The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox

You cannot have it all, I'd just taught Sphaera, but oh, how I did want it all!

I wanted to return to my carefree days on the banks of Sweet Lily Pond, when I had no greater care than how to pose so the sunbeams highlighted the shades of my fur to the best effect. I wanted to return to the territory of my fox parents, to pretend that so long as I submitted to them outwardly, they would protect me from all dangers.

But at the same time, I wanted – no, needed – to return to Norcap so I could see how the New Empire was faring. Had Floridiana and Den maintained control in my absence? Had King Philip reasserted his "rights" as Eldon's father? Lord Magnissimus hadn't eaten anyone important, had he?

This isn't forever, I reminded myself. As soon as we get the Empire stable enough – at latest when Eldon comes of age – I can step back, disappear into the forests, and live free as a fox while I grow my other eight tails. This is just for now.

"For now," alas, was really dragging it out. Leaving Steelfang to make sure the Snowy Mountains stayed more or less pacified, I traveled back to Norcap with Sphaera, perched on her litter's armrest to raise myself above her head. Even those optics, however, were not enough to appease Floridiana.

"You thought it was a good idea to bring the former self-proclaimed Fox Empress of All Serica here?" At that point, words failed her, and all she could do was wave her arms to illustrate how terrible an idea it was.

She's given up stealing the throne from Eldon.

"Yes, but what if people rally around her anyway? It's happened before, you know."

Nah, she's a fox spirit. East Sericans hate foxes. (I'd learned that in Claymonth, much to my own chagrin.) If anything, her presence in the capital will unify people behind Eldon. They'll see her as a threat and him as the safe alternative.

(Yes, I came up with that on the spot. Yes, I brought Sphaera along because her rosefinch handmaidens carried her litter faster than a mortal fox could run. Yes, even though I concocted my justification post facto, it sounded gods-cursed good.)

Don't you see? She's the perfect foil for Eldon. The evil, scary fox with too many tails, as compared to the cute, innocent human toddler with his crown sliding off his head and his fuzzy chimera by his side – he did get his chimera, right?

For the very first time, it occurred to me that maybe Lady Fate hadn't sent one down to him after all. That my allowing Flicker to reincarnate me as a fox had negated the deal I'd struck with her.

But that wasn't me! It was all him! I wanted to wail – except I hadn't tried to stop him, had I? That in itself could be viewed as a choice, if you were inclined to hate me.

And Lady Fate did hate me. No, "hate" was the wrong word. She was so far above me that she had no need to feel so common a sentiment as "hate." But she was not favorably disposed towards me, and I'd bet my lone tail that she was inclined to view all my choices through the most warped lens possible. She probably thought I'd cheated her, that I'd feigned virtue to her face and then turned around and corrupted Flicker.

It wasn't me this time! It really wasn't me! It was all his idea! I howled inside my head.

"Chimera?" Floridiana asked, with a puzzlement that knotted my gut into a hard, cold lump. "Was a chimera supposed to come down from Heaven while you were away? Was that why you were gone so long?"

The knot in my gut froze as solid as if Lord Magnissimus had breathed on my entrails. I hadn't thought. I hadn't thought about how my fox-hood would look to Lady Fate. If I'd given it even a passing thought, I'd have known that she would consider it betrayal, even though it hadn't been meant as such.

For the very first time in any of my many, many lives, for the first time in so long as my soul had existed, I gazed down on my fluffy fox's tail and wished fervently that it were any other kind of tail.

You cannot have it all.

In Heaven:

I can't believe I did that. I can't believe I did that.

The guilt gnawed on Flicker's innards, like hot acid corroding the core of him. Whenever one of his coworkers nodded a good morning at him, he saw an accusation in the silent greeting: How could you violate our code like that?

Whenever he had to walk past Glitter's office, both his feet and his heart picked up their pace. Her door gaped like a demon's maw: I will devour you for your temerity.

Even in the privacy of his office, he couldn't escape. Every file he opened, every soul he sent on to its next life, seemed to demand: Why aren't you giving me the form I want?

But worst of all was when he was face-to-face or, more often these days, side-by-side with Star, whom he could no longer bear to face. How could he look her in the eye and say, "I reincarnated your old nemesis in the form she had when she destroyed you"? But how could he look her in the eye and not tell her?

He started finding excuses to hide in his office, re-filing files, rewriting reports, inventing busywork in the name of "working late." At first Star sent her star-child runner with repeated messages asking if everything were all right. Then she sent her lieutenant, Lady Grus, to "run into" him on his way back to his dorm to inquire if he required assistance. Finally, she grew so desperate that she sent her other lieutenant, Lady Dan, the one who was having an affair with Cassius, to offer to mediate between clerk and god.

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How that must have cost Star!

But to all of these inquiries, Flicker gave the same response: "Nothing is wrong. I'm simply very busy. I'm sorry."

That last part, at least, was sincere.

One year, one week, and four days after he reincarnated Heaven's worst enemy in the form it feared most, Flicker was huddled in his office in the middle of the night, trying to convince himself to rewrite a report for the fifth time, when a low, rhythmic sound registered on the edge of his consciousness.

They came for me! was his first thought. He was paralyzed, trapped between dashing out the door and ducking under his desk.

The sound repeated, more urgently, like his heartbeat.

Tap tap tap. Tap-tap-tap.

Wait. That wasn't the tread of guards come to drag him to jail. That was a knock on the grate in the wall, where runners relayed messages.

A warning to flee! he thought, before he could remind himself that there was no one who'd send him such a warning.

Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.

Gulping a deep breath of air and steeling himself, he slid the grate open. "Yes – ?" Then he saw who was on the other side. "Star? What are you doing here?!"

Because it was she. The Star of Reflected Brightness, Assistant Director of the Bureau of the Sky, former Empress of Serica, squeezed into a dark, dingy back passageway meant for runners and janitors, bent double so she could peer through the grate.

"What am I doing here?" She sounded, if anything, more astounded than he. "I came to check on you! Something's obviously wrong. You hide in your office three-quarters of the time, and the other quarter you're so preoccupied that you hardly speak to me. What's going on?"

"Nothing." The word came out automatically. "Nothing's wrong. Work is just very busy, and I'm behind so I've been working overtime to catch up."

Too late, he realized that his desk was empty save for one closed file, the one he'd been trying to convince himself to recopy in even better handwriting. He shuffled sideways to block Star's view of his desk, but of course she'd already seen it.

Hurt flashed across her features before the mask she wore at formal events clamped down. "Ah, I see." Her face withdrew from the grate, then returned. "Flicker...." She hesitated, uncharacteristically diffident. "I – you know that if this isn't working out – the two of us, I mean – you have only to say so, right? You shouldn't ever feel that you're trapped, that you have no way out…."

Was that how she'd felt as Cassius' Empress? Trapped, with no way out? But of course that had been how it was. How else could she have felt?

"No, no, it isn't that," he hastened to say, but then he found that he couldn't continue the sentence. Because how could he explain that he'd sided with the soul who had made Star's position as Cassius' Empress so unbearable, so untenable, and, in the end, such an abject failure? She was right. The relationship between the two of them wasn't working out, because the thing he had done, because Piri herself, would always loom between them like a mountain full of demons.

"It's not you. It's not anything you did or didn't do. It's me," he told Star, hoping to put the blame on his own shoulders where it belonged. "It's my fault. I'm so sorry."

Star's throat worked, but her face stayed as serene as a wooden image in a Temple to All Heaven. "You have nothing for which to blame yourself. You have comported yourself as the perfect gentleman. It is I who must apologize for my importunate demands long after you made it clear they were unwanted."

Flicker's own throat choked up. "No, no, it's my fault. It's all my fault. It had nothing to do with you."

That, at least, drew a wry smile from her. "Perhaps we should both stop blaming ourselves, then. Good-bye, Clerk Flicker."

Her face vanished first, and then her glow. Flicker listened to her footsteps fade away down the passageway, a hollowness expanding in his core. How he and Piri had brought Star low! First Piri had stripped her of her influence at court, over her husband, even her own children, until finally she'd torn away her very noble status. Now he'd stripped away Star's dignity as a goddess, ending things with her while she was hunched up in a servants' back passage! What a pair he and Piri made!

Star's footsteps had died to practically nothing when they suddenly grew louder, drew closer once more.

She's coming back! Flicker's heart leaped and started to thud – and then pounded even harder when he realized that the footsteps weren't hers at all, or even those of a single person. They were many, and they were hard and booted, and they beat out the well-trained staccato of Heaven's guard force.

They're here for me! They came for me at last!

He froze once more, caught between dashing out to surrender to the guards, and ducking under his desk so they had to drag him out, and so he was still seated with a single closed file before him when they kicked down his door. He offered no resistance, but they still tore him from his chair and threw him to the floor. Booted feet caught him in the ribs from both sides, five, six times, while rough hands gripped his hair and wrenched back his head to snap on a neck-stock. The coarse edges drove splinters into his throat. They forced his wrists through a second hole below his chin, slapped a notice on his forehead that read "Traitor to Heaven," and shoved him out the door.

The Star of Heavenly Joy, Assistant Director of Reincarnation, former Emperor Cassius of Serica, waited in the hallway with his hands clasped behind his back. At the sight of his ex-wife's ex-lover, he heaved a sigh of fake disappointment. "What a sad day when the rot of demonic corruption taints even Heaven itself. How long have you been in league with the nine-tailed fox demon Flos Piri, clerk?"

"Heavenly Lord, I have not – "

A guard punched Flicker in the side of the head so hard that his ears roared.

"You dare lie to His Heavenly Lordship?" snarled the captain of the guards. "When The Demon is running around free on Earth as a fox?"

"But she – " She isn't a demon anymore, Flicker tried to say. She hasn't been for a long time now. If she still were, Lady Fate wouldn't have picked her to fix Serica.

Another blow shattered his thoughts into black stars. When the world reformed itself, he was tottering between two guards with the Star of Heavenly Joy's sneer burning into him.

"He's wasting my time. Take him to the Goddess of Life. She'll get the truth out of him."

"No!" The cry burst out of Flicker. The Goddess of Life would peel him, shred him, shave him away in little curls of starlight to dissolve into the firmament. "Wait! Let me talk to Lady Fate! She can explain – "

Another blow. This one knocked him sideways, and he tripped over his hem. The guards made no move to catch him. He hit the floor hard. The neck-stock cut into his throat.

"Let me never hear Her Heavenly Ladyship's name pass your lips again, clerk," said the Star of Heavenly Joy, "or I will have them cut off. And your tongue too. The Goddess of Life does not need you to be able to speak to get the answers out of you."

"But she – but I – wait, please, just ask her!" Flicker begged, but of course it did no good.

As the guards half-dragged, half-carried him out of the Bureau of Reincarnation towards the Bureau of Human Lives, he thought, Thank goodness Star left before they arrived. Thank goodness we broke up.

At least now she could disavow him and disclaim any knowledge of his actions. He could only hope that would be enough to save her.