A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

  “You should feel privileged. You aren’t nearly powerful enough to warrant being eliminated so soon.”

  Another step down. Creak. How many steps were there? Gods and saints, I spent most of my life going up and down those stairs, how did I not know how many stairs there were?

  “If that idiot Oberon had taken care of you like he was supposed to, I probably wouldn’t be bothering with you at all. You’re almost nothing.” Creak. Creak. “But no, he makes a mess and I have to clean it up…” Creak.

  Oberon?

  Inquisitor Oberon?

  I sure hadn’t liked him, but what did he have to do with the Spring Green Man?

  Creak.

  I had an idea. It wasn’t a good idea, and it was probably going to get me killed, but the only other idea I had was to wait until he was fully in the cellar, and try to sneak past him, and that wasn’t much better. I slid along the wall, hopefully far enough, and crouched down. I felt around me, hoping I’d been right, hoping I’d got far enough back—

  There!

  Creak. “You can’t hide, little bread wizard. I don’t need light to find you.”

  Then he giggled.

  I’ll be honest with you, I wet myself a little when he giggled. That was a sound that signaled not just a murderer, like some of the thugs in the Rat’s Nest, but someone who enjoyed killing people. That giggle went straight into the pit of my stomach and played the xylophone on my ribcage. It was completely dark, but there were bright slashes behind my eyes, and my heart wasn’t so much pounding as drumming, like a woodpecker on a drainpipe.

  I think I came close to fainting, and if I had, there wouldn’t be much more to read than this. But I didn’t. Instead, I wet myself, which was getting off lightly. I wasn’t even embarrassed. If there’s a killer coming after you with a knife, embarrassment doesn’t even register.

  There wasn’t another creak. Instead, I heard the scuffing of footsteps over stone. He was at the bottom of the stairs and moving into the cellar.

  I put one hand over my mouth, because my own breathing sounded incredibly loud, and hunched myself into the smallest ball I could. I had one weapon, and only one chance to use it.

  The gingerbread man gripped the edge of my ear and shifted slightly on my shoulder.

  “You’re over there in the corner,” crooned the Spring Green Man, walking slowly toward me. “I can smell it. Little fool, how did you manage to outwit Oberon?”

  Please, I thought, a desperate and incoherent prayer. For some reason, the only person I could think of to pray to was the statue on the front of the church I had passed walking home from the palace, Our Lady of Sorrowful Angels. I didn’t want to be an angel, sorrowful or otherwise. Please, oh please…

  The footsteps were right on top of me. I held my breath and clenched my fingers.

  “Got you!” crowed the Spring Green Man, as he took a last step forward, and I flung the bucket with Bob the sourdough starter over him.

  The man screamed. It was shock at first, and then it was pain, because Bob was mad. I’d pumped as much of my panic and terror into the dough as I could.

  Attack is not a command I’ve ever given to bread before, but if those rats last winter were any indication, Bob knew exactly what to do.

  The Spring Green Man screamed again, and I heard flailing and a crash as he staggered into something. There were globs of sourdough on my clothes. I didn’t wait around to see what had happened. I took off for the steps, somehow avoided the baking pans, and shot up the stairs like a rabbit.

  “Mona! This way!” hissed a voice from the door.

  “Spindle!”

  “Come on!” He beckoned furiously. “The Spring Green Man is after you! He came in here!”

  “I know!” I raced to the door. “And I think he might be working with Oberon! We have to get Aunt Tabitha—”

  “Do you want him to kill her too?”

  It was like being slapped. I sucked in a lungful of frosty air so hard it hurt.

  “But—”

  “Come on! There’s no time!”

  He turned and ran. I wavered for a second, no more, heard the basement stairs creaking, and took off after him.

  We pounded through the streets, skidding on the frost-slicked cobbles. I kept my eyes fixed on the back of Spindle’s jacket. I didn’t dare look around. If I looked around, I might lose him—Spindle took a route as twisty as a baked pretzel—but more importantly, I might look behind me and see the face of my pursuer.

  It was probably stupid of me, in a morning full of stupidities, but I kept worrying about whether Bob had survived. On the run for my life and fretting over a sourdough starter. It could only happen to me. I realize that a lot of people wouldn’t even consider Bob to be alive, as such, but I’d grown attached to that blob.

  We ran for at least three blocks, and I couldn’t keep it up. “Slow—down—wait—please—” There was a stitch in my side so painful I wondered if I hadn’t been stabbed after all.

  Spindle twisted his head around, looking annoyed. “What? Already?”

  “Please!”

  He slowed to a fast walk. “Gonna get us killed…”

  I shook my head, clutching at my side. Did it matter if we ran? The Spring Green Man had said he could smell my magic. Did that mean he could track me like some kind of evil bloodhound?

  I managed to glance around this time, before we plunged into yet another alleyway. We were off Rat’s Elbow and going in deeper. I didn’t even protest. While somebody in there might decide to kill me, somebody out here had already tried.

  It was scary in the Rat’s Nest, though. The buildings weren’t just run-down, they were falling apart. Some of them were burned out, and some of them had collapsed completely. Even the ones that were just piles of rubble showed signs of life, though. There was a clothesline running from a hole in a pile of rock to a pillar. Somebody was actually living in the rubble.

  There was a dead dog in the middle of the street. It was only barely light enough to see it, and I might have missed it, but Spindle detoured around it. It had been a big dog.

  It was too much, in a morning that had already been too much. I threw up.

  After a couple of seconds, I felt somebody pull my hair back. When I looked up, shaky and sweating, it was Spindle.

  “Th-thanks…” I mumbled, wiping at my mouth. He shrugged.

  I felt a little better. Not much. I felt cold, mostly—I hadn’t grabbed my jacket on the way out of the bakery, and the wet patch on my pants was freezing.

  People weren’t staring at me here the way they had in the Rat’s Elbow. There weren’t many people out, but there was a little cluster at the mouth of every alley, and when I looked up, there were people crouched on the edges of the buildings, too.

  They were watching the street. Not just us, although we were the biggest and most obvious things on the street at the moment, particularly given the vomiting, but they were watching everything. I realized that they were guards of some sort.

  No, not guards. They were sentries. These were people who were watching to see what was coming into the Rat’s Nest, and if they saw anything, they would go and alert more people. Given where we were, I did not want to know what those other people would look like, or what kind of weapons they might be carrying.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, trying to keep up with Spindle.

  He had slowed to a brisk walk. “Away. Nobody comes in here who doesn’t belong here.”

  I didn’t belong in here, but it didn’t seem like the right time to say so.

  Fortunately, somebody else said it for me.

  “Mona? Spindle? What’re you doin’ in here?”

  The voice was familiar, as was the clunk-clunk-clunk on the stones. I looked up gratefully into the dead face of Nag, and the bird’s-nest tangle of Knackering Molly.

  “This is no place for you, girl—or you either, Spindle, even if you think you’re tough.”

  Spindle jerked his head and rolled his eyes. I put a
hand on Nag’s shoulder and tried to think of something to say, and couldn’t come up with anything for a minute.

  “I—I—”

  Molly tilted her head and looked down at me. “Girl? You okay?”

  “Somebody just tried to kill me,” I whispered, feeling tears squeeze out of the sides of my eyes. A single painful sob escaped, and I stuffed the side of my hand into my mouth, because the Rat’s Nest did not seem like a good place to cry at all.

  Molly’s mad eyes softened. She rooted around in the nest on Nag’s back and dropped a blanket across my shoulders. It was old and tattered and didn’t smell very good, but neither did I right at the moment. And it was warm, which was the important thing.

  “Come on,” she said. “Grab onto Nag’s tail, and let’s get you someplace a little safer, and you can tell Molly all about it.”

  She nudged Nag forward. The skeletal tail twitched in front of me, bones wrapped in old ribbons, with bits of stiff horsehair sticking out around the edges. Not the most appealing handhold, but I grabbed on. It felt like holding a bag full of twigs.

  The gingerbread man climbed right up Nag’s tail and sat on one of the horse’s hip bones. He kicked his heels as if to say, “Giddyup!”

  Spindle muttered something under his breath, but he followed behind us anyway. We let the dead horse lead us into the twists and turns of the alleys of the Rat’s Nest.

  Twelve

  Knackering Molly listened to my whole story, and she didn’t ask any embarrassing questions, like why I thought attacking somebody with a sourdough starter would work, or why I started crying when I talked about Bob. What if he was dead? Really dead this time? What if he’d died saving me?

  I mean, you may think it’s strange crying over a bucket of yeasty sludge—I know Spindle probably thought I was crazy—but it wasn’t just any sludge, it was Bob. He made amazing bread, and he liked me, insomuch as sludge likes anybody.

  Molly understood, though. When you spend most of your time with a dead horse, you learn to respect other people’s weird pets.

  By the time I’d gotten to the end of the story my nose was dripping. Molly dug a handkerchief out of her pocket and handed it to me. It was dry. Bits of it were unpleasantly crunchy, but I couldn’t afford to be picky.

  “Thags,” I mumbled, blowing my nose. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right, girl, you’ve had a shock and no mistake.”

  Spindle snorted. He was leaning in a corner with his hands shoved into his pockets and a sour expression. I could tell he thought I was being a baby. That made me pretty mad. I’d bet nobody had tried to stab him today. I wiped my eyes and sniffed furiously.

  We were at Knackering Molly’s home, or at least one of her homes. She called it a squat, which sounded vaguely rude. It was half a house on the edge of the Rat’s Nest that had fallen over, so one side looked almost normal and the other side was a crazy-quilt of collapsed beams. There were old crates and ragged bits of rug on the floor, and she’d hung burlap sacks over the windows to block them out.

  It probably wasn’t very structurally sound, but since there was a whole horse skeleton stomping around the room and the rest of the ceiling hadn’t fallen in yet, I decided not to worry about it.

  I had much bigger things to worry about, like what to do next and how not to be murdered.

  “Okay. Okay.” I took a deep breath and scrubbed at my face. I didn’t want to cry any more. Crying wouldn’t help. “What do we do now? We should find the constables or somebody, right?”

  Spindle made a rude sound. “Fat lot of help they’ll be. Wouldn’t be surprised if they sent him after you.”

  “Oh, come on!” I rolled my eyes. “You’re telling me you think the constables are conspiring to set assassins on bakers?”

  That Inquisitor Oberon was a bad apple was obvious. The Spring Green Man had said as much. But thinking that people like Constable Alphonse and Constable Montgomery were in league with Inquisitors and assassins was ridiculous. They were people. They ate pastries. Alphonse’s sister lived on the next street over and came in every market-day to buy a scone. They didn’t even make signs to ward off bad luck when they thought I wasn’t looking.

  “Somebody did it,” said Spindle stubbornly, dropping his chin onto his chest and glaring at me. “Guards never care about people like us, as long as we don’t make trouble. They’re trying to wipe magickers out now so you don’t make trouble. They started with Tibbie, and now they’re goin’ for you.”

  I appealed to Knackering Molly. “Molly, this is nuts. You don’t think the constables are behind this, do you?”

  “Not the constables, no…” said Molly slowly. “They’re following orders is all. Somebody’s giving those orders, though. I was hearing rumors about the Spring Green Man on the street before you ever turned up in the Rat’s Elbow, girl. I need to ask some questions, maybe call in a few favors…” She stood up. “You kids stay here awhile. Not sure how long I’ll be gone.”

  “Wh-what? You’re leaving?”

  She swung herself up on Nag, who clomped across the creaky floorboards and out the door. Spindle hurried to yank the burlap curtain aside. “Got questions to ask, baker girl!” she shot over her shoulder—and was gone.

  The clunk-clunk-clunk of Nag’s hooves faded into the darkness. It was almost morning, and I could just see the edge of light over the tops of the houses, but it hadn’t gotten down to street level yet.

  She’d left. Just like that. I mean, sure, she was a little nuts—okay, she rode a dead horse, she was a lot nuts—but she was a grown-up and it seemed like she knew what she was doing. I certainly trusted her judgment a lot more than I trusted Spindle’s. And if you were a grown-up, you didn’t just leave two kids alone in a house with a madman on the prowl trying to kill them, did you?

  Apparently, Molly did.

  I probably would have stood in the doorway with my mouth hanging open for the next five minutes, but Spindle dropped the sacking back down and I had to step back.

  I couldn’t help it. I started sniffling again.

  It wasn’t real crying, I wasn’t sobbing or anything, but there were some tears and my chest ached the way it does when you know that a good hard sob is just waiting to get out. I wouldn’t let it out. Not with Spindle standing there, looking at me like I was pathetic.

  I didn’t see what he had to be so smug about. He’d cried after we found Tibbie’s bracelet, and I hadn’t been mean to him about it or anything.

  He let out an annoyed sigh and flopped down in the corner of the room.

  This struck me as horribly unfair. Sure, he saved my life and now he was stuck in this shack with me, instead of out doing…whatever he did…but what did he have to be annoyed about? Nobody was trying to kill him.

  “Sorry this is bothering you,” I snapped. “I wouldn’t have gotten attacked if I’d known it would be so inconvenient for you.”

  He flushed and mumbled something. I sat down, because there wasn’t anything else to do, and we sat in the room in an irritable crackling silence.

  I wondered how long it would take Knackering Molly to find out what she wanted to know, or whether the Spring Green Man would find us first.

  It was definitely getting light out. The edges of the burlap sacking over the windows went from black to grey to a kind of watery tan. Aunt Tabitha would be getting up soon, and she’d wonder where I was. And the bakery was a mess, and Bob was scattered all over the cellar. She’d probably be worried sick.

  She might not even be able to make cinnamon rolls and sticky buns and gingerbread cookies and set the bread out…

  My stomach growled.

  You wouldn’t think that you could be hungry after someone tried to kill you. You’d be wrong.

  “I still got that bread you gave me yesterday,” said Spindle.

  It was probably a peace offering, but I wasn’t in the mood to accept it, and anyway, I’d have to magic it a lot softer before I could gnaw through bread that stale. I just didn’t have the e
nergy now. “No thanks.”

  “It’s all I got,” said Spindle. “Unless you wanna eat that cookie riding around on your shoulder, it’s all we’re gonna get.”

  “No!” I put a hand over the gingerbread man protectively. “Nobody eats him! And anyway, he’s really stale.” The cookie tweaked my ear indignantly at that.

  “Might change your mind soon,” said Spindle, smirking. “You don’t get to be so picky when you’re on the lam.”

  The cookie made a rude gesture at him. My stomach growled again for emphasis.

  “I’m not on the lam,” I said. My chest felt hot and tight, as if the tears had got squeezed until they cracked open. I was angry, nearly as angry as I had been at Inquisitor Oberon. I felt like I might split open, right down the middle of my sternum. “I haven’t done anything wrong! Having somebody try to kill you doesn’t make you a criminal!”

  Spindle snorted. “Sure. Take that to the constables and see how far you get.”

  It was the last straw.

  “Maybe I will!” I scrambled to my feet. The gingerbread man shifted hastily to hang on.

  “What? Mona, no!”

  “I will go to the constables! You’re just paranoid and think ’cos you’re a street rat, everybody’s like you!” Which wasn’t fair and I felt guilty immediately, but the angry squeezing in my chest wouldn’t let me stop. I stomped to the burlap curtain and wrenched it aside.

  Spindle balled his hands into fists. “Knackering Molly told us to stay here!”

  “And then she left us alone! With no food and no explanations, nothing!” I did feel a little guilty about leaving, but mostly I just felt mad. Why shouldn’t I go to the constables? I’d never committed a crime in my life, not unless you count filching cookies from the case, and I’d baked those cookies in the first place, so that didn’t really count. It was no wonder people like Spindle and Knackering Molly were paranoid, but I was a respectable citizen. The constables were there to protect me.