The Eyes of the Dragon - Stephen King [55]
Peter waved it away. He felt very tired. "Do the others feel as you do? The other guards?"
"My Lord," the guardsman said, carefully setting the tray on Peter's desk, "I'm not sure I still feel the way I did."
"But do the others feel that I am guilty?"
There was a long pause, and then the soldier nodded.
"And is there some one reason they tell against me most of all?"
"They speak of a mouse that burned they say you wept when Peyna confronted you "
Peter nodded grimly. Yes. Weeping had been a bad mistake, but he hadn't been able to help it and it was done.
"But most of all they only say you were caught, that you wanted to be King, that it must be so."
"That I wanted to be King and so it must be so," Peter echoed.
"Yes, my Lord." The guardsman stood looking at Peter miser-ably.
"Thank you. Go now, please."
"My Lord, I apologize-"
"Your apology is accepted. Please go. I need to think."
Looking as if he wished he had never been born, the Home Guardsman stepped out the door and closed it behind him.
Peter spread his napkin over his knees but didn't eat. Any hunger he might have felt earlier was now gone. He plucked at the napkin and thought of his mother. He was glad-very glad indeed-that she wasn't alive to see this, to see what he had come to. All of his life he had been a lucky boy, a blessed boy, a boy to whom, it sometimes seemed, no bad luck ever came. Now it seemed that all the bad luck which should have been his over the years had only been stored up to be paid at once, and with sixteen years of interest.
But most of all they say you wanted to be King and it must be so.
In some deep way he understood. They wanted a good King they could love. But they also wanted to know they had been saved by only a hair's breadth from a bad one. They wanted blackness and secrets; they wanted their fearful tale of rotten royalty. God only knew why. They say you wanted to be King, they say it must be so.
Peyna believes it, Peter thought, and that guardsman believed it; they will all believe it. This is not a nightmare. I have been accused of my father's murder, and not all my good behavior and my obvious love for him will dismiss the charge. And part of them wants to believe I did it.
Peter carefully refolded his napkin and laid it over the top of the fresh bowl of stew. He could not eat.
There was a trial, and it was a great wonder, and there are histories of the event if you care to read them. But here's the root of the matter: Peter, son of Roland, was brought before the judge-General of Delain by a burning mouse; tried in a meeting of seven which was not a court; convicted by a Home Guardsman who delivered his verdict by spitting into a bowl of stew. That is the story, and sometimes stories tell more than histories, and more quickly, too.
When Ulrich Wicks, who drew the white stone and took Peyna's place on the bench, announced the verdict of the court, the spectators-many of whom had sworn for years that Peter would make the best King in Delain's long history-applauded savagely. They rose to their feet and surged forward, and if a line of Home Guards with their swords drawn had not held them back, they might well have overturned the sentence of lifelong imprisonment and exile at the top of the Needle and lynched the young prince instead. As he was led away, spittle flew in a rain, and Peter was well covered by it. Yet he walked with his head up.
A door to the left of the great courtroom led into a narrow hallway. The hallway stretched perhaps forty paces, and then the stairs began. They wound up and up, around and around, all the way to the top of the Needle, where the two rooms Peter would live in henceforth, until the day he died, awaited him. There were three hundred stairs in all. We will come to Peter at the top, in his rooms, and in good time; his story, as you will see, is not done. But we will not climb with