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He had been King of Delain-at least in his own heart-for five years now, and he thought his luck had been the kind which the Staad family, with its famous bad luck, would have understood. But perhaps tonight would make up for all.
His rope, his legs, his luck. Either all would hold or all would break, quite possibly at the same time. No matter. Poor as it had been, he would trust to his luck.
“Tonight,” he murmured, turning from the window… but something happened at supper which changed his mind.
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It took Peyna and Arlen all day Tuesday to make the ten miles to the Reechul farm, and they were nearly done in when they arrived. Castle Delain was twice as far, but De
After covering not quite half the distance, he began to look for a place where he could hole up for the next few days. So far he had met no one on the road, but noon had passed and soon there would be people returning from the castle market. De
De
There was no food at all upstairs, but in the cellar he found a few potatoes and a handful of turnips. He ate the potatoes (De
If I’m hungry enough, De
He finally did have to eat a number of them, although he managed to hold out until Saturday noon. By then, they actually had begun to look good, but as hungry as he was, they still tasted terrible.
De
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De
He slept in the cellar, fearing surprise, but during the daylight hours of those four long days, De
Peyna, after hearing De
By Saturday noon, he had a letter he was pretty well satisfied with (which was good, since he had worked his way down to the final two sheets of notepaper). He looked at it with some admiration. It covered both sides of the paper, and was by far the longest thing he had ever written. He folded it to the size of a medicine tablet, and then peeked out the sitting-room window, waiting impatiently for it to be dark enough to leave. Peter saw the gathering clouds from his own poor sitting room atop the Needle, De
By four, the long, blue shadow of the house had begun to creep out from the foundations, and De
He left the house in the bleak sunset hour, do
As he trudged through the snow-desolate fields, De
He had no more than thought the magician’s name when a wolf howled somewhere out in the still white wastes. In a dark room below the castle, Flagg’s own sitting room, the magician sat bolt upright suddenly in his chair, where he had fallen asleep with a book of arcane lore open on his stomach.
“Who speaks the name of Flagg?” the magician whispered, and the two-headed parrot shrieked.
Standing in the center of along and desolate field of white, De