Dusty's big, long nose jerked up, and his ears flinched back. "We're going out?" he asked, in a tone that maybe he thought sounded neutral.
Well, yes – I began before I took another look at the baby horse spirit.
His sides were streaked with sweat. His matted, tangled mane straggled down his neck. Even that long, proud tail of his, which he normally kept swishing into people's eyes, drooped to the paving stones.
Right. He had fought off the rioters for a while before I invited them in for tea and snacks, hadn't he? And he was a baby spirit. Those did tend to tire more easily.
I had a vague memory of Anthea falling asleep all over the place when she first came to Cassius' palace. You'd be strolling down a covered gallery, glance into the gardens – and there she'd be, curled up on a bench next to the peonies, sound asleep. Or you'd enter a sitting room, sweep towards your favorite carved rosewood chair – and there she'd be, sprawled across the cushion belly up, snoring away. The magnificence of the City of Dawn Song had overwhelmed her at first.
Plus I'd swept her along in my wake, as the newest member of my retinue, and she'd lacked the stamina to keep up. (Not any more, though. Now she was over five hundred years old. She could keep up with the body of a mortal sparrow – if not with my mind.)
Never mind, Dusty. Stay here and help Bobo and Floridiana, I told the baby horse spirit. Recalling that the serow was listening, I tacked on an affectionate-sounding, Dear. You've already done your part. Stay here and rest, dear.
The horse sagged with such relief that I thought his knees might buckle. But he stayed on his hooves and scanned the courtyard for Floridiana.
At the moment, the mage was admonishing the youngest priests to circulate with their trays and offer refreshments to the guests– instead of stopping in the middle of the crowd to cram cakes into their own mouths.
At least the erstwhile rioters didn't seem to think anything was amiss with my – er, the Temple's – staff's manners. If anything, they seemed to find the mini-priests cute.
Well, this was the Temple to the Kitchen God. Maybe people thought the priests here should eat a lot. Hmmm. This had possibilities for recruitment....
Future recruitment. Right now, I needed to retrieve my Head Priest.
I zipped into the Temple, calling, Anthea! Anthea! Where are you?
Anthea, with her own semi-honed instinct for showmanship, had transformed fully into human shape and was kneeling on a cushion (stolen from my sitting room) before the Kitchen God image in the Main Hall. She was holding her hands together at chest height, a stick of lit incense in her fingertips, and bowing her head over it in an attitude of prayer.
Her carriage, I had to confess, was much more graceful than Floridiana's. Perhaps I should get her to give lessons to the priests. They were (sort of) her priests too, after all.
I landed on the offering table, next to the bronze brazier filled with grey dust and burned-out ends of incense sticks. (Actually, only the top layer was incense dust. The rest was dirt from the garden. We hadn't burned enough sticks to fill a whole brazier yet: Incense was expensive.)
Anthea, Anthea.
My voice was soft and gentle. It wasn't wise to disrespect the Kitchen God's protégée in front of his own image.
YOU ARE READING
The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox
FantasyAfter Piri the nine-tailed fox follows an order from Heaven to destroy a dynasty, she finds herself on trial in Heaven for that very act. Executed by the gods for the "crime," she is cast into the cycle of reincarnation, starting at the very bottom...
