“Come again?!”

The Dragon King of Caltrop Pond glanced at the courtiers to his right, who nodded back, and at the ones to his left, who shrugged their long forms side-to-side. Yes, their body language confirmed, you heard that right.

He cocked his head at me, requesting an explanation.

I couldn’t blame him. If you weren’t privy to all the convoluted details, it did sound preposterous.

I know it seems – exaggerated? Melodramatic? Insultingly farfetched? – but this is no ordinary child. Her soul is – intelligent and lively and mischievous – incredibly unlucky, and her incarnations have died young life after life.

The dragon’s eyes were popping out of his skull. “Rosie, what did you do to get assigned this kind of job?!”

Too much to tell him everything before the party, that was for sure.

It’s a long story. Regardless, a compassionate goddess has taken an interest in this soul and tasked me with shepherding it to achieve its full potential.

“Huh. A goddess, huh?” He blinked, running through his mental list of goddesses who were both compassionate and fond of small children. With a roll of his eyes, he dismissed the vagaries of the Heavenly court. “Whew. Wow. Tough luck, Rosie. Kids are the worst. All those…tantrums.” He shuddered.

Yes, indeed. All those tantrums. I shuddered too.

“Anyway, what’d you want my help with? Please don’t tell me it’s babysitting. You wouldn’t catch me DEAD babysitting. I am not a kid person.”

Yeah, well, it wasn’t like I was a huge fan of them either. Sometimes you just had to grin, grit your teeth, and babysit them anyway.

Oh, no, don’t worry, I have the childcare end covered. But her family has fallen on hard times, and I was wondering if you could help there.

At the mention of “hard times,” the dragon shot up. “What sort of help? Caltrop Pond isn’t a wealthy fief. If you’re looking for financial or natural resources, Black Sand Creek has far greater – ”

I didn’t mean actual coin, I reassured him, even though I had been hoping that he’d open his treasury. He could have been a backup lender for the next Settling Day, in case Stripey got mad at me again and flounced off. I was thinking more along the lines of recruiting and interviewing tutors in advanced subjects, using your connections to open up apprenticeship opportunities, that sort of thing.

Now that he knew he wasn’t getting saddled with screaming children or requests for money, the dragon grew generous. He lounged back against his throne and mused, “Oh, hmm, that’s a good idea. I’ll have to think about the apprenticeship thing, but finding tutors should be easy. How old is the kid?” As an afterthought, he followed up with, “What’s her name, anyway?”

She’s four years old. At least, she had been when I reincarnated. She was probably closer to five now, although I’d never considering learning her birthday until right this moment. I made a mental note to ask Mistress Jek the next time I remembered. Her name is Jek Taila.

The name’s effect on the dragon king and his courtiers was instantaneous. Both lines of snakes went stiff as flagpoles.

“Jek Taila?” exclaimed the dragon. “You’re mixed up with the Jeks?! Oh, but you’re friends with Bobo, so of course you are.” He clicked his tongue and shook his head. “Oof. Tough luck, Rosie.”

I agreed with him wholeheartedly – but I suspected for different reasons. Why do you say that?

“Well, aren’t the Jeks super, super weird? I’ve heard the stories. They’re so – ” And he waggled his hands in a gesture that didn’t convey any actual information.

Do you mean that the Jeks have always been unpopular? Or is this a more recent development?

Their ostracization now wasn’t all my fault, was it?

No. It couldn’t be all my fault. Flicker had said so himself: Mistress Jek’s family, the Loms, had always had “a slightly adversarial relationship” with their neighbors because they claimed to be descended from emperors. You couldn’t blame the neighbors, really. No one liked people who put on airs and acted self-important.

Oh, wait. Hmmm….

Blessedly, before I had to follow that train of thought any further, the dragon answered, “Well, to be fair, in any social group, there’s always going to be the one weirdo, right?”

The courtiers snickered, indicating that they had one of their own.

“So in any fief, there’s always going to be the one family that just doesn’t fit in. In the Claymouth Barony, that’s Mistress Jek’s family. The Loms. Have you met them yet?” At my headshake, he went on, “Lucky you. The first time they meet anybody, they go on and on about how their great-great-great-great-whatever-grandfathers were emperors. It’s like they have to make sure everybody knows how important their ancestors were. And they insist on sticking to these archaic naming conventions, so their kids all have super weird names….”

Archaic naming conventions?

I tried to think what those might be. How had Sericans named children before they started using names that ended in “-us” for the boys and “-a” for the girls?

“Yeah. You’ve seen it with the Jek kids, haven’t you? Ailus, Cailus, Nailus, Maila, Taila – the poor things! Who gives kids names like that?! It’s just begging for them to get bullied!”

I decided not to comment on how bizarre human names that didn’t end with “-us” or “-a” sounded to me.

“Anyhow, people were always going to look at Mistress Jek funny because she’s a Lom. But now – now the Honeysuckle Croft branch of the Jeks has gone nuts! They make the Loms look like nothing! Whoo boy!”

If all of his information got filtered through drunken party gossip, no wonder he felt that way. Have you met any of them, though? Have you talked to them in person? They’re actually pretty nice.

“Well…no,” he admitted. “I don’t leave the Water Court much, uh, during the day when humans are awake. I have a lot of paperwork to deal with.”

Turtles don’t have eyebrows to raise, but I opened one eye a lot bigger than the other.

“Anyhow! I’m happy to help! Let’s get that poor little Jek girl out of that crazy house before she turns into a weirdo too! She’s, what, you said four years old? That’s young enough. We can still save her!”

Uh…. We obviously didn’t see eye-to-eye on the reasons that Taila needed saving. But sure. Whatever convinced him to help.

“So, tutors and apprenticeships, you said. Let me think about it and ask around for you.”

It doesn’t have to be related to her education and career, I said hastily. I didn’t want him restricting his own creativity. Anything to improve her living conditions, now or in the future, would be good.

“Sure, I’ll think about it.” All of a sudden, he noticed that the mouth of the tunnel leading to the pond had grown dark. “Oh, hey, we gotta get ready for the party! Okay, this audience is concluded. See you later, Rosie!”

And just like that, I’d secured a dragon king as an ally for Taila.

A very small, very insignificant dragon king – but a dragon king nonetheless. That had to counterbalance some of the damage I’d done to the Jeks, didn’t it?

A real project! A real project! An actual, real project that would have an actual, real impact! How exciting!

For days, Den (short for His Majesty Densissimus Imber the Dragon King of Caltrop Pond, although only the stuffy spirits in Black Sand Creek and the star sprite clerks in Heaven called him that) could think of nothing else. It even superseded his idle chitchat with Oryza, Sativus, and Paddy, the oldest of the rice paddy snake spirits and hence the closest to beginning the thousand-year process of transforming into dragons, about what their future dragon names would be!

You didn’t get to choose, of course. Heaven awarded you a formal name and title when you were enfeoffed. But dragon kings’ names were often drawn from poetry, usually related to water, and always in Classical Serican. Den’s name, for example, came from a four-book poem on Earthly agriculture. Specifically, from the section that described a massive storm washing away humanity’s hard work and stressed the importance of turning to the Jade Emperor for salvation from flood and famine.

For lack of anything better to do, Den and his friends often recited water-related poems to one another and speculated on which phrases would make the best names. It was a surprisingly effective way to relax and drop off to sleep after a night of partying, or to while away a long afternoon of tedious bureaucratic busywork.

Now Ory passed him the daily weather report that he had to submit to the Master of Rain. She’d already filled out the standardized form for him. After skimming its contents – rainfall, mist, and fog amounts all within tolerances of what was decreed at the Meeting of the Dragon Host, blah blah blah – Den approved it with a sloppy stamp and tossed it onto his “out” pile.

While he waited for Sati to finish preparing a census form that enumerated all the plants and animals and spirits in Caltrop Pond, he stretched out his back. “So! What d’you think is the most useful kind of tutor for a four-year-old human?”

He’d been posing the same question a few times a day for the past few weeks now, but hey – it was novel, and it beat asking, “What d’you think is the best weather-themed poem?” the way he had been for the past few decades.

Sati’s mouth moved as he tallied up the new caltrop plants that had grown since the last census. He filled out the number and slid the document across the desk to Den. “Mmm-MMM-mmm,” he shrugged, the wordless syllables rising and falling with the same intonation as, “I DUN-no.”

“Rosie said she’s been teaching the girl basic math, reading, writing, and etiquette, right?” put in Paddy, who’d finished her work already and was sprawled across a giant floor cushion with her coils drooping off its sides.

“Right,” confirmed Den.

“So we should find a tutor for something that’s not math, reading, writing, or etiquette,” she concluded.

“Not helpful, Paddy. There are a lot of other subjects for humans to learn,” commented Ory. She stretched too, arching all the way over her chairback. She flipped around, slid off, and slithered to a floor cushion next to Paddy’s.

“Yeah, like natural philosophy and literature and magecraft and history and philosophy and cookery….” Sati droned on for a while in that vein. The items on his list never changed, Den had observed, although the order sometimes did.

“But which one should we start with first?” he asked, getting them back on track.

“Well, she’s a peasant, right?” pointed out Ory. “We should start with cookery.”

“Isn’t her ma teaching her that already?” objected Paddy.

Ory gave a brisk shake of her head. “No way a peasant knows fine cooking. If we want her to become a chef for a noble when she grows up, she’s gonna need to know how to cook fancier things than her ma’s rice porridge.”

“No, no, we need to think bigger,” Sati reminded them. He finished his paperwork for the day and passed it to Den, who glanced over it before stamping it too. “Just because she’s a peasant doesn’t mean she has to become a servant. Rosie said that the goddess wants to improve the girl’s life, right?”

Ory argued back, “Yeah, but castle chef is a big step up from peasant farmer.”

“Sati just wants her to become a musician so she can perform at our parties,” Paddy drawled.

“I heard her older sister was good at the flute,” Sati defended himself.

Lately, he’d been talking to the other partyers about the Jek family, learning everything he could about them.

“Yeah, but people always say that sort of thing about little kids. ‘Oh, he’s so talented at this’ and ‘Oh, she’s a genius at that.’ And then they grow up to be nothing special at all,” groused Ory, who had several dozen nieces and nephews who’d turned out to be disappointments (i.e. died before they lived long enough to awaken).

“Well, okay,” summarized Den. “So we know that we shouldn’t look for a tutor in math, reading, writing, etiquette, or cookery. That narrows it down a bit. Good job, everyone! Let’s keep thinking.”