The older maunt nodded but didn’t look up. Her eyes were on the fingers of the girl playing.

“I was hoping to find Sister Cook,” said the Superior Maunt.

“She’s in the mushroom cellar, harvesting for a fungal soup. Shall I fetch her?” asked one of them.

“No,” said the Superior Maunt, looking one to the other. “Are you all first-years?”

“Shhhh,” said the crone.

The Superior Maunt did not like being shhh’d. “Are you professed, the lot of you?”

“Shhhh, he’s coming.”

“Mother, I have work—” said the Superior Maunt. The sister in the chair raised her wrinkled hand. She had no fingerprints, no lifelines on her right hand—no identity, no history, nothing to read, as if her hand had been burned clean of individuality through some chastening flame.

Only one old biddy had this hand. “What are you on about, Mother Yackle?” asked the Superior Maunt.

The old creature didn’t answer, didn’t look up, but she did crook one hobbled finger skyward. The Superior Maunt turned. All kinds of romance and lore about visitors from the sky, from sacred scripture to rabble-rousing prophecies. The sky was hard to ignore.

It wasn’t the sky, though, that Mother Yackle was indicating, but one of the trees. Out of it fell a ruffling cascade, like a stack of ladies’ fans sliding silkily off a credenza. A scatter of brazen feathers, red winking. A gold eye set in a pear-shaped skull.

A crimson pfenix! Male, to judge by the plumage. The species was rumored to have been nearly hunted to extinction. The last known colonies of pfenix lived in the very south of Oz, where the watery acres of marsh began at last to dry out, and a strip of jungle thought to be seven miles wide still defeated travelers to this day. This fellow—blown off course, perhaps, or deranged by disease?

The pfenix landed on the center of the musical instrument that the third girl was playing.

She looked up in some alarm; she hadn’t been attending anything but her music. The pfenix craned his head and fixed first one, then another golden eye on the Superior Maunt.

“If you’re looking for the talented one,” said the pfenix—well, the Pfenix, if he spoke—

“this is the one for you. I’ve been watching for an hour, and she takes little notice of anything but her music.”

The women said nothing. Talking Birds were not uncommon, but they rarely bothered to speak to human beings. What a specimen this Pfenix was! His rack of tail feathers fanned out laterally, like a turkey’s, but a Pfenix just as easily could unfurl his close-coiled camouflage feathers, which spiked globally all about him, affording a sort of private chamber of airy, concealing, fernlike fronds. A mature male Pfenix aloft in full display could look like a shimmering globe in the air.

“Do you know the boy who has been brought here?” asked the Superior Maunt, beginning to govern her own awe.

“I don’t know any boys. I don’t consort with your kind at all. I am a Red Pfenix,” he added, as if they might not have taken it in.