Aria Snowstripe's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

By the third dawn, the line at the palace steps stretched past the tree line. Aria handed out the last of the seed cakes and turned back toward the crystal doors. A squirrel followed her. Then a marten. Then two crows that hopped from step to step, watching her tail. She stopped on the top stair. They stopped too. Word had spread, and now the forest wanted to see where the food came from. Aria's ferret climbed to her shoulder and hissed at the crows. Aria did the math on the walk back through the blue and purple halls. Two sacks left in the wardrobe. Maybe ten days. If one of these hungry followers slipped past her and found the mahogany doors, the stores would be gone by morning, and the line at the steps would turn on her by noon. She needed a guard. She knew only one animal who could keep a secret and outthink a crow. She found him where she always found him, asleep under the stained glass windows in the south gallery, colored flowers thrown across his purple fur. Jasper Quicktail. Fox. Skinny. The only friend from her running years who had followed her here and stayed. "Get up," Aria said. "I need you to steal something for me." Jasper opened one red eye. "You have a palace. What's left to steal?" "Time." She crouched beside him. "They're following me home. If they find the wardrobe, we're done in a night." He sat up slow. He looked at the ferret on her shoulder, then at the doors behind her. He did not ask what wardrobe. He had known her mother. "You want me on the door," he said. "I want you between the door and every nose in the forest." Jasper stretched. His grin came up sideways. "I charge in seed cakes." "You charge in loyalty. I'll feed you anyway." They moved the sacks that afternoon. Jasper picked the spot, not Aria: a narrow storeroom behind a false panel in the wardrobe's back wall, a trick her mother had built and never mentioned. He found it in six minutes. Aria watched him work and understood why she had kept him close for years. That night she walked the gallery alone while Jasper sat by the false panel with a stick across his knees. The ferret curled in her mother's coat pocket. Two floors below, something scratched at the outer door. Aria did not go down. She listened until the scratching stopped. In the morning she counted the sacks. Both there. Both full. Jasper was asleep against the panel, one ear up. She had bought herself the stores. She had not bought herself more food. The line at the steps would be longer today, and the followers would come again, and now two mouths inside the palace ate from the same shrinking pile.