The Owl Princess

Book 3: Chapter 1- The Return of the Princess

Hazel knew that she would soon have a choice to make. She was aware that Frank and Leo had been in love with her for years and now that she was old enough to be wed, she expected that they would both ask for her hand in marriage. Frank had just been made a guard at the palace and Leo had taken over his master's blacksmith's forge. Both were now in a position to support a wife.
The three of them were inseparable and had been since childhood. Frank was a broad shoulder for her to cry on and Leo was always there to make her laugh. They were the only ones who had ever stood up for her when people called her mother a whore and mocked her for being a bastard.
Hazel and her mother lived in a modest white stucco house with a terra cotta shingled roof near the Athenian agora. It was built around a central courtyard with two one-story buildings on the right and left sides. One contained the kitchen and store room; the other acted as a barn for their donkey and goats. The two story building in the back was where they lived with the first floor being the public part of the house while the second held the sleeping quarters.

Hazel's father had given them this house a long with a pension which allowed them to live comfortably. They supplemented this income by selling their homemade goat cheese, cloth, and pottery. In order to make their pots more attractive, Hazel painted designs on them as well as scenes from the lives of gods, heroes, and of ordinary mortals. She painted in both the Corinthian black figure style- black silhouetted figures on a yellowish or reddish background with enhanced by adding touches of red or white paint and the Athenian red figure style- the reverse of the black figure style, where the  figures are outlined first then the background is colored in black, leaving the outlined area orange-red. Two of her most recent pots were in the black figure style: an amphora (a jug for wine or olive oil) depicting the Goddess of War and Wisdom charging into battle and a hydria (water jug) featuring a line of women waiting to fill up their hydriai with water at a fountain.