Present day, in the Bureau of Reincarnation:

Whaaaat? They decided to stay? They don’t want to go home?

The possibility that the rock macaque soldiers and wild boar demon wouldn’t return to the Jade Mountains had never occurred to me. Because, seriously, who would want to move to the Claymouth Barony, of all places?

(Well, me, I guess. Technically, I’d died trying to move there. Hmmm.)

“Apparently not. They have expressed a – ” Flicker pursed his lips – “strong desire to stay.”

A strong desire to stay. And the barony did not have the forces to drive off a demon army, even a battered, half-dead, half-eaten one. I had to get back there to fix things – oh, wait.

But this must have happened two months ago. What are they doing now? And how do you know anyway? Can you cast visions of places like dragon kings?

If so, I could just have him show me Honeysuckle Croft right now, instead of trying to fly halfway across Serica in my next life.

But Flicker dashed those hopes. “I’m afraid that is not within my ken. At best, I could walk out the South Gate after work and look down through the clouds, but visibility is limited at night. And I’m on the clock right now. I don’t have time,” he tacked on before I could demand that we take a field trip this instant.

Awwww. That’s too bad.

I didn’t press the issue. Peering down over a cloud at the tops of miniscule buildings had limited utility. After all, I wasn’t a star sprite and didn’t have far-sight. Plus Flicker had more souls after me to reincarnate, starting with Not-Marcius, and none of them would appreciate the delay. See? I could be altruistic. I could accommodate other people’s needs!

You haven’t answered my other question, I reminded him. How do you know all this, if you didn’t see it yourself?

It seemed like a straightforward-enough question to me, but for some reason, Flicker’s eyes slid to a side. “Uh…. I’m afraid I can’t answer that….”

Confused, I blinked my blackness. Wait, really? Why not?

Flicker studied the wood grain on the back of his door as if Glitter were going to pop up and command him to draw it from memory. “Ah, because the…individual who told me prefers not to have…their identity known…?”

What?! Now you have to tell me who it is!

“I literally just told you why I can’t tell you!”

Yeah, when had that ever stopped me? I ran through the possibilities in my, well, not-head. It couldn’t be Glitter. She didn’t even know that Flicker had gotten tangled up in affairs on Earth, and if she ever did find out, she’d punish him rather than update him.

It also couldn’t be the absentee Director of Reincarnation. The Kitchen God was too busy scraping together offerings from the kitchens and hearths of Earth to keep track of what was happening in his own bureau.

It most assuredly was not Cassius, the would-be Assistant Director of Reincarnation. He’d never stoop to communicating with a clerk.

As for the former Assistant Director of Reincarnation, the Goddess of Life had left the bureau and presumably had no further interest in it. (Arguably, she’d lost interest already towards the end of her tenure here, since she was looking forward to her next post as Director of the Bureau of Human Lives.)

So the only person left was –

Aurelia. It was Aurelia. The Star of Reflected Brightness. She’s the only one with the knowledge, interest, and inclination.

Except – why would a goddess care enough about a clerk to bother updating him on a project he was no longer involved in?

Flicker jolted as if I’d pecked him. “What makes you think it’s the Star?” he blurted out before catching himself. “It’s not her! You’re mistaken! The Star is virtuous and upright and honest, she would never break the rules like that….” He blathered on in that vein for a while, convincing precisely no one.

Eventually, I got bored of watching him flounder. So what else did she tell you about what’s going on in the Claymouth Barony?

“But I just told you it wasn’t – ” Surrendering to the inevitable (i.e. me), Flicker sighed. He slumped in his chair and mumbled at his desk, “It’s – I don’t know – complicated. Messy.”

Yes, getting involved with the gods generally is.

“No! I meant the situation in the Claymouth Barony!”

Huh. Flicker was interestingly quick to leap to Aurelia’s defense. Well, I’d always suspected that he adored her to the point of worship.

“Um, where to start? The Jeks are doing well. Taila is doing well at school, even if she gets distracted too easily to be top of her class.”

I snorted. I could imagine that.

“Mistress Jek works full time at the school now, assisting Floridiana, who’s the headmistress.”

Ha! Got her. I knew that settling down in a community was better for humans than traveling constantly in search of odd jobs.

“By the way, they’re calling it the Claymouth Academy for now, although they’re thinking of renaming it the North Serican Academy.”

“North Serican Academy” sounds more prestigious, I agreed. Names were crucial. They conveyed a first impression even before you saw the thing in question. How about Bobo? How’s she doing?

“She’s doing well too. Since Mistress Jek has a full-time job outside the home, Bobo has taken over running Honeysuckle Croft. She was…distraught when she learned of your and Stripey’s deaths, but she’s keeping herself busy.”

Aww, poor Bobo. But the bamboo viper had a cheery nature, and now a steady job too. She’d be all right. And all the demons? What are they up to?

“That’s where it gets messy. There wasn’t enough farmland for all of them, and in any case, none of them knew anything about farming. Some learned from their new neighbors and took to it; others tried but gave up; and still others took one look and decided that they wanted nothing to do with sloshing through the water planting rice seedlings.”

The cadence of Flicker’s sentences had changed. Underneath his voice, I could almost hear Aurelia’s amused tone and see her wry smile.

“Some of that latter group hired on with Baron Claymouth as guards, but the barony is relatively safe and he doesn’t need that much security. So, regrettably, others ended up joining the duck demon bandits, and the rest formed their own band to skirmish along the border with Sir Black Pine’s knights.”

Yeah, that didn’t surprise me. When your entire skillset centered around fighting, every problem looked like something that needed bashing over the head.

“When the fighting gets too heated, King Densissimus Imber mediates between them. That helps. Temporarily.”

Ha. I’d bet. How about Yulus and Nagi –

At that moment, a loud rap sounded on the door. Flicker jumped, grabbed my file, and opened it before he called, “Come in!”

An irritated clerk poked her head into the office. “What’s taking so long? Souls are piling up in your waiting room. They’re going to start spilling out into the hallway soon. If Glitter performs a surprise inspection, we’re all dead.”

Flicker gulped. “Sorry, sorry! I’ll speed it up in here!”

His colleague gave a curt nod and snapped the door shut. Flicker dropped my file and raised his hands, preparing to reshape me into my next form.

Wait! You haven’t told me about Yulus and Nagi yet! I protested as the net of gold light fell over me.

“You heard her. No time,” he grunted.

The net constricted, cutting into me, sticking to me, ripping me apart. And then there was only pain.

This time, it was late summer when I hatched in a nest in South Serica. It was a different nest in a different tree, but once again, a day of flying and searching brought me to Lychee Grove. I went straight to the window of that house on stilts over the river, the one where a young woman with two long plaits had promised to feed me rice. It had been two months since then, but maybe she’d remembered. Maybe she tried to feed every bird that visited.

I found her seated next to the common room window again, using the last rays of sunlight to embroider scarlet peonies and emerald-green leaves on blue cotton cuffs. My eyes nearly popped out of my head at the color combination, but hey, it was a nice change after the plain Claymouth Barony clothing. And, come to think of it, bold, clashing colors had been the style at Cassius’ court. I guessed I’d just gotten used to all the earth tones of Claymouth tunics and the stark black of clerk robes.

Landing on the windowsill, I chirped.

The young woman’s head swiveled, plaits flying. “Hast thou returned, little friend?”

(Yes…but not in the same body. I guessed all sparrows looked the same to her too.)

She laid aside the cuff, opened an embroidered drawstring pouch, and poured a handful of rice grains onto the sill. Jumping back, I cocked my head to check for nets or traps. There were none that I could see. Still keeping a wary eye out, I hopped forward and pecked at the rice. Still no movement on the periphery.

The young woman simply clasped her hands in her lap and watched me eat with a gentle smile. She really was a bird lover – and I didn’t mean a lover of birds as food.

Once I’d eaten my fill, I chirped my thanks and took off. As I flew northeast into the dusk, her voice trailed after me: “Come back again, little friend!”

A different sparrow would have to become her “little friend,” though. I was going home. This time – this time – I was going to make it back to Honeysuckle Croft.

I didn’t.

Two days into my journey, I made the mistake of forgetting that cats existed. When I landed in a farmyard to eat rice grains on the ground, the farm cat got me.

That meant another forty-nine days in an archival box. This time around, there wasn’t anyone I knew in the waiting room, and Flicker was too jumpy to chat.

On to Take Three! Surely the third time would be a charm!

It wasn’t.

This time, I got attacked and eaten by a hawk that dove out of nowhere. Back to the archives for another forty-nine days.

Four was such an unlucky number that I expected nothing good from my fourth life as a sparrow, and that prediction proved correct.

While southern Serica stayed balmy throughout the winter, the same could not be said of the Snowy Mountains. They were cold. They were snowy. And they didn’t have any food for me to eat or anywhere warm for me to sleep, so it turned into a competition between starvation and hypothermia as to which would kill me first.

The latter, as it turned out. I froze to death in a blizzard.

Back to the archives.

“You know,” said Flicker with some asperity, “maybe you shouldn’t charge northeast as soon as you hatch. Maybe you should spend some time planning.”

I wasn’t any happier about seeing his face every two months. But you’re not telling me any Claymouth news anymore, so I have to go back myself to see what’s happening there.

He jerked, stunned. “Those people are that important to you? Still?”

I pulsed at him. If I’d had teeth, I’d have bared them. Of course not. I just don’t trust them to make the right life choices without me. Also, how are they going to deal with all those demons on their own? How are they going to grow that school into the premier institution of learning in all of Serica? They need me to tell them what to do.

“They really don’t. They’re doing fine – ” At a sudden, unpleasant thought, Flicker’s lips twisted down.

See? They’re obviously not doing fine. What’s wrong now?

“It’s not wrong, precisely, depending on your definition of wrong,” he hedged.

Uh huh….

“The baron is just, uh, expanding. Aggressively. He spends a lot of time skirmishing with Sir Black Pine. This past summer, he also led some of the rock macaques to assist the king of East Serica in the war against the queen of North Serica, and as a reward, the king appointed his – Baron Claymouth’s, I mean – eldest daughter a viscountess.”

A “viscountess”? That wasn’t a title Cassius had granted to his nobles, and I wasn’t sure what it entailed.

“Yes. Viscounts and viscountesses assist the local count in governing, well, counties. She helps run the courts and collect taxes.”

Wow! That sounds fun.

“Uh….”

Apparently “fun” was not a word Flicker applied to (im)proper governance.

Hey, do I get karma for events I set in motion in a previous life? If so, I had to be raking in positive karma for boosting the standing of the baron and his family.

Sadly, Flicker shook his head. “I’m not an Accountant, but as far as I’m aware, you do not. Your karma for a given life is summed up at the end of that life, and that is the final number.”

Blah. That seems unfair.

“The calculation would become unmanageable otherwise,” Flicker pointed out, but that wasn’t my problem. It was the Accountants’, to devise more effective computational tools than abacuses. “Anyway, Piri, a word of advice, if you’ll take it.”

He didn’t look too hopeful that I would, or that I would take it in the way he intended.

“Focus on your new life. Let go of the old. If you keep clinging to the past and dying over and over trying to return to it, you’ll never achieve anything new. Try to live as if you did take the Tea of Forgetfulness. The system was designed this way for a reason.”

I hated to admit it, but he might have a point. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a tragedy if I explored Lychee Grove a bit more before I returned to Honeysuckle Croft. It sounded like my friends were doing reasonably well on their own anyway. Surely they could wait a bit longer for me.

Okay, I promised. I’ll give it a try.