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?
The King left the room as silently as he had come. Peter never saw him. Roland lay awake most of that night, thinking deeply about what he had seen, and although it was hard for him to endure Flagg’s disapproval, he saw him the next morning in a private audience, before his resolve could weaken, and told him he had thought the matter over carefully and decided Peter should be allowed to play with the dollhouse as long as he wished. He said he believed it was doing the boy no harm.
With that out, he settled back uneasily to wait for Flagg’s rebuttal. But no rebuttal came. Flagg only raised his eyebrows, -this Roland barely saw in the deep shadow of the hood Flagg always wore-and said, “Your will, Sire, is the will of the King-dom.”
Roland knew from the tone that Flagg thought his decision was a bad one, but the tone also told him Flagg would not dispute it further. He was deeply relieved to be let off so cheaply. Later that day, when Flagg suggested that the farmers of the Eastern Barony could stand higher taxes in spite of the drought that had killed most of their crops the year before, Roland agreed eagerly.
In truth, having the old fool (for so Flagg thought Roland to be in his deeper thoughts) go against his wishes in the matter of the dollhouse seemed a very minor thing to the magician. The rise in taxes for the Eastern Barony was the important thing. And Flagg had a deeper secret, one which pleased him well. In the end he had succeeded in murdering Sasha, after all.
12
In those days, when a Queen or any woman of royal birth was taken to bed to deliver a child, a midwife was called in. The doctors were all men, and no man was allowed to be with a woman when she was about to have a child. The midwife who delivered Peter was Anna Crookbrows, of the Third South'ard Alley. She was called again when Sasha’s time with Thomas came around. Anna was past fifty at the time when Sasha’s second labor began, and a widow. She had one son of her own, and in his twentieth year he contracted the Shaking Disease, which always killed its victims in terrible pain after some years of suffering.
She loved this boy very much, and at last, after every other idea had proved useless, she went to Flagg. This had been ten years before, neither prince yet born and Roland himself still a royal bachelor. He received her in his dank basement rooms, which were near the dungeons-during their interview the uneasy woman could sometimes hear the lost screams of those who had been locked away from the sun’s light for years and years. And, she thought with a shudder, if the dungeons were near, then the torture chambers must also be near. Nor did Flagg’s apartment itself make her feel any easier. Strange designs were drawn on the floor in many colors of chalk. When she blinked, the designs seemed to change. In a cage hung from a long black manacle, a two-headed parrot cawed and sometimes talked to itself, one head speaking, the other head answering. Musty books frowned down at her. Spiders spun in dark corners. From the laboratory came a mixture of strange chemical smells. Yet she stammered out her story somehow and then waited in an agony of suspense.
“I can cure your son,” he said finally.
Anna Crookbrows’s ugly face was transformed into something near beauty by her joy. “My Lord!” she gasped, and could think of no more, so she said it again. “Oh, my Lord!”
But in the shadow of his hood, Flagg’s white face remained distant and brooding, and she felt afraid again.
“What would you pay for such a miracle?” he asked.
“Anything,” she gasped, and meant it. “Oh my Lord Flagg, anything!”
“I ask for one favor,” he said. “Will you give it?”
“Gladly!”
“I don’t know what it is yet, but when the time comes, I shall.”
She had fallen on her knees before him, and now he bent toward her. His hood fell back, and his face was terrible indeed. It was the white face of a corpse with black holes for eyes.
“And if you refuse what I ask, woman…”
“I shall not refuse! Oh my Lord, I shall not! I shall not! I swear it on my dear husband’s name!”
“Then it is well. Bring your son to me tomorrow night, after dark.”
She led the poor boy in the next night. He trembled and shook, his head nodded foolishly, his eyes rolled. There was a slick of drool on his chin. Flagg gave her a dark, plum-colored potion in a beaker. “Have him drink this,” he said. “It will blister his mouth, but have him drink every drop. Then get the fool out of my sight.”
She murmured to him. The boy’s shaking increased for a moment as he tried to nod his head. He drank all of the liquid and then doubled over, screaming.
“Get him out,” Flagg said.
“Yes, get him out!” one of the parrot’s two heads cried.
“Get him out, no screaming allowed here!” the other head screamed.
She got him home, sure that Flagg had murdered him. But the next day the Shaking Disease had left her son completely, and he was well.
Years passed. When Sasha’s labor with Thomas began, Flagg called for her and whispered in her ear. They were alone in his deep rooms, but even so, it was better that such a dread command be whispered.
Anna Crookbrows’s face went deadly white, but she remembered Flagg’s words: If you refuse…
And would not the King have two children? She had only one. And if the King wanted to remarry and have even more, let him. In Delain, women were plentiful.
So she went to Sasha, and spoke encouragingly, and at a critical moment a little knife glittered in her hand. No one saw the one small cut she made. A moment later, Anna cried: “Push, my Queen! Push, for the baby comes!”
Sasha pushed. Thomas came from her as effortlessly as a boy zipping down a slide. But Sasha’s lifeblood gushed out upon the sheet. Ten minutes after Thomas came into the world, his mother was dead.
And so Flagg was not concerned about the piffling matter of the dollhouse. What mattered was that Roland was growing old, there was no meddling Queen to stand in his way, and now he had not one son to choose from but two. Peter was, of course, the elder, but that did not really matter. Peter could be gotten out of the way if time should prove him unsuitable for Flagg’s purposes. He was only a child, and could not defend himself.
I have told you that Roland never thought longer or harder on any matter during his entire reign than he did on this one question-whether or not Peter should be allowed access to Sasha’s dollhouse, cunningly crafted by the great Ellender. I have told you that the result of his thought was a decision that ran against Flagg’s wishes. I have also told you that Flagg considered this of little importance.
Was it? That you must decide for yourself, after you have heard me to the end.
