The Juggler’s Son...

Sybil de Walter was not what you would consider to be much of a heroine for a story. For two and twenty years she had led a perfectly amiable and uneventful life. She had suffered no childhood calamities, neither of her parents had died from horrific pestilences and she had not been married off to some dreadful old man with creepy hands. Life was never particularly easy, but yet it was never particularly hard either.

Her self-confessed best feature was the ability to stamp and twist her feet in intricate ways to ring the tiny bells that were tied about her ankles. You see Sybil was a dancer, the offspring of a minstrel father and a musical mother. And in that family which so prided itself on its romantic and fantastical abilities Sybil was found sadly wanting. Not that her family would tell her such, for she was a good daughter and a hard worker, but they could not deny the fact that hers was certainly not the face which would inspire any great chivalric feats of arms.

She was a simple, good-humoured and sturdy sort of girl, not prone to screaming or fainting-fits or peculiar flights of fancy. That was until she fell in love. For Sybil suffered from the particular misfortune of falling in love with her best friend. To her knowledge this was possibly one of the most ignoble forms of love to find oneself in. Courtly love, as sung by her father, was full of tales of burning passions for wandering troubadours or of dashing knights who slowly win the admiration of a fine lady. There was something altogether disappointing with falling in love with the familiar features of a friend who would never dream of directing heated glances your way, let alone composing a poetic verse to your beauty.

It was the kind of love that subtly crept upon you, slowly, silently, until when finally you are aware of its presence it feels as if it has always been there. It was the kind of love that developed from a friendly pat on the back and careless offer of a bandage in times of injury, to anxious hovering by a candlelit bedside and shrieking shrilly for more hot water. It was the kind of love that could simultaneously make you flush with tongue-tied embarrassment and gabble on about mindless nonsense.

But the worst hardship for Sybil was that it was the kind of love of which could never ever be spoken about. It was a secret and she was not a secret-keeping kind of girl. For to tell a stranger you love them you lose nothing except perhaps a little pride. But to tell a friend you love them you risk losing everything that was there before that sneaky and contrary emotion called love reared its head. So she held her tongue and would always hold her tongue. Yet still she would think to herself as she listened with chin cupped in hand to the tales sung in her father’s clear voice, that he could not be compared to those heroes of courtly love. He was no hero for a story, he was infinitely better than all of them.

And so who was this friend who had captured her plain and honest heart? Who was this paragon of virtue and beauty? Well he was naught but the juggler’s son. But he was everything to Sybil de Walter.