A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

  She got out of the carriage on Joshua’s arm. He helped me down too—Spindle jumped—and I handed him the rest of Aunt Tabitha’s muffins. My mind reeled with images of the enormous palace ovens that I had passed during our trip to the scullery. You could bake huge things in there.

  Really huge things.

  The weakest may command a mountain, the book had said.

  Well. I’d wanted to make an elephant out of dough, hadn’t I?

  “Tell the bakeries to let the bread rise much farther than they would otherwise,” I said, surprising myself with how steady my voice sounded. “Let it overflow the pans. We need size. Spindle, I need you to go back to my room and get the book on the nightstand, and a change of clothes for me. Tell Aunt Tabitha I’ll be gone overnight. Your Grace, I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll do my best.”

  Twenty-Seven

  If you have ever prepared for a siege in two days, then you know what the next few days were like. If you haven’t, then you probably don’t. Well…a big formal wedding is about the same (and because we do cakes, I’ve been on the periphery of a few), except that if things go wrong in a siege you’ll all die horribly, and in formal weddings, the stakes are much higher. We had a bride threaten to set the bakery on fire once when her buttercream frosting came out the wrong color.

  My plan was simple. I was going to make gingerbread men—or at least bread men, they probably didn’t need more than a token amount of ginger—except that instead of being four inches tall, they’d be fourteen feet tall.

  Even the big palace ovens couldn’t do bread that size, so the blacksmiths were creating a kind of giant outdoor vaguely humanoid cookie sheet. Twelve enormous shields, hammered flat and bolted together, resting on top of a trench filled with coals and manned by teams of apprentices with bellows.

  The result wasn’t pretty, and I had no idea if it was going to work—I suspected that my bread warriors would be black and burnt on the bottom and raw in the middle—but I pretended I knew what I was doing.

  The head blacksmith was a swarthy man named Argonel, and he was brilliant. He had a voice like stones grinding wheat, and his hands were scarred and hideous and he didn’t act like it was strange at all to take orders from a fourteen-year-old girl. He was the one who suggested the outdoor cookie sheet. I was trying to figure out whether I could bake them in parts in the oven and then cement them together somehow—icing, maybe, although if working with icing gives me a headache normally, that would probably have sent me into a ten-day migraine—and Argonel listened carefully and said, “We can do this. Show us how large you want your golems, and we will make your oven.”

  Golems. I hadn’t thought of them that way before. I’d run across the word in Spiraling Shadows but I hadn’t connected it to my cookies.

  When I had a moment, I pulled out the book and looked up the section on golems.

  An unliving thing brought to life. Golems are often sculpted from clay, mud or stone or cast in plaster or bronze. Golems have been created of water and air, though this is very difficult. Golems can be crude or finely detailed, and are usually in the shape of men, although there are notable exceptions, such as the feather bird-golems of Ganifar the Winged.

  My own little gingerbread golem had hitched a ride in my shirt pocket and spent the first day riding around on my shoulder, observing things.

  “What do you think?” I asked him, quite aware that this was ridiculous. The book was very clear that golems were only so intelligent as their creator caused them to be, and I hadn’t been trying to make a genius of a cookie.

  On the other hand, he had also lasted weeks longer than any cookie I’d ever animated before. Usually I pulled the magic out of them before we sold them, because nobody wants to bite into a live cookie. Maybe golems got weird if you left them alive long enough.

  The cookie surprised me. He walked down my shoulder and studied the hive of activity in the courtyard. He examined the shields being hammered and nodded approvingly. About the buckets and cauldrons and bathtubs of dough—I think they pulled large chunks of the plumbing out of the palace to provide me with places to store rising dough—he was less approving. He actually pinched some of the dough between his arms and frowned at it, then shook his head at me.

  “Too spongy, I know,” I said. “And probably horribly bland. But nobody’s going to eat it.”

  The cookie gave me a look. (You wouldn’t think icing could do that.) Then he waved his arms in the air, as if to say, “Well, fine, if you’re sure…”

  The blacksmiths were the easiest people to work with. You’d think the cooks would be thrilled to have an active role in possibly defending the city from a Carex invasion. And maybe they were, but that didn’t extend to being happy about a fourteen-year-old kid taking charge of their kitchen and demanding they do terrible things to dough.

  “Let it rise how long?” asked the head cook, scandalized. “And you’re baking it where?”

  “I know,” I said wearily. “Believe me, I know.”

  “It’ll taste terrible!”

  “Nobody’s eating it,” I said.

  “Hmmph. Waste of good flour.” The cook sniffed. “Now, if you ask me, young lady—”

  Spindle, who had been taking advantage of the cook’s distraction to pocket a cold meat pie, part of a ham, and a dozen hard-boiled eggs, turned his head at this. “She din’t ask you,” he said. “She’s tellin’ you. It’s the Duchess’s orders!”

  The cook turned the color of stolen ham. “Spindle…” I said, torn between being grateful and being mortified.

  “It’s true,” he muttered.

  I abandoned all hope of the cook liking me. It didn’t matter. If she was furious, so be it. The Carex would be a lot worse. I drew myself up as tall as I could—I came to a little under the cook’s collarbone—and said quietly, “Please fill as many buckets as you can with dough. If you run out, the guards will bring you more. Flour is being brought from the warehouses.”

  “As you say,” grated the cook.

  “Thank you,” I said, and left the kitchen. I dragged Spindle out with me. However mad the cook was now, it was going to get a lot worse when she counted the eggs. My face felt hot. Having a grown-up mad at me…I mean, here I was, trying to save the city from being overrun by cannibal mercenaries, and I felt sick to my stomach because the cook was mad at me. Being fourteen has a lot of drawbacks.

  The sun was going down. The cookie and Spindle and I sat on the edge of a low stone wall that separated the courtyard from the stableyard and made a meal of eggs and illicit ham.

  “This is pretty horrible,” I said.

  “S’good ham,” said Spindle, with his mouth full. “Dunno what you’re on about.”

  “Not the ham. Everything.”

  “Oh.”

  He swallowed. I watched the blacksmith corps swing shields into position. Argonel said that they’d be done tomorrow by noon. The Carex were supposed to reach the big gates of the city tomorrow evening, although they probably would be too busy setting the outlying buildings to the torch to attack the city proper until daybreak.

  At the very best estimates, if they’d started marching the minute the message from Gildaen was cut off, the army would still be three days away when the Carex arrived.

  “They’ve told everybody that the Carex are coming,” said Spindle, peeling the shell off his third egg. “Criers on every corner.”

  “How are people taking it?” I asked. Really what I wondered was how Aunt Tabitha and the customers were taking it. Miss McGrammar probably refused to believe it, and Widow Holloway had to have the criers repeat themselves three or four times. Brutus…Brutus might be one of the people who showed up at the gates. We don’t have a formal standing militia in the city, but Joshua had said that they were calling on anybody who was able to swing a sword to report to the palace to help man the gates.

  Spindle shrugged. “’Bout like you’d expect. Some people sayin’ it’ll blow over if we pay ’em off. Most people are d
oin’ what they’re told.” He swallowed. “Even if the Carex take the whole city, they probably won’t get very far in the Rat’s Nest. So—uh—you and yours wanna come in, we can probly find a place for you.”

  “Thanks, Spindle.” I dusted my hands off. “Okay. Back to work, I guess.”

  I got a good few hours of sleep that night. I didn’t expect to sleep in a bed again until the siege was over, and I’d expected to be too scared to fall asleep. But I did sleep, and I didn’t even worry that much. I think I’d managed to shove all the fear down into the background. Sure, I was scared to death, but it didn’t do much good to be scared, so I wasn’t going to dwell on it when there was work to do.

  Morning brought one really good change, from my point of view. When I went into the kitchen to get a cup of tea and something for breakfast, the angry cook wasn’t there. Instead—

  “Aunt Tabitha?!”

  She was elbow deep in a washtub full of dough. “Well, I wasn’t going to let you get killed up here at the palace without me! The orders came down for as much dough as we could make, so once we’d made it, I came up on the wagon alongside. Your Uncle’s minding the bakery. He never was much good with the ovens, but he’ll keep the place from burning down without us.” She freed one arm from the dough and hugged me sideways with it.

  “But the cook—”

  “Oh, her.” Aunt Tabitha sniffed. “I don’t think much of her.”

  From Aunt Tabitha, this was the equivalent of being consigned to the blackest depths of the abyss. I said, “Yeesh.” I wondered where she’d buried the body. The various kitchen attendants were working very quickly, with dazed expressions. I don’t think the cook had been very popular, but lord knows what they made of Aunt Tabitha.

  One person, at least, seemed very happy. Jenny the scullery maid grinned at me from the far side of the table.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I mean—er—well, I kinda lied to you when I was here before—”

  “Lord-love-a-duck!” she said, flapping her apron. “You’re a hero! I told everybody it was you who was in here before, but most of ’em didn’t believe me.” She shot a triumphant look around the kitchen, where various attendants were pretending not to watch us.

  “Your aunt’s got everything squared away right and tight,” she added. “Not like old Sourfingers. And she ain’t stingy with the food, neither.”

  “No,” I said. “Aunt Tabitha is never stingy with food.” (Frankly, I think Aunt Tabitha feels she was put on this earth to make sure that nobody goes hungry.) “Um. Are you sure you want to be here? Don’t you want to be with your family?”

  “Ain’t got any,” she said cheerfully. “I’m a foundling. Somebody left me in a basket on the steps of the Sisters of Unrelenting Virtue. If’n I go back to the convent, I get to spend the next three days on my knees, praying for mercy or divine intervention or whatnot, and those stone floors are hard.” She narrowed her eyes and looked suddenly, absurdly ferocious. “And if I’m here, I can help. You’ll see! I ain’t gonna stand around while no Carex rides through my city!”

  “Oh,” I said faintly. “Well…err…glad to have you?”

  Aunt Tabitha swept by, patting Jenny on the back and leaving floury fingerprints on her apron. “That nice blacksmith was in here earlier. Said to tell you that they’re on schedule. I don’t think he slept at all last night.” She waved towards a plate of biscuits. “Here, some dough more or less won’t matter, and you need to keep your strength up.”

  I sat down and had biscuits with honey and butter. It was divine. Aunt Tabitha’s biscuits have always been better than mine. She says I work the dough too much and then rely on magic to fix it.

  “Brought a friend, too,” she said, and dropped a soup tureen down on the floor next to me.

  I turned to look at it. It went “blorp.”

  “Bob!”

  “About two-thirds of him, anyway,” said Aunt Tabitha. “I put the pot down and told him you needed help. I guess most of him volunteered. Your uncle’s supposed to be feeding the rest, but you know how he is, so I left a whole haddock in the old bucket.”

  “Aw, Bob, I’m glad you’re here.” I put a hand down in the tureen. Bob belched affectionately and a mushy tentacle of starter rubbed against my fingers. Jenny stared at him, then at me, with her eyes wide.

  “Is that your familiar?” she whispered.

  “Who, Bob?” I looked down into the tureen. “He’s a sourdough starter. I guess…well, yeah, that’s the sort of familiar I’d have.”

  The gingerbread man poked me in the ear and gave me a very severe look. “You too,” I said. (Can a person have multiple familiars? I wasn’t clear, and Spiraling Shadows didn’t say.)

  “That’s amazing!” She grinned. “I wish I was a magicker!”

  “Really?”

  “Really!” She nodded. “I never b’lieved all that stupid stuff about wizards, and those stupid posters. You’re gonna do some amazing magic, I know it!”

  Something on one of the spits was burning, and she dashed off to save it. It was nice that someone had confidence in me, even if it was just another girl my own age. I wished I had that much confidence in myself.

  I finished my biscuits, rubbing my fingers together thoughtfully. Bob had felt sort of soggy and there was a crust of dried flour forming around the edge of the tureen, and that was all. But the Spring Green Man had accused me of throwing acid on him, and he’d had the scars on his face to prove it. And then there was the matter of the dead rats.

  Hmmm.

  “Gotta go, Aunt Tabitha,” I said. I slid off my stool and gave her a hug. “Thanks for bringing Bob. I think we might have a use for him.”

  Tracking down Joshua was harder than I expected—apparently he was one of the people in charge of the city’s defense now—but when I said, “It’s wizard stuff,” the guards got very helpful and stopped trying to give me the brush off. I found him on the far side of the stables, where there’s a small drill-ground, supervising the newly-formed militia.

  He had a gloomy expression. I looked at the men, but since I had no idea what I was looking for, it just looked like a bunch of guys with wooden poles whacking at targets made out of straw.

  “Are they any good?” I asked.

  Joshua sighed. “No. Some of the ex-military ones are fine, but there aren’t enough of them. I’ve put those with the guard. The rest…well, putting them on the front lines would be murder.”

  I watched one big man throw himself at a target and reduce it to kindling and hanks of straw. “He looks pretty good.”

  Joshua shook his head. “Armies aren’t made of individual fighters. An army is a group of men who fight together, as a unit. But it takes a lot longer than two days to drill a squad into fighting as a group instead of as a lot of little parts, and we just don’t have the time.” He ran a hand through his hair and looked tired. “But that’s my problem, not yours. What can I do for you, Wizard Mona?”

  “This is probably a stupid question, but we’re going to be fighting Carex coming through the gate, right? And there are big walls, and you put people on top of the walls, right?”

  “Yes. Archers, mostly. And the people in charge, like you and me.”

  The notion that I was one of the people in charge would ordinarily have reduced me to a gibbering wreck, but like Joshua, I just didn’t have that kind of time. “Do you ever, oh, dump boiling oil on them and stuff?”

  He laughed. “Boiling oil? More trouble than it’s worth. The walls are barely wide enough for two men to pass—there’s no place to build a fire to boil anything, and I’m certainly not having men run up the stairs carrying pots of scalding oil. Why do you ask?”

  “Well…I have this…thing.” Saying I have a homicidal sourdough starter sounded much too bizarre. “It’s like, um, magic dough. If you get it mad, it’ll attack people and try to…err…dissolve them. It burned the Spring Green Man pretty badly, and he was a wizard. I don’t know if it’ll help, but if there was a way
to fling it down onto them…”

  “How long will it last?” asked Joshua.

  I spread my hands helplessly. “I don’t have any idea! I’ve never done this before. I don’t think it could eat a whole person, but I thought maybe if we could throw a whole bunch of little bits…”

  To my surprise, Joshua was nodding. “Like burning pitch,” he said. “It’s used sometimes in sieges, same as your boiling oil. It can kill you if it hits you, but most people only get hit by some of the splash. It hurts, and it slows you down to deal with it. We can’t use pitch for the same reason we can’t use oil, but if your magic dough doesn’t require anything special—”

  “Just flour and water.”

  “—then perhaps we can fill jars with it and put it in slings.” He nodded. “Yes. This is a good plan.”

  “I don’t think it’ll stop them, you understand,” I said, worried.

  Joshua put a hand on my shoulder. “Mona—nobody expects you to stop them single-handedly.”

  “The Golden General could do it,” I said gloomily.

  “No, he couldn’t,” said Joshua. I stared at him. He sighed. “Mona, did you never wonder why he travels with an army? He throws lightning, certainly, but he could no more face the Carex alone than you could. He just happens to have two thousand trained men at his back at all times. If he were here, he’d tell you so himself.”

  “…oh,” I said. And went back to the kitchens in a speculative frame of mind.

  Twenty-Eight

  I spent most of the day making a whole lot more of Bob. Dough kept arriving from every bakery in the city: wagons full of barrels oozing with dough, vats full of dough, horse-troughs and pots and buckets of dough. The palace servants stacked it up around the edges of the courtyard.

  I stopped in my tracks when I saw a coffin, lid off, dough creeping over the sides. It was a plain pine box, nothing fancy, but it was still unmistakably a coffin. “Where did that come from?”