Xara Zynthar's Arc

Chapter 1 of 16

Xara Zynthar had six days to make a prince fall in love with her, and she still did not know how to get past his front gate. She paced the warm inner room of her borrowed shelter, a squat stone box that looked like a tomb from the outside and a nest from within. Her green skin caught the firelight. Her tight silver dress made a soft sound with every step. Back home, her people were starving under a sky the color of rust. The council had chosen her because she could speak the prince's language and because she was, they said, pleasing to human eyes. They had given her a ship, a dress, and a deadline. They had not given her a way in. She knelt at the fireplace. The shelf above it glowed with the books her handlers had packed: courtly manners, royal genealogies, a slim volume called Secrets of the Star Prince. She had read them all twice on the crossing. She knew the prince hated loud music. She knew he kept a garden of night-blooming vines. She knew his mother had died when he was nine. She knew everything except the shape of the door she needed to walk through. Her eel drifted from the water bowl on the table, glowing pale green, and curled once around her wrist. She had raised the eel from a hatchling. It always came close when she was afraid. "I know," she said. "I'm stalling." She unrolled the parchment the council had pressed into her hand at departure. The crimson star at its center was her binding oath, signed in her own blood. Return with the prince's favor, or do not return. Her sisters had signed as witnesses. She could still see the smear of her middle sister's thumb. She set the parchment down and picked up the small vial beside it. Moonlight water. One drop pulled the truth out of any tongue it touched. The council had meant it for the prince. Xara uncorked it and let a single drop fall onto her own. The taste was cold metal. Her jaw loosened. "I don't want to seduce him," she said to the empty room. "I want to be let inside. I want someone to listen." The eel tightened on her wrist. She stared at the fire until her plan arrived, plain and small. She would not climb the wall. She would not bribe a guard. She would walk to the servants' gate at dawn and offer the one thing she had that no human girl could fake: a live, glowing eel from a dying world, and a scholar's knowledge of the prince's own private books. She would ask for work in his library. Nothing more. Yet. She corked the vial. She folded the blood-marked parchment into her sleeve. The deadline had not moved. But the door had.