The Eyes of the Dragon

The next day, Ben is selling cows at the market when a bunch of men begin calling him a murderer. There is a fight, and Ben is beaten up. When Andrew Staad sees his son’s bruises, he tells Ben he will take the cows to the market instead from then on, but Ben says no: He is proud of having stood up to the men and for sticking to his beliefs; he will never believe Peter murdered his father. Ben tells his father that standing up for himself is a better strategy because the men will look for easier sport eventually. Andrew objects, but Ben stands firm, and Andrew realizes his son has become a man.

Late at night on the 15th day of Thomas’s reign, there is a loud knock on the Staads’ door. It is a soldier demanding that Ben see Peyna. This scares Andrew and Ben’s mother Susan, but Ben complies and tells his family that everything will be okay. After Ben leaves, Susan bursts into tears and Andrew’s voice quivers as he tries to comfort her.

Peyna explains the situation to Ben and then asks Ben to repeat the instructions: Take 12 guilders and go to the castle to speak to Dennis. Give two guilders to Dennis, one to himself, one to whomever finds the dollhouse, and the other eight to Beson. Whoever finds the dollhouse will deliver it to Dennis, Dennis will deliver it to Ben, and Ben will deliver it to Beson. Dennis will deliver 21 napkins (each with the royal crest removed) to Beson every week.

Ben tells Peyna that he wishes he can do more. Peyna tells him that doing more would be dangerous. Ben says he doesn’t believe Peter killed his father and asks Peyna if he believes it, but Peyna skirts the question, saying that if he didn’t, he would very careful who he said it to. He convinces Ben to do as he is asked and no more, for the safety of his family. Ben returns home to his parents’ relief. He then realizes that Peyna never answered the question about Peter’s innocence.

On the 17th day of Thomas’s reign, Dennis delivers the first pile of 21 napkins. He brings them from a storeroom that the narrator explains will be important later. It is a storeroom that few people know about and Dennis takes it for granted. The narrator hints that “the grim business of Peter’s imprisonment” (205) will be done and could have been done three years sooner if more people knew about the storeroom.

Peyna hires a woman to remove the royal crest from each napkin. She works alone and in secret, unmaking beautiful needlework. Dennis then gives those napkins to Beson. Meanwhile, there is a rumor that Flagg will soon get rid of Peyna as Judge-General.

On the 18th day of Thomas’s reign, Peters receives his first napkin with breakfast. It makes him smile for the first time since his imprisonment. He has a beard now. He thanks Ben in his heart and uses the napkin to wipe away his tears. The lesser warders make fun of Peter for wanting a napkin, but Peter keeps smiling and his smile makes the warders no longer want to crack jokes. Eventually, they close the spyhole and leave Peter alone. The napkins are delivered to Peter three times a day for the next five years.

On the 30th day of Thomas’s reign, the dollhouse is delivered to Peter. Under Flagg’s influence, Thomas had just signed the Farmers’ Tax Increase, which is widely hated in Delain, into law. The law raises the taxes on farmers by 80%. The people begin calling the law Tom’s Black Tax, and they begin calling Thomas “Thomas the Tax-Bringer.” Thomas is usually drunk on wine.

After Brandon finds the dollhouse, Brandon, Dennis, and one of Peyna’s soldiers remove all the sharp objects. Two squires are chosen to deliver the dollhouse up the three hundred stairs to the Needle. Ben bribes one of the squires with his one guilder to take the squire’s place and asks Dennis not to tell his father. Ben and Dennis, who are becoming friends, are also learning that it is sometimes necessary to hide things from their fathers. When Ben tells Dennis he doesn’t believe Peter is guilty, Dennis bursts into tears and admits that his heart says the same. They embrace.

While delivering the dollhouse, Ben leaves a note to Peter. They share brief eye contact but pretend not to recognize each other. After the squires (including Ben in disguise) and Beson leave Peter’s rooms, Peter finds Ben’s note. The letter explains that Ben and Dennis believe Peter is innocent, and if Peter needs their help, he can reach them through Peyna. Peter’s heart fills with gratitude, and he eats the note to get rid of the evidence.

The narrator assumes the reader has already guessed Peter’s escape plan. Then the narrator explains the plan: Peter will take a few threads from each of the napkins and use the working loom in the dollhouse to make a rope long enough to climb down the side of the Needle. The narrator assures the reader that although this plan sounds wild, Peter is thinking logically.

The narrator reflects on how difficult it is to tell this part of Peter’s story because all of Peter’s days for five years are the same. He exercises, eats, sleeps, looks out the window, and dreams of freedom. It is a tough life. He is often too hot or too cold, and he catches the grippe, a terrible sickness. While he is sick, he dreams that Roland visits him. Peter thinks Roland will take him to the Far Fields (a kind of afterlife), but Roland instead tells Peter that he has much left to do. The guards see this happen and believe Peter really is visited by Roland’s ghost.

Peter spends hours every day making the rope. His beard reaches the middle of his chest now. It covers half his face except where Beson left him the scar. Even though he is only 21 years old after five years, the beard is gray.

Peter takes only five threads from every napkin so nobody notices. First, he needs to learn how to make a rope. He remembers that Yosef once explained to him the danger of “breaking strain” (222); when the oxen pull too heavy a load, the chains snap. Peter experiments with various ways to braid and wrap the strands to make a rope strong enough to hold his weight. Each time he makes a new section of rope, he tests it against his own strength. Finally, he tests a three-foot-long section of rope by tying it to a beam in the room and then hanging from it. The rope holds his weight for a full minute. He cries tears of joy.

Peter realizes he needs to find somewhere to hide the rope as he makes it. It will be 270 feet long when it is ready. He then finds a loose stone in the rooms and an open space behind it that is perfect for the rope. He reaches into it and discovers a gold heart-shaped locket and chain. Inside the locket are two pictures of a beautiful couple Peter thinks he recognizes. There is also a sheet of brittle paper with writing in blood. It is a letter written by Leven Valera, the infamous Black Duke, who would’ve been king until he was imprisoned for the murder of his wife.

The letter is over 450 years old, and Leven wrote it after being in prison for almost 25 years. In the letter, Leven explains he is innocent and that the king’s magician killed his wife and framed him for the crime. He believes the magician will one day be punished because there are “Gods who punish Wickedness in the end” (226). Leven asks the letter’s reader to avenge him. He says again that he did not poison his wife’s wine but that it “’Twas Flagg! Flagg! Flagg!” (226). He asks the reader to show Flagg the locket so he may know Leven helped to end him. Upon reading the letter, Peter realizes Flagg is no mere man but a monster who has been plaguing Delain for centuries. He realizes that Flagg is manipulating his brother.

At first, Peter considers contacting Peyna about his discovery, but he realizes doing so would only work “in a storybook” and not “in real life” (228). Peter thinks on the recent events of Delain. Everyone is scared because more and more people are being executed for treason every day. The people are especially angry at Thomas, whom they call Foggy Tom the Constantly Bombed. Peter suspects Flagg means to destroy the Delain monarchy and telling Peyna now will only result in Peyna’s death, so Peter hides the rope with the locket and continues working on his escape plan.

Things in Delain keep getting worse. After three years, Peyna resigns his post as Judge-General and is allowed to retire. Brandon passes away, leaving Dennis to take over as Thomas’s butler. After four years, the Staad family disappears. Many of the noble families are beheaded or flee. Rumors spread that the runaway nobles gather in a forest to plan a rebellion.

Meanwhile, Peter keeps working on his rope. During the first year, he made 25 feet of rope. But after seeing how bad things were getting in Delain, Peter decided to work more quickly. In the second year, he took 10 threads from each napkin. In the third year, he took 15 threads, and in the fourth year, he took 20. The rope was 58 feet long after two years, 104 feet after three, and 160 feet after four. In the fifth year, he begins taking 30 threads from each napkin. Now, if someone looks at the napkins, it is obvious that Peter has been stealing threads.

But nobody ever looks at the napkins. Peter had incorrectly assumed that the napkins he was using were being reused. But they were not because, amazingly, there are over half a million napkins in the storeroom.

Flagg is ironically responsible for the napkin surplus. After framing Leven Valera, Flagg almost succeeded in destroying Delain by manipulating Alan the “Mad,” but when Alan died, his niece Kyla the Good took over the put a stop to Flagg’s evil machinations. To help the Kingdom recover, she put everyone to work. She had people make half a million royal napkins, not because they were needed but because people needed paid work. For similar reasons, Peyna kept paying the woman to remove the royal seals because he knew she needed the work, so each time Peter had used a napkin, it was thrown away. If Peter had known this, he might have been done making the rope much earlier. The narrator questions whether things would have worked out better or worse if that were so.

Thomas occasionally forces Dennis to drink wine with him. He sometimes yells at Dennis for things that are not his fault. Thomas also occasionally makes Dennis stay the night when he is drunk and cannot bear to be alone. One such night, when Peter is 21 years old and Thomas is 16, Dennis witnesses something that will change the course of future events.

One night, while Dennis is sleeping on Thomas’s couch, Thomas sleepwalks. He has been feeling worse in recent days because Flagg has been gone. For eight days, Flagg has been searching for rebels in the forests north of the castle. Over the years, Thomas had developed an addiction to Flagg’s sleeping potions, and now he has run out of them. Without the potions, Thomas has guilt dreams about his father’s murder and sleepwalks.

Dennis wakes up and follows Thomas as the king sleepwalks through the castle. Dennis is scared, but he hears his father’s voice in his head, reminding him that he owes a service to Peter. His gut tells him that following Thomas will serve Peter in some way, so he watches as Thomas opens the secret door by pressing the stone and then does the same, following the king into the dark passageway.

Fifty miles away, Flagg has a bad dream, which causes one of the soldiers sleeping near Flagg to die and another to become blind. Flagg, too, seems to be “strangely blind” (243) in this moment; he has a bad dream because the course of events is turning in Peter’s favor, but when Flagg wakes up, he cannot remember what the dream was.

Dennis finds Thomas crying behind the eyes of the dragon. Thomas looks through the eyes of the dragon and shrieks, “Don’t drink the wine! Don’t drink the wine! Don’t drink the wine!” (245), terrifying Dennis.