Surprise Cake for Blueberri

Tang's hollow always smelled like something good. Today it smelled like bananas and a small amount of panic.

Kiwi was measuring flour for the third time. Taro was in Tang's best hammock, which he had found and got into immediately on arriving, and which Tang had decided not to argue about. A recipe book lay open on the little clay shelf and nobody was looking at it.

"Stir it," said Kiwi.

"I am stirring it," said Tang.

"You're looking at it."

"I'm stirring it with my eyes."

Kiwi took a breath.

Nobody heard Blueberri coming. Monkeys are quiet when they want to be, and Blueberri had been swinging through the canopy on her way to the Berry Patch when she caught the smell. She stopped on a branch above the door, sniffed once, and dropped in.

"Hi," she said.

Tang grabbed a bowl and held it in front of the batter. Kiwi stepped in front of the recipe book. Taro did not move, which was normal.

"HI!" said Tang. Very loudly.

Blueberri looked at the bowl. She looked at Kiwi flattened against the shelf. She looked at Taro, who gave her a small wave. She looked at the date scratched on Tang's little wall calendar.

Oh, she thought. Oh.

And then, half a second later, the part that mattered: Tang has been planning this for a week and he is about to fall over.

"What are you making?" she said.

"...A thing," said Tang.

"Smells good."

She took an apron off the hook by the door. It had a hole in it and smelled faintly of last week's soup.

"Can I help?"

Kiwi's eyes went very wide. Tang's mouth opened and closed.

"...Sure," said Kiwi, carefully.

So Blueberri helped.

She mashed the bananas. She stirred when Tang was only looking at things. She handed Kiwi the salt before he asked for it, and then the spoon before he asked for that, and Kiwi blinked at her both times.

And the whole while, she was doing sums in her head that had nothing to do with baking.

Don't find the candles. Don't look at the calendar again. Don't be too good at this.

Because here was the trouble, and Blueberri turned it over and over while she stirred. They wanted to shout SURPRISE at her. Tang wanted it so much you could see it in his tail. And you cannot be surprised by something you worked out in four seconds flat, standing in a doorway, before anybody said a word.

She could keep the secret. She was very good at keeping secrets.

She just couldn't give herself the one thing the secret was for.

The batter came together at last, pale and smooth and right. And then Tang leaned over the bowl with a certain look on his face.

"It needs something," he said.

He reached up to his own shelf and took a great fistful of deep purple berries. His berries. The ones he always kept up there and never shared with anybody.

"Tang—" said Kiwi.

"They're her—" Tang stopped. Glanced at Blueberri. "They're good berries," he said, and dropped them in before anyone could argue.

Blueberri's throat went a little funny.

She had not seen that coming.

She had not seen it coming at all — not the berries, not that he'd been saving them, not that he would spend the whole jar on one bowl of batter without being asked. It was not on the calendar. It was nowhere in her sums.

The batter swirled purple. Then deeper purple. Then the exact blue-purple of a Wan Hundred Woods evening, which is a colour some people are named after.

The cake came out of Tang's clay oven completely, perfectly, unmistakably purple.

Kiwi stared at it. "...That's not what the recipe said."

"No," said Blueberri. "It's better."

They carried it to the Great Clearing as the afternoon turned gold. Jackfroot was already there, and had been for a while — you could tell from the small circular track worn into the grass. Cheri stood at the edge, perfectly still, exactly on time.

"SURPRISE!" everyone shouted — which was a little strange, since Blueberri had walked there with them and was holding the cake.

Tang shouted it loudest of all.

Blueberri set the cake on the flat rock and looked at them: Kiwi with flour on his ear, Tang practically humming, Taro who had somehow arrived before everyone despite leaving last, Jackfroot skidding to a stop after one final lap, Cheri giving a single nod as though this had all gone to plan.

She took the first slice.

Bananas and summer and Tang's purple berries and the warm smell of the hollow and every single one of them.

Later, when the cake was mostly gone and the clearing had gone quiet, Tang looked at the last purple slice, and then at Blueberri.

"Did you know?" he said. "The whole time?"

Blueberri picked up the last slice and held it out to him.

"Eat your cake, Tang," she said.

He did. And the lanterns came on one by one as the light went, until Wan Hundred Woods glowed soft and gold all around them.