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he never suspected?
    Yes, by a few—by historians and spinners of tales like me, mostly. They suspected that the man who now called himself Flagg had been in Delain before, and never to any good purpose. But they were afraid to speak. A man who could live among them for seventy-six years and appear to age only ten was obviously a magician; a man who had lived for ten times as long, perhaps longer than that . . . such a man might be the devil himself.
    What did he want? That question I think I can answer.
    He wanted what evil men always want: to have power and use that power to make mischief. Being a King did not interest him because the heads of Kings all too often found their way to spikes on castle walls when things went wrong. But the advisors to Kings . . . the spinners in the shadows . . . such people usually melted away like evening shadows at dawning as soon as the headsman’s axe started to fall. Flagg was a sickness, a fever looking for a cool brow to heat up. He hooded his actions just as he hooded his face. And when the great trouble came—as it always did after a span of years—Flagg always disappeared like shadows at dawn.
    Later, when the carnage was over and the fever had passed, when the rebuilding was complete and there was again something worth destroying, Flagg would appear once more.

18
    T his time, Flagg had found the Kingdom of Delain in exasperatingly healthy condition. Landry, Roland’s grandfather, was a drunken old fool, easy to influence and twist, but a heart attack had taken him too soon. Flagg knew by then that Lita, Roland’s mother, was the last person he wanted holding the scepter. She was ugly but good-hearted and strongwilled. Such a Queen was not a good growth medium for Flagg’s brand of insanity.
    If he had come earlier in Landry’s reign, there would have been time to put Lita out of the way, as he expected to put Peter out of the way. But he’d had only six years, and that was not long enough.
    Still, she had accepted him as an advisor, and that was something. She did not like him much but she accepted him—mostly because he could tell wonderful fortunes with cards. Lita loved hearing bits of gossip and scandal about those in her court and her Cabinet, and the gossip and scandal were doubly good because she got to hear not only what had happened but what would happen. It was hard to rid yourself of such an amusing diversion, even when you sensed that a person able to do such tricks might be dangerous. Flagg never told the Queen any of the darker news he sometimes saw in the cards. She wanted to know who had taken a lover or who had had words with his wife or her husband. She did not want to know about dark cabals and murderous plans. What she wanted from the cards was relatively innocent.
    During the long, long reign of Lita, Flagg was chagrined to find his main accomplishment was to be not turned out. He was able to maintain a foothold but to do little more than that. Oh, there were a few bright spots—the encouragement of bad blood between two powerful squires in the Southern Barony and the discrediting of a doctor who had found a cure for some blood infections (Flagg wanted no cures in the Kingdom that were not magical—which is to say, given or withheld at his own whim) were examples of Flagg’s work during that period. It was all pretty small change.
    Under Roland—poor bowlegged, insecure Roland—things marched more quickly toward Flagg’s goal. Because he did have a goal, you know, in his fuzzy, malevolent sort of way, and this time it was grand indeed. He planned nothing more nor less than the complete overthrow of the monarchy—a bloody revolt that would plunge Delain into a thousand years of darkness and anarchy.
    Give or take a year or two, of course.

19
    I n Peter’s cool gaze he saw the very possible derailment of all his plans and careful work. More and more Flagg came to believe that getting rid of