The Eyes of the Dragon

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.

When Flagg had still not returned on the eighth night (he and his soldiers were even then camped fifty miles from the castle and Flagg was in a foul mood; the only trace of the nobles they found had been frozen hoofprints that might have been days or weeks old), Thomas sent for Dennis. It was later that night, that eighth night, that Thomas arose from his couch and began to walk.