“This is not over, little witch,” he growled.
And then it was over, because the Inquisitor seemed to realize that standing toe to toe with a baker girl was beneath his dignity, and he turned on his heel and stalked away.
A guard grabbed my shoulder, shaking his head. My shoulder was beginning to get awfully tired of this treatment. I was going to have finger marks on that arm for days. “You don’t know just how lucky you are, magicker,” he said ruefully, hurrying me down the hall.
The mad part of me did not want to let go of the matter quite yet and didn’t really like being called ‘magicker’ in that tone of voice. “But—”
He opened the door and pushed me through it.
“But—”
“You’re free to go,” said the guard. “I suggest you do go. Now.”
And shut the door.
I stood there and stared at it for a while.
I was at one end of the long courtyard we’d entered that morning. There were no carriages in the yard now, and all the guards were pointedly not looking at me.
I was a good three hours’ walk from home, assuming I could find the right canal and follow it all the way home.
How dare they drag me all the way up here, find me innocent, and then not give me a ride back home?
* * *
I thought about bursting into tears. The mad feeling had receded, and what it left was a hot itchy feeling behind my eyes.
Then there was a soft hiss and a familiar splattering, and I looked down at an increasing number of little grey splotches all over the pavement.
It had started to rain.
I had to walk home, for hours, through an unfamiliar part of the city, in the rain.
I began, rather absurdly, to laugh. This was ridiculous. Nobody could have luck this bad, could they?
At least they found you innocent, whispered the little voice in the back of my head. That’s pretty good luck, right there.
I stopped laughing.
Nothing to do with luck, I thought grumpily, folding my arms across my chest and stalking across the courtyard and towards the distant carriageway. I was innocent. They didn’t have a choice.
Are you sure about that?
This was too much, particularly on top of the rain. Of course they had to find me innocent. That the Inquisitor might have the ability to find me guilty of a murder I hadn’t committed wasn’t something I wanted to think about.
The rain started to come down with increasing enthusiasm.
I paused at one side of the gateway. I was going to get soaked. I was already fairly soggy, and the rain was just getting warmed up.
I looked back at the guards. They were donning oilcloth slickers. It didn’t look like any of them were going to come over and offer me a carriage ride home.
I was hungry and tired and mad and far from home. The baking wasn’t going to get done until I got home. If the baking didn’t get done…well, it’d be bad.
I wasn’t going to get any closer to home unless I started walking.
So, I gritted my teeth, and started.
Six
The rain had stopped.
It turned out that my estimate of three hours to get home had been conservative. It took closer to six. It doesn’t take anything like six hours to walk across our city, so you can guess that I got turned around a lot. I followed a street that looked familiar for nearly forty-five minutes, expecting it to turn into the roadway for the Birdbridge canal, which I could follow home. Then it hit a wall, literally ran smack into the side of a church that I didn’t recognize. The angel over the doorway was eight feet tall and had a stone blindfold over her face. She looked as if she were weeping. The carving under her feet read, “Our Lady of Sorrowful Angels.”
I thought about going in to ask for directions, but I wasn’t in the mood to talk to any more strangers today, so I just turned around and went back. That was probably pretty dumb, but I’d had a really lousy day, and even the Lady of Sorrowful Angels probably wouldn’t want anything to do with me.
Anyway, I found the right street eventually and made it to the Birdbridge, which is covered in carvings of kingfishers and oystercatchers, the edges of their wings melting away under wet green moss. Then from the Birdbridge canal, through the Tailor District, where everyone was inside or under tarps, trying to keep their wares dry, and up to Market Street, which crosses all the big canals. You can take Market pretty much anywhere, even to Aunt Tabitha’s bakery, but it’s a roundabout sort of way.
On the other hand, if your nerves are good—or if you’re in no mood for delays—you can take a short cut from one end of Market, through the crooked alley called the Rat’s Elbow, and you come out less than a block from the bakery. Rat’s Elbow wasn’t really all that bad, but it had a number of offshoots, and most of those led into the Rat’s Nest, which really is all that bad. Beer is cheap and blood is cheaper in there, or so they say.
I don’t know how much blood costs out here, come to think of it—we don’t use it much in baking—but presumably it’s even cheaper in the Rat’s Nest. (We do use beer to make the dark ale bread. It costs six pennies a keg from the tavern down the street, and Aunt Tabitha says that’s highway robbery, but she’s never suggested buying beer in the Rat’s Nest.)
By the time I made it to the Rat’s Elbow, the rain had slowed to a tentative drizzle. The sun wasn’t exactly shining, but there were some bright patches of cloud. I could see them reflected in the puddles down the middle of the cobblestones.
The problem with the Rat’s Elbow, even leaving aside the name and the proximity to the Rat’s Nest, is that the street settled badly on one side, so the road slopes sharply from the north side down to the south. The settling made the houses on the south all lean in over the road. Various generations of owners have propped up the leaning walls with wooden beams, usually wedged right up against the street, so now it’s impossible to get a carriage through and half the road is always in the shadow of the leaning buildings. Plus there’s a real drainage problem. Even though the rain had been stopped for a little bit, the right side of the Rat’s Elbow looked like a lake, with murky water swirling around (and occasionally over) the front steps of the leaning buildings.
People watched me from the wet front steps. There were people on the porches and in the dark, unshuttered windows. They weren’t doing anything threatening. They were playing cards and talking, and a dead-faced woman was pinning up laundry to a clothesline, standing knee deep in brown water. Nobody said anything to me, and they didn’t exactly stare, but they knew I was there, and I knew that they knew, and they knew that I knew that they knew, all in a creepy, crackling tangle of mutual awareness.
It occurred to me that it was much easier to scoot through the Rat’s Elbow when Aunt Tabitha was expecting me back any minute and would raise holy hell if I didn’t arrive. But she had no idea where I was, and if she was going to start looking for me, she’d start back at the palace. Nobody knew where I was, except for the people in Rat’s Elbow.
They probably wouldn’t do anything to me. They were poor, obviously—if you were rich, you wouldn’t live in Rat’s Elbow—but just because you were poor didn’t mean you were bad. I mean, poverty didn’t mean that you were going to, to take an example completely and totally at random, hit a bedraggled young woman over the head and go through her pockets to see if she had any money. It was just that it also didn’t mean that you weren’t.
That one woman is doing laundry. Do bad people do laundry?
It’s not like I have anything worth stealing…
But do they know that?
I walked a little faster.
I could hear them talking quietly, and some kids had come out and were playing, but they got quieter when I walked by, and then it took a minute for the noise to start up again behind me.
I wish Aunt Tabitha were here.
I wish Uncle Alfred were here.
I even sort of wish Bob the sourdough starter was here. I don’t think anybod
y’d mess with Bob. Not twice, anyway.
There was a clattering noise behind me. The skin on the back of my neck crawled, but I was not going to look around, no I wasn’t, definitely not—
“Hey, bread girl!”
I turned around.
Two empty eye-sockets, dark as sorrow, hung a little above my head. The skeletal face swept down into long, smooth bones that framed a cavernous nasal passage stuffed with twigs. An empty jaw opened and closed with a hollow clacking.
I stared into the face of a dead horse and nearly fainted with relief.
Seven
Knackering Molly was, to put it bluntly, insane.
She wasn’t stupid, though. There was a sharp, glittering intelligence inside the insanity that had learned early on that it was much easier to get away with being insane if you were also useful and had a little bit of money, and if people were just a little bit scared of you.
Molly was, like me, a very minor wizard, but her talent was even weirder. She could make dead horses walk.
This may not sound like a very good talent, but if you live in a large city with narrow streets, it’s actually quite handy. Horses are useful animals, but they die like everybody else, and when they’re dead, they’re about a thousand pounds of meat and bone that you have to dispose of before it starts to stink. The knackermen who run the big rendering yards at the edge of town will pay money for the dead horse, but they also charge money to come take it away, and they have to roll a cart in, and the cart takes up space and disrupts traffic and blocks people’s doorways. Then the people loading the horse onto the cart want to get paid, and sometimes they have to start butchering the horse right there if they can’t carry it out and it’s just a horrible business with blood and nastiness everywhere, and the neighbors get very put out.
Or you can go get Knackering Molly, and for sixpence, she’ll put her hand on the horse’s head, and it will stand up and walk to the knackers under its own power. It’s still pretty horrible to watch, but it’s a lot less trouble.
Anyway, you can spot Molly pretty easily. She rides around the city on Nag. Nag’s been dead longer than I’ve been alive, and he’s mostly bones now, so she pads him with rags and straw and old flour sacks. He looks like a magpie nest with hooves.
People are sometimes a little nervous about us magic-folk. I mean, we’re born this way, and nobody knows quite why—my parents weren’t magic at all, and nobody else in the family is either—but if you start complaining about magickers, there’s always a chance that the person you’re talking to knows one or is married to one or has one in the family and they’ll get annoyed about it. And it’s not like everyone advertises their ability. Presumably some people have talents so obscure that they never get to use them. There’s a fairytale about a girl who could talk to tornadoes, which would be pretty impressive, but we haven’t had a tornado in Riverbraid in a hundred years, so how often does it really come up?
We’re lucky here, though. Our city’s really nice about magickers. Other than holding bits of iron in court, they don’t treat you differently. Some cities don’t allow magickers to live there, or make them register with the government. Delta City has the Spell Quarter, which is a kind of ghetto like the Rat’s Nest, only just for wizards.
None of that happens here in Riverbraid. If you’re going to be a magicker, this is the place to live.
If you’re a wizard who can do big scary impressive things, you usually wind up in the army or working for the Duchess. Nobody really wants to live next to someone who can summon lightning out of the sky. The rest of us, who do little small not-very-impressive things, usually go out of our way to act harmless and useful so that people don’t start making signs to ward off bad luck when we walk around.
Knackering Molly doesn’t care about any of that. If people make signs against bad luck when Nag trots by, she figures it’s good advertising.
Molly’s the only other magicker, other than Master Elwidge, that I talk to regularly. There’s a girl at the farmer’s market and we nod to each other, but that’s as far as it goes. I think most magic-folk don’t want to talk about it, and maybe they think that making gingerbread dance is a little too flamboyant…although nobody’s as flamboyant as Knackering Molly.
“Hi, Molly.” I patted Nag’s nose. The bones are so old that they’re not icky any more, just dry and smooth. (The rags are still pretty icky.) There’s not very much to Nag, but Molly told me once that he liked having his nose petted, so I try.
“What’re you doin’ in the Elbow, duck?” asked Molly, nudging Nag into a walk beside me.
“Trying to get home,” I said wearily. Nag’s hooves went clonk-clonk-clonk on the pavement. (Regular horse hooves go clop. Don’t ask me why Nag’s went clonk.)
She peered down at me, her lined face drawing even more lines as she frowned. “If you don’t mind me saying so, love, you look like the ass end of a seagull.”
Which was pretty insulting, if you think about it, but perversely, it made me feel better. When you feel absolutely wretched, it’s consoling to know that you look just as awful as you feel.
“Your uncle’s not dead, is he now? Saw the body wagon at your aunt’s place.”
“No, my uncle’s fine.” I kept walking. People weren’t staring now. Apparently a girl walking through the Elbow was unusual, but a girl with a madwoman riding a dead horse was perfectly acceptable. There was probably a moral lesson in there somewhere, but I had given up on moral lessons for today. “There was a dead girl in the bakery.”
“Huh,” said Knackering Molly. “Who killed ’er?”
“They thought I did it,” I said gloomily.
“Did you?”
“No!”
“Well, then.” She sat back. “You’re a good girl, you’d probably have a good reason. I ain’t judging. But if you didn’t do it, who did?”
“I don’t know.” My shoes squelched. Nag went through a puddle and splashed water up the side of my trousers. “They sent a man out from the palace. He said something about her death being magic.”
“Magic?” Molly threaded her hands into Nag’s rags. “No good comes of poking around in death magic.”
Says the woman riding the dead horse, I thought, but didn’t say it. “I don’t know. I had nothing to do with it. I went up to the palace and saw the Duchess…”
It occurred to me as I was saying it that it should have been very exciting, seeing the duchess, even with everything else. She’d actually spoken to me. She’d been distant and busy, but she’d kept me from getting thrown in jail. I wasn’t excited, though. I was just bone tired, and maybe still a little mad.
Molly didn’t say that it should have been exciting. She only said “Huh!” again. And then, after a minute, “There’s a thing, anyway. Huh.”
“She told them to let me go. Well…I mean…she talked to a wizard, and I guess he told her—”
“Wizards!” Knackering Molly leaned over Nag’s withers and spat on the ground.
“We’re wizards,” I said mildly.
“Not like real wizards, duck. We’re just little people, you and me.” She slapped Nag’s skeletal shoulder. “The big wizards, well, now. The gov’mint wizards. You stay clear of them, bread girl. They’re no good for nobody, and worse for people like us.”
They say some wizards came around once, when Molly was young, to ask her if she could make dead people walk, probably thinking that if she could make dead soldiers get up and fight, she’d be worth a lot to the right people. She doesn’t talk about that. Miss McGrammar said that she couldn’t do it, but I heard Brutus the chandler say once that he thought she had been able to do it, and that’s why she came back crazy. Even if she just made the cavalry horses get up and charge again, they would have shoved her out on a battlefield to do it, and how awful would that be?
I wanted to ask him more about it, but all he’d say was that she hadn’t been any crazier than anybody else before the wizards took her away.
She hates the gover
nment now. She mutters about that a lot, but then again, she also mutters that the fleas are the ghosts of ancient philosophers and they’re trying to suck out the truth from her ankles.
This doesn’t stop her from driving a very hard bargain when you want a horse moved, though. People have tried to take advantage of her because they think she’s not right in the head. It doesn’t end well for them.
“Lord Ethan’s okay,” I said, remembering that golden glittering presence in the audience chamber, and the way he’d smiled at me. “I mean, I think he told her I couldn’t have done it.”
“Feh.” Molly was unconvinced. “Waves in parades, maybe, but he’s a war wizard, right enough. Maybe he did you a good turn now, but he’ll kill you if you get in his way, not outta meanness like some of ’em, but just like a bug.” She rooted in her bird’s-nest hair for a minute and pulled out some small wiggly thing. “Like a bug.” Her thumbnail came down and cracked it.
“At least he’s not mean,” I said faintly. Lord Ethan could call storms out of the sky to slam the enemy flat. The songs the minstrels sing on street corners said he could control the lightning. But I still couldn’t imagine him crushing somebody like a bug.
“Mean ’r not, you’re still dead, bread girl.” She straightened up. “And here we are, almost home.”
“Oh…oh.” I looked around, surprised. We’d emerged from the Rat’s Elbow onto the street, and I hadn’t even noticed. “Oh. Thank you.”
Knackering Molly shrugged. “Rat’s Elbow’s not as bad as some places, but y’ gotta walk careful. Never hurts to have a friend with you, even if it’s just ol’ Nag.” She leaned down over the dead horse’s neck and gestured. “Come here, bread girl.”
Somewhat reluctantly, I came. I was grateful for her escort, but she was still insane, and more importantly, she stank to high heaven. Most of it was unwashed woman and unwashed cloth, but there was a distinct reek of the knackeryards clinging to her too.
A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking Page 4
