The Promise of the Child

Part 8 (updated daily)

The house was half-submerged in the garden itself, a few acres of sculpted trees rising smoothly up the stepped sides of a grass-covered hummock. Five bell-shaped towers grew from the low hill, peeling white stone structures strung with lanterns and ruddy bougainvillea. The flowers hummed in the breeze as the evening ripened, enhanced chambers in their bracts hauntingly reverberating to different chords.

Backing off the beach, the estate gave way in each direction to rolling hills and groves of subtropical jungle, now wild again after generations tamed. Lycaste strolled through the orchard towards one of the white towers with Sonerila at his side, listening. The screams from the woodland to the east were loud this evening, echoing from the broad, curved walls of the closest towers.

He slowed and turned. Something didn't feel right. A sensation he hadn't experienced since childhood: someone was observing him, watching him as he walked. Heat on the back of his neck, almost physically creeping across his skin. Lycaste looked up at the hills, as if expecting to see someone in the darkness of the undergrowth, but the day was late, the shadows grown deep.

As he neared a slim archway at the base of the tower, his body darkened quickly, like glass suddenly polarised. The tone of his skin settled on a matt charcoal before switching rapidly through a tight spectrum, the colours churning together over his body like mixing paint. After a second, his skin evened to a milky blue, mirroring the fading light in the sky. Lycaste paused to look at his hand, watching the last of the colour tinge his fingers, then went inside.

Impatiens called it a doll's house whenever he saw it, but it was much more than that. Lycaste pulled out his favourite chair and sat down, taking up his paintbrush from its pot of water and a section of the extension he had begun building last month. He turned it in the evening light, looking for the unpainted window frames he remembered needed doing, waiting for the lamps to awaken around him. At his side stood dozens of stoppered blue jars and bottles filled with trinkets and tools, most of them gifts from the birds whenever they went into Mersin. He dabbed at some white paint, applying it carefully as the lights woke up, beating to the rhythm of his heart and relaxing into a rich glow. He finished a window frame and sat back.

The whole piece had taken him seven years. It reached almost to the ceiling of the large chamber, an idealised house fit for a Province prince. Inside were hundreds of figures and animals, all individually painted and with full Melius names and stories of their own. Lycaste reached in and picked up a few of the earliest figurines, scrutinising each one in turn and laying them in a row with some others. His painting skills had improved slowly over the years, and these had begun to look a little crude, as if a child had made them. Briza, Drimys' young son, occasionally asked if he could help Lycaste with his work, but the boy was absolutely forbidden. He'd caught the child playing with the house once, in the days when he still left the door to the chamber unlocked, and banned him from the whole top floor of the tower. This was his, and only his.

Lycaste carefully moved the figures to one side, counting them under his breath as he did so, to make space for the extension, which he placed on a folded square of stained white linen. The prince needed more space in his palace for all his new pets, a number of which Lycaste had just made. He reached under the table for the metal tray of powdered colourings, pausing to look at them as he put them on the table. They were a gift from her, after he'd finally found the courage to show her this locked-away place.

He barely heard the knock on the door. Impatiens pushed it open an inch and peered in.

'How's your doll's house, Lycaste?'

'It's a palace,' he muttered, dipping his brush in the water pot.

'My mistake.' Impatiens surveyed the model for a moment, as if looking for something. 'Did you find my—'

'Yes, thank you.' Lycaste dug in a drawer and handed him the skeletal, rather mummified body of a lizard he'd found set upon the miniature dining table one morning, the tiny figures arranged around it as if at a great feast. 'I've made my own food for the table.' He indicated the painted bowls and cups, some tiny coloured beads and woollen balls placed inside them with tweezers.

'They must get fairly hungry, locked away up here.'

Lycaste wiped his hands and went back to his painting, ignoring the man.

Impatiens sighed and rubbed his great bushy beard, listening to the rattle and clatter of preparations downstairs. 'It sounds like your dinner party's happening without you. Coming down?'

Lycaste nodded, reluctantly setting aside the paintbrush and practising his breathing techniques. Old, familiar butterflies rose to dance in his stomach at the thought of having to entertain guests, fluttering more manically still as he glanced at the paint tin, knowing she might have already arrived.