Have you seen a newly hatched sparrow? If not, you cannot possibly comprehend the horror of finding yourself in a nest of them.

My siblings were as bald as miniature chickens plucked and ready for roasting. They had raw, pinkish skin, with splotches of moldy grey on their heads and wings and running in stripes down their spines. The corners of their mouths were as swollen as pus-filled sacks. They were the most revolting creatures I’d ever seen.

And I looked just like them.

I stared at my featherless chest, which looked exactly like a tiny, uncooked chicken breast. I gaped at my featherless wings, which looked exactly like tiny, uncooked chicken wings. It was wrong. It was so wrong. Living birds should never look like this!

I opened my beak to shriek again, and my mother sparrow dropped in a bug. It was still wriggling.

Eeeeek!

But my sparrow body devoured it while my Piri-brain retched. When it was gone, my sparrow-brain opened my beak again and screamed for more. And so, alongside my hideous siblings, I fed.

What other options did I have? I could, of course, have squirmed to the edge of the nest, flung myself off the side, and hoped that Glitter would reincarnate me as a better bird next time. However, if my two-hundred-odd years as many, many catfish were any example, she’d simply order Flicker to stuff me into the next sparrow egg to hatch. All I’d gain would be another forty-nine-day stint inside an archival box.

No, better to wait this out. Sparrows had to develop faster than baby turtles, right? They couldn’t possibly look so disgusting for months on end. If they did, humans would have stamped them out for marring the landscape.

All right. I could stick this out. I would stick this out.

A deep breath, another bug to eat, and then my eyes were drooping shut. Being horrified was exhausting. I needed sleep to muster energy for my next round of outrage against Glitter.

Four days after hatching, my siblings and I started to sprout down. After that, we looked much more presentable, and the nest no longer resembled a butcher shop. The view got even better when we grew beige-grey feathers and began to approximate real sparrows. By then, my eyeballs were so traumatized that I didn’t consider adult sparrows drab and boring anymore. I even thought that the sight of my siblings as fluffy feather balls verged on cute. Honestly, at this point, I’d have taken anything over sparrow hatchlings!

This phase didn’t last long, though. Soon we were learning how to fly, and then, one sunny morning, we all left the nest and flew off in separate directions. My siblings would be searching for food or patches of dirt for dust baths.

As for me, I had a different goal. It was time to figure out how to return to Honeysuckle Croft.

The landscape was different. That was the first thing I noticed. After some pondering and more flying, I concluded that it was because the plants were different. Their leaves were weirdly broad and overall larger than I was used to. And everything was so green. I wasn’t used to seeing so much green everywhere. It felt wrong.

Anyway, plants were all well and good, but where were the people? I needed to find a city or a village or, at the very least, a farmstead, so I could eavesdrop on conversations and figure out where I was.

Eventually, I came to an orchard where human and spirit farmers were busy harvesting small, reddish fruits. I zipped over for a better look – and backwinged in shock.

Lychees! They were picking lychees! The precious fruits that nobles in the south had offered to the court! Officially they’d been for Cassius and Aurelia, as the emperor and empress, but I’d claimed my fair share. (Aurelia’s, that was.)

This meant I’d been reborn in the south this time! I’d never been in southern Serica before, because no self-respecting Serican crossed the Snowy Mountains going south. It was unbearably hot and humid there, sobbed the nobles who returned from exile. Rife with disease, the den of tigers and vipers and vicious ex-ministers – a place to exist, but never to live. Even when Cassius made official progresses through his domain, he never journeyed south of the Snowy Mountains. His generals refused to guarantee his safety. I was going to have to watch my back.

Oh, wait.

I was no longer Prime Minister of a hated, yearned-for, distant court. I was an unremarkable bird, beneath human or spirit notice. The only things I needed to watch out for were natural predators.

I didn’t even know what a sparrow’s natural predators were. Oh well.

Keeping the mid-morning sun on my right, I kept flying.

As the sun sank towards the horizon on my left, I saw the glare of a river, lined on both sides with boxy shapes. A proper city at last! Now I could finally figure out where I was! Pumping my tired wings, I headed that way.

At my first sight of the buildings, I nearly fell out of the air.

Those houses had the strangest design I’d ever seen. They teetered on the edge of the river, practically in the river. Wavelets lapped against stone walls that rose about one story before balconies jutted out over the water, supported by wooden stilts. All the houses had multiple stories, and most shared walls instead of being built as individual units. Each had a stone staircase that led straight down to the water, where a little boat bobbed up and down. Women squatted at the foot of the steps, washing vegetables and rice directly in the river.

Curious, I approached the nearest house. Its owner, a pregnant woman with tan skin and black hair in a messy bun, heaved herself to her feet. Holding a pot of rice against one hip, she staggered up the worn, uneven steps. There was no guardrail, so she braced her other hand against the wall to keep from slipping.

She entered the second story of the house through a weather-beaten door, and I landed on the railing to peer through the window. This floor was a combined kitchen and storage area, complete with a stove. It was crude, of course, but the setup was still way more advanced than Honeysuckle Croft with its open hearth.

Technology? Civilization? In the south? What was this madness?!

“Oy! Shoo!”

The woman lumbered over, flapping her hands to prevent me from coming in to steal her rice or something. As if I wanted it!

Offended, I left a souvenir on her windowsill and flew up past a grey-tiled roof. The third floor was a common living space with a large table and benches. The daughter of the house was seated next to the window, mending a tunic by the last light of the sun. Two long plaits ran down her back, an odd choice for someone on the cusp of womanhood. It made her look like an overgrown version of Taila.

Cocking my head to a side, I chirped without realizing it.

The young woman looked around, and her face lit up. “Why, a sparrow! Hast thou come to visit me, little friend? I fear I have no seed for thee.” She held out a hand, index finger outstretched.

I studied first it, and then her face. She had decent features, even if that hairstyle did her no favors. Her skin was a similar shade as the Jeks’, which made me feel a little nostalgic, but something about her was definitely off….

“Here, little friend,” she coaxed. “I promise I will have rice for thee tomorrow.”

Her speech! That was what was off! It held echoes of the way we had spoken five centuries earlier. Perhaps the south’s isolation had preserved the language! It should have felt like a homecoming, and yet, after so much time around the people of Claymouth, it sounded jarring instead.

I shook my head to clear it. Her vocabulary wasn’t the important thing. The important thing was the location of this city. Leaving her a loose feather, I took flight again.

The top floor was the family’s bedroom. Three separate rooms, even small ones – this was luxury beyond imagining for all but the wealthiest merchants in Claymouth! And all the houses I saw were built like this one. What could possibly be the source of this city’s wealth?

Over the grey-tiled roofs I soared, searching for more people. I found them in a marketplace next to the docks where fishermen were unloading the day’s catch. Stalls, not unlike the ones in Claymouth, sold all manner of fruits and vegetables. In fact, there were two entire stalls devoted to different types of lychees. Lychees! I’d only ever seen them arranged in jeweled rosewood caskets, but here people just heaped them in baskets in the open-air market! And no bandits robbed them! (Although I did notice a raggedy urchin snake a hand up the side of one stall, grab a lychee, and run off.) What unfathomably wealthy hidden city had I discovered? Perching on the edge of a roof, I listened to the voices.

A burly human fishmonger was bawling, “Mistress Dai! Good e’en!”

A calico cat spirit, human shaped except for her ears and tail, screeched back, “Good even, Master Cha! Give me one grass carp! A good one!”

“I only sell good fish, Mistress Dai!”

The fishmonger gutted and cleaned a silver fish, wrapped it in lotus leaves, tied it up in a reed, and tossed it to the cat. She dropped some coppers on his table and trotted off, the bundle swinging from its reed.

Snatches of conversations drifted from a crowd waiting their turn at a produce stand. A wizened old man was selling white cabbages, green onions, and really weird squash that looked like cucumbers with warts.

“ – Harvest hath been good. The Lady will be pleased – ”

“ – Heard army recruiters are coming soon – ”

“Again? They were just here at the beginning of spring!”

“Know’st thou not? The Queen’s army is fighting up north. And in the west. She desireth to push back the Wilds – ”

A young human man snorted – rashly, to judge by the expressions of those around him and the way they all took a half or full step back, as the press of bodies allowed. “The Queen always desireth to push back the Wilds. When hath it worked? When hath it done anything besides get good people killed?”

“Shh!” hissed the young man next to him. “Katu, don’t say things like that in public!”

“Oy! Boy!” came a bellow, and the crowd parted for a stout, grey-haired human matron. “Thy mother is waiting for thee! Where is the green onion she sent thee to fetch!”

Everyone within line of sight craned their necks to check the young man’s hands, which were distinctly empty.

“But Grandmama,” he protested.

“Don’t ‘But Grandmama’ me! She sent thee out half an hour ago to buy a bunch of green onions, and what hast thou been doing? Wasting time! Making trouble in the marketplace! Dost thou want to be put in the stocks again?” She marched up to him, reached up, and pinched his ear.

“Ow, ow! Grandmama! That hurts!”

“Not as much as it will hurt if thou doth not buy those green onions and come home!”

Dragging him along with his body bent sideways, she plowed through the crowd to the front of the stall. The vendor grinned and held out several green onions, tied together with a reed. “Good even, Old Mother Len. Green onions for you today?”

The old woman released her grandson. “Pay him,” she commanded, and he rubbed his ear with one hand while fishing out a copper with the other. “We’re going home right this moment.”

“Yes, Grandmama,” he sighed, and followed her down the street.

Well, this had all been very entertaining, but I still wasn’t any closer to learning where precisely I was in the kingdom of South Serica. Although – that young man seemed to be obsessed with politics. Sooner or later, he was bound to come back to the marketplace and start ranting again. If I waited here and eavesdropped, perhaps I could glean enough to infer where I was and what the shortest path back to Honeysuckle Croft would be.

Yes, that was what I would do. And it had nothing to do with hoping for some more good, old-fashioned street entertainment.