Incredibly, those two political naïfs seemed to believe that by telling me their side of the story, I’d report it to my superiors, Lodia’s mother’s name would be cleared, and I would be reassigned to spy on someone else. Imagine their shock when I went on living in the Kohs’ house and eating their rice!

“Lodia, pay attention to thy food,” Missa scolded.

Lodia’s spoon had just tilted far enough for her rice porridge to splat back into her bowl, which made her jump and squeak. It was the second time it had happened this breakfast, and both times it was because she was distracted by tracking my movements.

As for what I was doing, I was twisting my neck around to preen my back. So when Missa followed her granddaughter’s gaze to the shelf, all she saw was a normal sparrow, doing normal sparrow things.

“Forgive me, Grandmother.” Watching me out of the corner of her eye, Lodia scooped up another absentminded spoonful of rice porridge.

“Is something the matter with Pip?” Rohanus asked. “Thou keep looking at her. Has she fallen ill?”

At the question, Missa’s eyebrows rose. She strode over to me, bronze seal swinging at her side. Like Floridiana, she strung it on a cord and hung it from her belt. It must be modern mage fashion.

“Pip looks healthy to me. Has she exhibited any unusual behavior lately?”

Even as she spoke, she was dabbing her seal into a dish of seal paste and stamping herself between the eyes. Then she held out a finger so I could hop onto it and examined me from all angles.

I glared at Lodia, silently commanding her not to say anything.

The girl swallowed, harder than a mouthful of soft, mushy porridge required. “No, Grandmother…. She has…not.”

Personally, I thought she paused too long before the “not,” but Missa seemed satisfied. She held her finger up to the shelf so I could hop back onto it, and then she returned to the head of the table.

However, I didn’t trust this to be the end of the matter, so after breakfast, I tailed Lodia down to the front door. And it was a good thing I did too.

Fidgeting, she asked, “Grandmother? Father? Um….”

“Yes, daughter? Is something the matter?”

She toyed with her fingertips. “Um, about Pip….” She trailed off and darted an uneasy glance around the foyer. But I was hiding on a rafter in the shadows, and she missed me.

Both adults waited for her to go on, Rohanus more patiently than his mother.

“Um, she’s a little – don’t you think she’s a little – ” Lodia checked the foyer one more time, taking a deep breath as she prepared to spill my secret. This time I flapped my wings to draw her attention. Her eyes widened, and she choked back the rest of her sentence.

“Pip is a little what?” Missa asked. “Lodia, how many times must I tell thee? Think of what thou want to say before thou begin to speak.”

In the face of the scolding, all of Lodia’s courage left her, and she hung her head. “Forgive me, Grandmother.”

At this point, her father intervened. “Is something the matter with Pip?” To his mother, he pointed out, “Lodia has been acting odd around the bird lately. Perhaps it is unhappy in our house? It is a wild creature, after all. Lodia, would thou like to go down to the market and pick out a proper, tame songbird instead?”

And get rid of me?

Lodia shot me a stricken look, mumbled something that the adults interpreted as a negative, and scuttled back upstairs. Since I doubted she’d blab my secrets to the wetnurse, I opted to monitor Missa and Rohanus instead.

After the two finally left the house, Missa scolded her son, “Thou need to be firmer with thy daughter, Rohanus. She is sixteen years old, far too old to act like a touch-me-not.”

To demonstrate, she brushed a fingertip against a creeping plant that grew on the edge of a neighbor’s garden. At once, the tiny leaves curled up and the stem drooped. After several moments, the stem straightened again and the leaves recovered.

Rohanus was staring straight ahead. “It’s been a difficult time for her, Mother.”

“It’s been a difficult time for all of us. Thou in particular. She may have the luxury to shut herself up in the house for now, but she cannot hide forever. The world will find her, whether she wills it or not.”

Rohanus walked for a few moments in silence. (Watching Lychee Grove Earth Court officials walk to work was still a bizarre sight for me, but either the fief was very safe, or Missa and Rohanus were very confident.) “Young Katu has been encouraging her to send a sample of her embroidery to Lady Anthea, in hopes of gaining her favor.”

“I heard.”

From their neutral tones, I could guess that they, like Lodia herself, were conflicted over whether that was a good idea.

After some more walking, Rohanus said, “Lady Anthea is close to the Queen….”

Missa was too dignified to snort, of course, but she did exhale a little harder than necessary.

Her son retreated from that line of thought at once. “But what shall we do with Lodia? If she were like her mother, content to marry and bear children and manage a household for the rest of her life, I wouldn’t worry, but….”

But she wasn’t. I’d already guessed as much from the zeal with which she’d tackled that mirror pouch. And yet, in the end, she’d sabotaged herself.

If only my taskforce were here. Mistress Jek, at least, knew how to handle awkward adolescents, and Floridiana should be getting plenty of practice as headmistress. Even Master Gravitas might be useful, accustomed as he was to cat wrangling.

But none of them were here. It was just me. And Missa and Rohanus, who were clearly clueless.

What would we do with Lodia, indeed.

In the Lychee Grove Earth Court:

Anthea was in a foul mood. She’d been summoned to the kitchen. The kitchen, of all places. Where frying grease had splattered everywhere and gone rancid, and vats of boiling water steamed up the whole space, and the cooks tossed around spices and herbs that were delicious in dishes but would stain her gown if she so much as brushed against them. That gown was hand painted. She’d overseen the selection of the silk and the design herself, and convinced young Crispus to bankrupt his father paying for it.

The old Earl’s wrath had been assuaged by Anthea’s assurance that she’d put in a good word for him the next time she saw Jullia. Everyone knew how close she was to the queen. The Earl, as earls were wont to do, had gotten tangled up in some inheritance fight over whether a plot of land belonged to him or to his second cousin thrice removed (or was it his third cousin second removed?), and even though said plot of land had no apparent economic or strategic value (according to the finance-y types at court), its legal ownership was of paramount importance to both parties. It was a matter of principle, they claimed.

Meh. Whatever. Not Anthea’s problem.

What was, however, her problem, was that she was currently teetering between the stove and a big bowl of bubbling, floury slush, trying to avoid touching anything with any part of herself. Unfortunately, since she counted her embroidered, long-toed slippers as part of herself, and since she couldn’t fly, this was a lost cause.

And the Kitchen God wouldn’t stop talking.

“…And then the Goddess of Life said, ‘I’m leaving to start my own department,’ and I said, ‘What! Just like that?’ It really wasn’t very nice of her to just up and leave with no warning, but it was such a good opportunity that she couldn’t turn it down, and of course I wouldn’t have wanted her to, no no, of course not….”

Somehow, in the almost non-existent gaps between his words, he was picking up squares of white sugar rice cakes from the steamer baskets and popping them into his mouth. More empty steamer baskets rolled about on the table next to him. Anthea had planned to eat those cakes as an after-dinner snack. The dessert cook was going to have to remake them. He was going to scream, she already knew. He was the screaming sort.

“…which means I need to get myself a new Assistant Director ASAP, but you know how committees work. They take forever to make any kind of decision, and then even after they agree on an appointee, the appointment still has to make its way up through all the levels of the bureaucracy for approval before we can finalize it. So at the moment there’s no one up there to oversee the bureau’s day-to-day activities….”

If he were going to eat all her snacks, couldn’t he have the decency to stop talking while he chewed?

“…and oh, by the way, you’re dedicating these cakes to me, right? They’re very good.”

Were they? She wouldn’t know. Because she hadn’t gotten a chance to eat a single cake. Offering.

Anthea forced a cute, innocent smile. “Of course they’re for you! I remember how much you love them!”

“Thanks.” He popped another one into his mouth. “You can’t imagine how lean the pickings have gotten since the empire fell apart. So anyway, as I was saying, I need to get myself a new Assistant Director to hold down the fort, or kitchen, haha, while I’m down here fundraising, so to speak….”

Would it be too uncouth to eat a cake herself, standing up in the kitchen? The god was doing it – although normal rules of etiquette never applied to gods, and especially not to this one.

“…can you imagine?!”

Oh. The Kitchen God was beaming at her as if he expected a strong reaction. To what, Anthea had no idea. But there was only one way to respond.

“No! Really?!”

“Yes! Really! I’m so proud of young Cassius! Such a shame what happened to him, he was always so generous with his offerings, but being a star god isn’t bad at all, no, no, and now he’s going to be Assistant Director of Reincarnation? That young man’s really come up in the world!”

The former Son of Heaven, an assistant director of a bureau in Heaven? That didn’t sound like a bad trade for losing his empire at all. “I’m so happy that it all worked out for him in the end!”

“Yes, it did, didn’t it? Well, you know, he has a lot of friends up there, and none of us were happy about what happened to him – say, Annie!” he said, startling her again.

“Yes?”

“How ‘bout convincing Jullie to ramp up her offerings? Issue a kingdom-wide decree or something? That should do the trick!”

Oh. He’d finally gotten to the point of this visit. Anthea wrenched her mind off how the grease and veggie remains on the floor were staining the soles of her slippers. “Do you mean the offerings to you, or to Heaven in general?”

Leaning in, he gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Well, both, of course, but I wouldn’t say no to a little extra!”

No, of course he wouldn’t. And of course Anthea couldn’t say no. She owed him. Back then, it had been a toss-up as to whether Lady Fate picked her or Piri to trash the empire, and he’d pushed for Piri.

“I’ll convince Jullia,” she promised.

He beamed at her. “I have no doubt you will! Ah, Annie, how you’ve grown! It seems like only yesterday you were this tiny ball of black fur, just the tiniest pup I ever saw. Oh, you were so terrified after that wicked red fox bit all your siblings to death, tsk tsk.” He shook his head.

Anthea smiled politely. She didn’t remember any of that, of course, since it had happened when she was still a mortal animal. But the Kitchen God loved to tell the story of how he’d come across a shivering racoon dog pup and found a nice farmgirl to raise it, and how he’d checked on it regularly. (By regularly, he meant every several decades, when he passed through the area and had both the time and inclination. He had always given her a tasty snack when he saw her, though.)

“And look at you now! An ancient, powerful spirit. So beautiful, with such good taste in everything. Ah, I’m so proud of you!”

“It’s all thanks to you, Heavenly Lord.”

“No thanks necessary, no thanks necessary! Well, talk to Jullie. I’m off now. Toodle-loo!” And with that, he and the last steamer basket of cakes vanished.

“Toodle-loo”? Was that a new expression in Heaven? Anthea tested the syllables, rolling them around on her tongue. Toodle-loo. Yes, it was fun to say. She liked it. She was definitely going to introduce it at court, along with the decree that everyone across South Serica dedicate more offerings to the Kitchen God.

But for now, she had a dessert cook to find.