“Urp! Mage Koh!”

“Grandmother?!”

“Mistress, these children are raising an unholy ruckus over that sparrow. If it’s so much trouble, I will cook it and be done with it.”

Cook me…. No, cooking me would be bad…. I struggled to open my eyesh, to fly away, but the room shpun in dizzying streaks of color. I was drunk. Drunk from eating too much fermented rice cake. I’d feel…I’d feel…what was the word? Outraged. I’d feel outraged if I weren’t so nauseated instead. Marinating myself for the cookpot wouldn’t be the dumbest way to die, but I didn’t want to. Not when I was finally getting shomewhere in Lychee Grove.

I fought to clear my head and focus on the shituation. Situation.

Missa’s voice spoke again, closer this time. “Lodia, let me have a look at her.”

The hands closed around me more tightly. “But Grandmother!”

“Lodia. I will not ask again.”

“Erm, Mage Koh,” Katu tried, “it’s really, really better if you just let it be – ”

By concentrating hard and pushing away the dizziness, I resolved an image of the young man inserting himself between me and the mage. That was brave of him. I wouldn’t stand between a mage and, well, anyone.

“Len Katulus.”

Two words were all Missa needed to say. Katu moved aside, Lodia’s fingers unfolded, and I squinted up at the mage. She already had a crimson seal stamp between her eyes.

That was bad.

I spread my wings halfway, and flapped, and fell over.

“Shhh,” soothed Missa. Her cool hands lifted me out of Lodia’s palms and raised me to eye level. “Shhh, Pip. This isn’t going to hurt, I promise.”

Yeah, I knew. If she wrung my neck fast enough, I wouldn’t feel it at all. I wouldn’t even know until forty-nine days later, when I woke up inside an archival box.

The last time she’d examined me with magically-enhanced vision, she’d thought that I was a normal sparrow, and she was performing a basic medical scan. I couldn’t tell what she was doing this time, but it had to be more. After what felt like an eternity, she returned me to Lodia.

Whew. No neck wringing. Not yet, anyway.

Then she asked, “Why do you say she’s a spirit?”

Scuffing sounds came from around where Katu’s foot should be. I was just grateful that Lodia was holding still. If she jostled me, I was going to throw up all over her hands.

The cook was the one who answered. “Because I heard her laughing, didn’t I? Just rolling around on a rice cake that I made – ” I didn’t have to open my eyes to sense her disgust – “laughing her head off. I heard her talking too, from the stairs. If that’s not a spirit, what is?”

“Except,” said Missa’s calm voice, “it isn’t.”

Lodia squeaked. Katu flinched. And the cook said, “Then all the more reason to kill it. It’s an abomination unto Heaven.”

An abomination? Me? She was the abomination, for wanting to murder innocent creatures just because they enjoyed her food! Shouldn’t she be flattered that anyone would enjoy her food so much? Given that she cooked for a living?

It was the last time I was going to eat a white sugar rice cake. Those things were cursed.

However, I did have the presence of mind to stay silent. If all Missa had gotten from her scan was that I had the body of a normal bird, and if Lodia and Katu held out and pretended that I was one, then I could still get away with it. Surely no one would trust the word of a servant over that of her social superiors.

Except that Missa did. “Lodia. Katu. I want you to tell me everything you know about this sparrow.”

When neither of them spoke, the cook volunteered, “They said she’s important to the Queen.”

Katu, the one who’d made that claim, urp’ed again. Lodia shot him a reproachful look.

Missa homed in (not-so-haha) on him as the weaker link. “Len Katulus. What dost thou know about this sparrow?”

“Erm, ah, well….” Katu hemmed and hawed and shot pleading glances at me which I refused to acknowledge. In the end, he hung his head and mumbled, “She’s a – she works for…the Queen.”

Missa sucked in a sharp breath. “The Queen?”

Katu nodded at the floorboards.

“In what capacity?” she asked, even though she must have guessed.

“Queen’s spy.”

He mangled the syllables, but she still understood. Her voice grew harder. “And what is a Queen’s spy doing in my house?”

This question seemed to be addressed at me. I held still and hoped that if I didn’t speak, maybe she’d dismiss the whole affair as a poet’s overactive imagination. And a cook’s vendetta against wildlife that ate her dishes.

“She’s here to investigate Mother’s case.” All of a sudden, Lodia spoke up, dashing my hopes. “Don’t you see, Grandmother? This is our chance! We can finally explain what truly happened! Which was nothing!”

Missa, however, did not share her granddaughter’s joy over the royal government opening (reopening?) the investigation. “Thou’rt too naïve, child. Why now? Why not when it happened? Or last year, when she passed on? And why at all, and at whose instigation? If the Queen has decided to take a second look at the matter, that does not necessarily bode well for our family.”

Lodia fell silent. Then she lifted me up and begged, “Pip? Pip, please talk to me. Aren’t you here to clear Mother’s name? What’s going on?”

I’d never actually said that I was here about her mother’s case. Actually, I couldn’t even remember if I’d ever stated that I was a Queen’s spy, or if she’d said it and I’d simply declined to deny it. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to pretend to be a spy so I could get close to Lodia so I could improve her life so I could win positive karma. Now, even to myself, my plan sounded as tangled as honeysuckle creepers.

What should I do now? What would my friends do?

Stripey would shrug his wings, shake his head, and sigh.

Bobo would stare at me with wide, anxious eyes before snapping back to her cheery self and telling me that I’d find a way out of this messs. And then she’d start tossing out “helpful suggestions” that weren’t helpful at all, but that I could sift through with Stripey’s help.

But neither of them were here right now. One was back at Honeysuckle Croft, and the other was Bureau-of-Reincarnation-knew where.

Had I let this farce of a life go on long enough? Did I want to cut my loses, let the mage kill me, and start anew?

No. Not yet. I had a handle on how to reach the Kitchen God. I wasn’t letting that chance slip away. I opened my beak to tell Lodia a better cover story.

I lied to you.

Oh. That wasn’t what I’d been planning to say.

“You lied to me?” Lodia’s shock – at a supposed spy confessing that she’d lied – only confirmed her grandmother’s assessment. She was indeed a naïve child.

Well, nothing to do but brazen it out with a version of the truth now. Yes. I lied. I am not a Queen’s spy. You assumed I was and I…I let you continue in that assumption.

“You’re not a Queen’s spy?” Katu sounded equally, if not more, horrified.

No. I am –

Here I had to stop. What was I? And more importantly, what did they want me to be?

I am a soul condemned to reincarnate over and over as mortal creatures until I have atoned for past misdeeds.

There. That sounded good. That sounded appropriately tragic and romantic, worthy of an epic poem – or one of Katu’s short verses – at least.

“You have just described every soul that reincarnates as an animal,” Missa stated.

Oh. Right. That much was common knowledge. It was the precise manner in which you earned positive karma that was the secret. (Probably because the Accountants assigned numbers at random.)

The difference is that I reincarnate with my mind, I explained.

Well, it wasn’t like I was giving away a giant secret with that revelation. They could all see that I wasn’t a dumb, mortal animal.

Somewhat to my surprise, it wasn’t the mage but Lodia who asked, “Why?”

As part of my punishment. Imagine if you were trapped inside animal bodies for – I nearly said “several centuries” but stopped myself. I didn’t want Missa reviewing her history texts and narrowing in on candidates for such cruel and extraordinary punishment. Imagine if you were trapped inside an animal’s body, unable to speak to anyone, not humans, not spirits, not even your fellow animals.

“Why can’t you speak to your fellow animals? Do you not speak, well, animal?” asked Katu, who in my opinion was being too literal for a poet.

It’s not that I can’t communicate with other animals. But what would I have to say to them? “Hello, mind if I share this birdseed”? “Don’t worry, I’m not here to steal your nest”? “Hey, that’s a nice patch for a dust bath”? Is that all the conversation you’d want?

I already knew his answer. Goodness knew what he’d do if you deprived him of arguing with old folks in front of wineshops.

Lodia was nodding along with a face full of pity, but Missa pointed out, “You seem to have no trouble speaking to humans. And, I assume, spirits.”

I shrugged my wings. But I really shouldn’t. It gets me into trouble. Like this.

The mage had no sympathy for me. “You were the one who sought us out. You were the one who pretended to be a normal sparrow whom we were in the process of taming. You were the one who wormed your way into my house and then pretended to be a Queen’s spy to deceive my granddaughter. Leaves know what you’re plotting now!”

Puffing up my chest, I challenged, Would you have taken me in if I’d come to you and told you that I was a mind trapped in a sparrow’s body, serving out a cruel and unusual punishment?

“Yes.” Missa didn’t hesitate one second.

Really?!

“Yes. If you’d been honest with me from the start, instead of manipulating my family. There is no way I can trust you now.”

She really would have? There was no way I believed that. Unless she had other motives.

You would have helped me – or vivisected me to understand how the soul joins to the body or whatever mages like to study?

She was too dignified to snort, but she did exhale harder than normal. “You seem to know nothing about what mages do and do not study.” (That much was true. I’d always tried my best not to listen when they started blathering about their research.) “Now, I want you out of my house.”

I beg your pardon?

“I am quite certain you heard me the first time. I want you out of my house. Now.” She wrapped her hands around my body, lifted me out of Lodia’s palms, and began striding towards the closest window.

Wait! Wait a minute!

“Grandmother!” Lodia protested, running after us. “You can’t just throw Pip out like that! What will she eat? Where will she sleep?”

“Whatever she was eating and wherever she was sleeping before.”

“But you heard her! She’s not a normal sparrow. She doesn’t know how to fend for herself out there!”

“Then it is high time she learned. If it is the will of Heaven that she atone for past crimes in this manner, then it is a crime, too, for thou to interfere in or lighten her punishment.”

That rebuke silenced Lodia. My last glimpse of her, before Missa thrust her hands past the window frame and tossed me up, was of the girl biting her lip and watching me with big, sad eyes.

And then sparrow-brain was taking over and my wings were flapping, carrying me over the river and far, far away from the Kohs’ house.