Oops! The Chicken Prophet Saves The Day!

Faith is five years old and she is standing in the Marsh family's front hall with a chicken under her arm and a strip of white cloth tied round her forearm. The Marshes take her for a beggar who has wandered in for food. The chicken is a phoenix, and the cloth is a talisman that Charles paid twenty years of his own life for, so that his mother would come back from the coma she had been lying in. Charles had gone to Asleth Temple on a rumour that its master could read a person's lifespan and find them a way out of trouble. The master turned out to be a small girl holding a chicken. She showed what she could do, and everyone present knelt and begged to be saved. He brought her home. His mother, Madame Marsh, who has just come round, and his sister Bella call Faith a dirty child and tell her the chicken stinks. They grab her, rip the white cloth off her arm, and say the unlucky thing should be thrown out. Faith shakes her head and tells Madame Marsh that a punishment from heaven is on its way and she will not live out the month. Nobody in the house believes her except Charles. Things start going wrong for the family one after another, and then they come to her and beg her, as master of the temple, to save them. By that time the heads of other great houses are kneeling outside the Marsh gate waiting their turn. Faith tells the Marshes that what heaven has decided is hard to undo and that she is moving on to the next family to earn merit. She goes to the Porters, and after them to the Grants, and meets resistance in each house.