This was an understatement of some size. Ben’s parents were waiting at the door in their nightclothes when Ben let himself in. They had heard the jingle of the approaching sleigh. His mother hugged him close, weeping. His father, red-faced, unaccustomed tears standing in his eyes, wrung Ben’s hand until it ached. Ben remembered Peyna saying The storms are not over but only beginning.
And still later, lying in bed with his hands behind his head, staring up into the darkness and listening to the wind whistle outside, Ben realized that Peyna had never answered his question-had never said whether or not he believed Peter to be guilty.
66
On the seventeenth day of Thomas’s reign, Brandon’s son, Dennis, brought the first lot of twenty-one napkins to the Needle. He brought them from a storeroom that neither Peter nor Thomas nor Ben Staad nor Peyna himself knew about, although all would become aware of it before the grim business of Peter’s imprisonment was done. Dennis knew because he was a butler’s son from a long line of butlers, but familiarity breeds contempt, so they say, and he thought nothing much about the storeroom from which he fetched the napkins. We’ll speak more of this room later; let me tell you now only that all would have been struck with wonder at the sight of it, and Peter in particular. For had he known of this room which Dennis took completely for granted, he might have attempted his escape as much as three years sooner… and much, for better or for worse, might have been changed.
67
The royal crest was removed from each napkin by a woman Peyna had hired for the quickness of her needle and the tightness of her lips. Each day she sat in a rocker just outside the doorway of the storeroom, picking out stitches that were very old indeed. When she did this her lips were tight for more reasons than one; to unmake such lovely needlework seemed to her almost a desecration, but her family was poor, and the money from Peyna was like a gift from heaven. So there she sat, and would sit, for years to come, rocking and plying her needle like one of those weird sisters of whom you may have heard in another tale. She spoke to no one, not even her husband, about her days of unmaking.
The napkins had a strange, faint smell-not of mildew but of must, as if from long disuse-but they were otherwise without fault, each of them twenty rondels by twenty, big enough to cover the lap of even the most dedicated eater.
There was a bit of comedy attached to the first napkin delivery. Dennis hung about Beson, expecting a tip. Beson let him hang about a while because he expected that sooner or later the dimwitted lad would remember to tip him. They both came to the conclusion that neither was going to be tipped at the same time. Dennis started for the door, and Beson helped him along with a kick in the seat of the pants. This caused a pair of Lesser Warders to laugh heartily. Then Beson pretended to wipe his bottom with the handful of napkins for the Lesser Warders’ further amusement, but he was careful only to pretend-after all, Peyna was in this business somewhere, and it was best to tread lightly.
Perhaps Peyna would not be around a great deal longer, however. In the meadhouses and wineshops, Beson had begun to hear whispers that Flagg’s shadow had fallen on the judgeGeneral, and that if Peyna was not very, very careful, he might soon be watching the proceedings at court from an even more commanding angle than the bench upon which he now sat-he might be looking in the window, these wags said behind their hands, from one of the spikes atop the castle walls.
68
0n the eighteenth day of Thomas’s reign, the first napkin was on Peter’s breakfast tray when it was delivered in the morning. It was so large and the breakfast so small that it actually covered the meal completely. Peter smiled for the first time since he had come to this cold, high place. His cheeks and chin were shadowed with the beginnings of a beard which would grow full and long in these two drafty rooms, and he looked quite a desperate character… until he smiled. The smile lit his face with magical power, made it strong and radiant, a beacon to which one could imagine soldiers rallying in battle.
“Ben,” he muttered, picking the napkin up by one corner. His hand shook a bit. “I knew you’d do it. Thank you, my friend. Thank you.”
The first thing Peter did with his first napkin was to wipe away the tears that now ran freely down his cheeks.
The peephole in the stout wooden door popped open. Two Lesser Warders appeared again like the two heads of Flagg’s parrot, packed into the tiny space cheek to scruffy cheek.
“Hope that baby won’t forget to wipe his chinny-chin!” one cried in a cracked, warbling voice.
“Hope that baby won’t forget to wipe the eggy off his shirty!” the other cried, and then both screamed with derisive laughter. But Peter did not look at them, and his smile did not fade.
The warders saw that smile and made no more jokes. There was something about it which forbade joking.
Eventually they closed the peephole and left Peter alone.
A napkin came with his lunch that day.
With his dinner that night.
The napkins came to Peter in his lonely cell in the sky for the next five years.
69
The dollhouse arrived on the thirtieth day of Thomas the Light-Bringer’s reign. By then modils, those first harbingers of Spring (which we call bluets) were coming up in pretty little roadside bunches. Also by then Thomas the Light-Bringer had signed into law the Farmers’ Tax Increase, which quickly became known as Tom’s Black Tax. The new joke told in the meadhouses and wineshops was that the King would soon be changing his royal name to Thomas the Tax-Bringer. The increase was not eight percent, which might have been fair, or eighteen percent, which might have been bearable, but eighty percent. Thomas had had some doubts about it at first, but it hadn’t taken Flagg long to convince him.
“We must tax them more on what they admit they own, so we can collect at least some of what’s due us on all they hide from the tax collector,” Flagg said. Thomas, his head fuddled by the wine that now flowed constantly in the court chambers of the castle, had nodded with what he hoped was a wise expression on his face.
For his part, Peter had begun to fear that the dollhouse had been lost after all these years-and that was almost the truth. Ben Staad had commissioned Dennis to find it. After several days of fruitless searching, Dennis had confided in his good old Da’-the only person he dared trust with such a serious matter. It had taken Brandon another five days to find the dollhouse in one of the minor storage rooms on the ninth floor, west turret, where its cheerful pretend lawns and long, rambling wings were hidden under an ancient (and slightly moth-eaten) dustcloth that was gray with the years. All of the original furnishings were still in the house, and it had taken Brandon and Dennis and a soldier handpicked by Peyna three more days to make sure all the sharp things were removed. Then, at last, the dollhouse was delivered by two squire boys, who toiled up the three hundred stairs with the heavy, awkward thing spiked to a board between them. Beson followed closely behind, cursing and threatening terrible reprisals if they should drop it. Sweat rolled down the boys’ faces in rivers, but they made no reply.
When the door of Peter’s prison opened and the dollhouse was brought in, Peter gasped with surprise-not just because the dollhouse was finally here, but because one of the two boys carrying it was Ben Staad.