A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

  We just don’t tell anybody about the eating-rats thing.

  Two

  Constable Alphonse was tall and broad and red-faced. He came into the kitchen, stopped, and said, sounding surprised “There’s a dead body in here!”

  “That’s what I told you,” said Uncle Albert behind him, sounding aggrieved.

  “Well, yes, but…” The Constable trailed off, but still made it abundantly clear that he’d expected a hysterical member of the public to be getting upset about nothing, not that there would be a genuine dead body in a respectable bakery.

  Aunt Tabitha took charge. “It’s a dead body all right. Mona found it this morning when she came in. Have a sweet bun.”

  Constable Alphonse took a sweet bun, chewed it thoughtfully, and decided to go for a second opinion.

  Constable Montgomery was also tall, also broad, but instead of being red-faced was rather sallow. He ate three sweet buns, confirmed that yes, indeed, it was a dead body, and then he and Alphonse stood in the kitchen in silence until Aunt Tabitha testily suggested that maybe they should call for the body-wagon.

  “We’ll need the coroner,” said Montgomery, and helped himself to another sweet bun.

  “The coroner, yep,” agreed Alphonse.

  They went out.

  “Better put in another tray of sweet buns,” said Aunt Tabitha heavily. “And a pot of tea, I think. Looks like we’ll be all morning about this.”

  The coroner, when he arrived, was a short man, bald and slabby, like a half-melted candle. He ate most of a tray of sweet buns by himself, but I didn’t get to hear what he said, because once they started moving the body, Aunt Tabitha shooed me out to the front of the store to take care of customers.

  Most of the customers are regulars (with their regular orders) and while they were disappointed that their muffins and bread and scones weren’t available, they were more worried that something was wrong. I repeated over and over again that everything was fine, somebody’d just broken into the kitchen and the police were looking at it, but nothing seemed to have been stolen, and we hoped to be open for business later today.

  “Nobody’s safe anymore,” said old Miss McGrammar (one lemon scone, no icing) with a sniff. She rapped her cane against the counter for emphasis. “Imagine, someone breaking into a bakery! We’ll all be murdered in our beds soon and no mistake!”

  “Some of us sooner than others,” muttered Master Elwidge the carpenter, (two cinnamon rolls, one loaf of cheese bread) winking at me.

  “Hmmph!” Miss McGrammar shook her cane at him. “You can laugh! Little Sidney, the boy of Mrs. Weatherfort who does the washing, he went missing just last week, and have they seen hide nor hair of him since?”

  “No?” I ventured.

  “They have not!” She smacked her cane down like a judge’s gavel.

  “Probably ran away to sea,” offered Brutus the chandler (one of whatever looks good today, m’dear, and a loaf of the day-old for the pigeons if you have it).

  “Run away to sea?” asked Miss McGrammar, scandalized. Elwidge put a hand over his mouth to stifle a smile. “Sidney? Nothing doing! He was a good boy, he was!”

  “Even good boys will be boys,” said Brutus mildly, rubbing his forearms. He had several faded tattoos, and I suspect he was speaking from personal experience.

  “Sidney Weatherfort wouldn’t run away to sea,” piped up the tiny Widow Holloway (one blackberry muffin, two ginger cookies, and thank you so much, dear Mona, you’re getting to look more like your poor dear mother every day, you know…) “He was a magicker, and you know how superstitious sailors are about taking on wizard-folk. They think the winds will fail if you’re carrying wizard-folk aboard.”

  “A magicker?” Elwidge looked surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

  “He was a mender,” said the Widow Holloway. “Little things. He fixed my glasses for me once when the lens cracked, and I thought I’d have to send away to Constantine to have a new one ground.” She smiled at me. “Small things, though. Nothing like as good as our Mona, here.”

  I flushed. As wizards go, I’m pretty much the bottom of the barrel. Even Master Elwidge, who’s got just enough magic to take knots out of wooden boards, is better than me. Dough and pastries are about all I can do. The great wizards, the magi that serve the Duchess, they can throw fireballs around or rip mountains out of the earth, heal the dying, turn lead into gold.

  Me, I can turn flour and yeast into tasty bread, on a good day. And occasionally make carnivorous sourdough starters.

  Still, they were all looking at me expectantly, and I didn’t have any food for them, so I felt like I ought to do something. I reached into the case and pulled out one of the day-old gingerbread men. It’s early spring, and much too late to still be carrying gingerbread men, but we’re the one bakery that stocks a few all year ’round, just for this purpose.

  I set the gingerbread man up on the counter and focused my attention on it. Live. Move. Up, up, up!

  The cookie woke up. It stretched its arms and pushed itself up onto its gingerbread feet. Then it bowed to the Widow Holloway, and to Miss McGrammar, threw a salute to Elwidge and Brutus, and walked along the counter until it came to a clear space.

  Dance, I ordered it.

  The gingerbread man began to dance a very respectable hornpipe. Don’t ask me where the cookies get the dances they do—this batch had been doing hornpipes. The last batch did waltzes, and the one before that had performed a decidedly lewd little number that had even made Aunt Tabitha blush. A little too much spice in those, I think. We had to add a lot of vanilla to settle them down.

  I don’t know how I learned to make cookies dance. Apparently I used to do it when I was very, very young. Aunt Tabitha still loves to tell the story of the time I was three and threw a tantrum in the bakery, and the entire case of gingerbread men came alive, even the ones that were still in the oven. Those started hammering on the door to be let out, and the already-baked ones ran through the store, giggling like little maniacs. “They got into the mouseholes,” she always says, “and it took us months to see the end of the little devils! That’s when I knew our Mona was meant to be a baker.” (Depending on how much she’s gotten into the kitchen sherry at that point, I get either an affectionate glance or a floury pat on the back. During rum-cake season, there is hugging.)

  Being a wizard is almost all like that—you don’t know what you can do until you actually do it, and then sometimes you aren’t sure what you just did. There aren’t teachers who can help you, either. Everybody’s different, and there’s usually only a couple dozen magic folk in any given city anyway. A few hundred if it’s a really big city. Maybe in the army the war-wizards get special training, but down here, it’s all trial and error and a lot of wasted bread dough.

  Anyway, the cookies. For me, it works best with cookies that are mostly people or animal shaped. Something to do with sympathetic magic, the parish priest said (six loaves of plain bread and—oh, all right, one berry scone, but don’t tell the abbot!) And it has to be something made of dough. The puppeteers who put on the Punch and Judy shows in the park can make wooden puppets dance, but I could focus on wood until I got a splitting headache and it’d just lie there. Dough is all I can do. It’s not a very useful skill.

  Still, it’s occasionally handy. If I can’t get something at the back of a shelf, I can usually get a gingerbread man to climb up there and push it forward until I can grab it. We bake up a new batch once a week. Aunt Tabitha says that if nothing else, it’s good advertising.

  I’ve heard—well, overheard, I wasn’t supposed to hear it—that there’s some people who won’t come into the bakery now that I’m here. I don’t know if dancing gingerbread bothers them, or if it’s the notion of a magicker baking their bread. I think Aunt Tabitha lost a couple of regulars when I started working, but she’s never said anything about it.

  I figure if they’ll let a little thing like that bother them, they deserve to miss out on the best sourdough in
the city.

  The gingerbread man finished his hornpipe and bowed to his audience, who applauded. Even Miss McGrammar unbent enough to smile, and she’s one of those people who watches magic-folk like they’re about to run mad or explode into a shower of frogs. The cookie blew a kiss to the Widow Holloway, who giggled as if she were a much younger woman, and then marched back to his bin.

  Thank you, I told it. That’s enough for now. It saluted me—this batch was rather military, now that I think of it, maybe we went heavy on the cardamom—and went back to being an ordinary cookie.

  “Very nice,” said Master Elwidge.

  “It’s not much,” I said, embarrassed.

  “Better than I can do,” he said, and winked at me. I know he’s another magicker, but I’ve never seen him do anything but straighten bent wood. Still, that’s got to be more useful than making cookies dance.

  When everyone had been shooed out of the shop—which took a while, in the case of Miss McGrammar—I went back into the kitchen, just in time to be accused of murder.

  Three

  “Wh-what?”

  There was a new man in the bakery, and he didn’t look like he was interested in tea or sweet buns. He was wearing dark purple robes past his ankles, and the hems weren’t dusty at all. The street sweepers do a good job, once the snow’s melted, but not that good. He definitely hadn’t walked here.

  “This is Inquisitor Oberon, Mona,” said Aunt Tabitha, in the very careful voice she uses for customers that are being difficult. I looked at her, and she made a very tiny shake of her head. A warning, obviously, but against what?

  “You, girl,” said Inquisitor Oberon, folding his arms. “You claim to have found the body, do you not?”

  “Uh…” That was a sneaky sort of question. “I found the body this morning when I came to work, yes.”

  “At four in the morning?” He looked at me over his glasses. They had tiny, fussy metal frames, the sort of glasses that a bird of prey would wear if its eyesight was starting to go.

  “I’m a baker,” I said. “I always come to work at four in the morning…” My voice sounded weak and scared, which was no good at all. I sounded like I was apologizing for the hours that bakers keep.

  “That’s true, Your Lordship,” rumbled Constable Alphonse, also sounding apologetic for having the temerity to confirm my story.

  From the Your Lordship, I knew that Inquisitor Oberon worked for the Duchess (if he’d been a member of the priesthood, he would have been Your Holiness, or Your Worship) but what a servant of the royal house was doing in our bakery—I mean, even if it was a murder, unless the victim was somebody really important, there was no reason for the royals to be involved. And if she was that important, why was she in our bakery, and why was she wearing mismatched socks?

  “You’re a wizard, are you not?” Oberon growled.

  “I…sort of…I guess…” I looked helplessly at Aunt Tabitha. “I mean, I can make bread rise…”

  “She’s a fine baker,” put in Aunt Tabitha firmly, as if this put to rest any question of guilt or innocence.

  “There is a taint of magic around this girl’s death,” said Inquisitor Oberon, with such authority that it didn’t occur to any of us until much later to ask how he knew, or what exactly that meant. “She was murdered here, in a bakery known to employ a wizard. A wizard who conveniently was the one to find the body.”

  The way he said “conveniently” made it sound like I’d been found standing over the body with a bloody baguette.

  “But—” I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. This was too stupid. “I don’t even know who she is! Why would I want to kill her?”

  “A question that we will aim to answer,” said Inquisitor Oberon, pushing his glasses back up and straightening his shoulders. “Coroner, remove the body. Constables, bring the girl to the palace.”

  I stopped laughing. This didn’t seem funny anymore. The horrible clenching in my stomach was coming back again.

  “The palace?” asked Constable Montgomery—not questioning, I could tell, but simply surprised. You didn’t bring prisoners to the palace. You took them to jail.

  Inquisitor Oberon sniffed, exactly like Miss McGrammar does when we run out of lemon scones. “Her Grace, the Duchess, is concerned with what she perceives as the rash of murders by wizards. She insists on overseeing these cases herself. Constables, if you please!”

  “But…” I said.

  “Now wait just a minute—” Aunt Tabitha said.

  “Oh, dear…” Uncle Alfred said.

  And despite what any of us said, I found myself pushed into a coach, and driven away to the palace.

  * * *

  The coach was dark wood and drawn by two large grey horses with platter-sized shoes and great soft drifts of hair around their hooves. They were very pretty horses. I can’t say the same about the coach. It had so many curlicues and carvings and finials and gargoyles and cherubs that it looked like a mahogany wedding cake. (We do wedding cakes occasionally. I hate them. It’s all tiny fiddly work, and while I can magic the dough so the icing goes on smoothly, it gives me a headache. Icing is not nearly as friendly as dough.)

  Since I was—apparently—a dangerous criminal, one of the constables rode in the coach with us, possibly to protect Inquisitor Oberon. I guess he might have thought he needed protection from a fourteen-year-old girl because I was a magicker. People get uneasy about that sort of thing. You can’t testify in court if you’re a magicker unless you’re holding a piece of iron, because iron is supposed to counteract magic, even though it doesn’t do anything of the sort. I use an iron skillet all the time. It’s just an old superstition.

  Frankly, an iron skillet would be a lot more dangerous than my magic at the moment. I could at least hit Oberon with it.

  To give credit where credit is due, Constable Alphonse looked awfully embarrassed by the whole thing.

  I sat miserably on the bench seat, with the Inquisitor opposite me, watching me like a constipated vulture, and the constable squeezed in next to me on the bench. It would have made more sense for me to sit next to the Inquisitor, since we were both smaller than Constable Alphonse, but somehow that didn’t seem like an option.

  I stared at my hands. There was flour on them. There was flour on my trousers, too, and sprinkled over the tops of my boots. There was flour on the constable’s boots as well.

  No flour had adhered to the hem of the Inquisitor’s robes. The robes apparently did not do flour.

  This was not the worst day of my life—the day when I was seven and I’d found out that both my parents had died of the Cold Fever had been the worst—but this was definitely in the running for second-worst.

  The coach rattled through the streets, every bump transmitted up the wheels and directly to our bones. For all the carvings, the carriage wasn’t very well sprung. There was probably a moral lesson in that, too, but I wasn’t in the mood. I folded my hands together.

  We rumbled past the big clocktower. The clock’s been stopped forever. (It’s a landmark, it doesn’t have to be functional.) Still, it couldn’t have been much past seven in the morning. Three hours. It had been a long three hours.

  If I were back in the bakery, I’d be almost done with the early baking, and I’d be starting on the second round: the delicate pastries; the tarts that require little individual crusts; mixing up all the stuff that needs to be chilled or settled overnight, so they’d be ready for tomorrow. The bread sponges would have to be set out to trap the wild yeast. With none of that done, Aunt Tabitha would have to work all day, and she’d still be short of bread tomorrow.

  “Will this take long?” I asked plaintively.

  “That will depend on your guilt or innocence,” said the Inquisitor, in a voice that was not reassuring. I stared out the window and wondered what the Duchess was going to do to me.

  Everybody calls our land a kingdom, but that’s just a hold-over from the old days, hundreds of years ago. There’s just a bunch of cities now,
each with their own little government and their own army and their own laws—“nation-states” if you want to use fancy words like the priest. Some of them have kings, but they only control the city and the land around it.

  Our city is called Riverbraid, because of the canals. We don’t have a king. We had a bunch of dukes and a couple of earls, and I think there was a prince at some point in there. For the last thirty years or so, the person in charge is the Duchess.

  The palace of the Duchess is built on a hill overlooking the city, or at least it looks like a hill. Actually it’s the remains of the former half-dozen palaces, which sank like everything else in the city, except for one which burned down. Because it’s higher, the streets slope up, and the buildings are more expensive because their basements don’t flood every spring. There are stories that underneath the palaces are old catacombs that used to be old dungeons, full of the ghosts of prisoners who were forgotten when the old buildings were walled up. There are also stories that there are still people under there, who live by eating rats, but nobody really believes them. Much.

  I really hoped that I wouldn’t have a chance to find out for myself.

  Four

  We arrived in the courtyard of the palace, which had high stone walls and pale stone cobbles the color of the grey horses’ coats. Inquisitor Oberon leapt out before the coach had come entirely to a halt.

  “Bring the prisoner,” I heard him say, as the door swung behind him.

  It took me a minute to realize that by “prisoner” he meant me. Probably that was pretty slow of me, but it had been a really awful morning, and some part of my brain, the bit that had been laughing hysterically earlier, still couldn’t get over how completely impossible this all was. Me, a prisoner? I baked bread. The worst thing I’d ever done in my life—the absolute and complete worst—was the time I was ten and snuck out with Tommy the butcher’s son and we stole a jug of sacrificial wine from the chapel down the street and drank it. I got sick as a dog. Tommy threw up. My headache the next day was so bad that it felt like divine retribution, but really, that isn’t the sort of thing that gets you dragged up before the Duchess.