Peter left the window, went to the one chair in his “sitting room” (that name was a cruel joke), and simply sat there with his hands folded in his lap. He sat and watched the room darken. His dinner came-fatty meat, watery ale, and coarse bread so salty it would have stung his mouth if he had eaten any. But Peter did not eat the meat or bread, nor did he drink the ale.
Around nine o’clock, as the carousing in the streets began again (this time the crowds were much more boisterous… almost riotous), Peter went into his prison’s second room, stripped to his ringlet, washed with water from the basin, knelt by his bed, and prayed. Then he got into bed. There was only a single blanket, although the little bedroom was very cold. Peter pulled it to his chest, laced his hands together in back of his head, and looked up into the darkness.
From outside and below came screams and cheers and laugh-ter. Now and then there was the sound of firecrackers, and once, near midnight, there was an explosive gunpowder flatulence as a drunken soldier set off a blank charge (the following day, the unfortunate soldier was sent as far east as the Kingdom of Delain stretched, for his drunken salute to the new King-gunpowder was rare in Delain, and jealously hoarded).
Sometime after one in the morning, Peter at last closed his eyes and slept.
The next morning, he was up at seven. He knelt, shivering in the cold, his breath puffing white from his mouth, goosebumps on his bare arms and legs, and prayed. When his prayers were done, he dressed. He went into the “sitting room” and stood by the window silently for nearly two hours, watching the city come to life below him. That coming alive was slower and crankier than usual; most of the adults in Delain woke with drink-swollen heads. They stumbled to their jobs slowly, and in a foul temper. Many of the men went to their tasks blistered by angry wives who had no sympathy with their aching heads (Thomas also had an aching head-he had drunk too much wine the night before-but at least he was spared the lecturing wife).
Peter’s breakfast came, Beson, his Chief Warder (who had a hangover of his own), fetched him plain bran cereal with no sugar, watery milk that was rapidly souring, and more of the coarse, salty bread. This was a bitter contrast to the pleasant breakfasts Peter had enjoyed in his study, and he ate none of it.
At eleven, one of the Lesser Warders fetched it silently away.
“Young princeling means to starve, thinks I,” he said to Beson.
“Good,” Beson replied indifferently. “Spare us the trouble of keeping him.”
“Maybe he fears poison,” the Lesser Warder ventured, and in spite of his aching head, Beson laughed. The jest was a good one.
Peter spent most of his day in the “sitting-room” chair. In the later part of the afternoon, he stood at the window again. The window was not barred. Unless you were a bird there was nowhere to go but straight down. No one, not Peyna, not Flagg, not Aron Beson, worried that the prisoner might somehow climb down. The Needle’s curving stone wall was utterly smooth. A fly might have done it, but not a man.
And if he grew depressed enough to jump, would anyone care? Not much. It would save the state the expense of feeding and housing a blue-blooded murderer.
As the sun began to move across the floor and up the wall, Peter sat and watched it. His dinner-more fatty meat, watery ale, and salty bread-came. Peter did not touch it.
When the sun was gone, he sat in the dark until nine, and then went into the bedroom. He stripped to his singlet, knelt, and prayed with small white puffs coming from his mouth. He got into bed, laced his hands behind his head, and lay on his back, staring up into the darkness. He lay there thinking about what had become of him. Around one o’clock in the morning, he slept.
So he was on the second day.
And the third.
And the fourth.
For a full week Peter ate nothing, spoke nothing, and did nothing but stand at his sitting-room window or sit in his chair, watching the sun crawl across the floor and then up the wall to the ceiling. Beson was convinced that the boy was in an utter blackness of guilt and despair-he had seen such things before, especially among royalty. The boy would die, he thought, like a wild bird that was never meant to be caged. The boy would die, and good riddance to him.
But on the eighth day, Peter sent for Aron Beson and gave him certain instructions… and he did not give them like a prisoner.
He gave them like a King.
52
Peter did feel despair… but it was not as deep as Beson believed. He spent that first week in the Needle carefully thinking out his position, and trying to decide what he should do. He had fasted to clear his head. Eventually it did clear, but for a while he felt terribly lost, and the weight of his situation pressed down on his head like a blacksmith’s anvil. Then he remembered one simple truth: he knew he hadn’t killed his father, even if everyone else in the Kingdom thought he had.
During the first day or two, he grappled with useless feelings. The childish part of him kept crying out, Not fair! This is not fair! And of course it wasn’t, but that sort of thinking got him no place. As he fasted, he began to regain control of himself. His empty belly peeled the childish part of him away. He began to feel cleaner, husked out, empty… like a glass waiting to be filled. After two or three days of eating nothing, the growlings in his stomach subsided, and he began to hear his real thoughts more clearly. He prayed, but part of him knew that he was doing more than praying; he was talking to himself, listening to him-self, wondering if there was a way out of this prison in the sky where he had been so neatly put.
He had not killed his father. That was the first thing. Someone had blamed it on him. That was the second thing. Who? There was only one person who could have, of course; only one person in all of Delain who could have had such an awful poison as Dragon Sand.
Flagg.
It made perfect sense. Flagg knew he would have no place in a kingdom ruled by Peter. Flagg had been careful to make Thomas his friend… and to make Thomas fear him. Somehow, Flagg had murdered Roland and then arranged the evidence which had sent Peter here.
He was this far by the third night of Thomas’s reign.
Then what was he to do? Simply accept? No, he wouldn’t do that. Escape? He couldn’t do that. No one had ever escaped from the Needle.
Except…
A glimmer came to him. This was on the fourth night, as he looked at his dinner tray. Fatty meat, watery ale, salty bread. A plain white plate. No napkin.
Except…
The glimmer grew brighter.
There might be a way to escape. There might. It would be horribly dangerous, and it would be long. At the end of much work, he might only die in spite of all his efforts. But… there might be a way.
And if he did escape, what then? Was there a way to bring the murder home to the magician? Peter did not know. Flagg was a wily old serpent-he would have left no evidence of what he had done to damn him later on. Could Peter worm a confes-sion out of the magician? He might be able to, always assuming Peter could lay hands on him in the first place-Peter guessed that Flagg might disappear like smoke if he heard that Peter had escaped the Needle. Would anyone believe Flagg’s confession, even if Peter could get one out of him? Oh yes, he confessed to the murder of Roland, people would say. Peter, the escaped father-killer, had a sword to his throat. In a fix like that, I might confess to anything, even the murder of God!
You might be tempted to laugh at Peter, turning such things over in his mind while he was still imprisoned three hundred feet in the sky. You might say he had gotten the cart quite a bit forward of the horse. But Peter had seen a way he might escape. It might, of course, only be a way to die young, but he thought it had a chance of working. Still… was there any reason to go through all the work if in the end it could come to nothing? Or, worse still, if it were to cause the Kingdom fresh harm in some way he did not see now?