The Promise of the Child

Part 16 (updated daily)

When they landed at the beach, Drimys was stretched out, asleep. Briza had covered about half of his father's body with sand but tired of the game when he'd got no reaction. The sandcastle was finished and Lycaste strolled up to it, wondering if it was indeed meant to be his house. The five towers were there, the central one a little taller than the others. He wandered around to the front where he could see the gaping entrance, part of which had caved in since it had been dug. Lycaste sat down next to it and patted the entrance back into place, but it fell in again as soon as he took his hand away. The sun had dried it out, he saw: running his hand along the top of the mound, the powdery outer layer of sand swept away in his palm. Maybe this was what would happen to his own home, in time.

He looked up the long strip of beach, speckled brown against electric jade, wondering what it would all look like in a thousand years. Would his house that he loved so much even be here any more? Perhaps some enterprising person would have built something else on top of it all, after Lycaste was long dead and with no sons or daughters to inherit what once was his. He smoothed his hand over the hump again, scouring away the dry sand, and clambered up stiffly. It was because of the things she'd told him, this new fascination, this new fear. He'd never heard of anything quite like the idea of ghosts until Pentas brought it up one evening, an age-old belief from the Seventh Province. The Seventh was a far-flung place to someone with such limited knowledge of life as Lycaste; he thought the people there must be very strange indeed to have come up with such things.

Ghost. He played with the word quietly on his tongue, looking out across the beach to the caves.

This had been his uncle's land, once. Only upon his death had Lycaste been permitted to visit and claim what had been left to him, the sole child born to the family for two centuries. Trollius, who had once owned the very sand between Lycaste's fingers, had never been kind to his nephew on the rare occasions when they had met, boisterous and unfeeling in the presence of Lycaste's timidity. He remembered a strong mutual dislike between them.

Disappointing to his uncle as he was, Lycaste was the only heir; the estate was his at twenty-five to do with as he pleased. Despite his indifference to his relative's death, Lycaste fancied absurdly that they were closer now than they'd ever been. Trollius had lived in the house by the beach for more than a hundred years, and although Lycaste found it hard to imagine the rancid old man appreciating anything, he must surely have enjoyed the very things that Lycaste found so continually breathtaking. Sometimes Lycaste would sit at his favourite spot, beneath the tall windows of the third tower, its vista encompassing the sea and the hills as well as the far-off blue haze northwards. Not even the highest tower could show you all that, its own view obscured by its position between the other four outposts. In the evening, the sun's rays slanted crimson into that top room as the flowers wailed, and he wondered if his uncle in all his years had ever felt the same peace and contentment as Lycaste did, sitting quietly and alone in that airy chamber.

Sometimes, after the westerly sunset was nothing but a slit of neon in the lambent blue, he slept up there, hidden in his nest above the world, closing and locking the heavy antique door so as not to be disturbed. They were arms, his towers, arms that swept him up and carried him to safety from the noise and the questions and the demands. They suited his own hermitic temperament elegantly, but perhaps his uncle had never bothered much with them. Too many flights of stairs, perhaps; he had hated stairs. If Trollius's ghost still lived here – he imagined his uncle's spirit shaded blue, like the sky – then Lycaste would be safest at the top of some stairs.

They met where the path forked about half a mile from Lycaste's home, climbing into the low hills away from the sea. The dusty track was more like a parting in the grasses, weaving in and out of the dense shade of the trees. Followed for long enough, it would take them out of Lycaste's estate and through a number of others, eventually joining a rocky causeway and leaving the Province entirely.

'I saw Pentas last night, you know,' said Impatiens after their conversation had lapsed sufficiently. 'After I came home from your dinner.'

Lycaste listened to the pause, hearing the thick buzz of cicadas all around them. 'How was she?' he asked at last.

'I cannot understand,' his friend replied after a moment's thought, 'just why you have fallen in love with that girl – of all the people you might have chosen. She really is nothing remarkable – I hope you don't mind my saying so.' He looked up from the ground at Lycaste. 'Her older sister, on the other hand, strikes me as a much finer catch.'

'Eranthis?' Lycaste smiled sheepishly. 'You think —?'

Impatiens laughed, a harsh bark that startled the cicadas. 'Not a chance, dear fellow. She's known you quite long enough to have seen through the mystery by now, I'm afraid.'

He glanced down again, feeling foolish for playing into Impatiens' little joke. 'I know you think I don't understand what love means, but I know what I feel, Impatiens.'

The older man's face softened. 'I'm sure you do. Make yourself better for it, Lycaste, and choose another. It's not as if you're short on offers.'

Again the same advice, as if everyone but him knew for certain how Pentas felt.

'So many people make such long journeys to come here, to the Tenth, to seek my betrothal . . .' Lycaste smiled apologetically, trying to find the right words. 'But there's only one person I want. Can't they see I'm not about to change my mind?'

'You had better, for all our sakes,' sighed Impatiens. 'Now stop dwelling on it, handsome fool – you'll give yourself a headache.'