The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox

Floridiana and Dusty were leaving. At long last, they were actually leaving.

Early in the morning, before the sun rose above the roofline of Goldhill, the two of them inspected their wagon one last time. We (well, Temple servants) had packed it with bolts of silk for bribing Baron Claymouth when he got unreasonable, pouches of dried lychees to share with the Jeks and Den and all our other friends, the finest colored inksticks that Camphorus Unus could find – and paper.

So much paper. Stacks and stacks of different types of paper, ranging from thick and creamy to fragile and translucent. They were wrapped in oilcloth and stamped with spells to keep out the humidity.

Floridiana tested the ropes that tied down the packages, while Dusty snuffled at them uselessly.

Your saliva is going to soak through the wrapping and ruin the paper, I warned from the wagon seat.

He flared his nostrils and blew at me, but not hard enough to knock me off. I supposed he was going to miss me too.

Floridiana lingered over the last rope longer than she needed to. None of us rushed her.

“Look what Lady Anthea sssent!” called Bobo from the door. She slithered down the steps, a heaping platter of white sugar rice cakes balanced on her coils. Stripey hovered, ready to catch the plate if it slid off. “Ssshe sssays to eat them fassst becaussse they’ll ssspoil in this heat.”

Floridiana picked one up but didn’t seem to see it. “You’re sure you don’t want a ride home, Bobo?”

“Uh-uh. Thanks, but I’m sssure. Ssstripey’s here, and Rosssie too! Sssay hi to everybody!”

“Will do.” Floridiana nodded without surprise, then scanned the courtyard as if she were memorizing it. She’d already sketched the Temple thoroughly, from all angles, using her new colored inks, and written down copious notes about everything, so she didn’t need to trust her fallible human memory. But I opted not to point that out.

Footsteps pattered up the street and through the front gates: Lodia, out of breath, clutching a parcel, with Katu in tow.

“Oh, thank goodness, you’re still here! I thought I missed you!” She thrust the parcel at Floridiana, suddenly shy again. “I made something for you. As a thank-you present. For, um….” She gestured at the spectacles on her nose.

“Why, thank you, Lodia. Or, should I say, Matriarch?”

“Oh, well, I….” Lodia lifted her hands, as if to twist them together, but then deliberately straightened all ten fingers and dropped her arms again.

Floridiana gave her an encouraging smile. “You’ll do just fine. You’ll make a fine Matriarch, Lodia.”

She unwrapped the parcel to reveal a silk purse, embroidered with lotuses and – a playful sparrow that looked very much like me. The mage’s lips twitched when she saw it. In amusement, I thought.

“It is beautiful, Lodia. I will treasure it forever.”

Mumbling that she was glad Floridiana liked it, Lodia backed up until she bumped into Katu. He put his hands on her arms to steady her, then kept them on her shoulders as he, too, said his farewells.

“Thank you, Mage Floridiana, for everything you have done for the Temple. Please accept this as a token of my gratitude.” And he proffered a small book – containing the collected hymns and sermons to the Kitchen God that he had composed. “We intend to distribute this throughout Serica, but this is the very first copy. I hope you will share it with those in the Claymouth Barony and use it to teach them the proper mode of worship of the Divine Intercessor.”

At the thought of establishing a new Temple when she’d barely escaped this one, Floridiana’s eyebrows rose. Still, she replied, “Thank you, High Priest. I’m sure the people of the Claymouth Barony will…appreciate the wisdom contained in these pages.”

Behind me, Stripey strangled his laughter.

After that, the priests whom Floridiana and Dusty had recruited from the slum swarmed them for their own good-byes, the child-priests climbing all over Dusty and petting him from mane to tail. Less close to them, Miss Caprina and the bears said their farewells in a more decorous manner, while Camphorus Unus and the rest of the staff bowed gravely.

At last, Floridiana detached a sobbing child-priest from Dusty’s neck and turned to Bobo, Stripey, and me. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Lodia guiding the others back towards the steps to give us privacy.

“Sssafe travels!” Bobo wrapped her front half around Floridiana’s torso and her back half around Dusty’s neck. “I’m going to miss you ssso ssso much!”

“I’ll miss you too, Bobo,” wheezed Floridiana.

Dusty attempted to toss his mane with arrogant dignity, which was a lost cause when a bright green snake was coiled around it. “I shall also think of you fondly, spirit.”

Stripey waddled forward and nodded at them both. It was good to work with the two of you again. I wish you all the best in Claymouth. Especially with Taila.

Floridiana and Dusty snorted in unison.

And then Stripey was ushering a sniffling Bobo away, leaving me alone with the mage and her horse. Under the slowly brightening sky, I studied the pair of them, remembering the first time I’d seen them. Dusty had been an ancient, broken-down nag, sold and resold with doctored paperwork so many times that no one realized just quite how ancient he was. As for Floridiana, she had been half-traveling mage, half-con artist, barely scraping by with her “rain summonings.” And I had been a catfish, a caged pet in the Water Court of Black Sand Creek. Look how far all of us had come from that first time.

Dusty stamped a hoof. “Well.”

“Well,” said Floridiana.

Well, I echoed. And then, since neither of them seemed to know what to say, I told them, Travel safely. Watch out for bandits. You’re transporting a lot of valuable goods. Don’t camp in the wild. Make sure you find inns – reputable inns – it’s not worth getting killed in your bed or stable because you were too stingy to –

“I know,” Floridiana snapped. “I’ve been living on the road since before you were born – ” She cut herself off, realizing how inane it was to say that to a former demon with memories stretching back over a millennium.

There, there. I’m sure you have.

Just to annoy her one last time, I landed on her shoulder and thrust my beak into her ear, making her yelp and swat at me. Dodging her hand (which wasn’t moving hard or fast), I zipped over to Dusty and gave him a peck on the cheek. One large, brown eye regarded me balefully.

Good-bye. Try to not get too…dusty.

He stomped his hooves, nearly cracking the freshly-repaved courtyard. “My name is The Valiant Prince of the Victorious Whirlwind, Vanquisher of Invaders! You will address me by my proper name, bird!”

There there. I already told you: I’ll call you that on the day I take over Heaven.

I gave him my sweetest chirp and darted back so his big, blocky front teeth snapped shut on thin air. (Okay, fine, I did lose a single tail feather that was loose and about to fall out on its own anyway.)

Floridiana climbed up into the wagon seat and Dusty pulled the wagon out of the courtyard. The rest of us clumped up in the gateway, waving and waving until they rounded a corner and vanished from sight.

No one felt like talking after that. Silently, we walked to the Temple dining hall, where we found the foxling and her chieftains already seated at the banquet table. They were two-thirds of the way through devouring the breakfast that was meant for all of us.

Demons!

On the road:

Clop clop clop, clop clop clop. Whoosh!

The road flew by under the hooves of the Valiant Prince of the Victorious Whirlwind, Vanquisher of Invaders. With his awesome might, he left all the other carts and carriages choking in the dust.

Clop clop clop, clop clop clop. Whoosh!

Behind him, on the wagon seat, Mage Flori hauled on the reins and screamed at him to slow down. But he could tell that she was enjoying the speed because when she wasn’t screaming at him, she was shrieking with laughter.

“Dusty! What was that all about?” she croaked on the second night, when he finally pulled the wagon off the road into what looked like an adequate campsite.

Mage Flori’s voice came from the depths of the wagon bed. She seemed to be having trouble unlocking her knees so she could stand. Or maybe it was because she was crammed in between a barrel of pork jerky and a whole trunk of stationery supplies.

The Valiant Prince came to her aid. He closed his teeth on the back of her tunic and hauled. There was a rip. Out she popped. Like the prince among horse spirits that he was, he lowered her onto a nice, soft patch of grass.

“What was that all about?!” she snapped. “Why were you running like the wolves of the Wilds were after us? Did you really think Piri would send them to drag us back?”

The damsels in distress who got rescued by the valiant princes in the old tales were never cranky. Not that Mage Flori could be a damsel in distress, of course. She was too old for a mortal, and too young to be a spirit. In a fairytale, she’d be the side character whose sour personality highlighted the virtues of the rescued damsel.

The Valiant Prince endured her ingratitude with dignity becoming of a hero. “I was attempting to take you home as fast as I could. I thought you were worried about the school.”

She tried to push his nose away but nearly fell over. She started massaging her joints one after another. “It’s not going to do the students any good if you kill their teacher on the road!”

“I wasn’t trying to kill you.” Drat, that came out sounding sulky.

“Then slow down! And stop for a rest more than once every two days!”

“Okay, okay, fine! See if I try to help you out next time!”

He didn’t talk to her again for a while, and she didn’t try to talk to him either.

It wasn’t until their fourth day on the road that she asked out of nowhere, “Did we make the right choice? Going back, I mean?”

Now she got cold hooves?

“What do you mean?”

He glanced at her out of the corner of one eye, but that just made her shriek at him to keep both eyes on the road. He was going to revise her role in the fairytale. She was clearly the evil stepmother. Wait. Did that make him the damsel in distress? No, that didn’t make sense –

“We were making a real difference in Goldhill.”

“Huh?” He almost asked what that had to do with character archetypes.

Good thing he didn’t, because she was talking about something completely different, which he figured out when she said, not patiently at all, “By organizing the Temple. We completely altered the political landscape of South Serica. And it’s going to change even more, I can tell. She’s there. She has plans. Not just for South Serica, but for all of Serica. And we left. To go home and teach the three R’s to ten-year-olds.”

“Don’t you always say that education is the most important thing you can do because you’re shaping the next generation of young minds?”

Silence. The crabby kind, he thought.

“Do you want to turn around and go back?” he offered.

More silence. Definitely the crabby kind.

At last, she said, “No. Let’s go home. I need to see how much the students have forgotten.”

“Probably everything.”

He didn’t think he deserved the swat of the reins he got for that.

Thanks to him, they were back in the Claymouth Barony before the farmers finished the harvest. There was an odd lack of kids helping out in the fields, though.

“Where are all the children?” Mage Flori wondered. The wagon seat kept creaking as she turned back and forth, searching for any sign of her students.

“Lord Silurus was definitely dead, right? He couldn’t have come back and eaten them all?” The Valiant Prince of the Victorious Whirlwind, Vanquisher of Invaders would fight the demon catfish if he had to, of course, but he wasn’t looking forward to it.

“No, he was definitely dead. We ate him, remember? Plus the parents would look a lot more upset if all their children were dead.” Spotting a farmer they recognized, Mage Flori called, “Good day, sir!”

He straightened, shaded his eyes with one dirty hand, and waved. “It’s the Headmistress! Hey, everybody! The Headmistress is back! Welcome home!”

All over the fields and paddies, men and women dropped what they were doing. For some reason, they ignored the Valiant Prince, but he withstood the neglect with forbearance.

“Where are all the children?” Mage Flori asked anxiously. “What happened to them?”

“Oh, the kids?” answered the first farmer. “They’re fine.”

Another farmer said, “They’re just in the river.”

The Valiant Prince and Mage Flori demanded in unison, “In the RIVER???”