A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

  I put a hand over my mouth. The innkeeper had been breaking the law this whole time? Did Aunt Tabitha know about this?

  Spindle laughed at me, but not unkindly. “C’mon, then.” He started up the tunnel and I followed.

  * * *

  Sure enough, the tunnels came out at a tavern. Well, they probably came out at all kinds of places, but the one we followed, based on a few chalk arrows and squiggles that Spindle claimed were “thief-sign,” came out in the alley behind a very seedy establishment called The Hanging Goat.

  “Wait here,” said Spindle, leaving me in the alley, and ducked through the open door into the back of the tavern’s kitchen. The smells coming out weren’t promising, but since the smell coming off me was truly apocalyptic, who was I to judge?

  I hunkered down in the alley and fidgeted. I could see people walking past the mouth of the alley. They looked very normal. Nobody was trying to kill them. I’d been like that once. It seemed like a very long time ago.

  A guard in a blue uniform went by the alley mouth, and I scrambled back farther into the piled trash. He didn’t even glance down the alley. The gingerbread man patted my ear comfortingly.

  Spindle re-emerged, clutching a lump of something wrapped in rags, and grabbed my arm. “C’mon! She’ll notice they’re gone in a minute! We gotta scarper!”

  So, we scarpered, which apparently meant “run away very fast.”

  Two blocks over we stopped, climbed a metal staircase in yet another alley, and Spindle unwrapped his prize—a pair of meat pies. They were still burning hot and somewhat squashed.

  “Nicked ’em off the cooling rack,” said Spindle proudly, juggling his from hand to hand. “’Ere, be careful! You’ll roast yourself!”

  “Gmmrmgfff,” I said. The filling was still boiling hot and scalded the roof of my mouth and the crust was deeply inferior compared to one of mine. The cook was letting the butter get too warm when she made it. The meat was probably horse.

  It was wonderful.

  “Thanks,” I told Spindle, who was eating his rather more slowly. “You just saved my life. I was going to starve to death right here.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “So,” I said, when he’d finished licking the crumbs off his fingers, “now where do we go? Back to Knackering Molly?”

  “Best I can think of,” he admitted. “But first we’re stealing some clothes outta the poor box on Hanover Street.”

  I didn’t much like the idea of stealing clothes out of the poor box, but desperate times called for desperate measures. “Do we need a disguise?”

  “Disguise nuthin’,” said Spindle, climbing down the staircase. He stopped at the bottom and looked up, wrinkling his nose. “We need clean clothes and a dip in a cistern. We stink.”

  Fourteen

  Five days later, I sat in a church belltower, building a circus out of bread.

  Knackering Molly had been hard to find. When Spindle finally tracked her down, I’d spent half the night hiding in back alleys and under bridges, shivering inside stolen clothes that were two sizes too big for me.

  Molly didn’t apologize for having left us for so long, or yell at us for leaving. I’m not entirely sure if she realized that she was a grown-up and we were kids, or if she knew and it just didn’t matter to her in the slightest. Maybe that sort of thing didn’t apply any more. If grown-ups were trying to kill you, did that make you an honorary grown-up? If so, I would have preferred to just grow up and get my period like a normal person.

  “Got a theory,” Molly said, when we had finished explaining our narrow escape. “Been talking to some people who saw the Spring Green Man workin’, like you did, girl. I think he’s magic too, but his talent’s something to do with air and smells. Maybe not so good for killin’ people, but good for sniffing out other magic. And he’s got the knife for the killin’ bit.”

  I remembered that strange, heavy smell around him, and how my brain felt foggy when I smelled it. “But why would he want to kill us?” I asked, pulling my over-sized coat tight around me.

  “Maybe he’s crazy,” she said, shrugging. (“You’d know,” said Spindle, not entirely under his breath.) “More like somebody’s paying him. He talked about that Inquisitor fellow, you said, so I’m guessin’ you don’t need to be lookin’ much farther.”

  “But why would the Inquisitor want to kill wizards?”

  Knackering Molly shook her head. A moment later, Nag shook his, and stamped one bony hoof. “The answer to that question won’t be found at street level, girl. I asked down in the Rat’s Nest and at the Goblin Market, and they know about the Spring Green Man and somebody even saw him—and smelled him—but there ain’t no telling what’s behind him.”

  “What about Knucklebones?” asked Spindle. “Knucklebones knows all kind of stuff from up high. Used to be a lady’s maid, she always says.”

  “Knucklebones is headed out of town on the first horse she can steal,” said Molly. “Her kid’s got a magicker daddy, and even if it don’t normally breed true, she’s runnin’. And Mona here’s the only one who’s tangled with the Inquisitor.” Her lips twisted. “Politics is what it is.”

  Spindle spat on the ground.

  “Now what do we do?” I asked gloomily. I didn’t see a way of defeating politics with bread.

  “They’re talking about bringing in sniffers to look for you. Don’t think they will, but if they do, that’s a lot of money on someone who wants you dead.”

  “Lot of work, too,” said Spindle. “You gotta keep them wet.”

  “Sniffers are just like bloodhounds,” said Molly, rather more cheerfully. “Track you for miles, but there’s ways of throwing them off. And they can’t get them in any closer than Delta City, so you’ve got a couple days. Grab hold of Nag’s tail.”

  So we followed Molly again, and she led us to a little church, only a few blocks away from Our Lady of Sorrowful Angels, but not nearly so well-appointed. I hung back nervously (I’d just stolen clothes from a church poor box, I wasn’t sure how good my credit was with the divine) but she rode Nag right up into the churchyard and urged Spindle and me toward a small door in the wall.

  “The friar’s stone deaf,” she said, “and the lay brother’s a good enough sort. They’ll not trouble you, and they’ll bring you two square meals a day on the strength of me asking.” She frowned. “I don’t know that the scent of hallowed ground’ll cover over magic. Mayhap it won’t. Maybe it’s just a superstition, like making a magicker hold iron in court. But it can’t hurt. If the Spring Green Man comes for you, girl, run for it. The folks here are priests, not fighters, and there’s little enough they can do for you but die tryin’.”

  I gulped.

  “I’ll keep an ear to the ground. If I learn anything, I’ll be in touch.” She swung Nag around and clattered out of the courtyard without saying goodbye.

  Spindle looked at me, and I looked at him, and then we went inside the church because we didn’t know what else to do.

  Well, I suppose I could leave the city—beg Spindle to take me to the gate and just start walking—but what would I do? What would I eat? Even I can’t make bread out of rocks and road dust. Not unless I get a bunch of extra ingredients.

  And what about Aunt Tabitha? They said sniffers could find places you’d even thought of being, and that meant they’d be all over the bakery. What if Inquisitor Oberon decided to accuse her of something?

  The church was small and very shabby. The pews looked worn, and the altar cloth had been eaten by moths until it was more holes than fabric. The lay brother was as good as Molly’s word. He was a tall, craggy-faced man, and he didn’t ask questions. He led me to a ladder and pointed up.

  “The bell-tower,” he said, nodding to himself. “We sold the bells long ago, you understand. The tower cannot be sold. There is little up there that will harm you. I would not go to the top room, where the bells were. There are bats.”

  After this inspiring speech, he nodded again and left. Spindle and I w
ent up the ladder, and found that the room was almost claustrophobically small, not very warm, and the edges of the entry shaft were splattered with bat droppings.

  “Cozy,” said Spindle.

  I peered out the single slitted window. I could see a number of roofs, and across them, the Church of Sorrowful Angels. “The view’s nice.” The gingerbread man hopped off my shoulder and stood in the window, gazing out.

  And it was defensible, if nothing else: the Spring Green Man had only one way in, and if I kicked the ladder down, not even that.

  Of course, that meant that I had only one way out as well.

  “You’re the one stuck here, not me,” said Spindle. He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Can I do anything for you?”

  “Tell Aunt Tabitha where I am,” I said. “If you can get me paper, and deliver a letter—”

  Spindle was shaking his head. “Knackering Molly already told me not to. They’ve got guards all over town and some of ’em got a look at me when we gave ’em the slip the other day.” He frowned. “And you gotta bet that Spring Green Man’s sniffing all over ’round there, and if he smells you on me, he could maybe track you back here.”

  I sagged. This was worse than I had thought. Aunt Tabitha had to be worried sick.

  “Hey,” said Spindle, “It’s not so bad. It’s only ’til they stop looking for you. I’ll snitch you some food during the day, though. Place like this, it’s nothing but gruel, gruel, and more gruel.”

  As it happened, he wasn’t far wrong. It was gritty porridge for breakfast and half an onion and a slab of dark bread for supper. The onion was tolerable, although it did awful things to my breath. The bread was an affront to the baker’s art. It took more energy to make it edible than I got from eating it. After the second day, I stopped even trying to eat it, and began molding it into tiny people and animals, which I tried to set into motion.

  Believe it or not, I’d never spent a lot of time really working on my magic. I was always more interested in learning how to bake. Baking is much more rewarding. There are cookbooks to tell you what to do, and at the end you’ve got chocolate chip cookies to show for it. There aren’t any books to teach you how to do magic, or if there are, they aren’t available to people like me.

  So when I do magic, it’s more of an instinctive thing. When the bread is burning, I don’t stop and think, “I must magic the bread so it doesn’t burn!” I just do it reflexively, like when somebody hits a glass of water with their elbow and you grab for it before it goes over. You don’t think, “I am going to grab that glass.” I wouldn’t have known that I could animate gingerbread men if I hadn’t done it once already as a little kid, when you don’t know stuff is impossible.

  The magic I try to do deliberately doesn’t work nearly as well, unless I’m panicked, like when I made the getaway-bread float, or brought Bob the sourdough starter to life. There’s something about stark terror that really gets magic working.

  Unfortunately, being stuck in a bell tower isn’t quite the same thing. I was terrified, sure, but it was a boring sort of terror. You can’t stay in a state of heart-pounding panic for very long. Your body just can’t manage it. So I’d just sit there and stare out the window and think about being out in the city. Then I’d start to think about Aunt Tabitha and how worried she must be and then I’d remember all over again what was happening and I’d be angry and scared and tired. I slept a lot. Sleep was at least time passing that I didn’t have to be around for.

  Spindle brought me a pack of cards. That was fun for a bit, but I made the mistake of teaching the gingerbread man the rules of solitaire. After that, whenever I’d try to cheat and run through the discard pile an extra time, he’d kick me in the wrist and sit on the cards.

  I taught him to play rummy, even though the cards were half as big as he was. He beat me eleven times in a row and then refused to play anymore. I think I bored him.

  It was probably a good thing that we didn’t have a checkerboard.

  There was one good thing. Stuck up there for days with an increasingly large pile of inedible bread, I finally had time to practice my magic.

  I started by smooshing the bread together into balls, and molding little figures out of them, then making them walk around. It sort of worked. They weren’t nearly as responsive as the gingerbread men. It felt like the chunks of bread didn’t want to come together.

  “Maybe I have to bake stuff into a human shape before it believes it’s human?” I said to the gingerbread man.

  He eyed my shambling bread-crust creature with disapproval and shrugged. He was building a house out of cards, which was a major construction project for someone his size.

  My bread creatures also weren’t very smart. When I made a couple of them and told them to march around the room, they stopped as soon as they ran into a wall. I sighed and took them apart again.

  When Spindle came back that night, I had a request. “Hey, Spindle?”

  “Mmmpgh?” His mouth was full. He’d gotten in the habit of eating a meal with me, and I felt almost pathetically grateful for the company. I knew that he didn’t have to keep bringing me food, and if he decided to ditch me, it’s not like I’d ever find him again. He’d probably be in a lot less danger, too, since he wasn’t a magicker and the Spring Green Man might not even care that he existed.

  “Can you get me some dough? Stuff that hasn’t been cooked yet?”

  He wiped his mouth. “It’d be harder than cooked stuff, but sure, I guess.”

  I was seized with a pang of misgiving. “Don’t do it if it’s too hard! I don’t want you to get caught.”

  He gave me a disgusted look. “Girl, you’re lookin’ at the thief who pinched the socks off the feet of the head of the Jeweler’s Guild. Too hard. Pfff!”

  He was as good as his word. The next morning I heard a rattling on the ladder, and he came up carrying a sack which held an entire mixing bowl of dough (bowl included) and a number of battered onions.

  I examined the dough. It was full of papery onion skin and bits of dirt.

  “What?” asked Spindle. “You weren’t gonna eat it, were you?”

  “I guess not. Why onions?”

  “Pretended to sell ’em,” he said proudly. “Took a basket into the kitchen at the White Horse and offered ’em to the cook. While she was yellin’ at somebody, I dumped her bowl into the basket and put onions over top.”

  “Very impressive. This is perfect, Spindle. Thank you.”

  I hugged him. He squirmed out and gave me a reproachful look, but his ears turned red, and I’m pretty sure that meant he was pleased.

  Fifteen

  The magic experiments went much better with dough than with bread. The dough was…well…smarter, I guess. More suggestible. The bread that had already been baked had a very clear idea that it was a loaf, it had always been a loaf, it would always be a loaf. The dough was willing to be little people or animals or anything else I wanted it to be.

  They were gloppy people and animals, so I couldn’t make them very large, and they were awfully sticky—I needed more flour, but I didn’t want to keep making demands of Spindle, who was already being so nice. But if you told them to walk around the room, they’d walk around the room. When they hit a wall, they would turn around and walk in another direction. If I took a nap, when I woke up, they’d be in different positions.

  One ran into the gingerbread man’s card house and got thrown out the window. My cookie had a temper.

  I could feel the dough, a little, inside my head. They were so small that I had to really pay attention, but it wasn’t like I had anything else to do. It was just a kind of little mental tugging. It didn’t do much but it did make me tired after a while, so I was careful to pull the magic out of them at night before I went to sleep.

  When I concentrated, I could feel something similar from the gingerbread man, now that I was looking for it. It had been going on for so long, though, that I didn’t even notice any more. If you wear really heavy boots in the winte
r, you stop noticing that they’re heavy after a few days, and then when you take them off, your feet feel ridiculously light.

  I was staring out the window one afternoon, when a couple of pigeons landed on a drainpipe at the corner of the roof below. One pushed the other off the edge, and it flapped frantically, tumbled a few feet, and then flew laboriously up to the roof.

  Hmm….

  I looked down at the dough in my hands. I’d made little dough dogs and horses. Could I make a dough bird?

  I started to get excited by the thought. If I could make a bird out of dough, could I send it with a message to Aunt Tabitha? It was much too far for even my gingerbread man to walk, but a bird could fly! And bread was lightweight, wasn’t it?

  I hastily pinched out the shape of wings.

  The end result was…gummy. It would undoubtedly have been better if I could bake it, but maybe with enough magic, it wouldn’t matter. I held the lumpy bird in both hands and thought Fly.

  It came alive like the others, flopping its wings. They stretched and drooped under the weight of the dough. This wasn’t going to work if it kept being so heavy! Could I convince the dough that it was lighter?

  You’re light, I told it. You’re as light and flaky as the inside of a croissant. You weigh nothing at all.

  The dough bird flapped wetly. Did it feel lighter? I couldn’t tell. Did it need more magic?

  I tried to pump more magic into it, through that odd little link in my head. Light! I thought frantically. You weigh nothing. You weigh less than air.

  It didn’t exactly feel like pouring magic into the dough, like you’d pour milk into a mixing bowl. It was more like trying to knead magic into it, like kneading flour into a very stiff dough. The bird didn’t want any more magic in it. It couldn’t all fit.