The Eyes of the Dragon

9

Once Flagg really did set out to poison Sasha. This was after she asked Roland to pardon a pair of army deserters whom Flagg had wanted beheaded in the Plaza of the Needle. Deserters, he had argued, were a bad example. If one or two were allowed to get away without paying the full penalty, others might try it. The only way to discourage them, he said, was to show them the heads of those who had already tried it. Other would-be deserters would look at those flyblown heads with their staring eyes and think twice about the seriousness of their service to the King.

Sasha, however, had discovered facts about the case from one of her maids that Roland didn’t know. The mother of the older boy had fallen gravely ill. There were three younger brothers and two younger sisters in the family. All might have died in the bitter cold of the Delain winter if the boy hadn’t left his encampment, gone home, and chopped wood for his mother.

The younger boy had gone because he was the older’s best friend, and his sworn blood brother. Without the younger boy, it might have taken two weeks to chop enough wood to keep the family through the winter. With both of them working at top speed, it had taken only six days.

This was putting it in a different light. Roland had loved his own mother very much, and would gladly have died for her. He made inquiries and found out that Sasha had the right of the story. He also found out that the deserters had left only after a sadistic sergeant major had repeatedly refused to relay their re-quests for compassionate leave to their superior, and that as soon as four cords of wood had been chopped, they had gone back, although both had known they must be court-martialed and face the headsman’s axe.

Roland pardoned them. Flagg nodded, smiled, and said only: “Your will is Delain’s will, Sire.” Not for all the gold in the Four Kingdoms would he have allowed Roland to see the sick fury that rose in his heart when his will was balked. Roland’s pardon of the boys was greatly praised in Delain, because many of Roland’s subjects also knew the true facts and those who didn’t know them were quickly informed by the rest. Roland’s wise and compassionate pardon of the two was remembered when other, less humane decrees (which were, as a rule, also the ma-gician’s ideas) were imposed. All of this made no difference to Flagg. He had wanted him killed, and Sasha had interfered. Why could Roland not have married another? He had known none of them, and cared for women not at all. Why not another? Well, it didn’t matter. Flagg smiled at the pardon, but he swore in his heart then that he would attend Sasha’s funeral.

On the night Roland signed the pardon, Flagg went to his gloomy basement laboratory. There he donned a heavy glove and took a deathwatch spider from a cage where he had kept her for twenty years, feeding her newborn baby mice. Each of the mice he fed the spider was poisoned and dying; Flagg did this to increase the potency of the spider’s own poison, which was already potent beyond belief. The spider was blood red and as big as a rat. Her bloated body quivered with venom; venom dripped from her stinger in clear drops that burned smoking holes in the top of Flagg’s worktable.

“Now die, my pretty, and kill a Queen,” Flagg whispered, and crushed the spider to death in his glove, which was made of a magical steel mesh which resisted the poison-yet still that night, when he went to bed, his hand was swelled and throbbing and red.

Poison from the spider’s crushed, twisted body gushed into the goblet. Flagg poured brandy over the deadly stuff, then stirred the two together. When he took the spoon from the glass, its bowl was twisted and misshapen. The Queen would take one sip and fall dying on the floor. Her death would be quick but extremely painful, Flagg thought with satisfaction.

Sasha was in the habit of taking a glass of brandy each night, because she often had trouble falling asleep. Flagg rang for a servant to come and take the drink to her.

Sasha never knew how close she came to death that night.

Moments after brewing the deadly drink, before the servant knocked, Flagg poured it down the drain in the center of his floor and stood listening to it hiss and bubble away into the pipe. His face was twisted with hate. When the hissing had died away, he flung the crystal goblet into the far corner with all his force. It shattered like a bomb.

The servant knocked and was admitted.

Flagg pointed to where the shards glittered. “I’ve broken a goblet,” he said. “Clean it up. Use a broom, idiot. If you touch the pieces, you’ll regret it.”