A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

  I stalked into the street.

  “Mona, don’t be stupid!” Spindle tried to get in front of me, but I shouldered past him. “You’re gonna be in big trouble!”

  We were on the edge of the Rat’s Nest. I should have been scared, but the anger was still doing all the talking. If I’d been thinking clearly, I probably would have tried to find the safest way out, but instead I just picked the direction I thought was right and plowed forward, ignoring the scampering of sentries and the puzzled faces watching me.

  “Mona!”

  The alleyway took a couple of zig-zag turns—if I’d had the sense to be scared, I wouldn’t have made at least two of those, which were prime ambush spots, and probably only the fact that I so clearly had nothing worth stealing kept me from getting mugged right there—then spilled out onto Varley Street. I stomped onto the sidewalk. Spindle halted at the mouth of the alley and made a grab for the back of my jacket but missed.

  Varley is a broad avenue running along the canal. It’s usually full of street musicians, because the sidewalks are wider than usual, but it was still so early that hardly anybody was about yet. I could hear someone tuning their fiddle a little way away, a few cautious notes, then a halt, then a few more random notes, splattered like drops of rain against the stones.

  But I wasn’t looking for a street musician. I was looking for a constable, and there one was, leaning against a lamp post across the street, about half a block up the road.

  I broke into a run.

  “Here now, what’s the trouble?” asked the constable, startled, as I raced up to him.

  “You have to help me!” I was panting. He wasn’t one of the men who patrolled our neighborhood, but he was wearing the uniform, and he had a broad, kind face. “Please!”

  “Of course I will, m’dear,” he said promptly. “What’s wrong?”

  “Somebody tried to kill me!” I waved my hands. “It was the Spring Green Man—he was wearing green—I was in the bakery and he had a knife—”

  “Tried to kill you?” His eyebrows rose sharply. “Spring Green....mercy me!” He put an arm around my shoulders. “Here now, it’s all right, m’dear. I’m sure there’s been some sort of misunderstanding. Just come with me and we’ll get this all sorted out.”

  I felt the knot in my stomach loosen. This was exactly what I wanted. Some responsible grown-up to get it all sorted out, so I could go back to my normal life and make cinnamon rolls.

  “It’ll be fine now, Mona,” said the constable. “Never you worry.”

  He turned, still with the arm around my shoulders, so I had to turn with him. He cupped his free hand to his mouth. “Hallooo!” he called, and down the road, a few blocks over, another constable answered “Hallooo!”

  How had he known my name?

  He was holding me awfully tightly, and I squirmed a bit, but his grip didn’t loosen, and I felt cold suddenly, very cold, because I was pretty sure that I hadn’t told him my name at all.

  I squirmed harder and tried to pull away, and he grabbed my wrist in one hand. It wasn’t too painful, I really don’t think he was trying to hurt me, but he wasn’t letting go, either. “Hold still, m’dear,” he said, trying to sound stern and reassuring all at once. “We’ve got orders to bring you in if you turn up. Somebody wants to talk to you, that’s all.”

  “Let go! I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  “Then you’ve got nothing to be afraid of,” said the constable. “Stop that, girl, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Then let go!”

  I kicked him in the shins. He grunted. “Now don’t be like—”

  He never finished saying what I wasn’t supposed to be like, as two things happened simultaneously. Spindle slammed into the back of the constable’s knees, and the gingerbread man launched himself off my shoulder and went for his eyes.

  He fell down with a wild yelp, batting the enraged cookie aside. Spindle rolled out from under the man’s legs and scrambled to his feet. I snatched my tiny gingerbread protector from the cobbles—the fall had knocked one of his icing buttons loose, but he was otherwise unharmed—and turned to run.

  There was another constable hurrying toward us from down the street. He’d gotten close enough to see that something was happening. I turned the other way and Spindle grabbed my elbow and yelled “This way!”

  We raced up Varley Street and across a footbridge. We had barely reached the far end when I heard footsteps pounding on it.

  I looked back. There were three guards chasing us now.

  “You were right,” I moaned, as we ducked into an alley and ran down it, jumping over old boxes and broken crates. Rats scampered out of our way, chittering angrily. “Spindle, you were right!”

  “Told—you—so—” he panted. “Probably—all got—orders—last night—”

  There was a constable at the end of the alley. He said “Here, now—!” but Spindle went right and I went left and he missed both of us. I flung myself through a gap in a courtyard fence that was too narrow for a grown-up—it was almost too narrow for me—and Spindle was right behind me, while the constable growled and rattled at the gate.

  “Over the back wall,” said Spindle. “Hurry!”

  Punching dough for hours a day gives you pretty strong arms, but it still wasn’t easy to get over the wall. Spindle had to actually get under me and shove my legs upwards. It would have been embarrassing, but when you’re running for your life, you tend not to worry about these things.

  The road we came out on was clear, but I could hear, “Halloo!” and, “They went this way!” echoing down the streets. They were between us and the Rat’s Nest. I could tell Spindle wasn’t sure where to go next, and my heart was hammering against my rib cage until I thought it might explode.

  We skidded through an intersection, past the fiddle player, whose instrument let out a very unmusical squawk as we tore past her.

  “I see them!”

  “There!”

  If only there had been more people about, we might have lost ourselves in the crowd. If it had been darker, we might have been able to hide.

  If I wasn’t a stubborn, hard-headed idiot, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.

  Another bridge loomed out of the early-morning gloom.

  “Down!” hissed Spindle, and wrenched me sideways. There was a water-stair there, a set of steps cut into the concrete, leading down into the canal. The water-stairs lead to tunnels where the sewer-workers can get into the drains, presumably to clear out rats and zombie crayfish and to make sure the sewers aren’t going to collapse under us.

  I know Spindle was thinking that maybe we could get into the drains and lose the constables that way. And it was a good plan, a really clever plan…except for the enormous locked grate under the bridge.

  Spindle rattled the bars futilely. The padlock had a latch as thick around as my thumb. There was no way we were breaking through it.

  “Can you pick that?”

  “Sure, if I’ve got time—”

  “Hallooo!” sounded directly over our heads.

  “They’re on the bridge,” I whispered.

  “They’ll be down here in a minute,” Spindle whispered back. “Can you swim?”

  Urrrgh.

  You don’t swim in the canals. Not unless you’re a duck, and even the ducks probably don’t enjoy it much. Whenever it rains, the sewers overflow directly into the canal—at high summer, the city stinks in ways that even poets can’t describe—and that’s not even including the stuff that people dump in there as a matter of course. We get our water from wells, not from the canals. We don’t even dig the wells anywhere near the canals. You jump in the canal if you’re trying to kill yourself, not if you want to go for a swim.

  “No,” I said. “Can you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Did you see them?” asked a constable at the far end of the bridge. “They didn’t come by me.”

  “Can you magic us out, then?” asked Spindle, rolli
ng his eyes wildly at the sound of the voices.

  “Bread! I work with bread! Only bread!”

  Spindle slapped his pockets and came up with the half-loaf I’d given him yesterday. “Okay, now what?”

  He looked so expectant that I didn’t know whether to cry or hit him. “Now nothing! I can’t do anything—I mean, maybe if you could get them to eat it—” I had a sudden absurd image of Spindle throwing bits of bread to the constables and the men quacking like ducks as they fought for the floating scraps. I could feel hysterical laughter welling up in my throat and crushed it.

  I’ll have plenty of time to go mad with terror after they’ve caught me.

  And then that stupid image of the constables in the water and the scraps of floating bread caught me, and I didn’t feel the urge to laugh any more.

  Floating bread.

  Floating bread.

  “Give me the bread,” I said.

  “Check the water-stair,” called one of the constables. “They might have gone to ground.”

  Half a loaf. Not sliced. Well, that was easy enough…

  I held the stale bread in both hands and suggested that maybe it was tired of being in one piece. It resisted for only a moment, then fell apart in exactly even slices.

  It took me a week last autumn to learn how to make bread slice itself. I made a lot of ragged stumps at first, and it’s a good thing Aunt Tabitha believed in me, because we had to put about fifty mangled loaves on the discount pile and make a whole lot more into bread pudding before I got the hang of it. I still tend to leave pretty thick end pieces, but I’m a lot faster than using a knife.

  I made five good-sized slices, and we’d probably only need four, so nobody would be stuck with the heel. And they were stale already, and as I held them, I told them to get even staler, to get so hard that they were practically stone. This bread wouldn’t dissolve in water. This bread hated water. Water was the enemy.

  Float, I ordered the bread. No matter how heavy you get, float.

  There was a clatter as one of the constables started down the water-stair.

  “Here,” I told Spindle, handing him two of the slices. “I don’t know how we’ll stay on them, but it’s the best we’ve got.”

  The constable peered into the gloom and cried “Hey! You there!”

  “Come on!” I set the bread into the murky green water, took a deep breath, and stepped out onto it, one foot on each slice.

  We were much too heavy, of course. It’s impossible to float on bread, which is why magic had to get involved. Hold us up, I ordered the bread. Don’t sink.

  If you have ever tried to stay afloat on a pair of magic bread slices, then you know what it was like. Otherwise, all I can say is that I don’t recommend it. The slices were from one of our big sourdough rounds, so they were a pretty good size, but my feet still stuck out a little over the crust.

  Staying balanced was nearly impossible. It was like trying to walk on moving ice. One foot went one way and the other foot went the other way and I nearly went down into the sludge. Then I overcompensated and nearly went down the other way as my left foot shot out from under me.

  Spindle caught on quicker than I did. He had both slices in the water and a foot on each slice before I’d managed to get my balance back.

  The constable stared at me. He could probably have reached out and grabbed me, but he was too flabbergasted. His mouth hung open and his eyebrows were so high they’d vanished under his hair. You’d think he’d never seen anybody ride bread before.

  The gingerbread man put his hands to either side of his head and made faces at the constable, as best you can when you don’t have a tongue to stick out.

  There is a river somewhere that flows into the city, breaking into all the canals, and that river flows eventually into the sea, which means that there is a vague current. It carried us away, not too swiftly, while Spindle and I flailed and rocked and tried not to fall in, and the constable stared after us as if we’d grown wings.

  But it worked. That was the thought that kept going through my mind—it’s working, it’s working, sweet Lady of Sorrowful Angels, it’s working! The bread was stale enough and my magic was strong enough. We floated on the surface of the water, and even though it splashed over the sides occasionally and soaked our shoes, the bread continued to float.

  “Look out!” The current was pushing Spindle into me. I tried to get out of the way, but bread isn’t very good at evasive maneuvers. At the last second, I leaned one way and he leaned the other and we passed with an inch or two to spare.

  It didn’t get any easier to ride, but we did get a little better at it. The best way was to crouch down with your knees close together, so that you didn’t slide too far to either side and risk having your feet go out from under you. There were pilings in the water that were harder to navigate around, but you could grab onto them to steady yourself, so they were actually more help than harm. I think the bread caught on to what we were doing and tried to steady us, too. (I’m not saying bread is intelligent, mind you, but magic is.)

  At one point, an eddy caught one of my slices, and it was either turn around with it or fall off completely, so I turned. A line of constables was just visible on the bridge, all staring after us with identical expressions of stunned dismay. One broke away and started running down the road, trying to keep pace with us, but the road turned and we floated between a row of houses that came right up to the canal’s edge. The gingerbread man on my shoulder waved to our pursuer as we drifted out of sight.

  “We’re getting away!” Spindle cried. “We’re really getting away! On bread!”

  “We are!” I said. “But we should find someplace to get off soon—I don’t know how long I can keep magicking this bread from getting soggy, and I don’t want them to get any bright ideas about nets.”

  Spindle nodded. “Or crossbows,” he said grimly.

  Crossbows? They wouldn’t shoot us, would they? I mean, we weren’t…we hadn’t…

  Somebody wants to talk to you, the constable had said.

  What if that somebody was Inquisitor Oberon?

  What if nothing—who else could it be?

  There was a grate ahead, where the canal ran under street level. The grates were wide enough for two kids to pass through, although I had a bad moment when each of my slices went on a different side of a bar and I had to grab the bar and swing awkwardly around it to keep from falling over.

  The ceiling on the other side was low and furred with moss. I could hear dripping sounds from all directions. Spindle and I crouched over our bread and let the canal carry us down the tunnel of dark water.

  Thirteen

  “I’m sorry I called you a street rat,” I said, flicking a pebble into the murky water.

  “S’okay,” said Spindle, hunching up inside his jacket. “You’re not used to this sorta thing.”

  We were sitting inside the sewers, or at least some tunnels that had probably originally been dug as sewers. Now they were much larger, as generations of smugglers running goods up the river had used them as a landing point and illicit entry to the city. We’d nearly wound up in the river ourselves before our sliced-bread floats gave out completely. But there had been a tiny little beach—if you can call it a beach when the sand is mostly covered in bits of packing crates and stubbed out cigar-butts—and we’d abandoned our bread and waded up onto it.

  It stank. I want to be absolutely clear on that. It could have been a lot worse—the river carried a lot of it away—but it still stank. Outhouse-at-high-noon kinda stink with wet green mucky stink mixed in and a faint patina of dead-thing-rotting stink on top. After wading in it, Spindle and I stank too.

  The gingerbread man made a show of holding his nose.

  “Quiet, you,” I muttered. “I don’t think you’ve even got a sense of smell.”

  He waved a hand in front of his face exaggeratedly, but even that wasn’t enough to cheer me up.

  I’m going to catch some kind of horrible disease.
It’ll kill me before the Spring Green Man gets the chance.

  “Anyway,” Spindle said, unrolling his sleeves so the grubby cuffs dangled over his fingers, “you got dropped into this sudden-like, you weren’t born on the streets, like me.” He jerked a thumb at his chest and sat up a little straighter. “So I guess it’s not your fault you’re a bit bacon-brained.”

  After this magnanimous speech, I didn’t feel like arguing, although…bacon-brained? Really?

  Actually, I would have killed for some bacon. Even the horrible stink wasn’t enough to make me forget that I was really hungry.

  I hoped I was the only hungry thing down here. If there were undead crawfish remaining anywhere in the city, it was probably somewhere nearby. I listened for the clicking of terrible tiny claws but didn’t hear anything.

  “So now what do we do?” asked Spindle.

  “I have no idea.” Truth be told, I had been hoping he’d have an idea. “Can we get back to Knackering Molly’s?”

  Spindle thought about it. “Maybe. Well, I can, probably. But you shouldn’t be going out until it’s dark. If the constables get sight of you, I dunno if we can give them the slip twice.”

  My stomach growled again. Spindle’s growled in response. We both snickered.

  “We gotta get some food,” I said. “Or else I’ll die down here, and I don’t want to give the Inquisitor the satisfaction.”

  Spindle bounced to his feet. “Well…here’s what I’m thinkin’. If we follow the smuggler’s tunnels, we’ll get to wherever they go to deliver their stuff, and I bet you anything it’s a tavern.”

  “A tavern? Why a tavern?” I stood up and dusted myself off. The gingerbread man steadied himself on my earlobe and went back to picking bits of waterweed out of my hair.

  Spindle gave me a superior look. “Because they smuggle booze. Don’t you pay attention? They bring it up the coast and sell it to taverns.”

  “What, illegally? Really?” I tried to imagine smugglers selling rum to the tavern down the street from the bakery. The innkeeper had really bad dandruff and his shoulders looked like a powdered-sugar donut, but he was always very nice to me, so I tried not to look at his shoulders when I talked to him. I had to run down and arrange the order of dark ale for the beer bread, and once Aunt Tabitha had gotten a big order in for rum cakes and had to order a…half-keg…of…rum….