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“You met no one? No one at all?” De
“No one,” Ben said. “I ranged a little bit ahead to keep an eye out. I saw guards several times, but we always had plenty of time to get to some cover before they could see us. In truth, I think we could have come directly here and passed twenty guards and only have been challenged once or twice. Most of them were drunk.”
Naomi nodded. “Guards o’ the Watch,” she said. “Drunk. And not drunk out on picket along the northern borders of some pissy little barony no one ever heard of; drunk in the castle. Right in the castle!”
De
“I’ll tell you this,” Ben said in a soft voice, “if I were Thomas, I’d quake in my boots every time I looked north, if such as we saw tonight are all he has around him.”
Naomi looked very troubled at this. “Pray the gods it never comes to that,” she said.
Ben nodded.
De
Frisky thumped her tail happily.
Naomi said: “I would hear this story of the sleepwalking King, De
So De
108
By the time he had finished, it was seven o’clock.
Outside, a dim gray glow had come over Delain-that clotted storm-light was as bright at seven as it would be at noon, for the greatest storm of that winter-and perhaps the greatest in history-had come to Delain. The wind howled around the eaves of the castle like a tribe of banshees. Even down here, the fugitives could hear it. Frisky raised her head and whined uneasily.
“What do we do now?” De
Ben, who had gone over Peter’s brief note again and again, said: “Until tonight, nothing. The castle’s awake by now, and there’s no way we could get out of here without being seen under any circumstances. We sleep. Get our strength back. And tonight, before midnight-”
Ben spoke briefly. Naomi gri
“Please, I wouldn’t go that far,” Naomi said, but by then her grin was so broad it seemed in danger of splitting her head in two. She reached over, put her arms around Ben, and kissed him soundly.
Ben turned an absolutely alarming shade of red (he looked as if he might be on the verge of “bursting his brains,” as they said in Delain in those long-ago days)-I must tell you, though, that he also looked delighted.
“Will Frisky help us?” Ben asked when he got his breath back.
At the sound of her name, Frisky looked up again.
“Of course she will. But we’ll need…”
They discussed this new plan for some time longer, and then Ben’s lower face seemed to almost disappear in a great yawn. Naomi also looked tired out. They had been awake for over twenty-four hours by then, you will remember, and had come a great distance.
“Enough,” Ben said. “It’s time for sleep.”
“Hooray!” Naomi said, begi
De
“What is it?” Ben asked.
De
Impatiently, Naomi said: “Of course we do! What do you think-” Then she remembered that De
De
“Why didn’t you say so first thing, you dolt?” Ben exclaimed.
“I guess because I was so excited to see you,” De
“You didn’t bring any turnips, did you?”
Naomi turned to look at him, puzzled. “Turnips? I don’t have any. Do you, Ben?”
No. A gentle and supremely happy smile spread across De
109
That was a mighty storm indeed, and it’s still told of in Delain today. Five feet of new snow had fallen by the time an early, howling dark came down on the castle keep. Five feet of new snow in one day is mighty enough, but the wind made drifts that were much, much bigger. By the time dark fell, the wind was no longer blowing a force-gale; it was blowing a hurricane. In places along the castle walls, snow was piled twenty-five feet deep, and covered the windows of not just first and second floors, but the third-floor windows as well.
You might think this would have been good for Peter’s escape plans, and it might have been if the Needle hadn’t stood all alone in the Plaza. But it did, and here the wind blew its hardest. A strong man couldn’t have stood against that wind; he would have been sent rolling, head over heels, until he crashed against the first stone wall on the far side of the Plaza. And the wind had another effect, as well-it was like a giant broom. As fast as the snow fell, the wind blew it out of the Plaza. By dark there were huge drifts piled against the castle and clogging most of the alleys on the west side of the castle keep, but the Plaza itself was clean as a whistle. There were only the frozen cobbles, waiting to break Peter’s bones if his rope should break.
And I must tell you now that Peter’s rope was bound to break. When he tested it, it had held his weight… but there was one fact about that mystic thing called “breaking strain” that Peter didn’t know. Yosef hadn’t known, either. The ox drivers knew it, though, and if Peter had asked them, they would have told him an old axiom, one known to sailors, loggers, seamstresses, and anyone else who works with thread or rope: The longer the cord, the sooner the break.
Peter’s short test rope had held him.
The rope to which he meant to entrust his life-the very thin rope-was about two hundred and sixty-five feet long.
It was bound to break, I tell you, and the cobbles below waited to catch him, and break his bones, and bleed away his life.