Peter at first entertained giddy thoughts of promising Beson another bribe to take the locket and the crumbling sheet of foolscap to Anders Peyna. In his initial flush of excitement, it seemed to him that this note must point the finger of guilt at Flagg and set him, Peter, free. A little reflection convinced him that while that might happen in a storybook, it would not happen in real life. Peyna would laugh and call it a forgery. And if he took it seriously? That might mean the end of both the Judge General and the imprisoned prince. Peter's ears were sharp, and he listened closely to the gossip of the meadhouses and the wineshops as it was passed back and forth between Beson and the Lesser Warders. He had heard of the Farmers' Tax Increase, had heard the bitter joke which suggested that Thomas the LightBringer should be renamed Thomas the Tax-Bringer. He had even heard that some few daring wags had renamed his brother Foggy Tom the Constantly Bombed. The headsman's axe had swung with the regularity of a clock's pendulum since Thomas had ascended Delain's throne, only this clock called out treason-sedition, treason-sedition, treason-sedition with a regularity that would have been monotonous, had it not been so frightening.
By now Peter had begun to suspect Flagg's goal: to bring the ordered monarchy of Delain to an utter smash. Showing the locket and the note would only get him laughed at or cause Peyna to take some sort of action. And that would undoubtedly get them both killed.
In the end Peter put the locket and foolscap back where they had come from. And with them he put the little three-foot pigtail it had taken him a month to weave. On the whole, he did not feel too bitter about the evening's work-the rope had held, and the finding of the locket and foolscap after more than four hundred years proved at least one thing-the hiding place was not apt to be discovered.
Still, he had much food for thought, and he lay long awake that night.
When he slept, he seemed to hear Leven Valera's dry, stony voice whispering in one ear: Avenge! Avenge! Avenge!
74
Time yes, time-Peter spent a great deal of time at the top of the Needle. His beard grew long, save for where that white scar streaked his cheek like a lightning bolt. He saw many changes from his window, as it grew. He heard of more terrible changes yet. The headsman's pendulum had not slowed down but actually speeded up: treason-sedition, treason-sedition, it sang, and sometimes half a dozen heads rolled in the course of but a single day.
During Peter's third year of imprisonment, the year in which Peter was first able to do thirty chin-ups in a single effort from his bedchamber's central beam, Peyna resigned his post as JudgeGeneral in disgust. It was the talk of the meadhouses and wineshops for a week, and the talk of Peter's keepers for a week and a day. The warders believed that Flagg would have Peyna jailed almost before the heat of the old man's bum had left the judge's bench, and that soon after the citizens of Delain would find out once and for all if there was blood or ice water in the judge-General's veins. But when Peyna remained free, the talk died down. Peter was glad Peyna had not been arrested. He bore him no ill will, in spite of Peyna's willingness to believe that he had murdered his father; and he knew that the arrangement of the evidence had been Flagg's doing.
Also during Peter's third year in the Needle, Dennis's good old Da', Brandon, died. His passing was simple but dignified. He had finished his day's work in spite of a terrible pain in his chest and side and came slowly home. He sat down in the little living room, hoping the pain would pass. Instead it grew worse. He called his wife and son to his side, kissed them both, and asked if he might have a glass of bundle-gin. This was provided. He drank it off, kissed his wife again, and then sent her from the room.
"You must serve your master well now, Dennis," he said. "Ye're a man now, with a man's tasks set before you."
"I'll serve the King as well as I may, Da'," Dennis said, although the thought of taking over his father's responsibilities terrified him. His good, homely face was shiny with tears. For the last three years, Brandon and Dennis had buttled for Thomas, and Dennis's responsibilities had been much the same as before, with Peter; but it had never been the same, somehow-never even close to the same.
"Thomas, aye," Brandon said, and then whispered: "But if the time comes to do yer first master a service, Dennis, you mustn't hesitate. I have never-"
At that moment, Brandon clutched the left side of his chest, stiffened, and died. He died where he would have wanted to die, in his own chair, in front of his own fire.
In Peter's fourth year of imprisonment-his rope below the stones growing steadily longer and longer-the Staad family disappeared. The throne possessed itself of what little there re-mained of their lands, as it had done when other noble families disappeared. And as Thomas's reign progressed, there were more and more disappearances.
The Staads were only one item of meadhouse gossip in a busy week that included four beheadings, an increased levy against shopkeepers, and the imprisonment of an old woman who had for three days walked back and forth in front of the palace, screaming that her grandson had been taken and tortured for speaking against the previous year's Cattle Levies. But when Peter heard the Staad name in the warders' conversation, his heart had stopped for a moment.
The chain of events leading to the disappearance of the Staads was one familiar to everyone in Delain by now. The tick-tocking pendulum of the headsman's axe had thinned the numbers of the nobility terribly. Many of these nobles died because their families had served the Kingdom for hundreds-or thousands-of years, and they could not believe such an unjust fate would or could fall on them. Others, seeing bloody handwriting on the wall, fled. The Staads were among these.
And the whispering began.