Roland pardoned them. Flagg nodded, smiled, and said only: “Your will is Delain’s will, Sire.” Not for all the gold in the Four Kingdoms would he have allowed Roland to see the sick fury that rose in his heart when his will was balked. Roland’s pardon of the boys was greatly praised in Delain, because many of Roland’s subjects also knew the true facts and those who didn’t know them were quickly informed by the rest. Roland’s wise and compassionate pardon of the two was remembered when other, less humane decrees (which were, as a rule, also the ma-gician’s ideas) were imposed. All of this made no difference to Flagg. He had wanted him killed, and Sasha had interfered. Why could Roland not have married another? He had known none of them, and cared for women not at all. Why not another? Well, it didn’t matter. Flagg smiled at the pardon, but he swore in his heart then that he would attend Sasha’s funeral.

On the night Roland signed the pardon, Flagg went to his gloomy basement laboratory. There he donned a heavy glove and took a deathwatch spider from a cage where he had kept her for twenty years, feeding her newborn baby mice. Each of the mice he fed the spider was poisoned and dying; Flagg did this to increase the potency of the spider’s own poison, which was already potent beyond belief. The spider was blood red and as big as a rat. Her bloated body quivered with venom; venom dripped from her stinger in clear drops that burned smoking holes in the top of Flagg’s worktable.

“Now die, my pretty, and kill a Queen,” Flagg whispered, and crushed the spider to death in his glove, which was made of a magical steel mesh which resisted the poison-yet still that night, when he went to bed, his hand was swelled and throbbing and red.