Three weeks. Kassius was mostly settled now. Dorne was pleasanter than he had expected, but he still felt the most at home in the gardens. After he’d gotten over his initial nervousness, he’d actually come to appreciate being away from home. Lord Nymeros had been surprisingly kind to him, and had supplied him with anything he had asked for, which had really just been some parchment, charcoal, and paints. He had spent most of his time since then seeking solitude in Sunspear’s pleasure gardens, drawing the birds and flowers he was unfamiliar with. Perhaps he would send some of his artwork to his sisters.
He sat-cross-legged in the grass, ignoring the unpleasant dampness seeping in through his clothes from the lingering morning dew, deft strokes of the brush leaving marks whose purpose only Kassius would be able to tell until it was nearly finished.
Sunspear wasn’t the only thing the young Tyrell had gotten used to, however. He was very stoutly ignoring the sounds behind him of a little girl making her way through the carefully arranged trees and bushes to find him. She wasn’t loud per se, but he was acutely aware of how the little Princess of Dorne had been following him around. He didn’t mind, though. She still reminded him of Jana, and it was nice to feel wanted.
A small yelp of pain had him whipping his head around to look for her, his drawing temporarily forgotten, but the chubby little girl was just finishing brushing the stray grass from her colorful robes as if nothing had happened. He frowned at her, and lay his parchment and brush aside, about to get up and approach her, but she flounced to his side before he could stand. In this position, they were just about the same height. “Are you o-” he started, but she interrupted him.
“What are you doing, my Lord?” She asked, brightly. That was the other thing. They kept calling him “my Lord.” No one in his family called him that, certainly not Jana, only the servants had. It was the one thing that kept reminding him that he wasn’t at home. Here, he was “Lord Kassius Tyrell.” He didn’t feel like himself.
“Please, just call me Kassius, Princess.” He finally blurted. He’d wanted to say that for over a week, but hadn’t worked up the nerve until now. “I-” He started again, about to answer her question, but then his eyes happened to look down and he noticed that a bit of her robe was stained slightly red. “You’re hurt!” He cried in alarm. “Let me call a servant.”
He was about to stand up and fetch someone, when she grabbed his sleeve. “No, I want to know what you’re drawing.” She insisted. He hesitated, not sure what the right course of action was, but then she plopped herself into his lap and picked up the parchment he’d been painting on, along with the little wooden board he’d been using as a makeshift easel. She frowned at it, puzzled by the seemingly random lines.
Lacking the confidence to be so rude as to dump the three-year-old daughter of his host in the grass while he went to get someone to treat her, he sighed and finally took the parchment from her hands, lowering it slightly from where she had raised it so he could point over at his model. “Look over there.” He said, a little awkwardly. “That red flower, catching the sunlight. Doesn’t it look a little bit like it’s glowing?” He was starting to get into the conversation a bit, remembering what had compelled him to sit down in the first place. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it in Highgarden.” He told her, though he was speaking half to himself. “The sun isn’t quite so strong there.”
A sniffle made him look down at the girl in his lap and he realized with a start that she was crying. “Princess Myria! Are you alright? Does your leg-”
“It’s beautiful.” She said, rubbing her nose with her sleeve. If Kassius had been able to think of a single thing to say to that, he would have, but he gaped at her slightly in confusion, until she demanded, “Keep painting it.” And since he had nothing else to do or say, he did, the little girl’s warmth surprisingly proving a nice companion for his painting he would grow used to over the coming months.