A moment or two later, he realized that Thomas was not just shrieking-he was crying out words. At first Dennis could make out only a single phrase, howled out again and again: “Don’t drink the wine! Don’t drink the wine! Don’t drink the wine!”
81
Three nights later, a light knock came at the closed sitting-room door of a farm in one of the Inner Baronies, a farm quite close to where the Staad family had lived not so long ago.
“Come!” Anders Peyna growled. “And it better be damned good, Arlen!”
Arlen had aged in the years since Beson had appeared at Peyna’s door with Peter’s note. The changes in him, however, were slight when compared with the changes in Peyna. The former JudgeGeneral’s hair was almost all gone. His spareness of frame had become gauntness. The loss of hair and weight were very little, however, when compared with the changes in his face. Formerly he had been stern. Now he was grim. Dark-brown hollows floated below his eyes. The stamp of despair was clear on his face, and there was good reason for this. He had seen the things he had spent his life defending brought to ruin… and this ruin had been accomplished with shocking ease, and in a shockingly brief period of time. Oh, I suppose all men of intelligence know how fragile such things as Law and Justice and Civilization really are, but it’s not a thing they think of willingly, because it disturbs one’s rest and plays hob with one’s appetite.
Seeing his life’s work knocked casually apart like a child’s tower of blocks was bad enough, but there was another thing which had haunted Peyna these last four years, something that was even worse. This was the knowledge that Flagg had not achieved all the dark changes in Delain alone. Peyna had helped him. For who else had seen Peter brought to a trial which was perhaps too speedy? Who else had been so convinced of Peter’s guilt… and not so much by the evidence as by a young boy’s shocked tears?
Since the day Peter had been led to the top of the Needle, the chopping block in the Plaza of the Needle had been stained a sinister rusty color. Not even the hardest rain could wash it clean. And Peyna thought he could detect that sinister red stain spread-ing out from the block-spreading out to cover the Plaza, the market streets, the alleys. In his troubled dreams Peyna saw rills of fresh blood washing in bright, accusing threads between the cobblestones and running down the gutters in streamlets. He saw the redans of Castle Delain gleaming bloody in the sun. He saw the carp in the moat floating belly-up, poisoned by the blood which poured out of the sewers in floods and which rose from the springs in the earth itself. He saw the blood rising every-where, staining the fields and forests. In these unhappy dreams even the sun began to look like a bloodshot, dying eye.
Flagg had let him live. In the meadhouses, people whispered behind their hands that he had reached an agreement with the magician-that he had perhaps given Flagg the names of certain traitors, or that perhaps Peyna “had something” on Flagg, some secret that would come out if Peyna died suddenly. This was, of course, ridiculous. Flagg was not a man to be threatened -not by Peyna, not by anyone. There were no secrets. There had been no agreements or deals. Flagg had simply let him live… and Peyna knew why. Dead, he would perhaps have been at peace. Alive, he was left to twist on the rack of his own bad conscience. He was left to watch the terrible changes Flagg had wrought on Delain.
“Well?” he asked irritably. “What is it, Arlen?”
“A boy has come, my Lord. He says he must see you.”
“Send him away,” Peyna said moodily. He reflected that, even a year ago, he would have heard a knock at the front door, but it seemed that he became more deaf with every passing day. “I see no one after nine, you know that. Much has changed, but not that.”
Arlen cleared his throat. “I know the boy. It is Dennis, son of Brandon. It is the King’s butler who calls.”
Peyna stared at Arlen, hardly believing what he had heard. Perhaps he was growing deaf even faster than he had thought. He asked Arlen to repeat, and it came out sounding just the same.
“I’ll see him. Send him in.”
“Very good, my Lord.” Arlen turned to leave.
The similarity to the night Beson had come with Peter’s note -even down to the cold wind screaming outside-came strongly to Peyna now. “Aden,” he called.
Arlen turned back. “My Lord?”
The right corner of Peyna’s mouth quirked the smallest bit. “Are you quite sure it’s not a dwarf-boy?”
“Quite sure, my Lord,” Arlen replied, and the left corner of his own mouth twitched the tiniest bit. “There are no dwarves left in the known world. Or so my mother told me.”
“Obviously she was a woman of good sense and clear dis-cernment, dedicated to raising her son properly and not to be held responsible for any inherent flaws in the material she had to work with. Bring the boy here directly.”
“Yes, my Lord.” The door closed.
Peyna looked into his fire again and rubbed his old, arthritis-crippled hands together in a gesture of unaccustomed agitation. Thomas’s butler. Here. Now. Why?
But there was no sense in speculating; the door would open in a moment, and the answer would come walking through it in the form of a man-boy who would be shaking with the cold, perhaps even frostbitten.
Dennis would have found it a good deal easier to reach Peyna if Peyna had still been at his fine house in the castle city, but his house had been sold from beneath him for “unpaid taxes” following his resignation. Only the few hundred guilders he had put away over the course of forty years had allowed him to buy this small, drafty farmhouse and continue to pay Beson. It was technically in the Inner Baronies, but he was still many miles west of the castle… and the weather had been very cold.
In the hallway beyond the door, he heard the murmur of approaching voices. Now. Now the answer would come through the door. Suddenly that absurd feeling-that feeling of hope, like a ray of strong light shining in a dark cave-came back to him. Now the answer will come through the door, he thought, and for a moment he found himself believing that was really true.
As he drew his favorite pipe from the rack beside him, Anders Peyna saw that his hands were trembling.
82
The boy was really a man, but Arlen’s use of the word was not unjustified-at least not on this night. He was cold, Peyna saw, but he also knew that the cold alone does not make anyone shudder as Dennis was shuddering.
“Dennis!” Peyna said, sitting forward sharply (and ignoring the twinge in his back the sudden movement caused). “Has something happened to the King?” Dreadful images, awful possibilities suddenly filled Peyna’s old head-the King dead, either from too much wine, or possibly by his own hand. Everyone in Delain knew that the young King was deeply moody.
“No… that is… yes… but no… not the way you mean… the way I think you mean…”
“Come in here close to the fire,” Peyna snapped. “Arlen, don’t just stand there gawking! Get a blanket! Get two! Wrap this boy up before he shakes himself to death like a buggerlug bug!”
“Yes, my Lord,” Arlen said. He had never gawked in his life-he knew it, and Peyna did, too. But he recognized the gravity of this situation and left quickly. He stripped the two blankets from his own bed-the only other two in this glorified peasant’s but were the ones on Peyna’s-and brought them back. He took them to where Dennis crouched as close to the fire as he could without bursting into flames. The deep frost which had covered his hair had begun to melt and to run down his cheeks like tears. Dennis wrapped himself in the blankets.