Humbled and ashamed, Peter looked down at the counterpane and shook his head. Apparently the conversation hadn't wandered as far as he had thought. Perhaps because the evening had been very full and because he was now very tired, tears rose in his eyes and spilled down his cheeks. He struggled against the sobs that wanted to come. He locked them in his chest. Sasha saw this and admired it.
"Don't cry over an unused napkin, my love," said Sasha, "for that was not my intention." She rose, her full and pregnant belly before her. The delivery of Thomas was now very near. "Your behavior was otherwise exemplary. Any mother in the Kingdom would have been proud of a young son who behaved himself half so well, and my heart is full with admiration for you. I only tell you these things because I am the mother of a prince. That is sometimes hard, but it cannot be changed, and i' truth, I would not change it if I could. But remember that someday lives will depend on your every waking motion; lives may even depend on dreams which come to you in sleep. Lives may not depend on whether or not you use your napkin after the roast chicken... but they may. They may. Lives have depended on less, at times. All I ask is that in everything you do, you try to remember the civilized side of your nature. The good side-the God side. Will you promise to do that, Peter?"
"I promise."
"Then all is well." She kissed him lightly. "Luckily, I am young and you are young. We will talk of these things more, when you have more understanding."
They never did, but Peter never forgot the lesson: he always used his napkin, even when those around him did not.
7
So Sasha died.
She has little more part in this story, yet there is one further thing about her you should know: she had a dollhouse. This dollhouse was very large and very fine, almost a castle in miniature. When the time of her marriage came round, Sasha mustered as much cheer as she could, but she was sad to be leaving everyone and everything at the great house in the Western Barony where she had grown up-and she was a little bit nervous, too. She told her mother, "I have never been married before and do not know if I shall like it."
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.