Страница 52 из 73
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. De
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 unca
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. De
“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?” De
“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 u
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 I
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. De
“There might be a way to get in,” he said. “But if he smells me, how I get in or where I hide won’t matter. If he smells me, he’ll run me down.”
Peyna nodded. He did not want to add to the boy’s fear, but in this situation, nothing less than the truth could serve them. “What you say is true.”
“But you still ask me to go?”
“If you can, I still ask it.”
Over a meager breakfast, Peyna had told De
“Napkins,” he said.
Peyna nodded. “Napkins.”
De
Arlen, who had been busy closing up the house, now joined them.
“Your house key, please, Arlen,” Peyna said.
Arlen handed it to him, and Peyna handed it to De
“Aden and I go north to join the”-Peyna hesitated and cleared his throat-"the exiles,” he finished. “I’ve given you Arlen’s key to this house. When we reach their camp, I’ll give mine to a fellow you know, if he be there. I think he will be.”
“Who’s that?” De
“Ben Staad.”
Sunshine broke on De
“I think he may be,” Peyna said. In truth, he knew perfectly well that the entire Staad family was with the exiles. He kept his ear firmly to the earth, and his ears had not grown so deaf that he was not able to hear many movements in the Kingdom.
“And you’d send him down here?”
“If he’ll come, aye, I mean to,” Peyna replied.
“To do what? My Lord, I’m still not clear about that.”
“Nor am I,” Peyna said, looking cross. He felt more than cross; he felt bewildered. “I’ve spent my whole life doing some things because they were logical and not doing others because they were not. I’ve seen what happens when people act on in-tuition, or for illogical reasons. Sometimes the results are ludi-crous and embarrassing; more often they are simply horrible. But here I am, just the same, behaving like a crackbrained crystal gazer.
“I don’t understand you, my Lord.”
“Neither do I, De
De
“Tuesday. Good. Now I’m going to ask you a question that my cursed intuition tells me is very important. If you don’t know the answer-even if you are not sure-for the gods’ sake, say so! Are you ready for the question?”