So he built a row of just a couple of dozen from his impressive army. The little guardsmen were made with such skill that they looked quite like real when you look at them from the high palace balcony. It's a pity that toy soldiers couldn't march and shoot with guns so bravely.
Alcus divided the soldiers into two groups and put them against each other. To tell the truth, it was not quite logical, because the Emperor's guardsmen do not fight each other, but other sets of small troops remained in the nursery, so we had to be content with what is. But if one of the older ones showed up, one hand would be enough to throw the soldiers in the drawer.
The guardsmen were standing against each other, bayonets were put up and their faces expressed their full readiness to rush into battle. Alexander looked at it for a few moments and, driven by a strange impulse, suddenly overturned all the figures. For a short moment, he presented the real soldiers of his father's guard in the place of tin soldiers... No, they shouldn't fight against each other.
This is wrong. At all.
The door was knocked respectfully. Alcus barely had time to drop the soldiers in a box before the strict and unfriendly footman Paul appeared on the doorstep.
- Your Highness, please accept the mentor. Mr. Andriy is waiting.
Alexander nodded silently, and only when the footman came out did he smile widely.
- Andri!
- Your Highness!
The professor's tall, thin shoulder son stepped towards the heir. He was a year younger than he was and almost half a head younger, but Alka had never been as interesting as this shaggy genius. Father said that Andrei Goran is a completely extraordinary boy, that such as he, talents, even among adults is still worth looking for ... But for the Crown Prince, the little genius painter was just a funny factionalism Andrew, with whom you can arrange a grand battle of tin soldiers or all day whistle to the river and there fly kites on the waterfront.
Andrew looked as if he had fled all the way, and at the last moment he was trying to smooth out the broken hair. It didn't hurt, by the way.
- Why are you so overwhelmed? - He asked, without holding back his curiosity, Alcus.
- Yes, I did... - Andri pulled his shoulder angrily and threw a hat on the table. - He was detained... I was afraid I would be late.
The prince cheered up. Judging by the still wet hair, the young mentor was detained by an insightful nanny, about whom Andri told more than once.
- This one is yours... like hers... Matilda?
- Mm-hmm. Antony, - Andri came to the big easel by the window and looked critically at the drawing of his student. - Al... Well, is it an oval? - The thin finger pointed to the ointment, which the heir of the emperor scattered on a piece of paper. Andrew sighed.
He was funny, this son of a professor. White-skinned, blue-eyed, with such a serious crease between his bright eyebrows. Always wearing ironed trousers and a white shirt. Always polite and terribly delicate when it came to Alcove's artistic endeavors. Andrew seriously believed that the heir could be taught something... Ha. Three times ha. Try to teach the elephant to play on the horn! And the cow to dance... Maybe they will be able to do it in the end, but only all their successes will look like a continuous circus.
Alcus never wanted to learn to draw. And music lessons were a real torment for him. Just like dancing. But if he managed to avoid hated activities until he was twelve, then after the death of one older brother and an extremely unsuccessful marriage of the second, the freedom of the younger prince came to an end. Full and irrevocable. Is it a joke! In one month he turned from the imperceptible third son into the main contender for the throne of Fatherland... To be the main - and the only one! - The heir turned out to be so troublesome that Alexander sincerely hated the wife of his brother Valentine, because of whom the loving idiot refused the right to inherit... The father then threatened not only to take away the title from Valentine, but also to shoot the unfaithful son for a terrible mesalliance with a commoner. Then I calmed down, of course... Val was his favorite. And the talent less ordinary Alcus is just one of three monarch children. Not pretending neither to be a crown, nor to be famous, nor to do great things. Alcus liked to run all day long with city boys, steal apples from other people's gardens, swim in the Neva River under the nose of angry city guards. He could easily escape from a foreign policy lesson, in which he understood almost nothing, and not appear in the palace until the evening. And then, almost at midnight, to return, demand hot bread with milk and sleep right in the chair, without taking off his shoe ...
Now for such pranks the Grand Duke was threatened with severe flogging.
Continuation in the next part 3.