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By Root 413 0

there a way to bring the murder home to the magician? Peter did not know. Flagg was a wily old serpent-he would have left no evidence of what he had done to damn him later on. Could Peter worm a confession out of the magician? He might be able to, always assuming Peter could lay hands on him in the first place-Peter guessed that Flagg might disappear like smoke if he heard that Peter had escaped the Needle. Would anyone believe Flagg's confession, even if Peter could get one out of him? Oh yes, he confessed to the murder of Roland, people would say. Peter, the escaped father-killer, had a sword to his throat. In a fix like that, I might confess to anything, even the murder of God!

You might be tempted to laugh at Peter, turning such things over in his mind while he was still imprisoned three hundred feet in the sky. You might say he had gotten the cart quite a bit forward of the horse. But Peter had seen a way he might escape. It might, of course, only be a way to die young, but he thought it had a chance of working. Still was there any reason to go through all the work if in the end it could come to nothing? Or, worse still, if it were to cause the Kingdom fresh harm in some way he did not see now?

He thought about these things and prayed over them. The fourth night passed the fifth the sixth. On the seventh night, Peter came to this conclusion: it was better to try than not to try; better to make an effort to right the wrong even if he died trying to do so. An injustice had been done. He discovered a strange thing-the fact that the injustice had been done to him didn't seem half so important as the fact that it had been done at all. It ought to be righted.

On the eighth day of Thomas's reign, he sent for Beson.

Beson listened to the speech of the imprisoned prince with incredulity and mounting rage. Peter finished and Aron Beson let loose a gutter flood of obscenity that would have made a horse drover blush.

Peter stood before it, impassive.

"You murdering snot-nosed hound!" Beson finished, in a tone that was close to wonder. "I guess you think yer still livin ' in the bloody lap o luxury, with yer sairvants to run scurrying every time you lift one o yer perfoomed little fingers. But it ain't like that in here, my young prince. No, sir."

Beson leaned forward from the waist, scruffy chin jutting, and although the stench of the man-sweat and thick cheap wine and great gray scales of dirt-was nearly overpowering, Peter did not give ground. There were no bars between them; Beson had yet to fear a prisoner, and certainly he felt no fear of this young whelp. The Chief Warder was fifty, short, broad of shoulder, deep in the gut. His greasy hair hung in tangles around his cheeks and down the back of his neck. When he had come into Peter's room, one of the Lesser Warders had locked the door behind them.

Beson balled his left hand into a fist and shook it under Peter's nose. His right hand slid into the pouch pocket of his shirt and closed around a smooth cylinder of metal. One hard smash with that loaded fist would break a man's jaw. Beson had done it before.

"You take your requests, and you jam them up your nose with the rest of the boogers, my dear little prince. And the next time you call me in here for any such royal rubbage as this, you'll bleed for it."

Beson started away toward the door, short and hunched over and almost troll-like. He traveled in his own tight little cloud of stink.

"You are in danger of making an extremely bad mistake," Peter said. His voice was soft but grim, and it carried.

Beson turned back to him, his face incredulous. "What did you say?"

"You heard me," Peter said. "And when you speak to me next, you stinking little turnip, I think you had better remember you are speaking to royalty, don't you? My lineage did not change when I climbed those steps."

For a moment Beson could not reply. His mouth opened and closed like the mouth of a fish yanked out of the ocean-although any fisherman catching something as ugly as Beson would surely have thrown it back. Peter's cool requests-requests delivered