A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

  A long time ago, supposedly, they had their own homeland, and then two of the city-states went to war—Edom, I think, and St. Salizburg, or maybe it was Delta City—and one of the cities hired the Carex to fight for them. When the war was over, the Carex decided they liked it here and didn’t leave like they were supposed to. Apparently, their homeland is all ice and mountains and things trying to kill you, so you can see why they’d want to stick around our kingdom, which has lots of farmland and rivers and high-quality baked goods.

  Don’t get me wrong: generally we like foreigners in our kingdom. We like anybody as long as they have money and buy scones. Some of the big port cities are crammed with people from all over the world, and they don’t make them live in their own quarter, the way they do magickers. The man who sells Aunt Tabitha cinnamon is from someplace that nobody else can pronounce quite right and has tattoos all over his skin, even on the little webs in between his fingers.

  But the Carex eat all the farm animals, even the horses and dogs and sometimes the people, and then they burn the farms for fun. They are not interested in being neighbors. They just take over towns and eat all the food and kill all the people, and then use it as a base to launch raids on other towns. Whenever that happens, the nearest cities send out the army and burn them out, and the Carex run back to the hills for a couple of seasons, then come out meaner and hungrier than ever.

  It was probably just my imagination that the city seemed colder without the Golden General in it. I felt less safe without the war wizards around. You didn’t want to need them, and they had scary powers in their own right, like calling lightning and throwing fireballs, but you liked to know they were there, just in case.

  One thing I didn’t worry about was what the army would do when they found the Carex. The army would win, no question. We have magic, and the Carex don’t. Carex hate magickers. If one of their kids turns up with a talent, they expose him. For the longest time I didn’t know what that meant, but it turns out that they just leave him on a hillside and let wild animals eat him. This is the sort of thing that makes you glad to live in a civilized city.

  The regulars all had their own opinions, but one I didn’t hear was Master Elwidge’s. He hadn’t come into the bakery in days. I was getting a little worried about him.

  I went to the farmer’s market one morning, and something happened that worried me even more.

  There’s a girl at the farmer’s market who’s a magicker like me. (I think she’s a lot better, honestly.) She’s a juggler, but when she juggles oranges, they turn blue or green or seem to catch fire. Her dad sells fruit, and every now and then, she’ll take out a few oranges and start juggling and people come over to watch. In late summer, she’ll turn rutabagas into doves.

  Her name’s Lena. She’s older than me and lives outside of town, and we don’t talk very much, so I was surprised when Lena saw me across the crowd and came over. She wasn’t juggling oranges today.

  “You’re Mona, aren’t you?” she said. “From the bakery.”

  “Yes?” I said.

  She nodded once, sharply, then looked around, as if afraid that someone might be listening. She pulled me toward the edge of the market, against one of the brick walls. “Are you leaving?” she said.

  “Um…I have to buy some strawberries for my aunt...”

  Lena shook her head. “The city. Are you leaving the city?”

  “Why would I leave the city?” I asked, baffled.

  “You know,” she said, waving a hand all around us, as if to take in the entire city.

  “No?” I was starting to feel like I’d come in on this conversation halfway through. “What do I know?”

  Lena blew air through her bangs, making them flip up. “Haven’t you been hearing? The disappearances? The…” she looked around again, “…the magickers?”

  “Knackering Molly said something,” I said cautiously. “But—”

  “We’re getting out,” said Lena. “Dad and me. We’re leaving tonight. There’s something going on in this city. It’s not healthy for magickers anymore. We’re going to Dad’s cousin in Edom.” She looked me over appraisingly. “We’re taking the wainwright’s boy, too, the one who turn rocks into cheese. You should come with us, too.”

  “What? No.” I took a step back, as if she might try to kidnap me. “My aunt and uncle are here. And the bakery.” I took another step back. “I mean—it can’t be that bad!”

  Could it?

  I tried to think of all the magickers I knew. There weren’t many. Lena, Molly, Elwidge…there was the girl who sang on the street corner and birds came down and sang with her—no, she’d been gone since last winter, hadn’t she? There had been a man with a hurdy-gurdy on that street corner for months now.

  Still, even if Lena was right…I was fourteen years old. Leave the bakery? That was just nuts.

  Lena narrowed her eyes. I took another step back. She didn’t have any rutabagas on her, but I wasn’t sure what she could do with a strawberry. I needed those strawberries for tarts. If they turned into doves, it was going to be a real problem.

  I thought she might yell at me, but she shook her head and said, “Good luck, then. I hope you’re right.”

  She hurried back to the fruit stand.

  On the way home with my strawberries, I took Peony Street, which takes you past the shop where Master Elwidge the carpenter works.

  The door was closed. There were no lights in the window. It looked like an empty shop, not just a closed one.

  I went home as fast as I could, feeling yet again like there was something watching me in the shadows.

  I didn’t tell Aunt Tabitha about the conversation. Probably she’d say that Lena was being ridiculous, but what if she didn’t? And if she took it seriously then I’d have to take it seriously and that meant that I wasn’t safe behind the bakery counter after all.

  These were depressing thoughts.

  I threw myself into work at the bakery, but there was only so much I could do. When the pans had gone in the oven and it wasn’t time for anything else to come out, when I had to wait ten minutes before I started the icing for the cinnamon buns, when there weren’t any customers, then I had a few minutes, and then the thoughts would start again.

  I’d steal downstairs and feed Bob, or if he had already been fed, I’d lean my forehead against the cool stone wall and let the thoughts bubble and ferment like yeast at the bottom of my mind.

  Sometimes Bob would put out a mushy tentacle of dough and touch me on the shoulder. I think he knew I was worried. Occasionally he’d even drag his bucket closer to where I was sitting and brooding.

  It wasn’t exactly thinking, if that makes any sense. I wasn’t looking at the thoughts. I just knew they were there, roiling around underneath.

  Problem was that, like yeast, the thoughts were growing. Pretty soon they’d overflow the edges of my skull, and I wouldn’t be able to ignore them any longer.

  For the moment, though, I could sort of squash them down, like dough into a pan, and think about something else. I settled for worrying about Spindle.

  I left day-old bakery goods out for him on the stoop a couple of times. They were gone in the morning, although it could have been dogs or raccoons, or even some other street kid. That was fine. Dogs and raccoons and street kids all have to eat, and the day-olds don’t do anybody any good in the case.

  Five or six days after my trip to the palace, I went down to the Rookshade Bridge with a half loaf of stale bread. Rookshade is a good bridge for feeding ducks because it’s low to the water, and the railing has wide enough gaps that you can dangle your feet through and throw bits of bread down to the ducks.

  It was a nice afternoon. It wasn’t raining for once—we’d had a very damp spring—and Aunt Tabitha had told me to get out of the bakery and go take a break, before she hit me over the head and forced me to relax. I walked down the road by the side of the canal, avoiding the carriages and the wheeled carts selling hot buns (nothing so good as our bun
s) with a gingerbread man sitting on my shoulder.

  He was the same one from the night Spindle and I had found his sister’s bracelet, and he was so stale by now that you’d probably break your teeth if you tried to bite him. I didn’t expect him to be walking around still, but I’d been pretty upset that night looking for Tibbie—it had been a really awful day—and when I was upset, my magic worked a lot better or harder or something. I should probably have figured that out with Bob, the unkillable sourdough starter, but it was still a surprise. At any rate, the gingerbread man showed no signs of stopping.

  That was fine by me. I kept him sitting on the bedpost at night, watching the door. He was supposed to wake me up if anybody tried to get in. I don’t know how well that would really work, but I felt a little better because of it.

  Aunt Tabitha hadn’t said anything, even when the cookie started displaying a little more initiative than was usual in baked goods. Twice he had brought me the salt without even asking, and I could tell him to put strawberry halves on top of the muffins and he would do the entire tray.

  I had been tempted occasionally to try baking a life-size gingerbread man to help out in the kitchen. Fortunately, the ovens weren’t big enough for anything like that, and I was becoming glad of it. My little gingerbread familiar was fairly benign, but what if I was upset or nervous and wound up creating some kind of berserk gingerbread golem?

  It didn’t seem likely that I could do that, but…well…best not to find out.

  Besides, between Lena and Knackering Molly warning me, I was starting to think that it was best not to call attention to my magic. A person-sized hunk of gingerbread wasn’t very subtle. And lately, when I’d made cookies dance, there’d been an edge to the laughter.

  We threw out three batches of old gingerbread men. Hardly anybody was willing to buy them. It’s maybe not so odd that gingerbread doesn’t sell in midsummer, but one or two customers left without buying anything.

  And Miss McGrammar…well.

  “Have you seen the broadsheets yet?” she snapped, when everybody else had left the shop.

  “The what?” I put the cookie back in the bakery case.

  “You’ll see,” she said, sniffing. She sounded maliciously pleased about something. “All you people’ll see soon enough.”

  She hadn’t explained and she hadn’t come back since. Nobody missed her, but it was still strange.

  On the bright side, she was the only reason we baked lemon scones every day. I started making blackberry tarts instead, and those were much better.

  I trudged up to the railing of the Rookshade Bridge, and saw Spindle already sitting there, staring moodily down into the water. I’d caught a glimpse of him once or twice, but this time he didn’t run off as soon as he saw me. The ducks had gathered under him, expecting to be fed, and the fact he wasn’t throwing anything down was inciting some angry quacking.

  I sat down next to him. The gingerbread man steadied himself by holding onto the rim of my ear.

  Spindle didn’t say anything. Neither did I.

  I pulled some stale bread out of my pocket and began tossing bits down to the ducks. I handed Spindle half the loaf. He took the slices wordlessly and put them in his pockets.

  Well, so much for that idea. I finished tossing bits down to the ducks and dusted off my hands.

  “You doing okay?” I asked.

  He shrugged. It was a stupid question. Tibbie was dead. It would never be okay that she was dead. My parents had been dead for years now, ever since the Cold Fever, and it still wasn’t okay and it would never be okay, but I guess that’s just how it goes.

  These are heavy things for a fourteen-year-old baker to have to think.

  We sat there in silence while the ducks nosed around the water for any bits they had missed. A cart rolled by behind us with a crunch of wheels and clop of hooves. The gingerbread man peered out from under my hair.

  Spindle glanced over at me, looked at the cookie, but didn’t comment.

  “We haven’t heard anything back about the investigation yet,” I said finally. “Truth is…I don’t know if there even is an investigation. They wanted me to be guilty, and when I wasn’t…I don’t know if anybody’s doing anything.”

  “Nobody ever does anything,” said Spindle quietly. “Not for people like us.”

  I wanted to say something encouraging. I wanted to promise him that the guards would find the killer. I wanted to be strong and hopeful and determined.

  It was hard to believe any of that when I thought about Tibbie and her mismatched socks.

  “I’m sorry,” I said instead, and flicked a pebble into the dark water of the canal. A duck grabbed for it, saw that it wasn’t edible and let out a loud quack of annoyance.

  “She had to cut ’er hair real short one winter,” said Spindle. He wasn’t looking at me, and I was afraid to say anything, for fear that he’d stop. “Tibbie, I mean. She couldn’t sneak if there was too much light. Lamplighter came around the corner with a lantern just when she was comin’ out the second-story window, and there was a constable on the corner, and he got a look at ’er. They went looking for a girl with real long hair, so she had to cut it. I lifted like a dozen hats for ’er, and she wore ’em, but she was never happy ’til she grew it back out again.”

  He wiped his nose on the collar of his shirt. “I told ’er to be careful,” he said, watching the ducks squabble in the water below. “I told ’er. We been hearing about the magickers, you know, how they’re turning up dead. Somebody got Willy Thumbs last week, and he wasn’t half the magicker she was. She said she’d be careful, but it didn’t matter.”

  He didn’t say anything else. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t know any of these people, and yet, after hearing Lena talk about leaving the city…

  After a while I got up and dusted myself off. “If you need anything…”

  Spindle looked up at me with dark eyes. His face was pale and smudged, like an unwashed ghost.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  Eleven

  Four in the morning again. I woke up to the water-clock chiming and pulled the blankets up to my chin.

  A minute or two later, the big bells tolled the hour, a distant sound that you might not hear if you weren’t awake and listening for it. I got up.

  The gingerbread man sitting sentry on my bedpost gave me a small salute as I stood up. I bundled myself into my clothes, let the gingerbread man climb to his usual perch on my shoulder, and let myself out of the building.

  The streets were quiet. They often weren’t quiet at midnight, but they were quiet now. Everyone walking at this hour had somewhere to be, and they walked rapidly, with their heads down and their breath frosting in the air. The same way I walked, except most of them didn’t have an animate cookie riding on their coat.

  I got to the bakery and unlocked the door. The day-olds were gone from the step again. I started up the ovens and was crouched down, reaching under the counter to get the dough that had been left to rise overnight, when the door opened behind me. The noise was so unexpected that I jumped and banged my head on the underside of the table. I staggered back a step, rubbing the top of my skull, and I suspect that saved my life.

  The knife that had been about to go into my ribs whooshed through the air instead.

  I stared at the blade stupidly, and then the hand holding it, which was coming out of a pale yellow-green sleeve, and my eyes traveled up the sleeve to the shoulder and the face, and I looked into the eyes of the Spring Green Man.

  His eyes were almost the same color as his clothes, an unnaturally light green, the pupils dilated in a pale, seamed face. There was a weird smell coming off him too, something heavy and spicy, like incense. It made it hard to breathe and harder to think.

  “Ex-excuse me…?” I said stupidly, as if I’d caught him manhandling the baguettes or trying to open the bakery case. Not trying to stab me. Trying to stab me probably deserved something other than “excuse me” but my mind didn’t
seem to be working.

  My body, however, was working just fine. My body realized that I was standing in the kitchen with a murderer and before I’d quite worked out what I was supposed to do next, my body took over, spun me around, and sent me at high speed down the stairs into the basement.

  It was dark. I hadn’t taken a light. It was black as pitch, and even though I walked through this room at least three times a day, suddenly I couldn’t remember where anything was. I tripped over a pile of baking pans and knocked them down with a clatter.

  The Spring Green Man laughed at me from the top of the stairs.

  His voice wasn’t deep, it was thin and sharp like his knife. “Do you think you can hide from me in the dark?”

  That was exactly what I was thinking, although I didn’t seem to be doing it well. I tried to disentangle myself from the baking pans and kicked one instead. The clang seemed to go up my entire spine.

  My mind seemed to be working again, but it wasn’t doing much except gibbering.

  Oh god oh god oh god he’s got a knife oh god

  “I can smell you,” said the Spring Green Man, taking a step down the stairs. The boards creaked. “I can smell your magic, little bread wizard.”

  I got away from the traitorous baking pans and scurried deeper into the basement, hands held out in front of me to feel my way.

  “I would have gotten you eventually,” said the voice from the stairs. Another step, another creak. “I’ll get you all eventually. But that little thief brat ran in here and I couldn’t drag her back out without a guard seeing and that…moved you up the list, so to speak.” Another step.

  A list? There was a list? How many people were on the list?

  I found the edge of the big drying rack where we keep the onions and garlic and felt my way around the end. The scent of garlic helped clear the weirdly heavy smell of incense out of my lungs. Unfortunately, being more clear-headed only meant that I was more clear on being in a basement with a murderer standing in the only doorway.