“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.
A cheer so great it was like the sound of surf breaking against the long, desolate strands of the Eastern Barony greeted their coming. Thomas looked around, amazed at the sound, and his first thought was: Where is Peter? Surely this must be for Peter! Then he remembered that Peter was in the Needle and realized the cheering was for him. He felt a dawning pleasure… and I must tell you that the pleasure was not just in knowing the cheers were for him. He knew that Peter, locked in his lonely tower rooms, must hear the cheering, too.
“It does it matter now that you were always best in lessons?
Thomas thought with a mean happiness that pricked him even as it warmed him. What does it matter now? You are locked in the Needle and I… I am to be King! What does it matter that you brought him a glass of wine every night and
But this last thought caused a strange, greasy sweat to rise on his forehead, and he put it away from him.
The cheers rose again and again as he and Flagg walked first to the Plaza of the Needle and then under the arch formed by the upraised ceremonial swords of the Home Guard, dressed again in their fine red ceremonial uniforms and their tall WolfJaw shakos. Thomas began to positively enjoy himself. He raised a hand in salute, and his subjects’ cheers became a storm. Men threw their hats in the air. Women wept for joy. Cries of The King! The King! Behold the King! Thomas the Light-Bringer! Long live the King! rose in the air. Thomas, who was only a boy, thought they were for him. Flagg, who had perhaps never been a boy, knew better. The cheers were because the time of unease was past. They were cheering the fact that things could go on as they always had, that the shops could be reopened, that grim-eyed soldiers in tight leather hats would no longer stand watches around the castle in the night, that everyone could get drunk following this solemn ceremony and not worry about waking to the sounds of confused midnight revolt. No more than that, no less than that. Thomas could have been anyone, anyone at all. He was a figurehead.
But Flagg would see that Thomas never knew that.
Not, at any rate, until it was too late.
The ceremony itself was short. Anders Peyna, looking twenty years older than the week before, officiated. Thomas answered I will, I shall, and I swear in all the right places, as Flagg had coached him. At the end of the ceremonies, which were conducted in such solemn silence that even those at the farthest edges of the huge crowd could hear them clearly, the crown was placed on Thomas’s head. Cheers rose again, louder than ever, and Thomas looked up-up and up the smooth, rounded stone side of the Needle, to the very top, where there was but one window. He couldn’t see if Peter was looking down, but he hoped Peter was. He hoped Peter was looking down and biting his lips in frustration until the blood flowed down his chin, as Thomas had often bitten his own lips-bitten them until there was a fine white network of scars there.
Do you hear that, Peer? he shrilled in his mind. They’re cheering for ME! They’re cheering for ME! They’re finally cheering for ME!
49
On his first night as King, Thomas the Light-Bringer awoke straight up and staring in bed, his face stark and horrified, his hands crammed against his mouth as if to stifle a scream. He had just had a terrible nightmare, one even worse than those in which he relived the awful afternoon in the Eastern Tower.
This dream had been a kind of reliving, too. He was in the secret passage again, spying on his father. It was the night his father had been so drunk and furious, striding around the room and shrilling defiance at the heads on the walls. But when his father came to the head of Niner, the things he said were not the same.
Why do you stare at me? his father shrieked in the dream. He’s killed me and I suppose you couldn’t stop that, but how could you see your brother imprisoned for it? Answer me, damn you! I did the best I could, and look at me! Look at me!
His father began to burn. His face turned the dull red of a well-banked fire. Smoke burst from his eyes, his nose, his mouth. He doubled over in agony and Thomas saw that his father’s hair was on fire. That was when he woke up.
The wine! he thought now, in horror. Flagg brought him a glass of wine that night! Everyone knew that Peter brought him wine every night, so everyone thought Peter poisoned the wine! But Flagg brought him wine that night, too, and he never did before! And the poison came from Flagg! He said it was stolen from him years ago,
He would not allow himself to think of such things. He would not. Because if he did think of such things-
“He would kill me,” Thomas whispered, horrified.
You could go to Peyna. Peyna doesn’t like him.
Yes, he could do that. But then all his old dislike and jeal-ousy of Peter returned. If he told, Peter would be let out of the Needle and would take his place as King. Thomas would be no one again, just a bumbling prince who had been King for one day.