Rosemary sullivan's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Rosemary Sullivan was eighteen years old and she had come to the market to buy a charm that would prove she was serious. She wanted the lion king's champion for a husband — the man who once stepped between the king and an assassin without flinching, the man who had never lost a bout. She had not been at the palace the day he saved the king. She hated that. She meant to make up for it by being the woman he chose, and she had three silver coins knotted into her handkerchief to begin. The charm-seller's table held one locket worth the price. It was small and round, engraved with fine gold filigree, and the seller said it had been blessed to steady the wearer's nerve. Rosemary paid before she could talk herself out of it. She fastened the chain at her throat and felt the weight settle against her collarbone. Then she heard her champion's name spoken across the square, and it was not spoken kindly. A fat badger in a velvet waistcoat sat under a great white tent of layered cloth, holding court on a cushion. A crowd of beasts and townsfolk leaned in. "The champion has chosen," the badger said. "He rides out every dawn past her pavilion. The lady has set her cap, and he has not turned his head away." The badger pointed one claw. Across the lane, a noblewoman stood on a deep, patterned carpet she had spread on the dirt like a throne room floor. A winged unicorn was tethered at the carpet's edge, folding and unfolding its feathers for the crowd. The noblewoman did not look at Rosemary. She did not need to. Rosemary's hand went to the locket. She could walk away and let the badger's story set like plaster. By sundown every stallholder would repeat it. By the week's end the champion himself would hear that he had already chosen, and a tired man might find it easier to agree than to argue. She stepped up onto the badger's cushion-stage instead. "You said he rides past her pavilion at dawn," she said, loud enough to turn heads. "He trains before dawn. Everyone knows it. Whoever you saw at her tent in daylight was not him." The badger's mouth opened and shut. A drover laughed. An old woman repeated Rosemary's words to the man beside her, and he nodded, because the dawn training was the one thing about the champion everyone agreed on. The noblewoman finally looked at Rosemary, and her face was flat and cold. The badger recovered and smiled at Rosemary with new interest. "Well," he said. "A second contender. The market will want to hear more of you, girl." Rosemary stepped down with the locket warm against her skin. She had killed the rumor. She had also put her name in the badger's mouth, and the noblewoman's eyes were still on her back.