Dennis could have told him that the napkins were brought, used once, removed (minus the few threads Peter plucked from each), and then simply thrown away. After all, why not? There were enough of them, all told, to last five hundred princes five hundred years… and longer. If Anders Peyna had not been a merciful man as well as a hard one, there really might have been a finite number of napkins. But he knew how badly that nameless woman in the rocking chair needed the work and the pittance it brought in (Kyla the Good had known the same, in her time), and so he kept her on, as he continued to see that Beson’s guilders went on flowing after the Staads were forced to flee. She became a fixture outside the room of the napkins, that old woman with her needle for unmaking rather than making. There she sat in her rocker, year after year, removing tens of thousands of royal crests, and so it was really not surprising that no word of Peter’s petty thievery ever reached Flagg’s ears.
So you see that, except for that one mistaken assumption and that one unasked question, Peter could have gotten about his work much faster. It did sometimes seem to him that the napkins were not shrinking as rapidly as they ought to have done, but it never occurred to him to question his basic (if vague) idea that the napkins he used were being regularly returned to him. If he had asked himself that one simple question-!
But perhaps, in the end, all things worked for the best.
Or perhaps not. That is another thing you must decide for yourself.
76
Eventually Dennis got over his fright of being Thomas’s butler. After all, Thomas ignored him almost completely, except to sometimes berate him for forgetting to put out his shoes (usually Thomas himself had left his shoes somewhere else, then forgotten where) or to insist Dennis have a glass of wine with him. The wine always made Dennis feel sick to his stomach, although he had come to enjoy a wee drop of bundle-gin in the evenings. He drank it nonetheless. He did not need his good old Da’ around to tell him one did not refuse to drink with the King when asked. And sometimes, usually when he was drunk, Thomas would forbid Dennis to go home but insist that he spend the night in Thomas’s apartments instead. Dennis supposed-and rightly-that these were nights on which Thomas simply felt too lonely to bear his own solitary company. He would give long, besotted, rambling sermons on how difficult it was to be King, how he was trying to do the best job he could and be fair, and how everyone hated him for some reason or other just the same. Thomas often wept during these sermons, or laughed wildly at nothing, but usually he just fell asleep half-way through some mangled defense of one tax or another. Some-times he staggered off to his bed, and Dennis could sleep on the couch. More often, Thomas fell asleep-or passed out-on the couch, and Dennis made his uncomfortable bed on the cooling hearth. It was perhaps the strangest existence any King’s butler had ever known, but, of course, it seemed normal enough to Dennis because it was all he had ever known.
Thomas mostly ignoring him was one thing. Flagg ignoring him was another, even more important thing. Flagg had, in fact, entirely dismissed Dennis’s part in his scheme to send Peter to the Needle. Dennis had been no more than a tool to him-a tool which had served its purpose and could be put aside. If he had thought of Dennis, it would have seemed to him that the tool had been well rewarded: Dennis was the King’s butler, after all.
But on an early winter’s night in the year when Peter was twenty-one and Thomas sixteen, a night when Peter’s thin rope was finally nearing completion, Dennis saw something which changed everything-and it is with the thing Dennis saw that cold night that I must begin to narrate the final events in my tale.
77
It was a night much like those during the terrible time just before and after Roland’s death. The wind shrieked out of a black sky and moaned in the alleys of Delain. Frost lay thick in the pastures of the Inner Baronies and on the cobbles of the castle city. At first, a three-quarters moon chased in and out of the rushing clouds, but by midnight the clouds had thickened enough to obscure the moon completely, and by two in the morning, when Thomas awoke Dennis by rattling the latch of the door between his sitting room and the corridor outside, it had begun to snow.
Dennis heard the rattling and sat up, grimacing at the stiffness in his back and the pins and needles in his legs. Tonight Thomas had fallen asleep on the couch instead of lurching his way to bed, so it had been the hearth for the young butler. Now the fire was almost out. The side of him which had been lying closer to it felt baked; the other side of him felt frozen.
He looked toward the rattling sound… and for a moment terror froze his heart and vitals. For that one moment he thought there was a ghost at the door, and he almost screamed. Then he saw it was only Thomas in his white nightshirt.
“M-My Lord King?”
Thomas took no notice. His eyes were open, but they were not looking at the latch; they were wide and dreaming and they looked straight ahead at nothing. Dennis suddenly guessed that the young King was sleepwalking.
Even as Dennis decided this, Thomas seemed to realize that the reason the latch wouldn’t work was that the bolt was still on. He drew it and then passed out into the hall, looking more ghostlike than ever in the guttering light of the corridor sconces. There was a swirl of nightshirt hem, and then he was gone on bare feet.
Dennis sat stock-still on the hearth for a moment, cross-legged, his pins and needles forgotten, his heart thumping. Outside, the wind hurled snow against the diamond-shaped panes of the sitting-room window and uttered a long banshee howl. What should he do?
There was only one thing, of course-the young King was his master. He must follow.
Perhaps it was the wild night which had brought Roland so vividly to Thomas’s mind, but not necessarily-in fact, Thomas thought of his father a great deal. Guilt is like a sore, endlessly fascinating, and the guilty party feels compelled to examine it and pick at it, so that it never really heals. Thomas had drunk far less than usual, but, strangely, had seemed drunker than ever to Dennis. His sentences had been broken and garbled, his eyes wide and staring, showing too much of the whites.
This was, to a large extent, because Flagg was gone. There had been rumors that the renegade nobility-Staads among them-had been seen gathered together in the Far Forests at the northern reaches of the Kingdom. Flagg had led a regiment of tough, battle-hardened soldiers in search of them. Thomas was always more skittish when Flagg was gone. He knew it was because he had come to depend completely on the dark magician… but he had come to depend on Flagg in ways he did not fully un-derstand. Too much wine was no longer Thomas’s only vice. Sleep is often denied to those with secrets, and Thomas was afflicted with severe insomnia. Without knowing it, he had be-come addicted to Flagg’s sleeping potions. Flagg had left a supply of the drug with Thomas when he led the soldiers north, but Flagg had expected to be gone only three days-four at the most. For the last three days, Thomas had slept badly, or not at all. He felt strange, never quite awake, never quite asleep. Thoughts of his father haunted him. He seemed to hear his father’s voice in the wind, crying out Why do you stare at me? Why do you stare at me so? Visions of wine… visions of Flagg’s darkly cheerful face… visions of his father’s hair catching fire… these things drove sleep away and left him wide-eyed in the long watches of the night while the rest of the castle slept.