Was it? That you must decide for yourself, after you have heard me to the end.
13
Now let many long years pass, all in a twinkling-one of the great things about tales is how fast time may pass when not much of note is happening. Real life is never that way, and it is probably a good thing. Time only passes faster in histories, and what is a history except a grand sort of tale where passing centuries are substituted for passing years?
During those years, Flagg watched both boys carefully-he watched them over the aging King’s shoulder as they grew up, calculating which should be King when Roland was no more. It did not take him long to decide it should be Thomas, the younger. By the time Peter was seven, he knew he did not like the boy. When Peter was nine, Flagg made a strange and unpleasant discovery: he feared Peter, as well.
The boy had grown up strong and straight and handsome. His hair was dark, his eyes a dark blue that is common to people of the Western Barony. Sometimes, when Peter looked up quickly, his head cocked a certain way, he resembled his father. Otherwise, he was Sasha’s son almost entirely in his looks and ways. Unlike his short father with his bowlegged walk and his clumsy way of moving (Roland was graceful only when he was horsed), Peter was tall and lithe. He enjoyed the hunt and hunted well, but it was not his life. He also enjoyed his lessons-geography and history were his particular favorites.
His father was puzzled and often impatient with jokes; the point of most had to be explained to him, and that took away all the fun. What Roland liked was when the jesters pretended to slip on banana peels, or knocked their heads together, or when they staged pie fights in the Great Hall. Such things were about as far as Roland’s idea of good fun extended. Peter’s wit was much quicker and more subtle, as Sasha’s had been, and his rollicking, boyish laughter often filled the palace, making the servants smile at each other approvingly.
While many boys in Peter’s position would have become too conscious of their own grand place in the scheme of things to play with anyone not of their own class, Peter became best friends with a boy named Ben Staad when both children were eight. Ben’s family was not royalty, and though Andrew Staad, Ben’s father, had some faint claim to the High Blood of the kingdom on his mother’s side, they could not even rightly be called no-bility. “Squire” was probably the kindest term one could have applied to Andy Staad, and “squire’s son” to his boy. Even so, the once-prosperous Staad family had fallen upon hard times, and while there could have been queerer choices for a Prince’s best friend, there couldn’t have been many.
They met at the annual Farmers’ Lawn Party when Peter was eight. The Lawn Party was a yearly ritual most Kings and Queens viewed as tiresome at best; they were apt to put in a token appearance, drink the quick traditional toast, and then be away after bidding the farmers enjoy themselves and thanking them for another fruitful year (this was also part of the ritual, even if the crops had been poor). If Roland had been that sort of King, Peter and Ben would never had gotten the chance to know each other. But, as you might have guessed, Roland loved the Farmers’ Lawn Party, looked forward to it each year, and usually stayed until the very end (and more than once was carried away drunk and snoring loudly).
As it happened, Peter and Ben were paired in the three-legged sack-race, and they won it… although it ended up being much closer than at first it seemed it would be. Leading by almost six lengths, they took a bad spill and Peter’s arm was cut.
“I’m sorry, my prince!” Ben cried. His face had gone pale, and he may have been visualizing the dungeons (and I know his mother and father, watching anxiously from the sidelines, were; if it weren’t for bad luck, Andy Staad was fond of growling, the Staads would have no luck at all); more likely he was just sorry for the hurt he fancied he had caused, or was amazed to see that the blood of the future King was as red as his own.
“Don’t be a fool,” Peter said impatiently. “It was my fault, not yours. I was clumsy. Hurry and get up. They’re catching us.
The two boys, made into a single clumsy three-legged beast by the sack into which Peter’s right leg and Ben’s left one had been tightly tied, managed to get up and lurch on. Both had been badly winded by the fall, however, and their long lead had been cut to almost nothing. Approaching the finish line, where crowds of farmers (not to mention Roland, standing among them without the slightest feeling of awkwardness, or of being some-where he shouldn’t) were cheering deliriously, two huge, sweat-ing farm boys began to close in. That they would overtake Peter and Ben in the last ten yards of the race seemed almost inevitable.
“Faster, Peter!” Roland bellowed, swinging a huge mug of mead with such enthusiasm that he poured most of it onto his own head. In his excitement he never noticed. “Jackrabbit, son! Be a jackrabbit! Those clod-busters are almost up your butt and over your back!”
Ben’s mother began to moan, cursing the fate that had caused her son to be paired up with the prince.
“If they lose, he’ll have our Ben thrown into the deepest dun-geon in the castle,” she moaned.
“Hush, woman,” Andy said. “He’d not. He’s a good King.” He believed it, but he was still afraid. Staad luck was, after all, Staad luck.
Ben, meanwhile, had begun to giggle. He couldn’t believe he was doing it, but he was. “Be a jackrabbit, did he say?”
Peter also began to giggle. His legs ached terribly, blood was trickling down his right arm, and sweat was flooding his face, which was starting to turn an interesting plum color, but he was also unable to stop. “Yes, that’s what he said.”
“Then let’s hop!”
They didn’t look much like jackrabbits as they crossed the finish line; they looked like a pair of strange crippled crows. It was really a miracle they didn’t fall, but somehow they didn’t. They managed three ungainly leaps. The third one took them across the finish line, where they collapsed, howling with laughter.
“Jackrabbit!” Ben yelled, pointing at Peter.
“Jackrabbit yourself!” Peter yelled, pointing back.
They slung their arms about each other, still laughing, and were carried on the shoulders of many strong farmers (Andrew Staad was one of them, and bearing the combined weight of his son and the prince was something he never forgot) to where Roland slipped blue ribbands over their necks. Then he kissed each of them roughly on the cheek and poured the remaining contents of his mug over their heads, to the wild cheers and huzzahs of the farmers. Never, even in the memory of the oldest gaffer there that day, had such an extraordinary race been run.
The two boys spent the rest of the day together and, it soon appeared, would be content to spend the rest of their lives together. Because even a boy of eight has certain duties (and if he is to be the King someday he has even more), the two of them could not be together all they wanted to be, but when they could be, they were.
Some sniffed at the friendship, and said it wasn’t right for the King in waiting to be friends with a boy who was little better than a common barony clod-buster. Most, however, looked upon it with approval; it was said more than once over deep cups in the meadhouses of Delain that Peter had gotten the best of both worlds-his mother’s brains and his father’s love of the common folk.
There was apparently no meanness in Peter. He never went through a period when he pulled the wings off flies or singed dogs’ tails to see them run. In fact, he intervened in the matter of a horse which was to be destroyed by Yosef, the King’s head groom… and it was when this tale made its way to Flagg that the magician began to fear the King’s oldest son, and to think perhaps he did not have as long to put the boy out of the way as he had once thought. For in the affair of the horse with the broken leg, Peter had displayed courage and a depth of resolve which Flagg did not like at all.