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By Root 431 0

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.

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 dollhouses. 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 se 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.

That probably sounds strange to you, if you have thought of all