The Eyes of the Dragon

Roland does not marry until he is 50 years old because his mother ruled into old age. Immediately after Roland is coronated, Flagg advises him to produce an heir. Flagg chooses six possible brides, each from the lower nobility and seemingly meek, and thus easy to control. Roland chooses to marry Sasha of the Western Barony, a 17-year-old girl who would become beloved in Delain.

Another reason Roland marries late is because he has no interest in women or sex. He needs a potion from Flagg to consummate the marriage, but Sasha is sweet to Roland, which gives him courage, and leads to him falling in love with her.

Sasha is a good queen. She convinces Roland to end the cruel practice of bear baiting in Delain, create a hospital, and lower taxes. These things annoy Flagg, but at first, he does nothing about it. He has lived many hundreds of years and can be patient. Roland still heeds his counsel, and Delain had won a fortune by defeating the Anduan pirates.

Despite his love for Sasha, Roland does not enjoy sex, but he knows he must produce heirs, so he continues to use Flagg’s potions. One day, however, he does not need a potion. While hunting in the King’s Reserves, the King’s hunting party is attacked by a dragon. Roland heroically defeats the dragon with an arrow and, per tradition, eats the dragon’s nine-chambered heart. That night, he tells the story to Sasha, and they conceive their first son, Peter.

Roland wants to satisfy his wife’s sexual needs, so he continues taking Flagg’s potion even after his first son is born. On the day of the annual New Year’s Day party, there is a terrible blizzard. Flagg, on a whim, mixes Roland a double dose of the potion. The potion gives Roland an “evil lust” (11); he becomes too aggressive with Sasha in bed, hurting her and ignoring her complaints. Thomas is conceived.

Roland never touches one of Flagg’s potions again. Flagg arranges for Sasha’s midwife, Anna Crookbrows, to murder Sasha during labor, using childbirth as a cover. Anna is successful, and Sasha dies giving birth to Thomas.

Sasha dies when Peter is five years old. Before her death, Sasha is an attentive mother because she feels it is her duty to raise him to be a good king. She knows the servants would let Peter do whatever he wants, but she wants to teach him manners. The narrator highlights one of Peter’s memories of Sasha: It is the first time Peter attends the Spring festival, and due to custom, he must sit on the other side of the table from his mother.

Afterward, Sasha scolds Peter for not using his napkin correctly. Peter complains that his father doesn’t use his napkin either, but Sasha explains that whatever a king does is correct. That is why it is so important to be a king who does only good things. A king’s actions have many consequences. She asks Peter to spell out “God” and “dog,” and she explains that these are the two natures of man. Most people are dogs; they are not evil, but they don’t know right from wrong. Dogs don’t use napkins. Peter promises to always use his napkin and to be more like a god than a dog.

The narrator makes a point to say one more thing about Sasha when she was alive. When Roland decides to marry Sasha, she is sad to leave her childhood dollhouse back in the Western Barony. As a wedding present, Roland hires the great craftsman Quentin Ellender to make Sasha a new dollhouse. The dollhouse is a completely functional house in miniature. Sasha likes the gift so much she curtsies deeply in front of Ellender, but she is an adult now and does not play with it. Flagg thinks it is a silly thing.

After Sasha’s death, Peter plays with her dollhouse often. Flagg warns Roland that playing with the dollhouse might make Peter a “sissy,” or make the Kingdom think he is a “sissy,” if rumors spread. Roland thinks it over. He is not very smart, and thinking makes him feel like boulders are “rolling around in his head” (22). He rarely makes decisions because he knows his decisions have many consequences, which is why he relies so much on Flagg, but this time, he thinks carefully about Peter and the dollhouse.

When Sasha was still alive, Flagg almost poisoned her because she had interfered with the execution of two army deserters. She had explained to Roland that the soldiers were only helping their sick relative and returned as soon as they could, so Roland pardoned them. The people loved Roland for it, but Flagg swore then that he would kill Sasha. He went down to his basement laboratory, which is full of caged animals. He takes a deathwatch spider he had been feeding poisoned mice for 20 years to increase the spider’s own poison’s potency, extracts the poison by crushing the spider over a cup of brandy, and calls for a servant. However, by the time the servant arrived, Flagg had poured the poison down the drain.

Flagg didn’t kill Sasha then only because he worried he might get caught. Sasha was too loved, and Roland would care enough to get to the bottom of her murder. Flagg does eventually have Sasha killed, but the narrator suggests that, in the end, Sasha wins in at least one way—concerning the dollhouse.

Roland watches Peter play with the dollhouse and notices that Peter uses the dollhouse to make up stories. Peter imagines stories about armies and dragons, which are stories after Roland’s own heart. Roland also likes how the dollhouse keeps the memory of Sasha alive, so Roland goes against Flagg’s advice about Peter playing with the dollhouse. Roland rarely disagrees with Flagg because he is afraid of him, but Flagg thinks the dollhouse is too minor a thing for him to care about. Roland is so thankful he immediately agrees with Flagg’s decision to raise taxes.

Long before Peter was born, Anna Crookbrows, Sasha’s midwife, had a son who contracted the Shaking Disease. Desperate, she sought out Flagg, who agreed to cure Anna’s son in exchange for a future favor. When Sasha was about to give birth to Thomas, Flagg called in his favor: At a critical moment, Anna made a small cut, and Sasha bled out during labor.

The narrator returns to the topic of the dollhouse and sums up Flagg’s decision making thus far. Roland spent more time thinking about whether Peter should play with the dollhouse than any matter of state, and Flagg considered that decision unimportant. The narrator asks the reader, “Was it?” (33) and concludes that the reader must decide for themselves.

The two princes grow up, and Flagg watches and determines which one will be king. By the time Peter is seven, Flagg knows he doesn’t like him. Peter is handsome, tall, and honest, like his mother, and is much smarter than his father.

When Peter is eight years old, he meets and becomes best friends with a farmer’s son named Ben Staad when they are paired in a three-legged race at the Farmer’s Lawn Party. The Staad family used to be nobility but had fallen on hard times over the generations due to “Staad luck” (36).

Peter has no meanness in him. He even intervenes when Yosef, the king’s head groom, is about to kill a lame horse. It is after this incident that Flagg decides Peter has too much courage and must be put out of the magician’s way.

The narrator flashes back to Peter at nine, when he steps in and stops Yosef from killing the lame horse. Yosef cites generations of experience, claiming it is mercy to kill a horse with a broken leg and that not doing so will lead to blood poisoning and “madness.” Peter demands that a doctor examine the horse first. A doctor arrives and says that blood poisoning is folly, but he recommends killing the horse because of the effort it will take to nurse it back to health and because the horse will always have a limp. Peter promises to nurse the horse himself.

Roland whips Peter for interfering with the head groom’s work, but he allows Peter to keep the horse. Peter faithfully nurses the horse back to health, occasionally with Ben’s help. He names it Peony, and she recovers with barely any limp at all.

This story becomes famous throughout Delain. Yosef gains respect for Peter, calling him “the young King” (46), and everyone begins to think Peter will become a great king. The narrator explains that, instead, Peter will be arrested for a terrible crime and sentenced to life at the top of the Needle.

The narrator turns to Thomas. Compared to Peter, Thomas does not seem like a good boy. Thomas takes after his father, with curved knees and overweight. He is often sad, confused, and jealous of his brother. He is jealous of his brother because everyone likes Peter, while Thomas senses that everyone blames him for Sasha’s death. Thomas is merely “throne insurance” (48). But the narrator asks the reader to give Thomas a chance before judging him to be a bad boy.

Thomas cherishes a memory of going to the castle moat with his father to see model sailboats and decides to make his dad a model sailboat, hoping that Roland will take him back to the moat another time. He spends all day carving it, cutting himself multiple times.

When Thomas goes to Roland’s apartment to give him the boat, Roland is praising Peter because he has won an archery tournament. Thomas nervously gives his father the boat, but Roland is unexcited by it; he tells Thomas he should become a bowman like his brother. Roland describes Peter’s archery win, and Thomas leaves feeling bad. As he walks away, Thomas overhears Roland tell Flagg that the boat looks like a dog turd.

The next day Thomas is so angry with Peter that he kills an old dog with a stone. The narrator admits that someone who kills a dog must be bad, even evil, but insists that the reader should still pity Thomas because he was “never a bad boy, not really” (54). Nobody sees Thomas kill the dog except Flagg, who watches through his crystal and is pleased.

The narrator then turns to Flagg’s backstory. Over the centuries, Flagg has gone by many names: The Hooded, The Dark Man, etc. He came to Delain from the region of Garlan, a magical land where carpets fly. He has barely aged since.

Once, he was Bill Hinch, the Lord High Executioner. That was 250 years before Roland’s grandfather, and parents in Delain still use the name to scare their children. Over 400 years ago he came to Delain as a singer named Browson, worked his way to Royal Adviser, and then started a war with Andua. He came to Delain before that, too, but those times predate Delain’s written history. Every time, Flagg comes hooded, as a whisperer in the shadows.

When Flagg arrived in Delain this time, he was too late to stop the rise of Queen Lita, Roland’s mother. Lita gave Flagg little power, but she kept him around as an adviser because she liked that he could tell fortunes with cards. It is only during Roland’s reign that he begins seeding the destruction of the Kingdom.

At age 15, Peter begins asking his teachers questions about Delain’s history, and those questions get close to Flagg’s role in that history. Flagg worries that Peter’s first act as king will be to exile him. To finish his work destroying Delain from within, Flagg decides that Thomas must be King.

Flagg thinks of a way to get rid of Peter without attracting suspicion. By the time Peter is 16, Roland is getting sicker each day. Flagg’s medicine is not working as well as it used to, partly because Flagg no longer wants it to work, and magic is influenced by the user’s intentions. Flagg hatches a plan to give himself the pleasure of killing Roland and getting rid of Peter at the same time.

The narrator comments that poison is the most common weapon for regicide, and Flagg knows a lot about poison. In his basement apartments, there is a room full of beakers, phials, and envelopes full of poison. Flagg visits the room to cheer himself up; the narrator calls it his “chapel of screams-in-waiting” (64). Flagg keeps the worst poison separate and behind an elaborate multi-locked system. It is Dragon Sand, one of the deadliest poisons in the world, which comes from the desert of Grenh beyond Garlan. The poison makes a person feel better for a couple days and then burns them from the inside.

Every night, Peter brings Roland a glass of wine, and they sit and spend quality time together. Flagg decides that on one such night, he will bring Roland a glass of wine too, poisoned by Dragon Sand. The idea amuses him.