"Why?"
Partly because he knows how long-how very long-I have been here. More, I think, because he senses exactly what I mean to Delain.
"It's hard to say, Tommy. I suppose it has to do with the fact that he is a very powerful man, and powerful men usually resent other men who are as powerful as themselves. People like a King's closest advisor, perhaps."
"As you were my father's closest advisor?"
"Yes." He picked up Thomas's hand and squeezed it for a moment. Then he let go of it and sighed mournfully. "A King's advisors are much like the deer in a King's private park. Such deer are cosseted and petted and fed by hand. Both advisors and tame deer have pleasant lives, but I've all too often seen a tame park deer end up on the King's table when the King's Preserves wouldn't yield up a wild buck for that night's deer steaks or venison stew. When a ruling King dies, the old advisors have a way of disappearing."
Thomas looked both angry and alarmed. "Has Peyna threatened you?"
"No... he has been very good," Flagg said. "Very patient. I have read his eyes, however, and I know that his patience will not last forever. His eyes tell me that I might find the climate in Andua healthier. "He rose with another swirl of cape. "So... as little as I like to go..."
"Wait!" Thomas cried again, and in his pinched, pallid face,
Flagg saw all his ambitions about. to be fulfilled. "If you were protected when my father was King, because you were his advisor, wouldn't you be protected now that I am King, if you were my advisor?"
Flagg appeared to think deeply and gravely. "Yes... I suppose... if you made it very clear to Peyna... very clear indeed... that any move made against me would be looked upon with royal disfavor. Very great royal disfavor."
"Oh, I would!" Thomas said eagerly. "I would! So will you stay? Please? If you go, I really will kill myself! I don't know anything about being a King, and I really will!"
Flagg still stood with his head down, his face deep in shadow, apparently thinking solemnly. He was, in fact, smiling.
But when he raised his head, his face was grave.
"I have served the Kingdom of Delain almost all of my life," he said, "and I suppose that if you commanded me to stay... to stay and serve you to the best of my abilities..."
"I do so command you!" Thomas cried in a quivering, febrile voice.
Flagg sank to one knee. "My Lord!" he said.
Thomas, sobbing with relief, threw himself into Flagg's arms. Flagg caught him and held him.
"Don't cry, my little Lord King," he whispered. "All will be well. Yes, all will be very well for you and me and the Kingdom." His grin widened, showing very white, very strong teeth.
47
Thomas couldn't sleep a wink the night before he was to be crowned in the Plaza of the Needle, and in the earlymorning hours of that dread day he was seized by a terrible fit of vomiting and diarrhea brought on by nervousness-it was stage fright. Stage fright sounds both silly and comic, but there was nothing either silly or comic about this. Thomas was still only a little boy, and what he felt in the night, when we are all most alone, was an extremity of fear so great that it would not be wrong to call it mortal terror. He rang for a servant and bade him fetch Flagg. The servant, alarmed by Thomas's pallor and the smell of vomit in the room, ran all the way and hardly waited to be given entry before bursting in and telling Flagg that the young prince was very ill indeed, might even be dying.
Flagg, who had an idea of what the trouble was, told the servant to go and tell his master he would be with him shortly, and to fear nothing. He was there in twenty minutes.
"I can't go through with it," Thomas moaned. He had vom-ited in his bed, and the sheets stank of it. "I can't be King, I can't, please, you have to stop it from happening, how can I go through with it when I may vomit in front of Peyna and all of them, vomit or... or..."
"You'll be fine," Flagg said calmly. He had mixed a brew which would both soothe Thomas's stomach and temporarily cement his bowels shut. "Drink this."
Thomas drank it.
"I'm going to die," he said, putting the glass aside. "I won't have to kill myself. My heart will just burst from fear. My father said that sometimes rabbits die that way in snares, even if they aren't badly hurt. And that's what I am. A rabbit in a trap, dying of fear."
You're partly right, dear Tommy, Flagg thought. You're not dying
of fear as you think, but you are indeed a rabbit in a trap.
"You will change your mind about that, I think," Flagg said. He had been mixing a second potion. It was cloudy pink-a restful color.
"What's that?"