
“You heard more,” Peyna said.
“Aye, my Lord Judge-General,” Dennis said. “Thomas… he raved quite some time. We were closed up in the dark together long.”
Dennis struggled to be clearer, but found no words to convey the horror of that closed-in passageway, with Thomas shrieking in the darkness before him and the dead King’s few surviving dogs barking below them. No words to describe the smell of the place-a smell of secrets which had gone rancid like milk spilled in the dark. No words to tell of his growing fear that Thomas had gone mad while in the grip of his dream.
He had screamed the name of the King’s magician over and over again; had begged the King to look deep into the goblet and see the mouse that simultaneously burned and drowned in the wine. Why do you stare at me so? he had shrieked. And then: I brought you a glass of wine, my King, to show you that I, too, love you. And finally he had shrieked out words that Peter himself would have recognized, words better than four hundred years old: 'Twas Flagg! Flagg! 'Twas Flagg!
Dennis reached for his cup, got it halfway to his mouth, and then dropped it. The cup shattered on the hearthstones.
The three of them looked at the shards of crockery.
“And then?” Peyna asked, in a deceptively gentle voice.
“Nothing for a long, long time,” Dennis said in a halting voice. “My eyes had… had gotten used to the darkness, and I could see him a little. He was asleep… asleep at those two little holes, with his chin on his breast and his eyes closed.”
“And he remained so for how long?”
“My Lord, I know not. The dogs had all quieted again. And perhaps l… I…”
“Dozed a bit yourself? I think it is likely, Dennis.”
“Then, later, he seemed to wake. His eyes opened, at any rate. He closed the little panels and all was dark again. I heard him moving and I drew my legs back so he would not trip over them… his nightshirt… it brushed my face…”
Dennis grimaced as he remembered a feeling like cobwebs drawn in a whisper over his left cheek.
“I followed him. He let himself out… I followed still. He closed the door so that it looked like only plain stone wall again. He went back to his apartments and I followed him.”
