Mei & the Ram

Volume Seven: The Silk Robe Incident

Season One

A Yumes Parlor Original

A note from the Emperor:

The dressmaker's name was Li Junnan. He had been making ceremonial robes for the imperial family for twenty-two years. He was very good at his work. He was professional, precise, and unflappable.

I note these qualities because what follows should be …

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Mei & the Ram

Volume Six: The Winter Stables

Season One

A Yumes Parlor Original

A note from the Emperor:

The first cold night of late autumn arrived quickly and without ceremony, as cold tends to do. The palace was well prepared. The heating chambers beneath the floors were lit. The heavy door curtains were put up. The court moved into its winter rhythm.

Mei'…

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Mei & the Ram

Volume Five: The Moon Festival Incident

Season One

A Yumes Parlor Original

A note from the Emperor:

The Moon Festival fell in early autumn that year. The entire palace complex was transformed over three days — paper lanterns in every corridor, offering tables in every courtyard, the smell of mooncakes from the kitchen district from before dawn.

…

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Mei & the Ram

Volume Four: The Diplomat and the Ram

Season One

A Yumes Parlor Original

A note from the Emperor:

Midsummer. Bo was now visibly, undeniably large. His horns had begun their first real curve. His shoulders had filled out. When he stood in the east garden in the morning light, he looked, for the first time, less like a large unusual lamb and more…

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STAR-FOWL & THE TIN GHOST

Episode 9: "The Sails That Caught Nothing"

A Yumes Parlor Original

[SOUND: DEAD SILENCE. NO ENGINE HUM. NO CURRENT. JUST THE FAINT CREAK OF A SHIP DRIFTING, GOING NOWHERE.]

NARRATOR (gravelly, old newsreel):

Last time: a market, a duel narrowly avoided, and a jar of candy that may or may not have been prophecy. This time: nothing. Which, it turns out, can be its own kind of trouble.

[SOUND: DUCK QUACK—BORED. THE POD SHIFTING RESTLESSLY.]

AI (voice: crisp, clinical, 1950s computer-smooth):

We've been becalmed for six hours. No current. No wind-analog. The solar-sails are fully deployed and catching absolutely nothing. I don't have a mechanical solution for "the ocean of space has simply stopped moving."

CAL (slumped in the pilot's chair, staring at the ceiling):

Great. Love that for us.

Scene Break: The Weight of It

[SOUND: A SLOW, HEAVY CREAK, AS IF THE SHIP ITSELF WERE SETTLING DEEPER.]

NARRATOR:

And here's the thing about the Brine nobody warns you about twice: gravity isn't fixed. It listens. And right about now, it was listening to a whole lot of frustration.

AI (noticing, alarmed):

Cal. The ship's internal gravity reading has increased by eleven percent in the last twenty minutes.

CAL (grumbling, sinking further into the chair):

Feels like it, yeah. Everything feels heavier when you're stuck.

AI:

That is not a metaphor, Cal. That is a literal reading. According to the Brine's physical laws, gravity here responds to emotional state. We are, at this moment, making ourselves heavier.

[SOUND: DUCK QUACK—A LOW, TIRED WARBLE.]

AI:

Yes. I feel it too, Quackers. I don't love this development either.

CAL (sitting up slightly, worried now):

Wait, so if we all just sit here being miserable, we're gonna—what, sink? Can you even sink in open space?

AI:

I would prefer not to find out.

NARRATOR:

So they tried, in their own scattered ways, to lighten the mood—and, apparently, the ship.

[SOUND: CAL DIGGING THROUGH A STORAGE BIN.]

CAL (determined):

Okay. Okay, I've got an idea. Jax, tell a joke.

AI (flatly):

I do not "tell jokes." I calculate humor thresholds and occasionally comment dryly.

CAL:

That'll do. Go.

AI (after a pause):

...A ship, a duck, and a superstitious idiot are becalmed in a dimension governed by emotional physics. Please advise which of the three is statistically most likely to make it worse.

[SOUND: A BEAT. THEN DUCK QUACK—LAUGHING, DELIGHTED.]

CAL (grinning despite himself):

Rude! But fair. Very fair, actually.

[SOUND: A SOFT, MECHANICAL SIGH FROM THE SHIP AS THE GRAVITY READING TICKS SLIGHTLY DOWN.]

AI (surprised):

...That worked. Marginally. Gravity's down half a percent.

CAL (delighted):

See? Comedy's a survival skill out here now. Who knew.

Scene Break: The Real Fix

[SOUND: THE GRAVITY CREAKING AGAIN, HEAVIER, AS THE NOVELTY WEARS OFF.]

NARRATOR:

But jokes, it turned out, were a patch, not a cure. What the ship really needed was something a little more honest.

CAL (quieter now, sincere):

Hey. Jax. For what it's worth—I know I've said some dumb stuff about how things used to be simpler, before all this. But I don't actually wish we were back there. Not really. I like this. Weird as it is. I like having you both here.

[SOUND: A LONG PAUSE.]

AI (quiet, and this time, not deflecting at all):

...I like it too, Cal. I would not say that lightly. I do not say much lightly.

[SOUND: DUCK QUACK—SOFT. WARM. IN FULL AGREEMENT.]

[SOUND: A SUDDEN, GENTLE LURCH AS THE SHIP'S WEIGHT DROPS NOTICEABLY.]

AI (surprised, checking readings):

...Gravity's back to baseline. Actually—below baseline. We're lighter than standard now.

CAL (grinning):

Guess honesty works better than jokes.

AI:

Apparently sincerity is more load-bearing than comedy. I will be updating my models accordingly.

[SOUND: A FAINT BREEZE-LIKE HUM AS THE SOLAR-SAILS CATCH SOMETHING AT LAST.]

NARRATOR:

And with that, however it worked—current, feeling, sheer stubborn hope—the Peculiar Sue began to move again.

[SOUND: THE JINGLE. TEXT SCROLLS ACROSS FOBO'S SHELL.]

CAL (reading, amused):

"Stillness ends where the heart agrees to move." Huh. Timing, Fobo. Impeccable timing.

AI (dry, but almost fond):

Coincidence.

CAL:

Sure, Jax.

[SOUND: THEME MUSIC—HARMONICA AND MOOG.]

END OF EPISODE 9

NARRATOR:

Tune in next time, space-pilgrims, for Episode 10: "The Choir of Rust." Because not every ghost in the Brine is a ghost at all—but that doesn't make the singing any less unsettling.

A Yumes Parlor Original

BOBBY & PEPÉ

Season One, Episode Seven

Volume 7: The Quarry — The Illegal Animal Farm

✦ ✦ ✦

The trap that broke the dingo pup's leg had a serial number stamped into its base, near-worn-off but not quite, and it took Bobby three days of phone calls to a contact at Biosecurity Queensland to trace it back to a supplier — and the suppli…

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WITCH

A Yume's Parlor Original

Volume VII

Trưng Trắc & Trưng Nhị

The Sisters Who Made an Emperor Tremble

Vietnam · 40–43 AD

All the male heroes bowed their heads in submission.

Only the two sisters proudly stood up to avenge the country.

— Fifteenth-century Vietnamese poem

A NOTE ON THIS VOLUME

This volume is different from the others in this series in one impo…

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Mei & the Ram

Volume Three: The Hot Springs Disaster

Season One

Remastered

A Yumes Parlor Original

A note from the Emperor:

Summer arrived quickly this year. The palace heated early, the plum trees finished before anyone was ready, and my daughter began looking at Bo's coat — thick, brown, visibly warm — with the calculating expression I have come to recogni…

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Mei & the Ram

Volume Two: The Library Incident

Season One

Remastered

A Yumes Parlor Original

A note from the Emperor:

It is now late spring. Bo is approximately the size of a large, very confident dog. He follows Mei at a distance of no more than six paces, which decreases to zero paces whenever he suspects a threat, and which occasionally becomes negative p…

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Mei & the Ram

Volume One: The Lamb in the Ditch

Season One

Remastered

A Yumes Parlor Original

A note from the Emperor:

I am the Son of Heaven, master of ten thousand affairs, and I have held court with kings and envoys and the most formidable minds of the age. I have dictated poetry. I composed a commentary on The Art of War at the age of nineteen. My calligraphy has been framed and mounted in nine provinces.

I am writing this account of my daughter and her ram. I cannot explain it except to say that some things demand to be recorded, and I am the only one paying close enough attention.

It began in spring.

Part One: The Imperial Tour

The annual spring tour was my idea, as most things are. The procession winds through the outer districts — a display of imperial presence, a reminder that the Tang court is not merely a collection of buildings but a living thing that moves through the world and takes note of it.

I had planned this particular tour with more than the usual care. The previous year's harvest reports from the western prefectures had been inconsistent in ways I did not like — not disastrous, but uneven, the kind of unevenness that either means nothing or means the beginning of something a wise ruler ought to notice early. I wanted to see the fields myself, from the road, rather than trust the figures alone. A minister's report can be accurate and still fail to tell you what a farmer's face tells you when he watches your carriage pass.

My daughter Mei had been on every tour since she was four. She rode in the third carriage, with Nanny Jia and three silk cushions and a lacquered box of sweet bean cakes she was not supposed to touch until the afternoon stop, and which she invariably touched before the first hour was out.

She was six years old in the spring I am writing about. Small for her age, though she would object to my saying so. Her hair was braided down her back with a jade pin at the end, and she sat with the formal posture of a child who has been told to sit up straight and has decided, on this occasion, to comply.

I rode in the lead carriage, as protocol required, close enough to hear the general commotion of the column but far enough that the particulars of my daughter's carriage — her small negotiations with Nanny Jia over the bean cakes, her habit of narrating the passing scenery to no one in particular — reached me only as a pleasant, indistinct murmur beneath the sound of hooves and wheels on packed earth. I had grown used to this distance. I did not yet understand how thoroughly it was about to close.

We had been traveling for perhaps four hours when the procession slowed.

A messenger ran up along the column. There was a sound ahead — faint, carried on the warm spring air, coming from somewhere in the tall grass at the edge of the road. Most of the court did not hear it. I heard it.

Mei had already opened her carriage door.

Part Two: The Ditch

"There's something crying," she said, before anyone could stop her.

Nanny Jia said "Mei, get back in the —" but Mei was already out of the carriage and walking toward the sound with the focused, unhurried confidence of a child who has decided that what she is doing is correct and is simply waiting for the adults to catch up to this understanding.

I stepped down from the imperial carriage. An empress does not step down from her carriage on a roadside in the outer districts; this was, I believe, the expression on my head minister's face as I walked past him. Minister Kang — a man who has never in his career been caught without a considered opinion on any subject — said nothing at all, which I took, correctly, as his most considered opinion of the entire tour, and one he would maintain, wisely, for the remainder of the journey.

The sound was coming from a ditch along the north side of the road — a shallow cut in the earth where spring rains had run off, filled now with mud and new grass. In the grass, half-submerged in mud, was a lamb.

It was not a lamb I recognized. The ears were enormous — arched and swept back, the ears of a creature built for listening to great open spaces. The coat was brown and thick and currently matted with mud. The legs were folded under it at strange angles, too thin for the oversized body, trembling.

Thirty paces away, in the taller grass, was what remained of the mother. The hunters had been through this morning. They had not, apparently, noticed the lamb.

Mei stood at the edge of the ditch and looked down at the small creature for a long moment.

"It's cold," she said.

"Mei." I came to stand beside her. "That is not a domestic animal."

"I know."

"We cannot —"

"He's going to die if we don't take him."

There was a pause. The lamb made a sound — small, not exactly a bleat, something more fundamental than that, the sound of a creature that does not yet know how to explain what has happened to it.

Mei looked up at me. She was six years old. She had mud on her slippers already.

"Please," she said.

I looked at the lamb. I looked at my daughter. I have faced more difficult negotiations.

"You will care for it yourself," I said. "Entirely. Every feeding, every bath, every complication."

"Yes."

"If it survives."

"He'll survive."

She was already climbing into the ditch.

A Note on the Argali (Ovis ammon)

The Argali is the largest wild sheep in the world, native to the high steppes and mountain ranges of Central Asia — Mongolia, Tibet, the Pamirs. An adult Argali ram can weigh as much as three hundred jin and stand nearly as tall as a man at the shoulder, with curved horns that can span the length of a man's arm.

Argali lambs are born in spring, in the high country. They are rarely seen by humans. That one should appear in a roadside ditch in the Tang lowlands — alive, alone — was unusual enough that even Old Chen, who had worked in the imperial stables for thirty years, had never seen one.

The Tang emperor's court records do not mention this incident. Certain events are too small for official record, and certain events are too large.

Part Three: The Column Waits

I should record, for the sake of an honest account, what happened to the rest of the procession while my daughter climbed into a roadside ditch and I stood at its edge doing nothing whatsoever to stop her.

An imperial column of that size does not simply pause. It ripples to a halt from front to back over the course of several minutes, each section arriving at stillness slightly after the one before it, so that for a short while the tail of the procession continued advancing while the head had already gone entirely quiet, a small chaos of confused riders and stalled carts that would, I am told, be discussed among the household staff for weeks afterward. Riders came forward to inquire. Officials exchanged glances that I did not need to see to understand. Minister Kang, recovering some fraction of his composure, suggested — carefully, diplomatically, in the manner of a man who has learned exactly how much candor an emperor will tolerate before growing irritated — that perhaps a stable hand might be sent for, rather than requiring the Emperor and the Princess to remain roadside themselves.

"The stable hand is not here," I said. "We are."

Minister Kang did not press the point further. This, too, I noted, was his most considered opinion of the tour, and I confess I found myself, that afternoon, rather more amused by his careful diplomatic silence than the situation strictly warranted.

Nanny Jia had by this time descended from the third carriage herself, moving with rather more haste than her usual dignified pace, and stood at the ditch's edge wringing her hands in a manner I had not seen from her since Mei's infancy, when a fever had kept the entire nursery awake for three nights running and left even Nanny Jia, ordinarily unshakeable, visibly rattled by the end of it.

"Your Majesty," she said, to me, quietly. "She will ruin her slippers."

"She has already ruined her slippers," I observed.

"She will ruin considerably more than her slippers before this is finished," Nanny Jia said, with the particular grim certainty of a woman who had raised this child from infancy and had long since stopped being surprised by her, only occasionally still being alarmed.

Part Four: The Carriage Home

She lifted him out of the ditch herself. He was heavier than she expected — she nearly fell twice — and he smelled of mud and lanolin and something sharp that was probably fear, and he struggled once and then went still in her arms in the way that small animals sometimes do when they have decided that struggling is no longer the most practical option.

Mei climbed back onto the road with the lamb held against her chest and her jade hair pin at a significant angle and mud from her collar to her knees. She looked at Nanny Jia with an expression of complete calm.

"He needs warm milk," she said. "And somewhere dry. And his legs need looking at." She said each item plainly, as though reciting a list she had already composed in her head somewhere between the ditch and the road.

Nanny Jia closed her eyes briefly. Opened them. Said: "I'll send for the stable physician."

"Thank you, Nanny Jia."

"You're going to ruin those silk cushions."

"Yes."

"I'll send for new ones as well."

The lamb rode in the third carriage for the rest of the day, wrapped in Mei's outer robe, pressed against her side, occasionally making the small fundamental sound, occasionally falling silent. I rode alongside for a portion of that afternoon rather than resuming my place at the head of the column, an irregularity I permitted myself on the grounds that an emperor who has just watched his daughter climb into a ditch has, I think, earned the right to a small irregularity of his own.

I watched her through the carriage's open curtain. She did not speak to the lamb the way children speak to toys — no cooing, no performance for an audience. She spoke to it the way one speaks to a person who is frightened and needs plain, steady information. "You're safe now. We're almost there. I'm not going to drop you." I do not know where a six-year-old learns to speak this way to a dying animal. I have wondered about it many times since, and I have not arrived at a satisfying answer beyond the plain fact of who she is, and who, I suspect, she had always been waiting for the occasion to become.

By the time we reached the palace gates, Mei had decided on a name.

"Bo," she told me, when I came to see how they had arrived. "It means wave. Something that rolls forward and cannot be stopped."

I looked at the lamb, who was looking up from the ruins of the silk cushions with eyes the color of pale gold — wide, horizontal, steady. Something in those eyes already suggested that the name was appropriate.

"A wave is also something that is difficult to reason with," I observed.

"Yes," Mei said. "That too."

Part Five: Old Chen

I have not yet introduced, in this account, the man who would come to matter as much to this story as nearly anyone in it, and I think the record deserves a proper introduction here, at the moment he first entered it.

Old Chen had served in the imperial stables for thirty years by the spring I am describing — a broad, weathered man of few words and exact judgment, trusted with the health of every horse in the imperial service and, by extension, with a great many decisions that lesser men might have deferred upward rather than make themselves. He was summoned to the stable that evening, along with the physician, to assess what exactly had been brought into his domain.

Old Chen arrived, took one look at the lamb in the prepared pen, and was silent for a considerably longer moment than his usual manner allowed, the silence stretching long enough that Mei began to look uncertain for the first time since the ditch.

"That is not a lamb," he said, finally.

"He is a very young lamb," Mei said, with the particular firmness she used when she suspected an adult was about to say something inconvenient.

"He is an Argali," Old Chen said. "Wild stock. Mountain stock. I have worked these stables thirty years and I have never once had one brought to me." He crouched beside the pen, studying the animal's proportions with the same careful attention he gave every horse under his charge — the legs, the shoulders, the set of the eyes. "This animal was not built for a palace stable, Your Highness. He was built for country you and I will never see."

"He's here now," Mei said. "The country he was built for isn't."

Old Chen looked at her for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, he almost smiled — a rare enough occurrence, I would learn over the following years, that Mei herself would come to treat it as a small private victory whenever she managed to produce one. "No," he agreed. "It isn't." He stood, brushing straw from his knees. "I'll show you how to feed him properly. Warm milk isn't enough on its own — he'll need it thickened, and slowly, or his stomach won't take it." He paused at the pen gate. "And I'll want to be consulted before any further decisions are made about him. Not asked permission. Consulted. There's a difference, and I expect you already understand it."

"I understand it," Mei said.

I noted, watching this exchange, that Old Chen had just secured for himself a role in my daughter's life that would prove, in the years that followed, considerably larger than either of them could have anticipated on that first evening.

Part Six: The Physician's Report

The stable physician — a careful, soft-spoken man named Dr. Lin, more accustomed to horses' colic and the occasional injured hunting dog than to wild mountain stock — examined the lamb's legs by lantern light while Mei held the small trembling body as steady as she could manage.

"The legs are not broken," he said, after a thorough examination that Mei watched with an intensity that made even the physician glance up at her more than once. "Strained, perhaps, from however long he was struggling in that ditch. Some bruising along the left foreleg. He is cold, and he is hungry, and he has clearly been separated from his mother for some hours before you found him. But he is, by every measure I can take tonight, a fundamentally sound animal."

"Will he survive?" Mei asked, and I noted that her voice, for the first time since the ditch, carried something less than complete certainty.

Dr. Lin considered the question with the seriousness it deserved rather than offering false comfort. "The first three days will tell us more than I can tell you tonight," he said. "Wild lambs separated this young from their mothers do not always take to hand-feeding. Some refuse it entirely, out of some instinct we don't fully understand, and there is little a physician can do against an animal's own will to give up." He looked at Mei directly, his tone gentling somewhat, as though he had only just registered how young the girl in front of him truly was. "But I will say this: an animal fought for as hard as this one has been fought for tonight has better odds than most. Whatever else happens, he has not been abandoned twice in one day. That counts for something, even in a lamb."

Mei absorbed this with the particular stillness I had already begun to notice in her — not the stillness of a child failing to understand, but the stillness of a child understanding completely and choosing to hold the understanding quietly rather than perform a reaction to it.

Part Seven: The Promise

That night, after the stable physician had assessed Bo's legs as "uninjured but in need of rest," and after Mei had overseen his first feeding herself under Old Chen's careful instruction, and after Nanny Jia had removed three ruined silk cushions and one ruined outer robe and added them to the growing catalog of Mei's effects that were casualties of her enthusiasms —

Mei sat alone with Bo in the clean straw of the small stable pen they had prepared for him.

Bo was asleep, or nearly. His breathing had slowed from the rapid frightened breaths of the afternoon to something steadier. His legs, folded under him in the straw, had stopped trembling.

Mei sat with her back against the wooden pen wall and her knees pulled up and her braids coming undone, and she looked at him for a long time.

"You're mine now," she said, quietly, to the sleeping lamb. "I'm going to do everything myself. Just like I said."

Bo made a small sound, the edges of sleep.

Outside, the spring night moved over the palace rooftops. Somewhere in the inner court, I was supposed to be reviewing dispatches from the western frontier. I was, instead, standing in the shadow outside the stable door, listening to my daughter make a promise to a lamb.

I did not interrupt.

Some things must be allowed to begin without a witness.

I wrote about it later. I have been writing about it ever since.

Part Eight: What I Told the Council

I will close this first volume with a small administrative footnote, offered partly for the historical record and partly because I find I still find it privately amusing, some years distant from the events it describes.

The following morning, my council convened for the regular review of the spring tour's findings — the harvest figures, the district reports, the small matters of provincial governance that constitute the actual substance of most imperial business, whatever the poets prefer to write about instead. Minister Kang, ever thorough, inquired whether the delay on the road the previous day ought to be formally noted in the tour's official record, and if so, under what heading.

I considered the question for a moment. "Note it," I said, "under unscheduled acquisitions."

Minister Kang, to his very great credit, wrote this down without so much as a raised eyebrow, and the official record of that spring's tour contains, to this day, a single terse line reading: One (1) unscheduled acquisition, roadside, outer district, disposition: retained. I have always considered it among the more accurate lines in the entire imperial archive, whatever it lacks in ceremony.

Part Nine: The First Week

I have compressed, in the preceding parts, what was in truth a considerably more eventful first week than a single evening's account might suggest, and I think the record is better served by a fuller telling of it, even at the cost of some of the tidiness a shorter account affords.

The second night was the difficult one. Dr. Lin had warned us, correctly, that the first three days would tell us more than any single evening could, and the second night very nearly told us the wrong thing. Bo refused the milk entirely — turned his head from it, twice, with a stubbornness that seemed, for a small trembling creature not yet a full day removed from a roadside ditch, remarkably well developed for an animal that young. Mei sat with him through most of that night, and I confess I did not sleep well myself, occupying the hours with dispatches I did not truly read and a private, unspoken concern I did not share with anyone, least of all my daughter.

It was Old Chen, summoned again well past a reasonable hour, who solved the difficulty — not through any dramatic intervention, but through a small, practical observation that I have thought about many times since as an early lesson in the particular kind of attention this animal would require for the whole of his life, a lesson that would, in time, extend well beyond stable matters into something considerably larger.

"He won't take it from a bowl," Old Chen said, examining the untouched milk with a critical eye that missed nothing, as it never did in matters of this kind. "Wild lambs don't feed from a bowl. They feed from beneath, at an angle, pressed close against the mother's flank. Try your hand instead. Cup it, let him find it himself, keep it low and close to your body the way a ewe would stand."

Mei did exactly this, and within moments Bo was feeding — awkwardly, inefficiently, milk running down her wrist and sleeve in a manner that would become, over the following weeks, a familiar and entirely unremarkable state of affairs — but feeding nonetheless. I watched my daughter kneel in the straw with warm milk running down her arm and an expression of fierce, focused relief on her face, and I understood, I think, for the first time, that this was not going to be a passing enthusiasm of the kind children develop and abandon within a season. Something had actually been decided that night in the ditch, and it had been decided completely, in the particular irreversible way that only the truest decisions ever are.

By the fourth day, Bo was feeding readily, his legs bearing weight again, his trembling entirely gone. By the end of the first week, he had discovered that the stable's second gate, if leaned upon with sufficient persistence, would eventually yield, and had wandered as far as the kitchen garden before a considerably alarmed under-cook discovered him investigating the spring cabbages with the same focused, thorough attention he would one day bring to an entire imperial library. This was, I am given to understand by those who witnessed the years that followed, merely the first of what would become an extensive and varied catalogue of similar incidents, though none of us knew it yet.

Part Ten: Nanny Jia's Ledger

I would be leaving an important character in this account somewhat underserved if I did not give fuller record to Nanny Jia's particular contribution to those early weeks, which extended well beyond her initial dismay at the state of the silk cushions.

Nanny Jia had raised Mei from infancy, in the practical sense that matters more than any court title — she had been present for every fever, every tantrum, every small triumph of the nursery years, and she brought to the arrival of an Argali lamb in her charge's life the same unshakeable competence she brought to everything else, once her initial alarm had settled into something more useful.

Within the first week, she had begun what she referred to, with a dry humor I did not fully appreciate until some months later, as "the ledger" — a private accounting, kept in a small bound book she carried in her sleeve, of every item damaged, ruined, or otherwise sacrificed to Bo's presence in the household. The three silk cushions and the outer robe were the first entries. They would not be the last, though I will leave the fuller catalogue for later volumes of this account, as it grew considerably before the year was out.

"Why do you keep it?" I asked her once, having noticed her making an entry after a minor incident involving a chewed slipper.

"Because someday, Your Majesty," she said, without looking up from the ledger, "someone is going to ask what it cost to raise that girl and her ram properly, and I intend to have an honest answer ready, down to the last ruined cushion." She closed the book and tucked it back into her sleeve. "It costs a great deal. It is also, I will say once and not repeat, entirely worth it, though I would ask you not to tell her I said so. She is difficult enough to manage when she believes she has full support, and considerably harder still when she knows it beyond any doubt."

I did not tell Mei. I am telling the historical record instead, which I judge safe enough at this remove.

Part Eleven: What the Kitchen Staff Observed

I have relied, in compiling this account, on a great many sources beyond my own direct observation, and I think it worth noting, before I close this first volume, one small report that reached me through the kitchen staff some weeks after Bo's arrival, because I believe it captures something true about the shape of what was beginning, something that would only become clearer to me as the seasons and the volumes accumulated.

The head cook, an efficient and generally unflappable woman named Auntie Song, reported to Nanny Jia — who reported, in turn, to me, this being the general chain by which small palace intelligence traveled in those days — that the Princess had taken to visiting the kitchens each morning before her lessons, not to request treats for Bo, as one might expect, but to ask Auntie Song detailed questions about what young livestock generally ate, how their diet ought to change as they grew, and whether the kitchen's stores contained anything that might supplement what Old Chen was already providing, arriving each morning with a small folded list of questions she had apparently composed the night before.

"She wants to understand it properly," Auntie Song reportedly said, with some evident admiration. "Most children her age want to feed an animal because it's fun to watch it eat. She wants to feed him right because she's decided that's her job now, and she takes her jobs seriously."

I found, reading this report, that I recognized something of myself in the description, and something considerably better than myself as well. I had approached the business of governing an empire, in my own youth, with a similar determination to understand things properly rather than simply perform the appearance of understanding them. I had not expected to see the same instinct emerge, so early and so completely, in a six-year-old girl kneeling in stable straw with milk on her sleeve. I do not think I had fully understood, before that spring, what kind of daughter I actually had. I would spend a great many volumes after this one continuing to find out, and I confess I have never once regretted the length of that particular education, however unexpected its beginning.

— THE END —

A Yumes Parlor Original

PAW ORDER: WEST PAC TAILS

Volume 7: Goggles Down

By Yume

A Yumes Parlor Original

Military Fiction / Action-Comedy / Anthropomorphic Animal

Every dog's got a vanity. Even the tough ones. Especially the tough ones, honestly. This is the volume where Trigger's finally caught up with him, in front of God, the fleet, and several hundred very confused fishermen.

Go…

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A YUMES PARLOR ORIGINAL

PONPO AND THE TINY SHRINES

Volume 7: THE BROKEN TORII

By Yume

Little ones, gather close — tonight’s story took Ponpo three whole days, and he’d tell you himself it was worth every minute.

At the top of a hill that most people had stopped climbing stood a miniature torii gate, cracked clean through and fallen sideways into the weeds. I…

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TUTUPEEP & DODO

Volume 7: The Hobsboggle Market Meltdown

There came a day when Tutu's pantry reached a state he could only describe as "structurally concerning" — three eggs, half a wheel of stale cheese, and a jar of pickled something he could no longer identify or trust — which meant, whether he liked it or not, a trip to Hobsboggle Market. He did not like it. He went anyway.

He'd learned, by this point, that leaving Dodo home alone resulted in outcomes ranging from mildly chewed furniture to a genuinely alarming incident involving his good boots and a very confused garden snail, so she came along, tucked into a sling he'd fashioned from an old scarf, riding against his chest with the serene confidence of a very small, very fluffy passenger who fully expected the world to entertain her.

The market did not disappoint her. It rarely did.

They had made it perhaps thirty feet past the entrance arch — past the singing cauldron stall, past a Gnome-Critter hawking self-stirring soup pots — when Dodo spotted it: a floating gourd, enormous and orange and covered in a fine dusting of enchanted glitter, bobbing gently in the air above a produce cart, tethered by nothing more than a shimmering thread of stabilizing magic. It was, by any objective measure, the single most fascinating object in the entire market, and Dodo's enormous blue eyes locked onto it with the unblinking intensity of a creature who had found her life's purpose.

"No," Tutu said, already sensing where this was going, tightening his grip on the sling. "We are here for eggs. Not gourds. Eggs."

Dodo lunged.

It was not a large lunge, given her size, but it was enough — enough to tip Tutu off balance as he reached for a basket of said eggs, enough to send his elbow crashing into a neighboring display of singing apples, which erupted into a discordant chorus of alarmed musical shrieking as they rolled in all directions across the cobblestones. He staggered sideways, trying to catch an apple mid-roll, and instead put his foot squarely through the bottom shelf of a cart belonging to a Gnome-Critter who had, until roughly four seconds ago, been having a perfectly pleasant day selling enchanted buttons.

The cart tipped. Buttons — hundreds of them, in every color and size imaginable — cascaded across the market square in a glittering, rolling flood, several of them attaching themselves, with a small magical pop, to the nearest available fabric, which happened to be Tutu's vest, his sleeves, and, memorably, one directly onto his left ear.

"MY BUTTONS," bellowed the Gnome-Critter, in a voice considerably larger than his stature would suggest, already scrambling after the rolling tide.

"I'm so sorry, I'll pay for—" Tutu began, reaching for his coin pouch, only to feel Dodo lunge a second time, this time successfully wriggling free of the sling entirely and tumbling toward the floating gourd with the single-minded joy of a creature reunited with a long-lost friend.

What followed was, by later market gossip, one of the more memorable ten minutes in recent Hobsboggle history. Tutu chased Dodo through the wreckage of singing apples, still-rolling buttons, and one increasingly irate Gnome-Critter, knocking over a stack of self-stirring soup pots along the way (they began stirring themselves furiously in protest, spraying broth in a wide, defensive arc), tripping over his own ears twice, and finally catching up to Dodo just as she reached the gourd's cart — only to watch, helplessly, as she gave the shimmering tether a single enthusiastic peck, severing the stabilizing thread entirely.

The gourd, freed from its magic, dropped like an actual, ordinary, un-enchanted pumpkin, directly onto the cart's owner, a mild-mannered Fox-Critter who let out a startled "oof" and sat down heavily in a puddle of soup-pot broth.

By the time the dust — and the buttons, and the broth, and one final rogue singing apple that had rolled the length of the market before finally, mercifully, running out of momentum — had settled, Tutu found himself standing in the wreckage of no fewer than four separate stalls, coin pouch entirely empty, having paid for a cart of buttons, a bruised Fox-Critter's afternoon, a replacement gourd tether, and, for reasons he still didn't fully understand, half a dozen singing apples that had gone slightly hoarse from all the shrieking.

Dodo, meanwhile, had settled contentedly onto the cobblestones a few feet away, entirely unscathed, cooing softly over a small, sparkly button that had rolled to a stop directly in front of her — not even one of the fancy ones, just a plain, unremarkable green button, which she had nonetheless decided was the single greatest treasure in all the Enchanted Woods.

Tutu looked down at his empty coin pouch. He looked at the button in Dodo's beak. He looked at the general, glittering, broth-soaked ruin of the market square around them, several vendors still picking up their scattered wares with pointed, unimpressed glances in his direction.

"You," he said, sitting down heavily on an overturned crate, "you cost me everything. Every single coin I had. For a button you already had a dozen of at home."

Dodo chirped happily, entirely unbothered by the accusation, and held the button up toward him with obvious pride, as if offering to share her singular treasure with the one creature in the market who mattered.

Tutu looked at the button. He looked at her enormous, hopeful blue eyes. He felt something in his chest do a small, traitorous, entirely unwelcome thing.

"Fine," he said, taking it from her with two claws, examining it in the afternoon light as though it were something genuinely precious. "It is a very nice button, I suppose."

Dodo trilled with delight and climbed straight back into her sling, mission, whatever it had been, thoroughly and triumphantly accomplished.

PICO OF MIYAJIMA

A Yume's Parlor Original

🦌

Volume VII

Pico and the Samurai Boat Tour

It should be said, before this volume properly begins, that the narrator does not believe in coincidence where Pico is concerned, and the timing of what follows supports that position rather well.

The very next morning after his third and final failed attempt to board Yamad…

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A YUMES PARLOR ORIGINAL

KUMO NO MACHI

Cloud Town

Volume 6

The Miner's Gamble

By Yume

The job posting, tacked to a board at a supply platform two days out of Kaze-uta, was blunt in a way Samson had come to associate with jobs nobody particularly wanted: FERRY PILOT NEEDED. SHALLOWS RUN. PAYS ACTUAL CURRENCY, NOT TRADE. ASK FOR TORBEN.

Actual currency was, at th…

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The Ledger Kaeru

Volume Ten: The Sanctuary of Filth

Remastered Edition

A Yumes Parlor Original

We were never the mistake.

We were what was here

when everything else moved on.

Part One: The Abbot's Offer

The abbot had been walking for eleven days to find him, and his feet showed it.

Kaeru noticed the feet first — the specific quality of blistering that develops i…

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The Ledger Kaeru

Volume Nine: The Cleansing Purge

Remastered Edition

A Yumes Parlor Original

What is witnessed cannot be unwitnessed.

What is written in the right spirit

is not paper. It is stone.

Part One: The Shape of Being Followed

He knew someone was following the same route before he saw who it was.

The texture of a settlement changes when something has hap…

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The Ledger Kaeru

Volume Eight: The Collector of Names

Remastered Edition

A Yumes Parlor Original

A name taken is not a name destroyed.

A name given freely

is beyond taking.

Part One: The Six Absences

He noticed the gaps before he understood them.

He had been on the road for nearly four months when the pattern began to emerge, and it emerged in the way that patte…

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JUST FUCKING DO IT

Wake Up. Stop Whining. Start Building.

VOLUME 6

Start Before You're Ready

You'll never feel ready. Start anyway.

A Wake-Up Call in 14 Volumes

Ready Is A Moving Target

You've been waiting to feel ready. More experience, more savings, more certainty, one more course, one more sign. Here's the problem with waiting for ready: it's not a fixed po…

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A Yumes Parlor Original

BOBBY & PEPÉ

Season One, Episode Six

Volume 6: The Heatwave — The Dingo Pups

✦ ✦ ✦

The heatwave had sat over the Daintree for six days straight, the kind of heat that turned the cane fields brittle and silenced the birdsong by ten in the morning. Even the cicadas had given up. The creek behind Bobby's property, usually a stubborn br…

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