A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

  With a more expendable batch of gingerbread men, I figured out that I could indeed give one orders across the bakery, if I had a scrap of the original dough in my hand. It was simple stuff, nothing too complicated—walk to here and stop. I ran up and down the cellar steps a dozen times a day, checking to see if they’d obeyed orders.

  My gingerbread man got very jealous. I went downstairs and found him giving orders to the lesser gingerbread men. One by one, they climbed up a shelf and did a swan-dive into Bob’s bucket.

  “Hey!” I said, snatching one up in mid-air, as it executed a beautiful triple back flip. “What are you doing?” And after a minute, while Bob slurped hungrily around the edge of the shelf, “How did you do that?”

  He folded his arms and stuck his icing nose in the air. I resolved to pay more attention to him in the future.

  Aunt Tabitha didn’t say anything about it, although I caught her eyeing the gingerbread men warily, as if she thought they might do something unexpected at any moment.

  To do a really dramatic experiment, like trying to control something across the city, I would have needed Spindle’s help. Unfortunately, he had made himself scarce.

  I couldn’t blame him. When Aunt Tabitha heard how he had saved my life and helped pull the city’s collective baguettes out of the fire, she would hear of nothing but that he would come to live with us. She made Uncle Albert clean out the storage room upstairs, and told Spindle to consider it his own.

  Spindle took one look at the room—rose-pink quilt, lace on every available surface, a stitched sampler that read “Today Is The Tomorrow You Worried About Yesterday,” and promptly went out the window, down the rain gutter, and was gone up the street before Aunt Tabitha had time to turn around.

  “The poor little mite,” she said, jamming her fists onto her generous hips. “He’s like one of those shy wild birds. Well, we’ll just have to win him over with kindness until he feels safe here.”

  Privately I thought this was laying it on a bit thick. Spindle had a lot of flaws—I would argue that he was primarily composed of flaws—but shyness was not one of them. Still, it didn’t pay to argue with Aunt Tabitha.

  “I wonder if he could learn a useful skill,” she mused, going back downstairs to the bakery.

  “He’s a really skilled pickpocket,” I said, opening the oven door to check on the muffins. The tops were rising and browning nicely but hadn’t yet cracked open. Sugar glittered from their crests.

  Aunt Tabitha ran a finger under her lower lip. “Hmmm. I suppose that’s a skill of a sort. Not really useful, though, is it?”

  Since that particular skill had kept me from starving to death and had gotten us the key to the garderobe, which turned out to be the keys to the kingdom, as it were, I could have mustered an argument, but I didn’t feel like fighting with Aunt Tabitha.

  Twenty-Six

  My resolve was tested the next day. I was in the back, waiting for a pan of muffins to come out, and she bustled in. “Mona! Why are you hiding back here? People want to see you!”

  I grimaced. There had been a lot of that. I hadn’t minded the regulars that first day, but people I didn’t know kept showing up and wanting to hear the story. I didn’t want to keep telling it. I wanted it to be over. I wanted people to buy scones because they were good, not because it was a chance to gawk at me. “I’d rather not, Aunt Tabitha. I’m sure they’re just here for bread.”

  “No, they’re here for you. Because you’re a hero!”

  She said it so nicely. She really meant it. But the word hero twisted up in my chest and I couldn’t seem to breathe around it. I mumbled something about the muffins and fled down the stairs to the cellar.

  I sat on the steps with my head in my hands. Hero.

  I was fourteen. People had been trying to kill me. I hadn’t done anything heroic. I’d been terrified and yes, I know that line about how courage is going forward when you’re scared, except that I hadn’t even done that. I hadn’t gone forward. I’d run away and run away and the only reason I’d gone to the Duchess was because I’d run out of ways to keep running away.

  Hero.

  It should never have come down to me. It was miserably unfair that it had come to me and Spindle. There were grown-ups who should have stopped it. The Duchess should have found her courage and gone to the guards. The guards should have warned the Duchess. The Council, whoever they were, should have made sure the Duchess knew about the proclamations. The Duchess should have had people on the street who reported back to her. Everyone had failed at every step and now Spindle and I were heroes because of it.

  The door creaked open. I sniffled. I didn’t want to talk to Aunt Tabitha. She meant well. She was proud of me. I didn’t know how to explain that she shouldn’t be proud, that it wasn’t anything I’d meant to do, it was just that the whole city had fallen down on the job.

  But it wasn’t my aunt. Uncle Albert came and sat down on the step next to me. I scooted over to make room.

  “Uncle Albert? You never come down here.” I wiped my eyes, probably leaving smears of flour. “Bob’s down here.”

  “Yeah, well. I heard your aunt talking to you. Thought I’d come down.”

  I sighed. “Do you want me to go apologize?” Uncle Albert was always the peacemaker, in the rare events that Aunt Tabitha and I argued.

  “No,” he said. That surprised me. A lot. I don’t know if when you’re an adult, you can argue and be right, but if you’re a kid and you argue with an adult, you’re automatically wrong. Always. It’s a law of nature or something. On the other hand, I’d been right about Oberon, so maybe the laws were in flux right now.

  “She thinks I’m a hero,” I said, when the silence had stretched out. “But I shouldn’t have had to do any of it. There should have been so many grown-ups who should have fixed things before it got down to me and Spindle. It doesn’t make you a hero just because everybody else didn’t do their job.”

  Uncle Albert leaned back and put his elbows on the step behind us. “I was in the army when I wasn’t much older than you,” he said.

  I glanced over at him, surprised. I knew this, but he didn’t talk about it. Not in a deep dark secret way, though. The one time I asked as a kid, he laughed and said it was mostly boring and people yelled at you a lot.

  “The one time we really got in trouble was against Delta City,” he said. He stared down the steps into the dimness. “We were sort of at war then, I guess. Nobody was real clear on it at the time. Probably they still aren’t. Anyway, a bunch of us were stationed way out at the end of a peninsula, and we were cut off by the enemy. They didn’t send us any help. Nobody attacked us, not really. Occasionally we’d throw rocks over the walls at each other, just to, y’know, remind ourselves there was a war on. But we ran out of message pigeons and we ran out of rocks and then we ran out of food. And still nobody came to save us. We thought there must have been a pitched battle or something, and maybe Riverbraid was overrun. Maybe no one was left to come save us. Eventually, the commander surrendered, because it was that or we’d all starve.” He tilted his head back, looking at the ceiling. “Delta City was very polite about it. They ransomed us back, and it turned out that nobody knew we’d been in trouble. A couple of quartermasters had been siphoning off supplies that the brass thought was headed our way. All the messages we’d sent were sitting at the bottom of a stack of papers on somebody’s desk.”

  I stared at him in horror.

  “Well, you can’t really have that happening. It looks bad when people just forget you’re there. So they decided it had been a siege. Called it the Siege of Dusk End, I think. They gave us medals for surviving, and we all went home heroes of the war.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Uncle Earl glanced over at me. “But as long as they gave us medals, that fixed it, as far as the army was concerned. You expect heroes to survive terrible things. If you give them a medal, then you don’t ever have to ask why the terrible thing happened in the f
irst place. Or try to fix it.” He made a flicking gesture with his fingers. “How else are you gonna have heroes?”

  I rubbed my face. “I’m sorry,” I said. Suddenly, my days in the church tower didn’t seem so bad. How long had Uncle Earl and his men been trapped, watching their supplies dwindle, waiting for help to come?

  “Yeah, me too. I’m sorry we failed you, Mona. We tried to go to the Duchess, but I’m not even sure if they told her we were there. Probably they didn’t. Should have occurred to me to try climbing a garderobe.”

  “You didn’t fail,” I said. “They wouldn’t let you succeed. It’s different.”

  He put his arm around me and squeezed. He’s not much of a hugger, not like Aunt Tabitha, and it was awkward, but I felt better.

  “I’ll talk to your aunt,” he said. “We heroes gotta stick together.”

  * * *

  It got better after that. I don’t know what he said to Aunt Tabitha, but she stopped asking me to talk to customers as much. Perversely, because she wasn’t asking, it got easier to do. I even slept a little more at night, although not much.

  That mood continued up to the end of the week, when the doors were thrown open and Joshua and Harold marched inside.

  I say “marched” because it was pretty clearly official. They were both wearing swords and they stopped on either side of the door. Widow Holloway, who had come in for her blackberry muffin, leaned toward me over the bakery case and whispered, “My! Such handsome young guards they have these days!”

  Widow Holloway is going exceedingly deaf, so her whisper could have been heard halfway to the palace. Joshua grinned and the tips of Harold’s ears turned pink.

  “Her Grace, the Duchess,” Joshua intoned, “to see Mona, the Wizard of the Bakery.”

  Wizard of the Bakery. Now there’s a title.

  Aunt Tabitha came out of the back to see what the commotion was, just as the Duchess came in the front door.

  “Mona, what’s all this—?”

  “Mona, my dear, forgive the disruption—”

  They stared at each other over the bakery case. I could see wheels turning in Aunt Tabitha’s head, probably she looks familiar, but where have I seen OH GOOD LORD—

  She dropped into a curtsey, apron flapping. “Your Grace!”

  “You must be Mona’s Aunt Tabitha,” said the Duchess, smiling warmly. “How wonderful to finally meet you. I am so very sorry for the agonies you must have suffered while she was missing.”

  Aunt Tabitha tried to say “It was dreadful,” and “It was nothing,” at the same time and produced a garbled sentence that sounded vaguely like, “Notherful! Fing!”

  “I hope to have leisure to sample some of your delightful pastries soon,” said the Duchess smoothly. I suspect she was used to over-awed people. It probably happens a lot. “Unfortunately, duty calls, and I must beg your leave to borrow Mona to consult with her on official business.”

  Official business? Me?

  I didn’t like the sound of that. It might be nothing—probably it was just the knighthood she had threatened me with—but despite her smile, there was a kind of tightness around the Duchess’s mouth that I didn’t like.

  Still, it was the Duchess. I took off my apron. Aunt Tabitha levered herself to her feet, holding onto the edge of the bakery case. “Begging Your Grace’s pardon, but…you’ll bring her back?”

  “I promise,” said the Duchess, and the smile slipped a bit, “Mona is not in any trouble. Indeed, I am hoping that she will be able to help us in our hour of need.”

  “Oh, well, then.” Aunt Tabitha gave me a quick, ferocious hug. “Mind your manners,” she whispered in my ear, and then, “and be careful.”

  Then she swept up a box full of muffins (which were supposed to go to the knitting circle on Fourth Street) and forced them into my hands. Maybe she thought they didn’t feed people at the palace.

  I walked out the door between Joshua and Harold, following the Duchess. Through the open door, I could hear Widow Holloway shout, in what she doubtless thought was a conspiratorial whisper, “That was the Duchess? Hmm. Didn’t get her father’s height, did she?”

  “It’s true,” said the Duchess mournfully. “Father was six-foot-two. One of my great sorrows. It is easier to be imposing when you are tall.”

  “You seem to do all right, Your Grace.”

  We were settling ourselves into the Duchess’s carriage, which had less carvings and gilt than Oberon’s, but still looked a bit like a cake on wheels, when a small, ragged figure launched himself from behind a water barrel on the corner. Spindle hit the door and clung to it like a squirrel.

  “If you’re goin’ somewhere with Mona, I’m comin’ too!” he announced.

  Joshua came around the side, sighed heavily, and picked him up by the scruff of the neck.

  “We should not dream of leaving you behind,” said the Duchess. “You may stand as surety of our good behavior.” Spindle was dumped into the carriage. He straightened up, nodded to Joshua, and sat down on the bench next to me.

  “What’s going on, Your Grace?” I asked, as the wheels creaked into motion over the cobbles. “What’s all this hour-of-need business?”

  The Duchess stared at her fingers. “Do you know—no, you could not know, of course. Well. When someone is exiled from the city, we have them followed for a little time. We do this to make sure that they do not immediately turnabout and try to sneak back inside.”

  “Wondered about that,” said Spindle. “Couldn’t figure that you’d just let ’em go and not keep an eye on ’em.”

  I was embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t thought about it, so I just nodded.

  “Well.” The Duchess leaned back against the cushions. “Our man followed Inquisitor Oberon. He travelled quickly, clearly with a direction in mind…and came to an encampment of Carex mercenaries.”

  I sat bolt upright on the seat. “But I thought the army was supposed to be out fighting them!” I said. “Aren’t they days and days away?”

  “Apparently not,” said the Duchess grimly. “I suspect that the army’s intelligence has also suffered from Oberon’s influence. As near as we can tell, the army was chasing a small group of Carex, and the main body of the mercenary troops are currently two days’ ride from here.”

  “Two days!”

  “Cor!” said Spindle, who had broken into Aunt’s Tabitha’s muffins.

  The bottom seemed to have dropped out of my stomach and been left somewhere back on the cobblestones. “What—two days—”

  The Duchess nodded grimly. “We’re trying to avoid a panic while we wait for confirmation, so there has not been a general announcement. But yes. I believe in two days, we will be in a state of siege. Oberon has found them—he must have been working with them all along—and informed them that the army is gone, the mages dead, and the city ripe for the taking.”

  Spindle has a quicker and twistier mind than I do. “Must ’ave planned to take over in here first, then use the mercs to deal with the army. Then he’d get a whole city without fighting for it. Now he ain’t gonna get that, so he figures he’ll burn it down and take what’s left.” He took a huge bite of muffin.

  The Duchess regarded him with a kind of weary amusement. “There may be a place in my cabinet for you, young Spindle. That is exactly what we believe he planned. It is a shame that none of us saw it sooner. Perhaps it never occurred to us that he might watch his own city sacked.” She leaned back against the cushions. “We sent riders out to find the army the day he was ousted, but without mages we no longer have instantaneous communication. It is to be hoped that when Master Gildaen died, Lord Ethan will have realized that something was amiss at home, but even at our most hopeful estimates, they are at least five days away.”

  Five days.

  The Carex were two days away.

  In two days, the Carex could overrun the city. They say that when a Carex goes past, his footprints fill up with blood. If what the Duchess said was true, the blood was going to b
e ours.

  “But what do we do?” I whispered.

  “We have the palace guard,” said the Duchess. “We have the city walls. And we have one wizard left.”

  One wizard left? But who—

  Oh.

  Right.

  Me.

  * * *

  I spent the rest of the ride to the palace coming up with reasons why I couldn’t possibly save the city, why I probably couldn’t do anything at all, why I was no kind of wizard at all.

  The Duchess listened to this with a faint smile on her lips. “My dear,” she said finally, “without the use of magic, you have managed to bring down a powerful traitor and recall a negligent ruler to her senses. I shudder to think what you might accomplish with the use of magic!”

  “Your Grace, I work with bread!” I cried, for about the twentieth time, as the carriage trotted into the palace courtyard. “Just bread! Aren’t there other wizards?”

  She shook her head sadly. “I am sure that there are others in the city, but they are hiding. All the talk of the curfew and a registry has frightened them badly—and no wonder! And now we are asking them to come to the palace? Why should they believe this is any different?”

  I slumped back in the seat, defeated.

  The Duchess leaned forward and patted my knee. “My dear, I am certain that you can go on about how unworthy and incapable you are for hours yet, but we have very little time. Let us pretend that we have done all that and that I have nodded correctly and made the proper noises, and skip to the point where you say, “I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll try.”

  Spindle snickered. I said “I…but…bread!”

  “The palace kitchens are at your disposal,” said the Duchess. “I assume that you will need dough for whatever you do. We will set every bakery in the city to producing as much as they can for your use. Do you have any special instructions?”