The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox

Golden light blazed from the altar, blinding everyone who could see it. Since I’d designed the Temple to have a clear line of sight from the front doors all the way to the back of the main hall, and since Katu was standing right in front of the wide-open doors, that meant all the ex-rioters. Gasps and shrieks rose from the crowd, accompanied by a wails from those who’d been unlucky – or lucky – enough to be staring at the altar when it lit up like a star sprite showing off.

Heedless of her skirt, Anthea dropped to her knees at the very first twinkle. Lodia, too, prostrated herself so fast that she left me hanging midair for an instant, before I caught myself, found a perch on a side table, and executed a perfect sparrow’s bow. Why not on the floor? The higher vantage point gave me a view of both the altar and the front doors. Also, I wouldn’t get trampled by accident. Plus the priests had been tromping in and out with refreshments, so the floor was pretty dirty and I didn’t want to besmirch my feathers.

“Well, well, well, my children,” boomed a voice from the heart of the brilliant light. I expected it to dim to reveal the figure of the Kitchen God, but it continued to blind everyone. Perhaps the god deemed these worshippers too lowly to see his divine self. “What have we here?”

Not the most original of lines, but backed by that Heavenly radiance, it didn’t need to be. Tardily realizing that they were in the presence of the divine, the ex-rioters fell over themselves groveling before it.

Katu, on the other hand, imitated Anthea’s pose, kneeling and bowing his head. From the venomous glare she shot his way, she took that as her personal poet setting himself up as her equal before her patron god. Personally, I thought it made perfect sense for the High Priest, the Voice of the Divine Intercessor, to be a little less prostrate than common worshippers.

After a moment, Anthea and Katu realized that the Kitchen God had asked a question, and that it might not be all rhetorical.

“Heavenly Lord – ” she began, at the same time that he said, “O Divine Intercessor – ”

Katu stopped, deferring to his patron and social superior. That would never do.

When Anthea attempted to keep speaking, I plastered myself across her mouth. Let him talk! Is your pride more important than establishing the credentials of the High Priest?

“Mmmph!” Anthea pried me off her face, made a convulsive gesture as if she were about to fling me aside – which would have killed me when I hit the wall or floor – but in the end, she settled for dumping me back on the side table.

I waved a somewhat rumpled wing at Katu for him to continue.

He’d followed our scuffle with dismay, but he obediently cleared his throat and addressed the Kitchen God once more. “O Divine Intercessor, O Prince of the Hearth, ye who watches over all on Earth, hear our prayer! Hear the cries of the poor, the weak, the hungry – the pleas of those abandoned, left behind, trampled underfoot. Save us from the demon horde!”

The golden light pulsed, shooting rays throughout the Temple and out the doors and windows. Everywhere, dazzled new devotees shouted their awe.

It wasn’t actually any kind of promise on the Kitchen God’s part, but Katu and the others interpreted it as such. “Thank you, O Divine Intercessor! Your mercy is endless. Your compassion is infinite.” And here, he, too, prostrated himself.

Ex-rioters who’d begun to raise their torsos, either out of a desire to get a better view of what was going on or simply out of discomfort, flattened them again.

The golden light grew brighter and brighter until I thought I might explode from the pressure of it – and then it flickered out. The divine presence faded.

Blinking my eyes to clear my vision, I tottered a little and surveyed my surroundings. Everyone was creaking to their feet while whispering about the scene they’d just witnessed. Everyone, that was, except for Katu.

He’d begun to rise too, but Floridiana had hissed a quick, “Stay!” at him, and he’d remained prostrate, establishing his superior faith.

At last, she gave him a minute nod. He stood and rotated slowly to face the new devotees, Lodia’s brilliant robes cascading off his frame. The butterfly spirits swirled about his head and shoulders like a majestic aura.

“Friends!” he shouted. “Do you see? We called, and he answered!”

Ragged, uncoordinated, but enthusiastic cheers rose from the new devotees.

“Praise be to our Savior the Divine Intercessor! Praise be to he watches over us and protects us from evil! Praise be to he who will save us from the demon horde! Come, my friends! Let us go into his Temple so that we may dedicate offerings to him!”

Oh, good. Katu remembered the point of this whole Temple business. Although, to judge by the glow on his face, his exhortation to donate funds had been more sincere than calculating.

Oh dear. My High Priest might have begun to buy his own rhetoric.

Still, this first round of fundraising proved most efficacious. Word of the Kitchen God’s miracle rushed throughout the capital as devotees pushed their home to fetch offerings, shouting about the god to all who would listen. The mob this side of Goldhill calmed down out of sheer curiosity, transformed into a crowd of festival parade onlookers, and redirected its flow from the palace to the Temple.

After I determined that enough of them had gawked at the High Priest Who Summoned the God, I assigned Camphorus Unus and the serow, Miss Caprina, to handle crowd control, and hustled an exhausted Katu off the workroom.

“Thank the Jade Emperor in Heaven and the Kitchen God on Earth that that worked,” he groaned. He made as if to drop into a chair, which would crumple the back of his robes, but I screeched. He jumped back up.

Lodia was already bustling behind him to check on the cape. Even to my eye, her “basting” had been so tidy that it still hung perfectly. Still, she tugged at it and measured the hem anyway, frowning (or maybe squinting) at some unevenness that she imagined she’d discovered.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Katu,” she said in a shaky voice. “It was too dangerous. What if they’d thrown rocks and knocked you off the gate? What if they’d dragged you off it and attacked you in the street? What if they’d turned on you when you were leading them here? What if a different group had attacked you when you were leading them here? What if you’d said something that the Kitchen God didn’t like and he got mad at you? What if – ”

Her voice broke off on a sob.

“But none of that happened,” he told her, more somber than I’d ever heard him sound. “It all worked out in the end. Thanks in large part to these robes you made.”

(And to my efforts.)

I expected Lodia to demur, to claim that she had nothing to do with it, that it was all due to his oratory skills, that he could have pulled off his High Priest role in rags.

But she didn’t. “It was still too dangerous! You could have been killed!”

“You could have been killed too,” he pointed out. He tried to turn to face her, but she circled with him and kept fiddling with the cape. She’d produced needle and thread from an embroidered pouch at her waist, and she was adjusting the way the fabric hung. “Loddie, why’d you come here anyway? The whole point of me going out there was to get them away from you! You were supposed to stay inside, where it was safe! You weren’t supposed to come outside at all!”

“Stay inside and watch you walk into a mob? How in the name of the Kitchen God did you think I would do that?!”

Lodia thrust the needle so hard that the tip came out of the fabric and stabbed under her nail. She gave a cry and dropped the cape before she could bleed on it.

That freed Katu to rotate at last. He took her by the shoulders and made her face him. “Loddie, do you want to go home?”

“Go home?” she and Anthea gasped at the same time.

“Yes, go home,” he confirmed.

“By myself?” she whispered.

He shook his head at once. “No. I’ll go with you. Say the word, and we’ll leave Goldhill today.”

What?! it was my turn to yelp.

Floridiana’s voice snapped, “Shh! Let them figure it out themselves.” At some point, the mage had popped up next to us.

But he’s the High Priest! “But he’s the High Priest!” Anthea and I whisper-wailed in unison.

If he leaves, how are we going to find another High Priest on such short notice?

“Don’t worry! I’m sssure we’ll find sssomebody. Maybe we can promote one of the other priesssts?” Bobo swung down from the lintel, making Anthea jump.

Clip-clopping hooves heralded the arrival of the final member of this comedy routine. “Or we can pick somebody else. Maybe another poet? There’s got to be more than one poet in the capital, right?” asked Dusty.

“I’m sure there is,” Floridiana told him, her eyes glued to the scene in the workroom.

If Lodia and Katu heard us, they gave no sign of it.

“But you’re the High Priest,” Lodia protested on our behalf. “You can’t just leave. Whatever will the Temple do without you?”

“They’ll find another High Priest. Maybe a noble this time, like the Earl of Yellow Flame. That’ll be more politically advantageous anyway.”

“But don’t you want to be High Priest? It’s so prestigious, and you’d have actual power to change things in the capital, just like you always wanted….”

“I’m serious,” Katu insisted. “Say the word, Loddie, and we’ll go home today.”

I was flapping my wings and bobbing up and down behind Katu’s back, shaking my head at Lodia in exaggerated motions, but she didn’t so much as glance at me. I really had to get Floridiana to fix the girl’s vision.

No, no, no, don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say you want to go home, I thought at Lodia. Maybe a noble holds more political power, but Katu now has a miracle to his name. We need him as High Priest, Lodia, surely you can see that….

“No.”

The word came out with such firmness that for a moment, I thought Anthea had spoken. But it had been Lodia’s voice.

“No?” asked Katu, bewilderment clear.

“No.” The word came out with just as much resolve on the repetition. “I don’t want to go home.”

“You don’t?” This time it was Anthea who failed to contain her shock. “You want to stay here? Even after all of that?”

She gestured around the room, presumably referring the scenes unfolding all over the Temple, the capital, possibly even the kingdom as the South Serican army retreated before the demon horde. She herself had fled the City of Dawn Song, after all. For all her self-professed love for that home, that way of life, she hadn’t stayed to fight for them, and she hadn’t imagined that Lodia might.

Of course, none of us had.

“But why?” Katu asked for all of us.

He was dazed by this reversal in his timid childhood friend, but I was remembering something her father had said, back in Lychee Grove: “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 content to live just within the confines of her home. She’d hinted at that when she accepted Anthea’s offer of the post of Junior Wardrobe Mistress, and again when she’d undertaken to design and sew the Kitchen God’s priest robes. Now she’d proven it definitely by refusing to leave the capital in its hour of crisis.

“Because the kingdom needs you,” Lodia told Katu. She straightened his robes, stepped back, scrutinized the effect, and nodded to herself. Then, in a slower, quieter voice: “The kingdom needs us. We must go to the palace.”

What would we do with Lodia? her father had asked.

We would let her embroider her way to a greater role.