The Eyes of the Dragon

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.”