Story associated with this leak: Nobody Plans This

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Email 1 — The junior clerk to Rosalind

From: Julie, Junior Clerk, Records & Filing, Soulmate Registry 

To: Rosalind Starweaver, Senior Fairy Godmother 

Subject: Permission to extend lunch break (one occasion, urgent)

Madam Starweaver,

I'm writing to request permission to extend my lunch break by thirty minutes today. I know the standing rule. I would not ask if it were not exceptional.

On my walk back from the courier office this morning, I came across a bakery I have never seen before. It was not there last week. The window display included pies of a kind I have not encountered in any of my training materials — they shimmer faintly, the crusts braid themselves while you watch, and one of them sang. Briefly. A short phrase, possibly in Old Fae, possibly in something older. I did not catch the words.

The proprietor was handing samples to passers-by. I did not take one. I came back to the office first, because the magic on the display is unfamiliar to me and I thought it should be logged before I touched anything.

I would like to return at lunch and examine the pies properly. If permitted, I will document the bakery's location, the apparent magical signature, and the proprietor's response to a polite enquiry. I will not consume any product without further authorisation.

I'm aware this is an unusual request. I would not ask if the bakery were ordinary. It is not.

Respectfully, Julie, Junior Clerk - Records & Filing

Email 2 — Rosalind's forward to Cashmere

From: Rosalind Starweaver 

To: Cashmere, First Elite Class, Field Operations 

Subject: FW: Permission to extend lunch break (one occasion, urgent) Priority: Quiet. Catastrophically quiet. The quietest priority this office has ever issued, including the one where the Tooth Sprite collective union went on strike.

Cashmere.

Read the forwarded note from the new clerk before you do anything else. She has good instincts. She came back to the office instead of biting into a singing pie, which already puts her in the top quartile of operatives in this building. The bar is, frankly, on the floor. Half my field staff would have eaten the pie, written about it in their diary, and asked questions in the afterlife.

So. The bakery.

Let us not pretend.

You know exactly which bakery she has found. I know which bakery she has found. The bakery knows it has been found, and the bakery is thrilled, which is the problem.

I am going to walk us both through this in writing, slowly, the way one explains a small accident to an insurance adjuster, because I want it on a record that will mysteriously fail to exist by the time anyone with a celestial subpoena comes looking for it.

The Hansel and Gretel matter was outside my jurisdiction. You know this because I told you it was outside my jurisdiction. I told you twice. I told you a third time using small words and one of those big diagrams with the arrows. The witch had a contract older than my office. The children were inside the boundary of her right to take them. The version of the story the world remembers — the candy house, the oven, Gretel pushing, the safe return home, the woodcutter weeping with joy, the stepmother conveniently dying off-page — that is the version that got written. It is not the version that was queued.

The version that was queued was significantly worse.

I made the appropriate decision, which was to file a polite objection and stand down. You made the inappropriate decision, which was to ascend, on your own initiative, to a level of the celestial hierarchy you are not credentialed for, attend an event you were not invited to, and remove from the table of the gods one (1) pie.

A pie, Cashmere.

You stole a pie.

From the gods.

I want to be clear that I am not asking you to confirm this. I am stating it for the purposes of my own emotional regulation. The gods serve a quite limited high tea menu and a missing pie is the sort of thing that gets noticed by exactly the entities you do not want noticing you. I have personally, in my professional capacity as Senior Fairy Godmother, spent the last two hundred and some years pretending I do not know which cat did this. I have aged. Visibly. On the inside.

I am not going to ask how you got in. I have theories. I am not entertaining them.

You fed the pie to Gretel. I know this because the binding the witch had laid on her broke in a way that no terrestrial counter-magic in our catalogue can produce, and divine magic of that order does not arrive in a forest by accident. I know you helped with the oven, because Gretel was nine years old and seventy pounds and the witch was neither, and the public file does not survive five minutes of forensic scrutiny by anyone who has met a nine-year-old. I have, for the record, never met a nine-year-old capable of leveraging an adult witch into an oven unassisted, and I have been doing this job since the Plantagenets.

I have, also for the record, never said any of this out loud. I am writing it now because I need you to know that I know, and I need you to know that I have always known, and I need you to know that I have never minded. The witch was foul. The children were small. You did what my office would not let me do, and I have lived with my gratitude in private, the way a senior administrator lives with most of her best feelings.

But.

The pie was not finished.

You did not eat the rest yourself, because — credit where it is due — you knew exactly what was in it and you are not stupid. You left the crumbs on the forest floor. You probably thought they would decompose. They did not decompose. Divine pastry does not decompose. It composts. It roots. It waits.

It has waited.

Cashmere, the crumbs have grown into a bakery.

A whole one. With a window. With braiding crusts and singing pies. With a proprietor, whoever or whatever that is — possibly an emergent property of the magic itself, possibly a fae opportunist who stumbled onto it and is now in deep trouble without knowing why. The clerk found it on her lunch break. She will not be the last. Magic of that order, sitting in shop window, offering free samples — we have a window of perhaps a week before someone with the wrong bloodline eats the wrong slice and we have a situation.

I will handle the situation. I have a budget for situations. I will not be handling you, because handling you is approximately as productive as handling weather, and after two centuries of acquaintance I have made my peace with that.

Here is what I need from you.

Lay. Low.

I mean it. I mean it more than I have meant anything since the unfortunate Cinderella audit. Do not go near that bakery. Do not be seen on that street. Do not be seen on adjacent streets. If anyone — and I mean anyone, up to and including our own operatives, up to and including the clerk if she develops the wrong kind of curiosity, up to and especially including any unusually well-dressed strangers asking polite questions about historical pastry — questions you about the bakery, the pies, the original case, the forest, the witch, the children, the oven, divine catering, or anything within six conceptual degrees of any of this, you will play cat.

I cannot stress this enough.

Play. Cat.

Sit on a windowsill. Stare at the wall. Find a sunbeam and commit to it. Lick one paw with the focused, mid-distance gaze of a creature who has never heard of pastry, does not know what a god is, and has no opinion on the events of 1812. If pressed, you may yawn. You may, at your discretion, walk away with your tail in the air. You are not — and I want this in writing, except I do not — to attempt a witty deflection, a clever misdirection, or any of your three favourite gambits that begin with the phrase "well, technically." Technically is what got us here.

You are a cat, Cashmere. Lean in. You have spent two hundred years building plausible deniability into your entire species and this is the moment that investment pays out.

If this goes badly — and I am hoping with what remains of my professional optimism that it does not — I will deny everything. I will deny knowing you. I will deny knowing the Hansel and Gretel file exists. If a god shows up, I will offer them tea and a very thorough tour of the wrong filing cabinets until they get bored. I have been doing this since the Plantagenets, as I may have mentioned, and I have a truly deep bench of distractions.

You have done enough for those children. You did it beautifully. You did it without authorisation. You did it using divine pastry obtained via felony. I have loved every minute of it. Let the next case be someone else's, and let the pie crumbs be, for once in their very long magical lives, somebody else's problem.

Rosalind

P.S. I am authorising the clerk's extended lunch. She demonstrated more situational awareness in one morning than I have seen from some operatives in their entire careers. If she comes back from that bakery with anything other than a written report, I am promoting her. If she comes back with a pie, I am demoting her, eating the pie, and pretending I never received it. Do not tell her I said that.

P.P.S. The bakery is singing in Old Fae. I do not know what it is saying. I would like to keep not knowing. Please do nothing that will require either of us to find out.