The Eyes of the Dragon

29

When Thomas got there and slid aside the two little panels, his father and his brother were just finishing their nightly glass of wine together. Peter was now almost seventeen, tall and handsome. The two of them sat by the fire, drinking and talking like old friends, and Thomas felt the old hate fill his heart with acid. After some little time, Peter arose and took courteous leave of his father.

“You leave earlier and earlier these nights, “Roland remarked.

Peter made some demurral.

Roland smiled. It was a sweet, sad smile, mostly toothless. “I hear,” said he, “that she is lovely.”

Peter looked flustered, which was uncommon with him. He stammered, which was even less common.

“Go,” Roland interrupted. “Go. Be gentle with her, and be kind… but be hot, if there is ardor in you. Later years are cold years, Peter. Be hot while your years are green, and fuel is plentiful, and the fire may burn high.”

Peter smiled. “You speak as if you are very old, Father, but you still look strong and hale to me.”

Roland embraced Peter. “I love you,” he said.

Peter smiled with no awkwardness or embarrassment. “I love you, too, Dad,” he said, and in his lonely darkness (spying is always lonely work, and the spyer almost always does it in the dark), Thomas pulled a horrible face.

Peter left, and for an hour or more not much happened. Roland sat morosely by the fire, drinking glass after glass of beer. He did not roar or bellow or talk to the heads on the walls; there was no destruction of furniture. Thomas had almost made up his mind to leave, when there was a double rap at the door.

Roland had been looking into the fire, almost hypnotized by the flicker-play of the flames. Now he roused himself and called, “Who comes?”

Thomas heard no response, but his father rose and went to the door as if he had. He opened it, and at first Thomas thought his father’s habit of talking to the heads on the walls had taken a queer new turn-that his father was now inventing invisible human company to relieve his boredom.

“Strange to see you here at this hour,” Roland said, apparently walking back toward the fire in the company of no one at all. “I thought you were always at your spells and conjurations after dark.”

Thomas blinked, rubbed his eyes, and saw that someone was there after all. For a moment he couldn’t rightly make out who… and then he wondered how he could possibly have thought his father was alone when Flagg was right there beside him. Flagg was carrying two glasses of wine on a silver tray.

“Wives’ tale, m'Lord-magicians conjure early as well as late. But of course we have our darksome image to keep up.”

Roland’s sense of humor was always improved by beer-so much so that he would often laugh at things that weren’t funny in the least. At this remark he threw back his head and bellowed as if it was the greatest joke he had ever heard. Flagg smiled thinly.

When Roland’s fit of laughing had passed, he said: “What’s this? Wine?”

“Your son is barely more than a boy, but his deference toward his father and his honor of his King have shamed me, a grown man,” Flagg said. “I brought you a glass of wine, my King, to show you that I, too, love you.”

He passed it to Roland, who looked absurdly touched.

Don’t drink it, Father! Thomas thought suddenly-his mind was full of an alarm he couldn’t understand. Roland’s head came up suddenly and tilted, almost as if he had heard.

“He’s a good boy, my Peter,” Roland said.

“Indeed,” Flagg replied. “Everyone in the Kingdom says so.”

“Do they?” Roland asked, looking pleased. “Do they, indeed?”

“Yes-so they do. Shall we toast him?” Flagg raised his glass. No, Father! Thomas shouted in his mind again, but if his father had heard his first thought, he didn’t hear this one. His face shone with love for Thomas’s elder brother.

“To Peter, then!” Roland raised the glass of poisoned wine high.

“To Peter!” Flagg agreed, smiling. “To the King!”

Thomas cringed in the dark. Flagg’s making two different toasts! I don’t know what he means, but… Father!

This time it was Flagg who turned his darkly considering gaze toward the dragon’s head for a moment, as if he had heard the thought. Thomas froze, and in a moment Flagg’s gaze turned back to Roland.

They clinked glasses and drank. As his father quaffed the glass of wine, Thomas felt a splinter of ice push its way into his heart.

Flagg made a half-turn in his chair and threw his glass into the fire. “Peter!”

“Peter!” Roland echoed, and threw his own. It smashed against the sooty brickwork at the back of the fireplace and fell into the flames, which for a moment seemed to flare an ugly green.

Roland raised the back of his hand to his mouth for a moment, as if to stifle a belch. “Did you spice it?” he asked. “It tasted… almost mulled.”

“No, my Lord,” Flagg said gravely, but Thomas thought he sensed a smile behind the mask of the magician’s gravity, and that splinter of ice slipped further into his heart. Suddenly he wanted no more of spying, not ever. He closed the peepholes and crept back to his room. He felt first hot, then cold, then hot again. By morning he had a fever. Before he was well again, his father was dead, his brother imprisoned in the room at the top of the Needle, and he was a boy King at the age of barely twelve-Thomas the Light-Bringer, he was dubbed at the cor-onation ceremonies. And who was his closest advisor?

You guess.