A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

  Seventeen

  The night I spent in the belltower after Spindle brought the broadsheets was one of the most restless I’ve ever had. Not the worst—it’d be hard to top having the Spring Green Man trying to kill me in the cellar—but the most restless.

  I tossed. I turned. I tried to get comfortable, which isn’t easy on a pile of straw, let me tell you. If you’ve got any notions that straw makes a good bed, just abandon them now. Straw is itchy. It pokes you. It’s softer to sleep on than dirt or flagstones, sure, but the individual straws aren’t soft at all. They stab through your clothes, and when you wiggle to move one out of the way, five more get into position to poke you.

  Still, the straw was the least of my worries.

  Sure, I was tired. You wouldn’t think you could get tired cooped up in a belltower all day, but you can, particularly when you do eleven push-ups and run laps around the room for half an hour. (Those were good push-ups too, on my toes, not on my knees. My forearms were really strong from smacking all that dough around, as I’ve said, but my biceps were no slouches either.)

  The posters were still there. I had shoved them to the far side of the room. They seemed to breathe malice into the air. I’d turned them over so that they were face down, otherwise I felt like the words were staring at me. Probably that sounds stupid, but that’s how I felt.

  The gingerbread man was standing sentry in the window again, and I watched his small, brave shadow travel across the floor as the night progressed. But I couldn’t sleep. My thoughts ran over and under each other, stretching and churning, as if my brain were trying to pull taffy. I’d swear to myself that there was nothing I could do, that I was going to stop thinking and go to sleep now, and then ten minutes later my brain would be going again, jitter-flop, jitter-flop, like a three-legged frog on a griddle.

  Oberon was planning to get rid of every magically-talented person in the city. He’d already gotten a bunch of us, and a bunch more had left. Spindle’s friends, his sister…I didn’t really believe that Little Sidney had run away to sea anymore. Lena at the market had said that everybody should get out, and like an idiot, I hadn’t listened.

  How many were gone?

  Maybe that was the wrong question. Maybe I should be asking how many of us were left.

  Great.

  Jitter-flop, jitter-flop went my brain, stuttering around, trying to find solutions to problems that were so much bigger than me, it was laughable.

  What could I do?

  Well, not getting killed by the Spring Green Man was probably a good start.

  And then what?

  Stay up in the belltower for the rest of my life, living on Spindle’s charity and the dour brothers below, until the Spring Green Man came sniffing up the ladder after me? No. Not an option.

  Leave the city?

  I rolled over in the straw, which fired a new volley of stickers into my legs and arms.

  I could leave, I guess. Maybe that was the sensible and sane thing to do. I could go to another city, get apprenticed to a baker somewhere. It wasn’t bragging to say that most bakeries would probably want me.

  Oh, but that would be hard. I tried not to think about my parents much. They had died an awfully long time ago, but I still remembered how my mom smelled, and the way my dad chuckled, a furry sort of chuckle down deep in his chest. Losing them had been the worst thing ever. If I had to lose Aunt Tabitha and my uncle and the bakery…I mean, I might find another bakery, I might even love another bakery, but it wouldn’t be mine in the same way.

  That was assuming I got anywhere. The roads between city-states were well-travelled, and I wouldn’t be eaten by bears, but being a fourteen-year-old girl on the road alone meant there were worse things than bears out there. And we were sort of cordially at war with a couple of other city-states, and what if I got all the way to one of them, and they turned me away because I came from Riverbraid?

  And the army was supposed to be out dealing with the Carex mercenaries, which raided all the city-states with a kind of even-handed brigandry, but suppose the army didn’t catch them all, and I stumbled into a Carex camp? They ate people. Probably.

  It would be ignominious to escape the Spring Green Man only to get eaten by a Carex. I’d almost rather get eaten by bears. At least that was sort of normal behavior for bears.

  And there was still the problem of being a magicker. If I got to a city, I still might have to leave again, or live in a wizard’s quarter, or get registered by the government as a known magicker. That was what I was trying to avoid. It seemed like once you agreed that the government could put you on a list because of something you were born with, you were asking for trouble. Sooner or later somebody like Oberon would get hold of that list.

  Jitter-flop, jitter-flop…

  So. If I couldn’t leave, and I couldn’t hide forever, what did that leave?

  Stopping Oberon and the Spring Green Man. Which I certainly couldn’t do by myself.

  Well, then. Who could?

  I gave up on any effort at sleep and sat up, pulling my knees against my chest and picking malicious straw out of my pants. I felt so jittery that I wanted to get up and run—or go down and do…something.

  The gingerbread man hopped down from the window and poked his head down the hole where the ladder came from.

  A moment later he came back and waved to me.

  I set a foot on the ladder and went cautiously down.

  The door at the foot of the tower was closed, but the hinges were well oiled. I slipped into the church. Moonlight seeped through the cracks in the boarded windows. I heard a crier far off in the distance—one o’clock and all’s well…well…well…

  Maybe for him.

  “Restless, my child?” asked a voice.

  I whirled around with a yelp.

  It was the old priest.

  He was sitting in the second row of pews, so small and silent I had taken him for a pile of coats. He looked to be about a thousand years old, give or take a few hundred.

  “S-sorry—” I said. I didn’t know whether to run back up the ladder or try to get out of the church. He wasn’t supposed to know I was there. Had I just given myself away?

  He smiled and nodded vaguely at me. After a minute, I realized that he probably couldn’t see me very well. His eyes had a dim, unfocused look.

  He patted the pew back. “Come and sit down, child. If you are restless, prayer is good for the spirit and if you are tired, there is no harm in sitting either.”

  I crept closer. He looked so frail that I couldn’t imagine that he could grab me. The gingerbread man lay close against the back of my neck.

  I sat down on the pew in front of him, a little to one side.

  “Is something troubling you, my child?” he asked, after a while. And before I could say anything, he smiled and added, “It doesn’t matter if you tell me, you know. I am stone-deaf and cannot hear it anyway. It makes me very popular in the confessional these days.”

  It occurred to me that he probably would have a hard time turning me in, even if he wanted to.

  “I’m scared,” I said finally. “I miss my bakery. I’m scared and I’m sick of onions and porridge and I’m only fourteen and I shouldn’t have to do this.” I folded my arms around myself. “I’m scared that the people who help me are going to get hurt.”

  The old priest smiled and patted my shoulder. “There, there, my dear. I’m sure it’s not as bad as that—or perhaps it is, in which case, I’m sorry. Or perhaps you were talking about the weather.” He sighed. “Well, if nothing else, I find that you can rarely go wrong appealing to a higher power.”

  We sat in the pew, and suddenly all the things percolating in my mind came together. I had poured in all the ingredients and stirred, and the dough had finally begun to rise.

  A higher power. I needed a higher power.

  Not a spiritual one, but one right here in the city.

  “The Duchess,” I said out loud.

  The gingerbread man moved rest
lessly against my neck.

  Somehow, I would have to get word to the Duchess. She would give me a fair hearing, I was sure of it. She’d intervened on my behalf before. She didn’t seem very warm, but she also didn’t seem cruel. And she had wizards—real wizards, not just piddly little magickers like me, wizards who could do powerful things, and stop Oberon in his tracks.

  Come to think of it, her name hadn’t been on any of the posters. They were all issued “by order of Inquisitor Oberon.” And I had a hard time believing that the Army wizards would be all that happy about a registry either.

  Did the Duchess even know about the posters?

  Nobody ever saw her outside the palace, except for during parades. There hadn’t been a parade for a long time. And the Golden General was gone.

  I was broken from my thoughts by a faint noise behind me. When I turned, the old priest was asleep with his head tilted back against the pew.

  After a moment, he let out a very impressive snore. The gingerbread man came out and stared at him in awe.

  I got up and crept back to the tower. My mind was a whirl.

  Could Inquisitor Oberon be doing all this without the Duchess’s knowledge? Why would he keep her in the dark? Could he be plotting against her as well as the magickers? Why did he even want the magickers dead, anyway? He couldn’t just hate all magic, like some people, could he? Otherwise would he really use the Spring Green Man—a magicker himself—to hunt them down?

  Could this be part of some larger plot?

  Even if the Duchess did know about the posters, even if she somehow believed all this stuff about wizard traitors, someone had to tell her that Inquisitor Oberon was using the Spring Green Man to kill magickers.

  So that was easy. I just had to get a chance to talk to the Duchess, with the understanding that all of her guards and ministers and functionaries would arrest me on sight and hand me over to my worst enemies.

  Piece of cake.

  * * *

  “You want to break in where?” said Spindle, staring at me like I had suddenly grown antlers.

  “The Duchess’s palace. No, the Duchess’s bedroom. The palace is too big. It has to be someplace where she won’t have a lot of people around her.”

  “The Duchess’s bedroom?” said Spindle, staring at me like I had suddenly grown purple antlers garlanded with daisies and marmalade kittens.

  “It’s the only way.”

  “You’re out of your mind! Mad as a mudlark! Completely bonkers!” Spindle looked wildly around the tower room until his eye fell on the gingerbread man. “Tell her!”

  The gingerbread man shrugged. He was displaying a lot of independent thought these days, but he still couldn’t talk, which was good. There would have been something really unsettling about a talking gingerbread man.

  “You’ll get killed!”

  “How is that different from doing anything else? I’m stuck in this stupid tower until either they catch me, or you get caught for something and stop bringing me food and I die of a porridge overdose! At least if I try to warn the Duchess, I’ll be doing something!”

  The nice thing about Spindle is that he didn’t tell me to be patient. A grown-up would have told me to be patient, it’d all work out. Spindle didn’t bother, which was good, because I was done being patient.

  Instead, he stomped over to the slit of a window and glared over the rooftops. I let him alone and settled for braiding a couple of stalks of straw together.

  Finally, Spindle said, “Getting into the palace shouldn’t be too hard. They’ve got a lot of people going in and out, and that always makes it easy. But once we’re in, we’d be in trouble. You gotta filch uniforms and stuff, or everybody stops you to ask who you are and why you’re there. And there’s no uniform in the world that’d get you into the Duchess’s bedroom with her.”

  “Don’t you think…like…a maid, maybe?”

  Spindle gave me a withering look. “You don’t know much about servants, do you?”

  “Oh, and you do?”

  “Sure. You gonna pick pockets, you gotta know your mark. If you’re gonna break into a big house, you actually want the high-up servant’s rooms—they got jewelry and stuff that’s worth money, but not so much that you can’t sell it.”

  “You can’t sell something that’s worth too much money?” This sounded bizarre to me. I mean, breaking into somebody’s house to steal their stuff sounded kind of bizarre already. I was pretty sure my nerves would give out before I was even in a window.

  Meanwhile, Spindle was still looking at me like I was an idiot. Mind you, he did this so often that I was starting to wonder if he just had an eyelid tic or something—surely I couldn’t be that dense, could I?

  “Steal a great lady’s jewels and ain’t nobody gonna fence it—you know, sell the stolen stuff for you,” he said. “S’more trouble to you than it’s worth, ’cos nobody can move it. It’s too good, you know? No back-alley pawnshop would have stuff like that, so it has to be stolen, and the constables will get awfully interested, and nobody’s gonna buy it, ’cos they don’t have the money. Stealing jewels like that is like…high-level stuff.”

  I propped my chin on my hand. “So, what? You’re telling me I’m not noble-looking enough to be a maid to the Duchess?”

  “Nope,” said Spindle.

  “So what would you do?” I asked testily. Tact, in Spindle’s world, was apparently something that happened to other people.

  “I gotta think about it,” said Spindle. “I gotta go look at the palace. This is crazy. I told you this is crazy, right?”

  Which is how we wound up, five nights later, climbing out of the Duchess’s toilet.

  Eighteen

  So, in a palace, the toilet’s called the “garderobe.” It’s basically a closet with a hole in the floor that drops straight down a couple of stories into a cesspit. In the nicer ones—and the Duchess’s garderobe was very nice—you get a little carved wooden bench with a seat on it, and you can sit there and think about life or whatever you want to think about when nature is calling, and the point is that since it’s three stories down and there are vents, it doesn’t even smell bad. Much.

  Well, comparatively speaking.

  Regular people have to use chamberpots, but if you’re rich or noble and you’ve got a castle with a spare closet and a straight shot to the ground, you get a garderobe.

  There’s a guy whose job is to shovel the cesspit out once a week. It’s under a locked grate in a little stone hut with locked doors. (Who knew you had to keep that under lock and key? I mean, nobody’s going to steal it…right?)

  As far as I can tell, Spindle broke into the palace disguised as an ash-sweeper, then followed this guy around for two days until he got a chance to filch the keys, and then he made a wax imprint in a bit of old candle and returned the key before the cesspit cleaner even noticed.

  I was very impressed by this and told him so. Spindle muttered something about how it was no different than any other second-story job, and there was no place in the world for a clever noddy who couldn’t swindle some outhouse cove. (I think that was what they call Thieves’ Cant.)

  It occurred to me that Spindle’s criminal experience was a bit wider than I had realized. I’m pretty sure “second-story job” meant that Spindle used to be a burglar, and presumably he was also the “clever noddy” in question, which would make the cesspit shoveler the “outhouse cove.” I wondered what Spindle and his sister Tibbie had gotten up to, before the Spring Green Man had showed up and put an end to her career. Some hints that Spindle dropped now and again made me think he’d been part of a gang of child-thieves, but apparently they’d either broken up or he’d left when Tibbie died. It was weird to think that this sort of thing went on in the city, while I’d been at home, innocently baking muffins and wondering if we had enough sugar to get through the week.

  At any rate, if you wanted to steal the keys to a royal cesspit, you couldn’t ask for better than Spindle.

  Once we had the ke
y, though, it was…well, still not easy.

  I have never climbed a three-story anything in my life. It’s not like it comes up when you’re a baker. You never have to climb a ladder and swan-dive into a vat of croissant dough or anything. I’m not afraid of heights—as far as I know—but I wasn’t sure that even with a rope, I was going to be able to do it. And I was awfully worried about what the Duchess was going to think when we showed up smelling like the inside of a garderobe. If she just started screaming, we were going to wind up in the dungeon without a chance to say our piece.

  I spent most of a day repeating my speech over and over in my head. Your Grace, I’ve come to warn you of a plot against magickers, and maybe against you. Your Grace, Inquisitor Oberon is plotting against them, and I’m sorry, this is the only way I could close enough to warn you. Your Grace, have you ever heard of the Spring Green Man?

  Oh, this was madness. I was going to show up dripping sewage on the Duchess’s rug and she was going to have me thrown in the dungeon and no one was going to listen and magic-folk were still going to die. The bit about Inquisitor Oberon plotting against her might not even be true. I didn’t have any proof, anyway. I just felt really nervous with Inquisitor Oberon still in the city, and the Golden General and the army somewhere else. It seemed like a bad idea.

  Was I really about to climb up a three-story toilet because the army being out of the city seemed like a bad idea?

  Apparently so.

  Well, even if they threw me in the dungeon, at least I’d be out of the bell tower. The room seemed to get smaller and smaller, once we had a plan. I paced back and forth for hours, twenty-five steps all the way around, and I kept expecting it to take less. Twenty-four. Twenty-three. It felt like the walls were closing in on me. I had to get up once in the middle of the night and measure it. It was still twenty-five steps. Probably that sounds nuts, but nobody was watching except for the gingerbread man and the rag-tag bread crumb circus.

  Spindle came for me on the fourth night, and I went down the ladder without a backward glance, the gingerbread man clinging to my hair. I was glad to be gone. The lay brother had been giving me odd looks. It might have been nothing, but it might have been that he’d seen the wanted posters, and there was no use taking a chance. I left the bread circus behind. They’d almost run out of magic and were just crude little sculptures made of bread. I don’t know what the priests thought of that.