“But there was one head you didn’t see,” Peyna said.
“No, my Lord, I saw them a-” Dennis stopped, eyes wid-ening. “Niner!” He gasped. “The peepholes-” He stopped, his eyes now almost as big as saucers.
Silence fell again inside. Outside, the winter wind moaned and whined. And miles away, Peter, rightful King of Delain, hunched over a tiny loom high in the sky and wove a rope almost too fine to see.
At last, Peyna fetched a deep sigh. Dennis was looking up at him from his place on the hearth pleadingly… hopefully… fearfully. Peyna bent forward slowly and touched his shoul-der.
“You did well to come here, Dennis, son of Brandon. You did well to make a reason for your absence-quite a plausible one, I think. You’ll sleep here with us tonight, in the attic, under the eaves. It’ll be cold, but I think you’ll sleep better than you have of late. Am I wrong?”
Dennis shook his head slowly once, and a tear spilled from his right eye and ran slowly down his cheek.
“And your mum knows naught of your reason for needing to be away?”
“No”
“Then the chances are very good she’ll not be touched by it. Arlen will take you up. Those are his blankets, I think, and you’ll have to return them. But there’s straw above, and it’s clean.”
“I’ll sleep just as well with only one blanket, my Lord,” Arlen said.
“Hush! Young blood runs hot even in its sleep, Arlen. Your blood has cooled. And you may want your blankets… in case dwarves and trolls come in your dreams.”
Arlen smiled a little.
“In the morning, we’ll talk more, Dennis-but you may not see your mum for a bit now; I must tell you that, although I suspect you already know it might not be healthy for you to go back to Delain, by the look of you.”
Dennis tried to smile, but his eyes were shiny with fear. “I had thoughts of more than the grippe when I came here, and that’s the honest truth. But now I’ve put your own health in danger as well, haven’t I?”
Peyna smiled dryly. “I’m old, and Arlen is old. The health of the old is never very strong. Sometimes that makes them more careful than they should be… but sometimes it makes them dare much.” Especially, he thought, if they have much to atone for. “We’ll speak more in the morning. In the meantime, you deserve your rest. Will you light his way upstairs, Arlen?”
“Yes, my Lord.”
“And then come back to me.”
“Yes, my Lord.”
Arlen led the exhausted Dennis from the room, leaving Anders Peyna to brood before his dying fire.
85
When Arlen came back, Peyna said quietly: “We have plans to make, Arlen, but perhaps you’ll draw us a drop of wine. It would be well to wait until the boy is asleep.”
“My Lord, he was asleep before his head touched the hay he had gathered for his pillow.”
“Very well. But draw us a drop of wine anyway.”
“A drop is all there is to draw, “Arlen said.
“Good. Then we’ll not have to set out with big heads to-morrow, will we?”
“My Lord?”
“Aden, we leave here tomorrow, the three of us, for the north. I know it, you know it. Dennis says there’s grippe in Delain-and so there is; one who would grip us if he could, anyway. We go for our health.”
Arlen nodded slowly.
“It would be a crime to leave that good wine behind us for the tax man. So we’ll drink it… and then take ourselves off to bed.”
“As you say, my Lord.”
Peyna’s eyes glinted. “But before you go to bed, you’ll mount to the attic and get the blanket you left with the boy, against my strict and specific instructions.”
Arlen gaped at Peyna. Peyna mocked his gape with uncanny aptness. And for the first and last time in his service as Peyna’s butler, Arlen laughed out loud.
86
Peyna went to bed but could not sleep. It wasn’t the sound of the wind that kept him awake, but the sound of cold laughter coming from inside his own head.
When he could stand that laughter no longer, he got up, went back into the sitting room, and sat before the cooling fireplace ashes, his white hair floating in small clouds over his skull. Unaware of his comic look (and if he had been aware of it, he would have been unmindful), he sat wrapped in his blankets like the oldest Indian in the universe and looked into the dead fire.
Pride goes before a fall, his mother had told him when he was a child, and Peyna had understood that. Pride’s a joke that’ll make the stranger inside you laugh sooner or later, she had also told him, and he hadn’t understood that… but he did now. Tonight the stranger inside was laughing very hard indeed. Too hard for him to be able to sleep, even though the next day was apt to be long and difficult.
Peyna was fully able to appreciate the irony of his position. All his life, he had served the idea of the law. Ideas like “prison break” and “armed rebellion” horrified him. They still did, but certain truths had to be faced. That the machinery of revolt had come to exist in Delain, for instance. Peyna knew that the nobles who had fled to the north called themselves “exiles,” but he also knew that they were edging ever closer to calling themselves “rebels.” And if he were to keep that revolt from happening, he might well have to use the machinery of rebellion to help a prisoner break out of the Needle. That was the joke the stranger inside was laughing at, laughing too loudly for sleep to be even a remote possibility.
Such actions as the ones he was now thinking about went against the grain of his whole life, but he would go ahead anyway, even if it killed him (which it just might). Peter had been falsely imprisoned. Delain’s true King was not on the throne, but locked in a cold two-room cell at the top of the Needle. And if it took lawless forces to put things right again, so it must be. But…
“The napkins,” Peyna muttered. His mind circled back to them and back to them. “Before we resort to force of arms to free the rightful King and see him enthroned, the business of the napkins should be investigated. He’ll have to be asked. Dennis… and the Staad boy, perhaps… aye…”
“My Lord?” Arlen asked from behind him. “Are you unwell?”
Arlen had heard his master rise, as butlers almost always do.
“I am unwell,” Peyna agreed gloomily. “But it’s nothing my physician can fix, Arlen.”
“I’m sorry, my Lord.”
Peyna turned to Arlen, and fixed his bright, sunken eyes upon the butler.
“Before we become outlaws, I want to know why he asked for his mother’s dollhouse… and for napkins with his meals.”
87
Go back to the castle?” Dennis asked the next morning, in a hoarse voice that was almost a whisper. “Go back to where he is?”
“If you feel you can’t, I’ll not press you,” Peyna said. “But you know the castle well enough, I think, to stay out of his way. If, that is, you know a way to get in unnoticed.
To be noticed would be bad. You look much too lively for a boy who is supposed to be home sick.”
The day was cold and bright. The snow on the long, rolling hills of the Inner Baronies threw back a diamond dazzle which made the eyes water before long. I’ll probably be snowblind by noon, and it’ll serve me right, Peyna thought grumpily. The stranger inside seemed to find this prospect hilarious indeed.
Castle Delain itself could be seen in the distance, blue and dreaming on the horizon, its walls and towers looking like an illustration in a book of fairy stories. Dennis, however, did not look like a young hero in search of adventure. His eyes were full of fear, and his face bore the expression of a man who has escaped from a den of lions… only to be told he’s forgotten his lunch, and must go back in and get it, even though he’s lost his appetite.