Seraphina Goldleaf's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Seraphina Goldleaf climbed the south stair of Bloomwarden Castle with a list of every man in Avalon who had ever wanted her, and not one of them was the man she wanted. The stair smelled of jasmine and damp stone. Petals stuck to her boots. She had spent three months in this castle, listening at doors, trading smiles for whispers, and she still did not have a name. Somewhere in the city lived a person her face did not move. She meant to find him and make him love her. Her rooms on the fourth floor faced the courtyard. She locked the door, kicked off her boots, and pulled a small scroll from her sleeve. It looked palm-sized, but it unrolled past her knees when she shook it open. Every favor she had collected lived on it. Lord Erren's gambling debts. The baker's affair. The captain who cried after. She read the list twice and crossed off four more names. None of them were immune. All of them had folded the moment she leaned in. She went to the window. Below, in the courtyard, the great wooden frame stood between the fountains, taller than the gate. Painted faces filled it in neat rows, every notable citizen of Avalon, refreshed each season by the heralds. Seraphina had stared at it for weeks. She knew the merchants, the knights, the priests, the scholars. She had bedded or bribed or befriended a quarter of them. The frame told her who mattered. It would not tell her who refused. A knock. She opened the door to a page holding a blue rabbit in a wicker cage. The animal's eyes fixed on her with a weight no animal should carry. The page said a gift had arrived from a lady on the third floor, payment for a secret Seraphina had kept last winter. He left. Seraphina set the cage on her table. The rabbit looked at her. She felt a soft pressure behind her forehead, like someone pressing a finger to glass. Then a thought arrived that was not hers. *You are looking for the wrong kind of name.* She sat down hard. *Try the one nobody puts on the frame.* She asked aloud who. The rabbit's nose twitched. *The gardener who tends the east wall. He sweeps your petals every morning. He has never looked up at your window.* Seraphina laughed once, sharp, because of course. She had walked past him a hundred times. She had never asked his name. She unrolled the scroll across the table and wrote a single new line at the top, above all the lords and captains and priests. *East wall. Gardener. Find out what he wants.* She blew on the ink. Tomorrow she would go down to the courtyard before sunrise, in plain clothes, and learn how to be seen by someone who had already decided not to look.