Sylvia whisper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Sylvia Whisper had studied the prince's schedule for six months, and she still had no way through his gate. She sat on the low wall outside the palace garden in Juniperfall, watching the guards turn away a cart of pear wine and a delegation from the river towns. She was a seamstress with clever fingers and a mother's debt to the tax collector, and she had decided, the night she first saw the prince ride past her shop, that she would make him love her. He had not smiled in three years, since his betrothed drowned in the summer floods. Sylvia had smiled at him from the crowd, and he had not seen her. He would never see her from outside this wall. A rabbit hopped out from under the hedge and sat in the gravel path, upright as a clerk. It wore a gray vest and a silver watch on a chain. The watch ticked loud enough for Sylvia to hear it from the wall. The rabbit tapped the watch face twice and looked at her, and she understood that she was being addressed. "You want inside," it said. "The prince keeps a menagerie. His last keeper drank himself out of the post on Sunday. They are hiring at the kitchen door within the hour. I will vouch for you, because I am tired of the fool they will hire otherwise." Sylvia stood up. She had never fed an animal larger than a shop cat, and she did not know why a rabbit could speak or why one would help her. She walked to the kitchen door anyway and gave the rabbit's name at the gate. The steward wrote her down as the new assistant to the menagerie. By noon she was inside the wall, carrying a bucket of cut apples toward a courtyard where the prince walked every morning at dawn.