“Thomas, aye,” Brandon said, and then whispered: “But if the time comes to do yer first master a service, Dennis, you mustn’t hesitate. I have never-”
At that moment, Brandon clutched the left side of his chest, stiffened, and died. He died where he would have wanted to die, in his own chair, in front of his own fire.
In Peter’s fourth year of imprisonment-his rope below the stones growing steadily longer and longer-the Staad family disappeared. The throne possessed itself of what little there re-mained of their lands, as it had done when other noble families disappeared. And as Thomas’s reign progressed, there were more and more disappearances.
The Staads were only one item of meadhouse gossip in a busy week that included four beheadings, an increased levy against shopkeepers, and the imprisonment of an old woman who had for three days walked back and forth in front of the palace, screaming that her grandson had been taken and tortured for speaking against the previous year’s Cattle Levies. But when Peter heard the Staad name in the warders’ conversation, his heart had stopped for a moment.
The chain of events leading to the disappearance of the Staads was one familiar to everyone in Delain by now. The tick-tocking pendulum of the headsman’s axe had thinned the numbers of the nobility terribly. Many of these nobles died because their families had served the Kingdom for hundreds-or thousands-of years, and they could not believe such an unjust fate would or could fall on them. Others, seeing bloody handwriting on the wall, fled. The Staads were among these.
And the whispering began.
Tales were told behind cupped hands, tales suggesting that these nobles had not simply scattered to the four winds but had gathered together somewhere, perhaps in the deep woods at the northern end of the Kingdom, to plan an overthrow of the throne.
These stories passed to Peter like the wind through his win-dow, the drafts beneath his door… They were dreams of a wider world. Mostly he worked on his rope. During the first year, the rope grew longer by eighteen inches every three weeks.
At the end of that year, he had a slim cable that was twenty-five feet long-a cable that was, theoretically at least, strong enough to bear his weight. But there was a difference between dangling from a beam in his bedroom and dangling above a drop of three hundred feet, and Peter knew it. He was, quite literally, staking his life on that slim cord.
And twenty-five feet a year was perhaps not enough; it would take more than eight years before he could even try, and the rumblings he heard at second hand had grown loud enough to be disturbing. Above all else, the Kingdom must endure-there must be no revolt, no chaos. Wrongs must be put right, but by law, not by bows and slings and maces and clubs. Thomas, Leven Valera, Roland, he himself, even Flagg paled into insignificance next to that. There must be law.
How Anders Peyna, growing old and bitter by his fire, would have loved him for that!
Peter determined that he must make his effort to escape as soon as possible. Accordingly he made long calculations, doing the figures in his head so as to leave no trace. He did them again and again and again, proving to himself that he had made no mistake.
In his second year in the Needle, he began to pluck ten threads from each napkin; in his third year fifteen; in his fourth year, twenty. The rope grew. Fifty-eight feet long after the second year; a hundred and four after the third; a hundred and sixty after the fourth.
The rope at that time would still have fetched up a hundred and forty feet from the ground.
During his last year, Peter began to take thirty threads from each napkin, and for the first time his robberies showed clearly -each napkin looked frayed on all four sides, as if mice had been at it. Peter waited in agony for his thefts to be discovered.
75
But they were not discovered then, or ever. There was not so much as a question ever raised. Peter had spent endless nights (or so they seemed to him) wondering and worrying when Flagg would hear some wrong thing, some wrong note, and so get wind of what he was up to. He would send some underling, Peter supposed, and the questions would begin. Peter had thought things out with agonizing care, and he had made only one wrong assumption-but that one led to a second (as wrong assumptions so often do) and that second was a dilly. He had assumed that there was some finite number of napkins-perhaps a thousand or so in all-and that they were being used over and over again. His thinking on the subject of the napkin supply never went much further than that. Dennis could have told him differently and saved him perhaps two years of work, but Dennis was never asked. The truth was simple but staggering. Peter’s napkins were not coming from a supply of a thousand, or two thousand, or twenty thousand; there were nearly half a million of these old, musty napkins in all.
On one of the deep levels below the castle was a storeroom as big as a ballroom. And it was filled with napkins… napkins… nothing but napkins. They smelled musty to Peter, and that wasn’t surprising-most of them, coincidentally or not, dated from a time not long after the imprisonment and death of Leven Valera, and the existence of all those napkins-coincidentally or not-was, indirectly at least, the work of Flagg. In a queer sort of way, he had created them.
Those had been dark times indeed for Delain. The chaos Flagg so earnestly wished had almost come upon the land. Valera had been removed; mad King Alan had ascended the throne in his place. If he had lived another ten years, the Kingdom surely would have drowned in blood… but Alan was struck down by lightning while playing cubits on the back lawn in the pouring rain one day (as I told you, he was mad). It was lightning, some said, sent by the gods themselves. He was followed by his niece, Kyla, who became known as Kyla the Good… and from Kyla, the line of succession had run straight and true down through the generations to Roland, and the brothers to whose tale you have been listening. It was Kyla, the Good Queen, who brought the land out of its darkness and poverty. She had nearly bankrupted the Royal Treasury to do it, but she knew that currency, hard currency-is the life’s blood of a kingdom. Much of Delain’s hard currency had been drained away during the wild, weird reign of Alan II, a King who had sometimes drunk blood from the notched ears of his servants and who had insisted that he could fly; a King more interested in magic and necromancy than profit and loss and the welfare of his people. Kyla knew it would take a massive flow of both love and guilders to set the wrongs of Alan’s reign right, and she began by trying to put every able-bodied person in Delain back to work, from eldest to youngest.
Many of the older citizens of the castle keep had been set to making napkins-not because napkins were needed (I think I have already told you how most of Delain’s royalty and nobility felt about them), but because work was needed. These were hands that had been idle for twenty years or more in some cases, and they worked with a will, weaving on looms exactly like the one in Sasha’s dollhouse… except in the matter of size, of course!
For ten years these old people, over a thousand of them, made napkins and drew hard coin from Kyla’s Treasury for their work. For ten years people only slightly younger and a little more able to get about had taken them down to the cool, dry storeroom below the castle. Peter had noticed that some of the napkins brought to him were moth-eaten as well as musty-smelling. The wonder, although he didn’t know it, was that so many of them were still in such fine condition.