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“Push, my Queen! Push, for the baby comes!”
    Sasha pushed. Thomas came from her as effortlessly as a boy zipping down a slide. But Sasha’s lifeblood gushed out upon the sheet. Ten minutes after Thomas came into the world, his mother was dead.
    And so Flagg was not concerned about the piffling matter of the dollhouse. What mattered was that Roland was growing old, there was no meddling Queen to stand in his way, and now he had not one son to choose from but two. Peter was, of course, the elder, but that did not really matter. Peter could be gotten out of the way if time should prove him unsuitable for Flagg’s purposes. He was only a child, and could not defend himself.
    I have told you that Roland never thought longer or harder on any matter during his entire reign than he did on this one question—whether or not Peter should be allowed access to Sasha’s dollhouse, cunningly crafted by the great Ellender. I have told you that the result of his thought was a decision that ran against Flagg’s wishes. I have also told you that Flagg considered this of little importance.
    Was it? That you must decide for yourself, after you have heard me to the end.

13
    N ow let many long years pass, all in a twinkling—one of the great things about tales is how fast time may pass when not much of note is happening. Real life is never that way, and it is probably a good thing. Time only passes faster in histories, and what is a history except a grand sort of tale where passing centuries are substituted for passing years?
    During those years, Flagg watched both boys carefully—he watched them over the aging King’s shoulder as they grew up, calculating which should be King when Roland was no more. It did not take him long to decide it should be Thomas, the younger. By the time Peter was seven, he knew he did not like the boy. When Peter was nine, Flagg made a strange and unpleasant discovery: he feared Peter, as well.
    The boy had grown up strong and straight and handsome. His hair was dark, his eyes a dark blue that is common to people of the Western Barony. Sometimes, when Peter looked up quickly, his head cocked a certain way, he resembled his father. Otherwise, he was Sasha’s son almost entirely in his looks and ways. Unlike his short father with his bowlegged walk and his clumsy way of moving (Roland was graceful only when he was horsed), Peter was tall and lithe. He enjoyed the hunt and hunted well, but it was not his life. He also enjoyed his lessons—geography and history were his particular favorites.
    His father was puzzled and often impatient with jokes; the point of most had to be explained to him, and that took away all the fun. What Roland liked was when the jesters pretended to slip on banana peels, or knocked their heads together, or when they staged pie fights in the Great Hall. Such things were about as far as Roland’s idea of good fun extended. Peter’s wit was much quicker and more subtle, as Sasha’s had been, and his rollicking, boyish laughter often filled the palace, making the servants smile at each other approvingly.
    While many boys in Peter’s position would have become too conscious of their own grand place in the scheme of things to play with anyone not of their own class, Peter became best friends with a boy named Ben Staad when both children were eight. Ben’s family was not royalty, and though Andrew Staad, Ben’s father, had some faint claim to the High Blood of the kingdom on his mother’s side, they could not even rightly be called nobility. “Squire” was probably the kindest term one could have applied to Andy Staad, and “squire’s son” to his boy. Even so, the once-prosperous Staad family had fallen upon hard times, and while there could have been queerer choices for a prince’s best friend, there couldn’t have been many.
    They met at the annual Farmers’ Lawn Party when Peter was eight. The