The Promise of the Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

the time.”
    â€œAnd have you? Seen any?”
    â€œNo, just porpoises. Hey, want to buy anything? We brought the cart.”
    Lycaste shook his head. The cart was always full of junk. The quality objects they hauled from estate to estate were nearly always gone by the time they reached the beach, all the best stuff taken. Lycaste was beginning to doubt there was even anything decent in there at the start; the one time he’d found a usable plastic figure for his palace they’d hiked the price. The boys hoped to start work in Impatiens’s export business in a year or two, possibly with the prospect of travelling to the next Province every now and then as things progressed. Perhaps then they’d stop ripping him off.
    He glanced up at the sunlight shining through the emerald leaves, already masking their chatter as his thoughts turned to the previous few days. Of all the help kept on, Sonerila was his favourite. She was always there to comfort him, to give him the best advice. Once the boys had gone he’d be able to talk to her properly; she would know what to do.
    *
    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