Tales were told behind cupped hands, tales suggesting that these nobles had not simply scattered to the four winds but had gathered together somewhere, perhaps in the deep woods at the northern end of the Kingdom, to plan an overthrow of the throne.
These stories passed to Peter like the wind through his win-dow, the drafts beneath his door... They were dreams of a wider world. Mostly he worked on his rope. During the first year, the rope grew longer by eighteen inches every three weeks.
At the end of that year, he had a slim cable that was twenty-five feet long-a cable that was, theoretically at least, strong enough to bear his weight. But there was a difference between dangling from a beam in his bedroom and dangling above a drop of three hundred feet, and Peter knew it. He was, quite literally, staking his life on that slim cord.
And twenty-five feet a year was perhaps not enough; it would take more than eight years before he could even try, and the rumblings he heard at second hand had grown loud enough to be disturbing. Above all else, the Kingdom must endure-there must be no revolt, no chaos. Wrongs must be put right, but by law, not by bows and slings and maces and clubs. Thomas, Leven Valera, Roland, he himself, even Flagg paled into insignificance next to that. There must be law.
How Anders Peyna, growing old and bitter by his fire, would have loved him for that!
Peter determined that he must make his effort to escape as soon as possible. Accordingly he made long calculations, doing the figures in his head so as to leave no trace. He did them again and again and again, proving to himself that he had made no mistake.
In his second year in the Needle, he began to pluck ten threads from each napkin; in his third year fifteen; in his fourth year, twenty. The rope grew. Fifty-eight feet long after the second year; a hundred and four after the third; a hundred and sixty after the fourth.
The rope at that time would still have fetched up a hundred and forty feet from the ground.
During his last year, Peter began to take thirty threads from each napkin, and for the first time his robberies showed clearly -each napkin looked frayed on all four sides, as if mice had been at it. Peter waited in agony for his thefts to be discovered.
75
But they were not discovered then, or ever. There was not so much as a question ever raised. Peter had spent endless nights (or so they seemed to him) wondering and worrying when Flagg would hear some wrong thing, some wrong note, and so get wind of what he was up to. He would send some underling, Peter supposed, and the questions would begin. Peter had thought things out with agonizing care, and he had made only one wrong assumption-but that one led to a second (as wrong assumptions so often do) and that second was a dilly. He had assumed that there was some finite number of napkins-perhaps a thousand or so in all-and that they were being used over and over again. His thinking on the subject of the napkin supply never went much further than that. Dennis could have told him differently and saved him perhaps two years of work, but Dennis was never asked. The truth was simple but staggering. Peter's napkins were not coming from a supply of a thousand, or two thousand, or twenty thousand; there were nearly half a million of these old, musty napkins in all.
On one of the deep levels below the castle was a storeroom as big as a ballroom. And it was filled with napkins... napkins... nothing but napkins. They smelled musty to Peter, and that wasn't surprising-most of them, coincidentally or not, dated from a time not long after the imprisonment and death of Leven Valera, and the existence of all those napkins-coincidentally or not-was, indirectly at least, the work of Flagg. In a queer sort of way, he had created them.