9th of September, 908.
Eight days until chaos.
I had a crumpled piece of paper on my desk, three failed drafts tossed in the bin, and a quill I'd been chewing on for so long it was basically ruined. All of this, every last scrap of stress, was because of one tiny green-haired menace who would be turning six in eight days and had absolutely no idea what was coming for her.
Sylvie's birthday landed on the 17th of September, and I was going to throw her the greatest surprise party this orphanage had ever seen. Granted, our only other birthday party ended with Tommy sitting on the cake, so the bar wasn't exactly sky-high, but I intended to raise it considerably.
I'd circled the date in red ink on the calendar hanging behind my office door, then written "DO NOT FORGET THE CAKE" underneath it in big sloppy letters, then immediately felt embarrassed and taped one of Mia's drawings of a sun over it. If Sylvie ever wandered in here and looked behind the sun, I was done for.
At least the cake itself was sorted. That was the one piece of this entire operation I actually felt confident about.
Madam Corvel ran a warm little bakery tucked into the merchant district, the kind of place that smelled like heaven and flour and cinnamon the moment you pushed the door open. She was a round, rosy woman who looked like she'd been gently baked herself, and she had opinions about buttercream that could start wars. I'd visited twice now, once to describe what I wanted and once to see her sketch of it, and the second visit nearly broke me.
She'd drawn a three-tier cake. The bottom layer was vanilla with a honey glaze, the middle was strawberry cream because Sylvie hoarded every last strawberry at breakfast like a little green-haired dragon guarding her treasure, and the top layer Madam Corvel had kept a mystery. She'd just winked at me and said "Trust me, Director, the little one will remember this for the rest of her life." The sketch showed tiny sugar flowers in green and yellow with a little fondant girl on top, wild hair and everything, arms out like she was about to sprint off the edge. I'd stared at it and said "that's her, that's exactly her" and Madam Corvel had laughed so loud the jars rattled.
Pickup was before dawn on the 17th so I could smuggle it into the kitchen before Sylvie's ears picked up anything suspicious.
And that was the real problem with this whole plan. Not the logistics, not the budget, not coordinating two hundred-something kids. The problem was Sylvie herself, because that girl had the hearing of a bat, the curiosity of a cat, and the snooping instincts of someone three times her age.
Last week, I'd tried to have a quiet word with Miss Dena, our head caretaker, about borrowing the big courtyard for the party. We'd ducked into the supply room at the far end of the building, closed the door, and kept our voices low. I barely got two sentences out before there was a tiny knock.
I opened the door and there she was, my adorable little spy, standing on her tiptoes with her hands clasped behind her back and the most innocent expression a five-year-old has ever faked.
"Papa, whatcha doin' in the closet?" she'd asked, tilting her head like she didn't already know I was hiding something.
"Inventory," I'd said.
She'd stared at me with those enormous golden eyes, and I could practically see the gears turning behind them. Then she'd said "Uh huh" in a voice dripping with doubt and skipped away humming, which was somehow worse than if she'd interrogated me on the spot.
Miss Dena had looked at me afterward and said, very flatly, "That child is going to be a problem, Director."
Yes. Thank you, Miss Dena. Noted.
So the morning of the 17th had to be handled carefully. I needed someone to take Sylvie out of the orphanage for a few hours while we set everything up, and it had to be someone she adored enough to follow without turning it into an interrogation. There was really only one person who fit that description.
I picked up a fresh piece of paper and started a letter to Lea Monad.
The first draft opened with "I require your assistance with a matter of some delicacy" which made it sound like I was asking her to help me dispose of a body. The second draft was too casual, like I was scribbling a shopping list. The third one I actually folded and set aside for the courier. It said something like: "I'm planning a surprise for Sylvie's birthday on the 17th and I could really use someone she loves to keep her busy for the morning. You're the only person she wouldn't immediately suspect. Please. I'm absolutely not above begging."
Lea was going to laugh at me and then say yes, because she always said yes when it came to Sylvie. The two of them had a whole thing going where Lea would show up, ruffle Sylvie's hair with that big-sister grin, and Sylvie would light up like a candle and immediately try to climb her. An actual Legendary Stalker, feared across the capital, standing in my courtyard with a five-year-old hanging off her arm like a monkey. She never once complained about it either, just smiled and hoisted her up.
The decorations I'd handed off to Rena and the five oldest kids, who had taken the assignment so seriously it was honestly a little scary. Rena, thirteen and terrifyingly organized, had shown up at my office with a handwritten list. Streamers in green and yellow. Paper flowers for the tables. A hand-painted banner that the younger kids could help colour in. And then, at the bottom of the list, underlined twice: a crown made of braided green ribbon, because in Rena's words, "Sylvie is basically our princess, Director, so she needs a proper crown."
I'd stared at that list for a while. Then I'd handed over the decoration budget without a single objection, because she was right.
Getting the rest of the kids to keep the secret was probably the most ambitious part of the whole thing. I'd gathered everyone in the courtyard the previous afternoon while Sylvie was napping, and the moment I explained what we were planning, the place erupted. Hands went up everywhere. Someone in the back started arguing about which song to sing. Jack formally requested permission to be the loudest one when we all yelled surprise, and when I told him the job was his, he pumped his fist so hard he nearly clocked the kid standing next to him.
Mia had found me after the meeting, tugging my sleeve with her fox ears all drooped and worried.
"What if she asks me something and I accidentally say it?" she'd whispered. "I'm really bad at lying. My ears twitch when I'm not telling the truth and she always notices."
I'd crouched down so we were eye to eye. "Then here's what you do. If Sylvie asks you anything, anything at all, you just say: I don't know anything about any parties."
Mia had repeated it back with the intense concentration of someone handling something very fragile. Then she'd practiced it five more times on her walk back to the dorms, muttering it under her breath the whole way, and I'd watched her go and quietly put my faith in those twitchy little fox ears of hers.
Then there was the gift, and that one had kept me up more than everything else combined.
I'd spent weeks turning it over in my head. Sylvie didn't need toys, she had a whole shelf of them. She didn't need clothes or sweets or books. She had a stuffed rabbit named Mister for reasons she flat-out refused to explain, and it went everywhere she did. What I wanted to give her was something different, something that was hers in a way that said you're not just one of my two hundred and thirty-six kids, you're my kid, my girl, and I see you. Besides the pendant of course.
So I'd gone to an old craftsman in the artisan quarter, a quiet man with weathered hands and a workshop that smelled like cedar shavings and linseed oil. I'd sat across from him and spent probably twenty minutes describing Sylvie in way too much detail. The way she never walked when she could run. The way she laughed so hard her whole body shook and she'd have to grab onto something to stay upright. The little gap between her front teeth that she liked to wiggle at me when she thought she was being clever. The way she puffed out her chest when she had something important to announce, like a tiny general addressing her troops.
He'd listened to all of it without interrupting, then gone quiet for a long moment.
"She sounds like sunshine with legs," he'd said.
I'd laughed at that, because yeah, that was about right.
He carved it perfectly. A small wooden figure of a girl with wild hair and pointed ears, caught mid-sprint, arms flung out, face split into a wide grin. He'd even gotten the gap in her teeth. When he handed it to me wrapped in soft cloth, I'd held it in both hands and just looked at it for a while, because it was so exactly her that my throat did something embarrassing.
I'd paid him without haggling, walked home holding the wrapped figure against my chest like it was made of glass, and hidden it in the bottom drawer of my desk under a stack of old paperwork. Sylvie had ransacked my top two drawers on separate occasions — hunting for extra chalk, she'd claimed both times with the straightest face I'd ever seen on a child — but she hadn't made it to the bottom one yet.
I glanced at the drawer now, then leaned back in my chair and looked over the plan one more time. Cake: handled. Lea distraction: letter going out today. Decorations: Rena had it locked down with mildly terrifying efficiency. Secret-keeping: two hundred kids briefed and enthusiastic, Mia armed with her rehearsed line. Gift: safe in the bottom drawer.
All I had to do now was act perfectly normal for eight more days and not give a single thing away to the sharpest five-year-old on the continent.
Through the open window I could hear recess in full swing outside, laughing and shrieking and the thud of a ball against the courtyard wall, and cutting through all of it, bright and bossy and unmistakable, Sylvie's voice directing some new game with the authority of someone who was absolutely in charge and everyone knew it.
I sat there smiling like an idiot for a while.
Then someone knocked on my door twice and immediately opened it without waiting.
Sylvie stood in the doorway in her green dress with grass stains on both knees and her hair looking like she'd lost a fight with a hedge. She was holding a yellow wildflower out toward me with both hands, very carefully, very seriously, like it was a treasure she'd brought back from a great quest. One of the petals was missing and the stem was a bit bent where she'd gripped it too tight.
"This is for you," she announced. "Because you've been making your worried face all morning and it's making my tummy feel funny."
I took the flower and held it up to examine it with appropriate gravity. "This might be the finest flower anyone has ever given me."
She beamed so wide the gap in her teeth showed. "I picked it special. The yellow ones are the bravest."
"Is that so?"
"Mhm. Miss Dena told me that." She rocked on her heels, then her eyes drifted to my desk, to the papers, to the quill with its chewed-up end. Her head tilted. "Papa."
"Yeah, bug?"
"You're being weird."
"I'm not being weird. I'm doing paperwork."
She squinted at me. She had this look, this devastating little look where she'd drop her chin and peer up through her lashes like she was trying to read something written on the inside of my skull. She'd been doing it since she turned five, and it worked every single time on every single person she aimed it at. I was, unfortunately, not immune.
"...Okay," she said finally, drawing the word out long and suspicious. Then she brightened up again instantly, like flipping a switch. "I'm going back outside. Emma wants me to be the dragon for tag."
"Be a nice dragon."
"Dragons aren't nice, Papa, that's the whole point." She turned to leave, made it two steps into the hallway, then spun around and ran back and threw her arms around my waist. She barely came up to my chest. I felt her squeeze as hard as her little arms could manage.
"Love you," she mumbled into my shirt.
There it was. That thing my chest did every time, that warm ache that made the whole world go soft and quiet for a second, like nothing outside this room mattered at all. I put my hand on her head, on that wild mess of green hair, and just held it there.
"Love you too, bug. More than you know."
She pulled back, grinned up at me with her whole face, and then she was gone, bare feet slapping down the hallway at a full dead sprint because Sylvie had never once in her life moved at anything less than top speed.
I sat at my desk holding a bent, one-petaled yellow wildflower, and I was smiling so hard my face hurt.
Eight days.
She had absolutely no idea.
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AN
how's the writing style for this chapter, lmk if its better or worse