And then Sally was gone, and everything had fallen apart, and I’d been trapped, friendless, in a town where my father basically ran things, and where an ancient bargain with the crossroads had seemed destined to consign me to a life of forced heterosexuality in order to uphold their promise to my long-dead ancestor: that there would always be a sorcerer in New Gravesend to protect the place.

  Not that we’d been doing much protecting. I didn’t even know what my ancestor had been expecting us to protect the town from, and since that was one of the things no one had bothered to write down, I was probably never going to know.

  But that was all very long ago and far away, and the mice were still cheering as jubilantly as football fans who’d just been informed that their team was going all the way to the Super Bowl. I groaned again, pulling my head out from under the pillow and glaring at the vent. The temptation to yell down it for them to shut the hell up was strong. It wouldn’t do any good. If the mice knew I was awake, they’d take that as an invitation to swarm my room and try to rope me into whatever ridiculous rodent event they were currently celebrating. I’d fallen afoul of that tendency a few times before I learned better, and I wasn’t making that mistake again.

  I grabbed my phone from the nightstand, swiping my finger across the screen to check the time. Not quite eight o’clock. Charming. At least it wasn’t before seven this time, or—horror of horrors—before five. They’d only done that twice so far. The rest of the house tended to rise before I did, but even they had their limits, and rodent choirs at four thirty in the morning exceeded those limits.

  Dropping the phone to my pillow, I rolled out of bed, grabbing a pair of sweatpants from the floor and yanking them on. Having my own bedroom was a luxury I hadn’t been fully expecting when a strange girl who set things on fire with the power of her mind had informed me that I was her brother now and we were leaving. To be honest, I didn’t know what I had been expecting, only that I needed to get out of New Gravesend, and I’d just watched her beat the living crap out of the crossroads, which made her my best chance at ever seeing Sally again.

  That was four years and a lot of rodent rituals ago, and the idea that I might have considered arguing with her had become literally unthinkable somewhere in the middle of all that. And sure, it was only four years on the calendar, since I’d skipped almost a whole year in the middle by getting myself shunted to a parallel universe that was running according to a different clock, but—

  But I was happy here, in Portland. Mice and all.

  My name is James Price, originally James Smith. I’m from Maine, and now I live in Oregon, where I’ve been forcibly adopted by a family of professional cryptozoologists. Despite the way that sounds, I came pretty much willingly, and I like it here. My new family, such as it is, is a lot nicer than my old one. My dad was an asshole who hated basically everything about me, and my mother died a long time ago, leaving me alone with him. Here, I get siblings, both legal and honorary, parental figures who don’t entirely suck, and an extended network of cousins and friends.

  And the mice, of course. Mustn’t forget about the mice. They certainly won’t allow it.

  Rubbing my face with one hand, I fished a sweatshirt out of the hamper and pulled it on, heading for the door. When all else fails, choose breakfast.

  I opened the door and found myself confronted with chaos.

  My room was on the second floor, along with most of the other bedrooms, and had pretty solid soundproofing in the walls—a necessity when your residents aren’t always human, and sometimes have to deal with some pretty severe nightmares. So apart from the mice, nothing that was going on in the house had managed to reach me before I was ready to get up, and rarely had I been as impressed by that soundproofing as I was just then.

  What sounded like everyone in the house was yelling. Not screaming: shouting to be heard above one another. Jane and Annie were the loudest, and I felt a small spark of pride at the fact that my adopted sister could out-shout so much of her family. Out-shouting even the quietest Price is an accomplishment. I could hear Evelyn and Kevin shouting under the two of them, along with Elsie and—more surprisingly—Artie, who didn’t usually come to the house these days. I amended my assumption that everyone in the house was yelling. Sam wasn’t. Sam was, if anything, unusually quiet.

  I considered going back into my room, where the only noise I’d have to deal with would be the incessant cheering of the mice. I am not a morning person. I am also not an incurious person, and something that could cause this much chaos while setting the mice off was something I probably needed to know about. I took a deep breath, and started to descend the stairs.

  Everybody was in the living room, for values of “everybody” that didn’t include those members of the family who were currently out of the state, or either of the two ghosts who popped in and out according to their own schedules. In addition to the people I’d heard yelling before, and Sam, who I’d assumed would be there if Annie was, Jane’s husband, Ted, was leaning against the wall with a cup of coffee in his hand. He raised it in greeting when I reached the bottom of the stairs, making him the only person to directly acknowledge my arrival.

  “Morning, Jim,” he said, voice warm.

  I don’t normally like being called Jim—or worse, Jimmy—but it’s different when Ted does it. He manages to make shortening my given name sound like a secret for just the two of us to keep, the sort of innocent private joke that I used to have with my high school teachers. The ones who didn’t resent the way I kept pissing off the rest of the kids.

  I drifted toward him, not disrupting the ongoing argument in the slightest. It seemed to be the two households against each other, currently represented by Jane and Annie, who were shouting directly at one another. No chill here. Kevin, who looked like he hadn’t slept in days, was trying to separate them, while Evelyn yelled for the both of them to calm down. Elsie was yelling at Annie for yelling at her mom, and Artie was just yelling random things, like he wanted to be included but wasn’t sure precisely how that was supposed to happen.

  He’s been like that since we got home from our impromptu visit to the Dimension of Giant Bugs, bringing a bunch of cuckoo kids and a spider large enough to tell the square-cube law to go fuck itself as involuntary souvenirs. He got hurt right before we made the transit back, and while Sarah did her best to repair him, I’m not sure it worked quite right. I’m not sure it could have.

  “What’s going on, Ted?” I asked, looking at the mug in his hand with undisguised avarice.

  “Family disagreement,” he said. “There’s more coffee in the kitchen. You’ll need it. When they get like this, they can keep going for hours.”

  “Got it, thanks,” I said, and made for the kitchen.

  Eventually someone was going to tell me why everyone was angry, and then maybe I could be angry too. In the meantime, there was coffee, and that was even better than inexplicable rage.

  ACADIA

  When a new Lineage of the Faith is born, the first tier of clergy must be Plucked from other Lines, or recruited from the Novices, many of whom are too young as yet to understand what is being asked of them. When the Precise Priestess did inform us that she had acquired for herself a Brother, who must carry his own Lineage, we were confronted with a question we had not asked since the Well-Groomed Priestess came before us with a new daughter, already old enough that many of her Truths had been lost to Time:

  Was he to be Honored as a God, as if he had been with us since the day of his Birth, even as we would honor any other Brother to a Priestess named and known, or was he to be accepted at some lesser level within the pantheon? The Rites for acquiring a God or Priestess through mating were clear. The Rites of Adoption were less so, as they had been utilized only the once, and then only under a degree of threat which we would not care to experience again.

  For lo, did the Well-Groomed Priestess not say unto us, “This Is Enid And She Is My Daughter Now, And Should You Choose To Disrespect Her, You Choose Also To Disrespect Me?”

  But the Precise Priestess made no such declarations, only gave him unto us and commanded that we should Figure Our Shit Out, as she had Better Things To Do.

  I was a dedicated novice then, chosen to serve as a member of her faithful and to recite her litanies into the open spaces of the Future. I, along with four of my number, was Called to serve the new line, for was it not that she had brought him forth, and was it not thus that his senior clergy should come from her ranks? Another four were drawn from the clergy of the Patient Priestess, as the last to be so Welcomed, and the rest from the novices who had been studying to pledge the Well-Groomed Priestess. So we had come together.

  We are a new clergy, second only to those who now serve the Calculating Priestess, but newer in many ways, for she has been with us since her childhood, while the Stolen God came before us Already Grown, and so we learn his Mysteries only as he chooses to Share them with us. We may never know all that we desire to know of him, and that is sad, but it will not keep me from serving him with Honor and with Joy.

  On the Day of Waffles, I was among those in the kitchen, awaiting his rising, even as the rest of the clergy sang a song of celebration in Honor of the New Mystery which had been in part unveiled to us. I sat near to the Toaster, groomed to Honor the lineage I served, a chunk of coffee cake clutched between my paws, nibbling at my own breakfast while I awaited the God’s arrival.

  When at last he came, I sat up as tall as I could, and with rapture, joined the choir of all those so gathered, greeting him as was only right and proper. “HAIL!” we cried, pulling the form of proper address from all we knew to be true, all we had known over our many years in service to the greater Faith.

  “HAIL TO THE RISING OF THE STOLEN GOD!”

  Wild cheering followed, ritual on the parts of the other clergies, relieved on the part of ours, for we must see his reaction when he was told of the night before, we must see if he could Understand.

  He groaned and scrubbed at his face with one hand, setting his hair even farther askew than the night itself had managed. “Not yet, okay? I need at least a cup of coffee before I have to deal with rodent religion.”

  “At least” was not a number, but it was the beginnings of a Boundary, and we have had plenty of time to learn the ways of respecting Boundaries. We quieted our cheering, and those who were associated with clergies who took no specific interest in this new Mystery dispersed, carrying their breakfasts into the walls and thence to other parts of the house. The Observers to the Family Fight had already been chosen from among the most senior of the clergies involved, who could be trusted to listen calmly and recite what they had seen and heard without having missed any essential Parts. In seconds, the Stolen God was alone with his own clergy, six of us scattered among the cupboards and counters, all watching him.

  He proceeded to the Machine of Coffee and prepared a mug, adding to it Hazelnut Milk and Honey before he wrapped his hands around it and blew upon the surface, then drank. The air grew slightly cooler as he did so. Like our beloved Precise Priestess, he is of the Line of Elements, but unlike her, or the God of Inconvenient Timing, he calls upon the Cold. We serve a mighty god, that he will never burn his lips upon his drink, nor scald his tongue upon his meat!

  Leaning against the counter, he looked directly upon me—upon me, a simple member of his clergy—and asked, in a weary voice, “Do you know who threw the fox into the henhouse?”

  My first impulse was to say I had no way of knowing, as the family has not kept chickens for food or eggs in many generations. But I have lived alongside them all my days, and am wiser than an untrained novice. Instead, I pushed my whiskers forward and asked, “Human idiom, yes?”

  “Yes,” he confirmed, and took another drink of coffee before looking at me more closely. “Acadia, right?”

  Like all among the divine, the Stolen God is unable to speak our True Names, for they twist and bedevil the tongues of all large beings. Like the Precise Priestess who brought him before us, he has learned to tell us one from the next, and given us Names he can speak, with our permission, that he might know who he Addresses. It is an honor to be so Named, and I am Proud of the Name he has given me, which he says I share with one of the most beautiful places in the land of Maine, from whence he originally came.

  “Yes,” I squeaked, jubilantly. “You are truly Kind and Glorious to have Remembered me!”

  “I remember you all the time,” he said, and drank more of his coffee. It must be a magical brew, for it is reserved for the grown among the divinities, and never to be shared with mice, or with children. “Why is there a carnival going on in the vents?”

  “Carnival?” I looked at him with polite confusion. “This is not the time of Carnival. We celebrate but one such festival, all apart from the place, which has been home and harbor now to three generations of the divine, and in whose name so many feasts are held.”

  He paused. “Actual Carnival? Like the Catholics?”

  “I don’t know what a Catholic is, but it is a great celebration, filled with joy and honor,” I said gravely. “It lasts five days—”

  “That sounds nice.”

  “—which is the time the Kindly Priestess lingered in her bed after her husband, the Cruelest God, struck her about the head and sent her falling to the floor. She never woke. Her child, the Well-Groomed Priestess, smuggled us from the home upon her mother’s death, accepting at once the suit of the God of Hard Work and Sunshine, which she had previously Disdained, for did she not say, ‘Better To Be Wed To A Carew Than Left Here With A Bastard’?” I preened my whiskers, momentarily overcome by the revelation of such a deep mystery. The Stolen God was forbidden none of the teachings, as he would one day take his Place in the Heavens among the very ones we spoke of, but still, to hear him invoke Carnival had been a shocking thing.

  From the way he now stared at me, I was not the only one to feel the weight of the mystery I had released into the air. His mouth worked for a moment with no sound issuing forth before he put his coffee gingerly onto the counter and asked, “Are you telling me that . . . wait, wait, I’ve got this one, the Kindly Priestess, that was Elizabeth, wasn’t it? The first member of the family to take care of you?”

  He paused then, waiting for my nod.

  “Are you telling me that Elizabeth’s husband killed her, and so her daughter grabbed the colony and . . . what, ran to the first man who would have her? And you don’t see anything wrong with that?”

  “It is Forbidden to speak against the Teachings,” I said, clutching my tail between my paws.

  “So you don’t get to have opinions?”

  His distress was feeding into my own. “There are reasons we do not speak of Carnival outside the period of observance,” I said. “I would not Presume . . .”

  “Oh, please. Please presume.”

  I twisted my tail between my paws, the solidity of it, the warmth, and tried to find the words. He was a God, brought before us by a beloved Priestess, who had seen in him something of the familial even before he was accepted. He had come with her when she was Returned to us, when we had feared she might be Lost Forever. And his place in the Heavens was assured.

  I took a deep breath. “The Cruelest God has been cast from the Pantheon,” I said. “Deicide is the greatest of Sins, and we could no more worship one who commits such an Act than we could break entirely with Faith. We do not teach his Mysteries. His clergy has been allowed to go silent, his Teachings forgotten.”

  The chapel of his divinity yet stood, rebuilt each time we had moved as a colony, constructed as a reminder that our gods were not, could not be, perfect. True, once he was cast out, he became no longer a god, and had never truly been. But the Kindly Priestess . . . her like would never come again, would not be seen within my lifetime or any other. She was the mother of all we had and all that we were, and she had erred by taking him for her mate, erred even to the point of her own destruction. We could not forget that—we were Aeslin, and Aeslin do not forget. But the chapel was a reminder that once, the greatest in our pantheon had acted in error; once, she had been wrong, and had died for her mistake. For that, and that alone, we would remember him forever.

  But his chapel was a place of silence and shame, and no clergy walked there in his honor, and no rituals were recited in his name. Thus is the censure of the Aeslin.

  “Then why don’t you call him by his name?”

  “Because,” I said, with utter calm. “We have intentionally Forgotten it.”

  JAMES

  I stared at the mouse, trying to reconcile what I’d been told was true about the colony with what she had just said. She looked utterly calm, no longer twisting her tail between her paws, watching me with unblinking eyes.

  I needed more coffee before I could cope with this. Recovering my mug, I took a long, slow drink, then said, “I was told that Aeslin mice never forgot anything.” That had been the first thing Annie said when we reached Portland and my meeting the mice went from a problem for the future to a problem for real damn soon now. Don’t do anything embarrassing in front of the mice, or they will absolutely remember it forever, and probably develop a holiday around it. They seemed to enjoy celebrating people’s worst moments a hell of a lot more than they enjoyed their best ones.

  “We do not,” Arcadia confirmed.

  “But you just told me that you forgot his name.”

  “That is truth.”

  “How can both things be true?”

  She took a deep breath. “An individual mouse, such as I, a lowly member of the clergy, is unable to forget anything I have experienced or heard spoken. These things are a part of me, indelible and immutable. This is truth. But the colony can choose, in times of great trial, to decree that knowledge be not preserved.”