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.

By first light Sylvia stood in the menagerie yard with a bucket of apple cores and no reason to be anywhere else. The prince would walk the gravel path along the inner hedge in less than an hour. The path ran past the aviary, then past a small stone cottage the old keeper had used for tea, then out through the rose gate. Sylvia had no errand along that path. If a guard found her standing in the hedge, she would be dismissed by breakfast. She needed a task that put her on the gravel at dawn, and she needed it today. The rabbit was waiting on the cottage step, watch swinging. "You are thinking too small," it said. "Do not stand in his path. Work in it." It pointed a paw at the cold fire pit beside the cottage, a stone ring with two curved benches. "The old keeper laid a fire here every morning so the prince could warm his hands halfway through the walk. No one has lit it in a week. Lay one now. If anyone asks, you are doing your job." Sylvia looked at the ash in the ring and understood. A fire was a reason. A fire was furniture the prince already expected. She would not be loitering. She would be tending. She carried kindling from the woodshed and split two logs badly and cut her thumb on the axe. She laid the sticks the way her mother had taught her and struck the flint six times before a spark caught. The smoke rose thin and gray above the cottage roof. She sat on one of the curved benches and pressed her cut thumb into her apron and waited. Boots crunched on the gravel. She did not look up until the steps stopped in front of her. A tall man in a plain gray coat stood at the edge of the ring, holding his gloves in one hand. He looked at the fire, not at her. "He kept it hotter," the prince said. "But thank you." He held his palms to the flames for the count of ten. Then he walked on. Sylvia stayed on the bench until the gravel went quiet. He had spoken to her. He had not seen her face. It did not matter. Tomorrow the fire would be hotter, and the day after that she would have something ready for him to sit down for. She wiped her thumb and went to fetch more wood. On the cottage step, the rabbit clicked its watch shut. "Good," it said. "Now the harder part. He thanked the fire. He has to thank you."