“But all these things must be, Tommy,” Flagg said gently.
“I can’t be King,” Thomas said. He seized Flagg’s arm, and his nails sank deeply into the magician’s strange flesh. “Peter was meant to be King, Peter was always the smart one, I was stupid, I am stupid, I can’t be King!”
“God makes Kings,” Flagg said. God… and sometimes ma-gicians, he thought with an inward titter. “He has made you King, and mark me, Tommy, you will be King. Either you’ll be King or there will be dirt shoveled over you.”
“Let it be dirt, then! I’ll kill myself.”
“You’ll do no such thing.”
“Better to kill myself than to be laughed at for a thousand years as the prince who died of fright.”
“You’ll make a King, Tommy. Never fear. But I must go. These days are cold, but the nights are colder. And I want to be clear of the city before dusk falls.”
“No, stay!” Thomas clutched wildly at Flagg’s cloak. “If I must be King, then stay and advise me, as you advised my father! Don’t go! I don’t know why you want to go, anyway! You’ve been here forever!”
Ah, finally, Flagg thought. This is good-in fact, this is RICH.
“It is hard for me to go,” Flagg said gravely. “Very hard. I love Delain. And I love you, Tommy.”
“Then stay!”
“You don’t understand my situation. Anders Peyna is a powerful man-an extremely powerful man. And he doesn’t like me. I should think it fair to say he probably hates me.”
“Why?”
Partly because he knows how long-how very long-I have been here. More, I think, because he senses exactly what I mean to Delain.
“It’s hard to say, Tommy. I suppose it has to do with the fact that he is a very powerful man, and powerful men usually resent other men who are as powerful as themselves. People like a King’s closest advisor, perhaps.”
“As you were my father’s closest advisor?”
“Yes.” He picked up Thomas’s hand and squeezed it for a moment. Then he let go of it and sighed mournfully. “A King’s advisors are much like the deer in a King’s private park. Such deer are cosseted and petted and fed by hand. Both advisors and tame deer have pleasant lives, but I’ve all too often seen a tame park deer end up on the King’s table when the King’s Preserves wouldn’t yield up a wild buck for that night’s deer steaks or venison stew. When a ruling King dies, the old advisors have a way of disappearing.”
Thomas looked both angry and alarmed. “Has Peyna threatened you?”
“No… he has been very good,” Flagg said. “Very patient. I have read his eyes, however, and I know that his patience will not last forever. His eyes tell me that I might find the climate in Andua healthier. “He rose with another swirl of cape. “So… as little as I like to go…”
“Wait!” Thomas cried again, and in his pinched, pallid face,
Flagg saw all his ambitions about. to be fulfilled. “If you were protected when my father was King, because you were his advisor, wouldn’t you be protected now that I am King, if you were my advisor?”
Flagg appeared to think deeply and gravely. “Yes… I suppose… if you made it very clear to Peyna… very clear indeed… that any move made against me would be looked upon with royal disfavor. Very great royal disfavor.”
“Oh, I would!” Thomas said eagerly. “I would! So will you stay? Please? If you go, I really will kill myself! I don’t know anything about being a King, and I really will!”
Flagg still stood with his head down, his face deep in shadow, apparently thinking solemnly. He was, in fact, smiling.
But when he raised his head, his face was grave.
“I have served the Kingdom of Delain almost all of my life,” he said, “and I suppose that if you commanded me to stay… to stay and serve you to the best of my abilities…”
“I do so command you!” Thomas cried in a quivering, febrile voice.
Flagg sank to one knee. “My Lord!” he said.
Thomas, sobbing with relief, threw himself into Flagg’s arms. Flagg caught him and held him.
“Don’t cry, my little Lord King,” he whispered. “All will be well. Yes, all will be very well for you and me and the Kingdom.” His grin widened, showing very white, very strong teeth.
47
Thomas couldn’t sleep a wink the night before he was to be crowned in the Plaza of the Needle, and in the earlymorning hours of that dread day he was seized by a terrible fit of vomiting and diarrhea brought on by nervousness-it was stage fright. Stage fright sounds both silly and comic, but there was nothing either silly or comic about this. Thomas was still only a little boy, and what he felt in the night, when we are all most alone, was an extremity of fear so great that it would not be wrong to call it mortal terror. He rang for a servant and bade him fetch Flagg. The servant, alarmed by Thomas’s pallor and the smell of vomit in the room, ran all the way and hardly waited to be given entry before bursting in and telling Flagg that the young prince was very ill indeed, might even be dying.
Flagg, who had an idea of what the trouble was, told the servant to go and tell his master he would be with him shortly, and to fear nothing. He was there in twenty minutes.
“I can’t go through with it,” Thomas moaned. He had vom-ited in his bed, and the sheets stank of it. “I can’t be King, I can’t, please, you have to stop it from happening, how can I go through with it when I may vomit in front of Peyna and all of them, vomit or… or…”
“You’ll be fine,” Flagg said calmly. He had mixed a brew which would both soothe Thomas’s stomach and temporarily cement his bowels shut. “Drink this.”
Thomas drank it.
“I’m going to die,” he said, putting the glass aside. “I won’t have to kill myself. My heart will just burst from fear. My father said that sometimes rabbits die that way in snares, even if they aren’t badly hurt. And that’s what I am. A rabbit in a trap, dying of fear.”
You’re partly right, dear Tommy, Flagg thought. You’re not dying
of fear as you think, but you are indeed a rabbit in a trap.
“You will change your mind about that, I think,” Flagg said. He had been mixing a second potion. It was cloudy pink-a restful color.
“What’s that?”
“Something to calm your nerves and let you sleep.”
Thomas drank it. Flagg sat by his bedside. Soon Thomas was sleeping deeply-so deeply that if the servant had seen him at that moment, he might have believed his prediction had come true and Thomas was dead. Flagg took the boy’s sleeping hand in his own and patted it with something like love. In his own way he did love Thomas, but Sasha would have known Flagg’s love for what it was: the love of a master for his pet dog.
He is so much like his father, Flagg thought, and the old man never knew it. Oh, Tommy, we will have wonderful times, you and I, and before I am done the Kingdom will run with royal blood. I’ll be gone, but I won’t go far, at least not at first. I’ll come back in disguise just long enough to see your flyblown head on a spike… and to open your brother’s chest with my dagger, and rip his heart from his chest, and eat it raw, as his father ate the heart of his precious dragon.
Smiling, Flagg left the room.
48
The coronation went off with no trouble or com-plications at all. Thomas’s servants (he had no butler, being too young, but this would be provided for soon) dressed him for the occasion in fine clothes of black velvet which were strewn with jewels (All mine, Thomas thought with wonder-and with dawning greed-These are all mine now) and high black boots of finest kid leather. When Flagg appeared promptly at eleven-thirty and said, “It is time, my Lord King,” Thomas was far less nervous than he had expected. The sedative the magician had given him the night before was still working in him.
“Take my arm then,” he said, “in case I stumble.”
Flagg took Thomas’s arm. In the years to come, it was a posture the inhabitants of the court city would become very familiar with-Flagg appearing to bear the boy King up as if he were an old man instead of a healthy youngster.
They walked out together into bright wintry sunshine.