Peter approached, frightened and dazed, and dropped upon one knee.
“Your Majesty,” he replied to her questioning, “I am Peter Dwarf; the kind Lord Chamberlain has permitted me to enter the hall.”
“I like this boy,” said the Queen to the stout Lord Chamberlain. “Put him into proper clothes and send him back to me; he shall be my page.”
So they took Peter through many snow-white rooms to a little room in the back of the palace. In it were a bed and chairs made of rosewood, and roses painted on the walls, and silver stars on the ceiling; so that when you lay in bed you felt as though you were in a bower, looking up at the starry sky.
“Here is your room,” said the servant who had brought him in. “And these are the clothes you are to wear.”
Peter took off his leather apron and his red cap, and put on a doublet and hose of light blue silk, and a mantle of dark blue velvet. But happy as he was in his rich attire, he did not forget about the king who was so ill. Every time he met somebody who might know, he asked:
“No,” was always the answer, “He is very ill.”
At last the kind Lord Chamberlain told Peter what the doctors had said.
“Some wicked enemy of the King,” he reported, “is burning a waxen image of his majesty over a slow fire; and as long as the image lasts the King will live, but when it has all melted he will die.”
“Who can it be?” cried Peter. “Does no one know?”
“Nobody knows except the wicked person himself. We think—but say not that I told you—we think it is someone in this very palace, for the good King has no enemies among his neighbors.”
Suddenly Peter remembered the magic power that the dwarfs had given him.
“Let me try on everybody’s shoes,” he cried, “and when I come to the shoes of the wicked person I shall know where the waxen image is melting!”
The Lord Chamberlain gave him permission to creep into every bedroom and dressing room in the palace. Minka always went ahead, and when anyone was in the room she waved her tail to warn Peter away, but when the chamber was empty, she said, “Mew,” and then Peter went in and tried on all the shoes he could find. But all the knowledge that came to him was a lot of little foolish secrets—where the Lady Natalia kept her jewels, and the Lord Richard had ridden over a chicken and had not paid the poor farmer a penny for it, and that the little chambermaid Clarissa was in love with a beggar-man. But he could not find out where the waxen image was melting.