But of all the childish things she left behind, the one she regretted most was the dollhouse she had had ever since she was a little girl.
Roland, who was a kind man, somehow discovered this, and although he was also nervous about his future life (after all, he had never been married before, either), he found time to commission Quentin Ellender, the greatest craftsman in the land, to build his new wife a new dollhouse. “I want it to be the finest dollhouse a young lady ever had,” he told Ellender. “I want her to look at it once and forget about her old dollhouse forever.”
As you’ll no doubt realize, if Roland really meant this, it was a foolish thing to say. No one ever forgets a toy that made him or her supremely happy as a child, even if that toy is replaced by one like it that is much nicer. Sasha never forgot her old dollhouse, but she was quite impressed with the new one. Anyone who was not a total idiot would have been. Those who saw it declared it was Quentin Ellender’s best work, and it may have been. It was a country house in miniature, very like the one Sasha had lived in with her parents in rolling Western Barony. Everything in it was small, but so cunningly made you would swear it must really work… and most things in it did!
The stove, for instance, really got hot and would even cook tiny portions of food. If you put a piece of hard coal no bigger than a matchbox in it, it would burn all day… and if you reached into the kitchen with your clumsy big-person’s finger and happened to touch the stove while the coal was burning, it would give you a burn for your pains. There were no faucets and no flushing toilets, because the Kingdom of Delain did not know about such things-and doesn’t even to this day-but if you were very careful, you could pump water from a hand pump that stood not much taller than your pinkie finger. There was a sewing room with a spinning wheel that really spun and a loom that really wove. The spinet in the parlor would really play, if you touched the keys with a toothpick, and the tone was true. People who saw this said it was a miracle, and surely Flagg must have been involved somehow. When Flagg heard such stories, he only smiled and said nothing. He had not been involved in the dollhouse at all-he thought it a silly project, in truth-but he also knew it was not always necessary to make claims and tell people how wonderful you were to achieve greatness. Sometimes all you had to do was look wise and keep your mouth shut.
In Sasha’s dollhouse were real Kashamin rugs, real velvet curtains, real china plates; the cold cabinet really kept things cold. The wainscoting in the receiving parlor and the front hall was of cherished ironwood. There was glass in all the windows and a many-colored fanlight over the wide front doors.
All in all it was the jolliest dollhouse any child ever dreamed of. Sasha clapped her hands over it with real delight at the wedding party when it was unveiled, and thanked her husband for it. Later she went to Ellender’s workshop and not only thanked him but curtsied deeply before him, an act that was almost unheard of-in that day and age, Queens did not curtsy to mere artisans. Roland was pleased and Ellender, whose sight had failed noticeably in the course of the project, was deeply touched.
But it did not make her forget her old dear dollhouse at home, as ordinary as it seemed when compared with this one, and she did not spend as many rainy afternoons playing with it-rearranging the furniture, lighting the stove and watching the chimneys smoke, pretending that there was a high tea going on or that there was to be a great dinner party for the Queen-as she had before, even as an older girl of fifteen and sixteen. One of the reasons was very simple. There was no fun making ready for a pretend party at which the Queen would be in attendance when she was the Queen. And maybe that one reason was really all the reasons. She was a grown-up now, and she discovered that being a grown-up was not quite what she had suspected it would be when she was a child. She had thought then that she. would make a conscious decision one day to simply put her toy and games and little make-believes away. Now she discovered that was not what happened at all. Instead, she discovered, interest simply faded. It became less and less and less, until a dust of years drew over the bright pleasures of childhood, and they were forgotten.
8
Peter, a little boy who would someday be King, had dozens of toys-no, if I am to tell you the truth, he had thousands of toys. He had hundreds of lead soldiers with which he fought great battles, and dozens of play horses. He had games and balls and jacks and marbles. He had stilts that made him five feet high. He had a magical spring-stick on which he could bounce, and all the drawing paper he wanted in a time when paper was extremely hard to make and only wealthy people could afford to have it.
But of all the toys in the castle, the one he loved the best was his mother’s dollhouse. He had never known the one in the Western Barony, and so to him this was the dollhouse of doll houses. He would sit before it for hours on end when the rain poured down outside, or when the winter wind shrieked out of a blue throat filled with snow. When he fell ill with Children’s Tattoo (a disease which we call chicken pox), he had a servant bring it to him on a special table that went over his bed and played with it almost ceaselessly until he was well.
He loved to imagine the tiny people that would fill the house; sometimes they were almost so real he could see them. He talked for them in different voices and invented them all. They were the King family. There was Roger King, who was brave and powerful (if not very tall, and slightly bowlegged), and who had once killed a dragon. There was lovely Sarah King, his wife. And there was their little boy, Petie, who loved and was loved by them. Not to mention, of course, all the servants he invented to make the beds, stoke the stove, fetch the water, cook the meals, and mend the clothes.
Because he was a boy, some of the stories he made up to go with the house were a little more bloodthirsty than the stories Sasha had made up to go with hers as a little girl. In one of them, the Anduan pirates were all around the house, wanting to get in and slaughter the family. There was a famous fight. Dozens of pirates were killed, but in the end they were too many. They made to attack for the final time. But just before they did, the King’s Own Guard-this part was played by Peter’s lead soldiers-arrived and killed every one of those rotten Anduan sea dogs. In another story, a nest of dragons burst out of a nearby wood (usually the nearby wood was under Sasha’s sofa by the window), meaning to burn up the house with their furious breath.
But Roger and Petie rushed out with their bows and killed every one. “Until the ground was black with their icky old blood,” Peter told his father the King that night at dinner, and this made Roland roar with approval.
After Sasha died, Flagg told Roland that he did not believe it was right for a boy to be playing with dollhouses. It might not make him a sissy, Flagg said, but then again, it might. Certainly it would not sound well, if the tale got out to the general population. And such stories always did. The castle was full of servants. Servants saw everything, and their tongues wagged.
“He’s only six,” Roland said, uneasy. Flagg, with his white, hungry face far back in his deep hood and his magical spells, always made him uneasy.
“Six is old enough to train a boy in the way he should go, Sire,” Flagg said. “Think you well on it. Your judgment will be right in this, as in all things.”
Think you well on it, Flagg said, and that was just what King Roland did, In fact, I should think it fair to say that he never thought on anything so hard during his entire twenty-some-year reign as King of Delain.