Dennis didn't like getting up early, but he liked his job very much, and he liked Peter, who was always patient with him, even when he made a mistake. The only time he had ever raised his voice to Dennis was when Dennis had brought him a light lunch and had neglected to put a napkin on the tray.

"I'm very sorry, y'Highness," Dennis had said on that occasion. "I just never thought-"

"Well next time, do think!" Peter said. He was not shouting, but it was a close thing. Dennis had never neglected to put a napkin on Peter's tray again-and sometimes, just to be safe, he put on two.

Morning ch.o.r.es done, Dennis faded into the background and his father took over. Brandon was every bit the perfect butler, with his cravat neatly knotted, his hair pulled tightly back and rolled in a bun at the nape of his neck, his coat and breeches without a speck, his shoes shined to a mirror gloss (a mirror gloss Dennis was responsible for). But at night, with his shoes off, his coat hung in the closet, his cravat loosened, and a gla.s.s of bundle-gin in his hand, he looked to Dennis a much more natural man.

"Tell you something to always be remembrun, Denny," he had said to his son on many occasions while in this comfortable state. "There may be as many's a dozen things in this world which last, but surely no more, and may be less. Pa.s.sey -o-nut love of a woman don't last, and a runner's wind don't last, nor does a braggart's wind, nor does haytime in the summer or sugartime in spring thaw. But two things that do last is one, royalty, and another, service. If you stick with your young man until he's an old man, and if you take care of him proper, he'll take care of you proper. You serve him an' he'll serve you, if you take the turn o' my mind. Now pour me another gla.s.s, and take a drop for yourself, if you like, but no more than a drop or your mother'll skin us both alive."

Undoubtedly, some sons would quickly have grown bored with this catechism, but Dennis did not. He was the rarest of sons, a boy who had reached twenty and still thought his father wiser than himself.

On the morning after the King's death, Dennis hadn't had t force himself blearily out of bed at five o'clock; he had been awakened at three by his father, with the news of the King's death.

"Flagg's rared up a search party," his father said, eyes full of bloodshot distress, "and that's right enough. But my master will be leading it soon enough, I'll warrant, and I'm off to help him hunt for the fiend who done it, if he'll have me."

"Me, too!" Dennis cried, grabbing for his breeches.

"Not at all, not at all," his father said with a hard sternness that made Dennis subside at once. " Things'll go forrad here just as they always have, murder or no-the old ways must be kept to now more than ever. My master and your master will be crowned King at noon, and that's well enough, although he comes to the crown in a bad time. But the death of a King by violence is always an evil thing if it comes not on the field of battle. The old ways will hold, doubt it not, but there may be trouble in the meantime. What's best for you, Dennis, is to go about your work just the same as always."

He was gone before Dennis could protest.

And when five o'clock came, Dennis told his mother what his father had said and told her he should get about his morning round, even though he knew Peter would be gone. Dennis's mother was more than agreeable. She was dying for news. She told him to go, of course* go and then come back to her no later than eight of the clock, and tell her all he heard.

So Dennis went to Peter's rooms, which were utterly deserted. Nevertheless, he observed his regular routine, finishing by setting breakfast in the prince's study. He looked ruefully at the plates and gla.s.ses, the jams and jellies, reflecting that surely none of those things would be used that morning. Still, going about his ordered course had made him feel better for the first time since his father had turned him out of bed, for he now understood that, for better or worse, things were never going to be the same again. Times had changed.

He was preparing to leave when he heard a sound. It was s m.u.f.fled he couldn't rightly tell where it was-only the general area from which it came. He looked toward Peter's bookcase, and his heart leaped in his chest.

Tendrils of smoke were drifting from between the loosely shelved books.

Dennis leaped across the room and began pulling books out by double handfuls. He saw that the smoke was issuing from cracks at one side of the bookcase's back. Also, that sound was clearer with the books gone. It was some sort of animal, squeaking in pained distress.

Dennis clawed and pawed at the bookcase, his fright spiraling toward panic. If there was one thing people were afraid of in that time and place, it was fire.

Soon enough his fingers happened on the secret spring. Flagg had foreseen this, too-after all, the secret panel wasn't really very secret-enough to amuse a boy, but not much more. The back of the bookcase slid to the right a bit, and a puff of gray smoke wafted out. The smell that escaped with the smoke was extremely unpleasant-a mixture of cooking meat, frying fur, and smoldering paper.

Not thinking, Dennis swept the panel all the way open. Of course, when he did that, more air got in. Things which had been only smoldering before now showed the first winks of flame.

This was the crucial point, the one place where Flagg had to be content not with what he was sure would happen but with his best guess of what would probably happen. All his efforts of the last seventy-five years now swung upon the fragile hinge of what a butler's son might or might not do in the next five seconds. But the Brandons had been butlers since time out of mind, and Flagg had decided he must depend on their long tradition of impeccable behavior. If Dennis had frozen in horror at the sight of those blossoming flames, or if he had turned and run for a pitcher of water, all of Flagg's carefully planted evidence might have burned in greenish tinted flames. The murder of Peter's father would never have been laid at Peter's door and he would have been crowned King at noon.

But Flagg's judgment was right. Instead of freezing or going for water, Dennis reached in and beat the flames out with his bare hands. It took less than five seconds, and Dennis was barely singed. The doleful squeaking went on, and the first thing he saw when he had waved the smoke aside was a mouse, lying on its side. It was in its death agonies. It was only a mouse, and Dennis had killed dozens of them in the line of duty without the slightest feeling of pity. Yet he felt sorry for this poor little b.u.g.g.e.r. Something terrible, something he could not even begin to understand, had happened to it and was still happening to it. Smoke rose from its fur in fine ribbons. When he touched it, he drew his hand back with a hiss-it was like touching the side of a tiny stove, such as the one in Sasha's dollhouse.

More smoke drifted lazily from an engraved wooden box with its lid slightly ajar. Dennis lifted the lid a little. He saw the tweezers, the packet. A number of brownish spots had flowered on the packet and it smoldered sluggishly, but had not burst into flame* nor did it now. The flames had come from Peter's letters, which were, of course, not enchanted at all. It was the mouse that had set these alight with its fearfully hot body. Now there was only the sullenly smoldering packet, and something warned Dennis not to touch it.

He was afraid. There were things here that he didn't under-stand, things he was not sure he wanted to understand. The one thing he knew for sure was that he badly needed to speak to his father. His father would know what to do.

Dennis took the ash bucket and a small shovel from beside the stove and went back to the secret panel. He used the shovel to pick up the smoking body of the mouse and drop it into the ash bucket. He wet the charred corners of the letters once more, just to be sure. Then he closed the panel, replaced the books, and left Peter's apartments. He took the ash bucket with him, and now he did not feel like Peter's loyal servant but like a thief- his booty was a poor mouse that died even before Dennis got back out the West Gate of the castle.

And before he had even reached his house on the far side of the castle keep, a horrible suspicion had dawned in his mind -he was the first in Delain to feel this suspicion, but he would not be the last.

He tried to push the thought out of his head, but it kept coming back. What sort of poison, Dennis wondered, had killed King Roland, anyway? Exactly what sort of poison had it been?

By the time he got back to the Brandon house, he was in a bad state indeed, and he would answer none of his mother's questions. Nor would he show her what was in the ash bucket. He told her only that he must see his father the moment he came in-it was dreadfully important. Then he went into his room and wondered exactly what sort of poison it had been. He only knew one thing about it, but that one thing was enough. It had been something hot.

{insert image on page 102} Brandon arrived just before ten o'clock, short-tem- pered, exhausted, and in no mood for foolishness. He was dirt and sweaty, there was a thin cut across his forehead, and cobwebs flew from his hair in long strings. They had found no sign of the a.s.sa.s.sin at all. His only news was that preparations for Peter's coronation were going full speed ahead in the Plaza of the Needle, under the direction of Anders Peyna, Delain's Judge-General.

His wife told him of Dennis's return. Brandon 's brow darkened. He went to the door of his son's room and rapped not with his knuckles but with a closed fist. "Come ' ee out here, boy, and tell us why you come back with the ash bucket from your master's study."

"No," Dennis said. "You come in here, Dad-I don't want Mother to see what I've got, and I don't want her to hear what we say to each other."

Brandon barged in. Dennis's mother waited apprehensively by the stove, expecting it was some sort of semi-hysterical foolishness which the boy had thought up, some ill-advised monkeyshine, and that very soon she would hear Dennis's wails as her tired and distraught husband, who must begin today at noon to b.u.t.tle not a prince but a King, took out all his fears and frustrations on the boy's backside. She hardly blamed Dennis; everyone in the keep seemed hysterical this morning, running around like crazy people just let out of bedlam, repeating a hundred false rumors, then taking them back in order to repeat a hundred new ones.

But there were no raised voices from behind Dennis's door, and neither of them came out for more than an hour. When they did, a single look at her husband's white face made the poor woman feel like fainting dead away. Dennis scurried along at his father's heels like a scared puppy.

Now Brandon was carrying the ash bucket.

"Where are you going?" she asked timidly.

Brandon said nothing. It seemed that Dennis could say nothing. He only rolled his eyes at her and then followed his father out the door. She saw neither of them for twenty-four hours, and became convinced that both were dead-or even worse, that they were suffering in the Dungeon castle.

Her dire thoughts were not so unlikely, either, for those were a terrible twenty-four hours in Detain. The day mightn't have seemed so terrible in some places, places where revolt and upheaval and alarms and midnight executions are almost a way of life* there really are such places, although I wish I didn't have to say so. But Detain had for years-and even centuries-been an ordered and orderly place, so perhaps they were spoiled. That black day really began when Peter was not crowned at noon and ended with the stunning news that he was to be tried in the Hall of the Needle for the murder of his father. If Detain had had a stock market, I suppose it would have crashed.

Construction on the dais where the coronation was to take place began at first light. The platform would be a jury-rigged affair of plain boards, Anders Peyna knew, but he also knew that enough flowers and bunting would cover the rude spots. They had had no warning of the King's pa.s.sing, because murder isn't a thing that can be predicted. If it could be, there would be no murders, and the world would almost certainly be a happier place. Besides, pomp and circ.u.mstance wasn't the point-the point was to make the people feel the continuity of the throne. If the citizens got the feeling that everything was still all right in spite of the terrible thing that had happened, Peyna didn't care how many flower girls got splinters.

But at eleven o'clock, construction abruptly ceased. The flower girls were turned away-many of them in tears-by the Home Guards.

At seven that morning, most of the Home Guards had begun dressing in their gorgeous red ceremonial uniforms and their tall gray Wolf-Jaw shakos. They were, of course, to form the ceremonial double line, an aisle down which Peter would walk to be crowned. Then, at eleven, they received new orders; strange, unsettling orders. The ceremonial uniforms came off in a blazing hurry and their dull, dun-colored combat uniforms went o instead. The showy but clumsy ceremonial swords were replaced with the lethal shortswords which were everyday equipment. Impressive but impractical Wolf-Jaw shakos were cast aside in favor of the squat leather helmets that were normal battle dress.

Battle dress-the very term was distressing. Is there such a thing as normal battle dress? I do not think so. Yet soldiers in battle dress were everywhere, their faces stern and forbidding.

Prince Peter has committed suicide! That was the most common rumor which went flying about the castle keep.

Prince Peter has been murdered! That one ran a close second.

Roland was not dead; it was a mistaken diagnosis, the physician has been beheaded, but the old King is insane and no one knows what to do. That was a third.

There were many others, some even more foolish.

No one slept as darkness stole over the confused, sorrowing castle keep. All the torches in the Plaza of the Needle were lit, the castle blazed with lights, and every house in the keep and on the hills below showed candles and lanterns, as frightened people gathered to talk about the day's events. All agreed wild work was afoot.

The night was even longer than the day. Mrs. Brandon kept watch for her men in terrible loneliness. She sat at the window, but for the first time in her life, the air was rife with more gossip than she wanted to hear. Yet for all of that, could she stop listening? She could not.

As the small hours of the morning stretched out endlessly toward a dawn that she felt would never come, a new rumor began to supplant all the old ones-it was incredible, unbelievable, and yet it was a.s.serted with more and more a.s.surance until even the guards at their posts were repeating it to one another in undertones. This new rumor terrified Mrs. Brandon most of all, because she remembered-too well!-how white poor Dennis's face had been when he had come in with the prince's ash bucket. There had been something inside, something that smelled sick and burnt, something he wouldn't show her.

Prince Peter's been taken in custody for the murder of his father, this awful rumor went. He's been taken* Prince Peter's been taken* the prince has murdered his own father!

Shortly before dawn, the distracted woman laid her head in her arms and wept. After a bit, her sobbing faded as she fell into a troubled sleep.

Now tell me what's in that bucket, and be quick about it! We want no fooling, Dennis, d'you understand me?" was the first thing Brandon said when he entered Dennis's room and closed the door behind him.

"I'll show you, Dad," Dennis said, "but first, answer me one question: what sort of poison was it that killed the King?"

"No one knows."

"What were its ways?"

"Show me what's in the bucket, boy. Do it now." Brandon balled a great hard fist. He did not shake it; he only held it up. That was enough. "Show me now or be knocked aside."

Brandon looked at the dead mouse for a long time, saying nothing. Dennis watched, scared, as his dad's face grew paler, graver, grayer. The mouse's eyes had burned until they were nothing but charred black cinders. Its brown fur had been crisped black. Smoke still rose from its tiny ears, and its teeth, visible in its death grimace, were a sooty black, like the teeth in the grate of a stove.

Brandon made as if to touch it, and then pulled his hand back. He raised his face to his son and spoke in a hoa.r.s.e whisper. "Where did you find this?"

Dennis began to stammer out bundles of phrases which didn't mean a thing.

Brandon listened a moment and then squeezed his son's shoulder.

"Draw you a deep breath and put your thoughts all in a row, Denny," he said. "I'm on yer side in this, as I am in all else, yer know. Yer did right to keep the sight of this poor thing from yer mom. Now tell me how you found it, and where you found it.

Eased and rea.s.sured, Dennis was able to tell his father the story. His telling was a bit shorter than mine, but it still took several minutes. His father sat in a chair, one knuckle digging into his forehead, shading his eyes. He asked no questions, did not even grunt.

When Dennis had finished, his father muttered four words in an undertone. Just four words-but they froze the boy's heart into a cold blue cake-or so it felt to him at the time. "Just like the King."

Brandon 's lips were trembling with fright, but he seemed to be trying to smile.

"Do you suppose yonder animal was a King of Mice, Denny?"

"Dad* Daddy, I* I*"

"There was a box, you said."

"Yes.

"And a packet."

"Yes.

"And the packet was charred, but not burned."

"Yes.

"And tweezers."

"Yes, like Mamma uses to pluck the hairs from out'n her nos " Shh," Brandon said, and dug his knuckle into his forehead again. "Let me think."

Five minutes went by. Brandon sat motionless, almost as if he had gone to sleep, but Dennis knew better. Brandon did not know that Peter's mother had given him the engraved box or that Peter had lost it when he was small; both of those thing had happened long before Peter entered his half-manhood and Brandon came into his service. He did know about the secret panel; he had happened on this in the very first year he had served Peter (and not very far into that year, either). As I may have said, it wasn't really a very secret compartment, as those things went just enough to satisfy such an open boy as Peter.

Brandon knew about it, but had never looked into it after that first time, when it had contained nothing more than the glorified junk that any boy calls his treasures-a Tarot deck with a few cards missing, a bag of marbles, a lucky coin, a braided bit of hair from Peony's mane. If a good butler understands anything, he understands that quality we call discretion, which is a respect for the borders of other people's lives. He had never looked in that compartment again. It would have been like stealing. At last Dennis asked: "Should we go over, Father, so you can look in the box?" "No. We must go to the judge-General with this mouse, and you must tell your story to him just as you've told it to me."

Dennis sat down heavily on his bed. He felt as if he had been punched in the belly. Peyna, the man who ordered jail terms and beheadings! Peyna, with his white, forbidding face and his tall, waxy brow! Peyna, who was, below the King himself, the greatest authority in the Kingdom!

"No," he whispered at last. "Dad, I couldn't* I* I*"

"You must," his father said sternly. "This is a turrible business-the most turrible business I've ever known of, but it must be reckoned with and set right. You'll tell him just as you've told me, and then it'll be in his hands."

Dennis looked in his father's eyes and saw that Brandon meant it. If he refused to go, his father would lay hold of the scruff of his neck and drag him to Peyna like a kitten, twenty years old or no.

"Yes, Dad," he said miserably, thinking that when Peyna's cold, calculating eyes fell on him, he would simply drop dead of a heart attack. Then (with rising panic) he remembered that he had stolen an ash bucket from the prince's rooms. If he didn't die of fright the moment Peyna commanded him to speak, he would probably spend the rest of his life in the castle's deepest dungeon for theft.

"Be easy in your mind, Denny-easy as you can be, anyway. Peyna's a hard man, but he's fair. You've done nothing to be ashamed o Just tell him as you've told me."

"All right," Dennis whispered. "Are we going now?"

Brandon got out of the chair and onto his knees. "First we'll pray. Get here beside me, son."

Dennis did.

Peter was tried, found guilty of regicide, and ordered imprisoned for life in the cold two rooms at the top of the Needle. All of this was done in only three days. It will not take long to tell you how neatly the jaws of Flagg's cruel trap closed around the boy.

Peyna did not order the preparations for the coronation stopped at once-in fact, he thought that Dennis must be mistaken, that there must be a reasonable explanation for all of this. Just the same, the condition of the mouse, so like the condition of the King, was impossible to ignore, and the Brandon family had a long and valued reputation for honesty and levelheadedness in the Kingdom. That was important, but there was something else of far greater importance: when Peter was crowned, there must not be a single stain on his reputation.

Peyna heard Dennis out and then summoned Peter. Dennis really might have died of fright at the sight of his master, but he was mercifully allowed to go into another room with his father. Peyna gravely explained to Peter that a charge had been leveled against him* a charge that Peter himself might have played a part in the murder of Roland. Anders Peyna was not a man to mince words, no matter how much those words might hurt.

Peter was stunned* flabbergasted. You must remember that he was still trying to cope with the idea that his beloved father was dead, killed by a cruel poison that had burned him alive from the inside out. You must remember that he had been leading the search all night, had had no sleep, and was physically exhausted. Most of all, you must remember that, although he had a man's height and breadth of shoulder, he was only sixteen. This stunning news on top of all else caused him to do a very natural thing, but it was a thing he should have avoided at all costs under Peyna's cold and a.s.sessing eyes: he burst into tears.

If Peter had hotly denied the charge, or if he had expressed his shock and exhaustion and grief by laughing wildly at such an absurd idea, the whole thing might have ended right there. I'm sure that possibility never entered Flagg's mind, but one of Flagg's few weaknesses was a tendency to judge others according to what was in his own black and murky heart. Flagg regarded everyone with suspicion, and believed everyone had hidden reasons for the things they did.

His mind was very complex, like a hall of mirrors with everything reflected twice at different sizes.

The track of Peyna's thoughts was not convoluted but very straightforward. He found it very difficult-almost impossible to believe that Peter could have poisoned his father. If he had raged or laughed out loud, things probably would have ended without even a trip to investigate the supposed box with his name carved on it, or the packet and tweezers it supposedly held. Tears, however, looked very bad. Tears looked like an expression of guilt coming from a boy old enough to commit murder but not old enough to hide what he had done.

Peyna decided he must investigate further. He hated to do this, because it meant taking guards, and that meant some word, some whisper, of these momentary suspicions would leak out, to taint the first weeks of Peter's reign.

Then he reflected that perhaps even this could be avoided. He would take half a dozen Home Guards, no more. He could leave four stationed outside the door. After this ridiculous business had blown over, all of them could be shipped off to the remotest part of the Kingdom. Brandon and his son would also have to be sent away, Peyna thought, and that was a pity, but tongues had a way of wagging, especially when liquor loosened them, and the old man's liking for bundle-gin was well known.

So Peyna ordered work on the coronation platform temporarily suspended. He felt confident that work could begin again in less than half an hour, with the laborers sweating and cursing and hurrying to make up for lost time.

Alas- The box, the packet, and the tweezers were there, as you know. Peter had sworn on his mother's name he had no such engraved box; his heated denial now looked very foolish. Peyna picked up the charred packet carefully with the tweezers, peered in, and saw three flecks of green sand. They were so small they could barely be seen, but Peyna, mindful of what had be-fallen both great King and humble mouse, put the packet back in the box and closed the lid. He ordered two of the four Home Guards still in the hall to step in, realizing reluctantly that the matter was steadily growing more serious.

The box was put carefully on Peter's desk, little wisps of smoke escaping from it. One of the guards was sent after the man who knew more about poisons than anyone else in the Kingdom. That man, of course, was Flagg.

I had nothing to do with this, Anders," Peter said. He had recovered himself, but his face was still pale and wretched, his eyes a deeper blue than the old judge-General had ever seen them.

"The box is yours, then?"

"Yes.

"Why did you deny that you had such a box?"