“He’s not right,” I said, remembering that voice giggling in the dark in the cellar under the bakery. It wasn’t that Elgar was mad. Knackering Molly was mad, and she’d never do anything like that. There was something else wrong with him, some kind of terrible darkness. “I don’t know if he’ll care that it’s suicide.”
Harold didn’t argue. “I’ll be guarding you,” he said. “You won’t be left unattended for a minute. If he does attack, that should buy you time to do something magical in your own defense.”
I nearly laughed or cried or both. Magical in my own defense? What was I going to do, bake an attack scone at him? Unless Harold managed to buy me two hours in an oven on medium heat, there wasn’t a lot I could do without prep work.
I didn’t say any of it. It didn’t matter if a hundred Spring Green Men were after me, there were still thousands of Carex outside the city intent on coming in. I could do nothing about Elgar right now. I might be able to do something about the Carex.
In magic, creativity is as important as knowledge…
“Fine,” I said to Harold. “Come with me.”
“Aunt Tabitha?” I said, stepping into the kitchens. “I need to make gingerbread. And I need a bunch of cookie sheets.”
These were probably going to be the worst gingerbread men ever. You’re supposed to let the dough rest for a couple of hours before you bake it, and I didn’t have time. But that was okay, because the worst gingerbread men ever is exactly what I wanted to make.
Aunt Tabitha helped me bash the dough together. It was a big batch, double what we make when we do the cooking in the bakery, and that makes forty or fifty cookies by itself. Spindle hunched up next to the fireplace, watching, and my gingerbread man stood on the mantle and glared suspiciously down at the batch of dough I was making. Jenny ran back and forth, bringing spoons and flour and towels and anything else we needed. Harold stood by the door and looked so tough and professional and guard-y that I wanted to cry.
“Cayenne in gingerbread?” asked Aunt Tabitha mildly. “Mona, are you sure?”
“I’d add broken glass if I didn’t think it would hurt my hands,” I said, dumping most of the cayenne in and looking around for something worse. “Have we got any rat poison?”
Jenny found it, a big jar full of dusty-looking granules. She brought in the jar, looking proud and worried. Aunt Tabitha ran her hands over her face and said, “Mona…”
“Nobody’s going to eat them,” I said. “I hope. I need them to be bad.” I dumped the rat poison into the mixing bowl.
“You know what you’re doing, I suppose,” said Aunt Tabitha, adding poison to her own batch.
“Not really,” I said, and was surprised to find that I was smiling. “But we’ll find out.”
The dough under my hands was bad. I could feel it. There was malice in it. It wanted to hurt people. I fed that as much as I could, pouring all my anger at the sight of the burning fields into it, and all my terror at the news that the Spring Green Man had escaped.
By the time I was done, you wouldn’t have had to worry about rat poison. The dough would try to choke you before you even managed to swallow it.
I didn’t like doing this. The thing about baking is that you’re feeding people and it’s nice. You make things that taste good and that make people happy to eat them. The very best thing about being a baker is watching somebody bite into a blueberry muffin or a fresh slice of sourdough dripping with butter and seeing them close their eyes and savor the taste. You’re making their lives better, just a little tiny bit. It is nearly impossible to be sad when eating a blueberry muffin. I’m pretty sure that’s a scientific fact.
Making cookies that were bad and horrible and that no sane person would eat was…well, it was like being an Anti-Baker. It was the opposite of what I was supposed to do.
I gritted my teeth and remembered the lines of burning wheat.
Aunt Tabitha helped me slap out a big ball of dough on each cookie sheet, and helped to roll it out flat, but I was the one who cut each gingerbread shape. I didn’t have a cookie cutter, so they were kind of irregular, but they had two arms and two legs each, and that was the important thing.
They were also really big, for gingerbread men. It was one to a cookie sheet, about a foot wide and eighteen inches tall. We ended up with twenty-three.
We slid them into the oven. The big palace ovens were perfect for this, because you could fit twenty-three cookie sheets inside without a problem. I took the scraps leftover from cutting the cookies and threw them back into the mixing bowl. If the book was right, that dough should be linked to the cookies, and I was hoping that I could use the magic of sympathy to control the cookies through the dough.
Well. That was half of it down. I turned to Spindle. “Spindle, for this next part, I need your help.”
Spindle slid down from the raised brick hearth and fired off a mocking salute. “At yer service, General Mona!”
Aunt Tabitha picked up the mixing and baking equipment and went off to the scullery to make sure that it got cleaned immediately and nobody sampled rat poison by mistake. I leaned against the outside of the fireplace next to Spindle.
“Look, you know people, right? Those people going out to harass the Carex tonight?”
“’Course,” said Spindle. “Ran with some of ’em, back in the day. Not Crackhand’s boys, but some of the others.”
“Do you know anybody who can take out a load of cookies?” I asked, nodding to the ovens. “They’re going to be bad. I think I can make them smart enough to start harassing the Carex. They aren’t fighters, exactly, but they’ll want to make mischief. Some of the ordinary gingerbread men get a little feisty sometimes—they’ll tie your shoelaces together and stuff—but these are going to be much worse. I thought they could, oh, spook the horses and cut ropes and put rocks in people’s beds—”
“—put pepper in the flour an’ set fire to bedrolls—”
“—steal their daggers and their socks—”
“—put out their eyes while they’re asleep!”
“Let’s not get carried away, Spindle.”
“Y’ever try to fight without any eyes?”
“No, and neither have you, so don’t start. Anyway, I need somebody to take two sacks of cookies outside the walls and set ’em loose near the Carex camp.”
Spindle nodded. “Right. I’ll do it.”
“No, you won’t!” I snapped. “You could get killed! Can’t you find somebody going out there—Wiggly Bob or whatever their names are—and have them do it?”
“They’ve all gone already,” said Spindle. “An it’d take hours to find somebody else and convince ’em. I know how to get out. I know the way through the knackeryard. They ain’t gonna catch me.”
“Spindle, no!”
He folded his arms over his chest. “Look, Mona, I can do this. Let me do this. I ain’t a wizard, like you, and I ain’t a fighter. If the Carex get through, I ain’t gonna be able to do much. But I’m real good at sneakin’ around. I’m not sayin’ I could pick the sentry’s pockets, ’cos I probably can’t and I wouldn’t try. But I can get in close enough to set your little things loose.”
“But—”
“This is maybe the only thing I’m gonna do that’ll be any help, so let me do it.”
I probably should have said no. It was crazy to let him go sneaking around outside the walls. But he was also right, and this wasn’t that much more dangerous than sneaking into the castle, was it? He’d done that ten times as well as I had. I’d gotten stuck in a toilet.
Besides, if he was outside the walls, at least Spindle wouldn’t be in the crossfire if the Spring Green Man came for me. “All right,” I said heavily. “You can take them. But be careful. If they kill you, I will never never never forgive you.”
“Yeah, yeah…”
It took me ten minutes to make up a big batch of icing, and by the time I was done, the cookies were coming out of the oven. Aunt Tabitha emerged from the scullery and Spi
ndle acquired two burlap potato sacks by the simple expedient of dumping potatoes all over the pantry.
“You know, we had leftover flour sacks…”
“So now we’ve got potato sacks too.”
Jenny put her hands to her mouth and giggled. “Oh, Cook’ll be mad as fire when she sees that!”
We yanked cookie sheets from the oven and dropped them on the big wooden table. I hurriedly iced eyes and mouths onto each one. I gave them little fangs. They wouldn’t be able to bite with them, but they seemed appropriate.
When they were all treated with icing and had cooled a bit, I grabbed the ball of leftover dough and took a deep breath.
“Okay, cookies, listen up!” I said. “We’ve got a job to do. You’re going to go out there and make a whole bunch of people miserable. Now get up!” And I pushed magic and will into the ball of dough and through it into the cookies.
There was a long, long moment when nothing happened, and I pushed the magic even harder, screwing my face up and—I can’t explain it, sort of shoving with the inside of my head—and then one of the gingerbread man sat up. The kitchen filled with soft ripping sounds as the cookies pulled themselves free of the cookie sheets, sitting up and stretching and looking around.
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s what we’re going to—”
One of the cookies picked up a mixing spoon and bashed the cookie next to it over the head. The cookie recoiled with a spray of crumbs and threw itself at its attacker, leaving one of its legs behind on the cookie sheet. (Apparently the grease hadn’t gone on quite evenly on that one.)
“Stop!” I yelled, rushing forward, as the one-legged cookie hopped furiously after the spoon-wielding cookie. “Stop, stop!”
Other cookies charged into the fray. Some of them went for their neighbors, while others started arming themselves with kitchen utensils. Two formed a temporary alliance and flipped up a cookie sheet as a makeshift barricade.
“Everybody stop!”
They weren’t listening. There was a jar of walnuts at one end of the table, and the two cookies behind the barricade broke into it and began pelting everyone indiscriminately with the contents.
Spindle dove under the table. Harold drew his sword and waved it vaguely, apparently not sure on whether he should be defending me or running a rogue cookie through. Aunt Tabitha whipped a frying pan around and connected with a cookie that had a whisk in each hand and a homicidal expression on its icing face.
This is horrible, I thought, sinking my fingers into the ball of gingerbread scraps. I’ve completely blown it. What was I thinking? You make evil bread, and it’s not going to listen just because you ask nicely. I’ll have to pull the magic out of all of them. What a waste of time and energy—
Suddenly, there was a loud banging. I looked up. Everybody looked up. My faithful gingerbread man was standing in the center of the table, clanging a spoon against a cookie sheet like a gong.
I expected the bad cookies to pelt him with walnuts and was about to dive to his rescue—he was a quarter of their size, and he was so stale, the walnuts might just bounce off, but what if he shattered?—when I realized that all the other cookies were staring at him.
When he was sure he had everyone’s attention, he set the spoon down and waved his arms, stomping back and forth and glaring.
It’s completely ridiculous and I still don’t quite believe it, but somehow he communicated with the other cookies. Don’t get me wrong, dough’s not smart. It’s not like they talked philosophy and spoke a language called Cookiese.
Nevertheless, my gingerbread man somehow managed to convey something to the bad cookies. It was mostly mime and arm waving and glaring. It went on for a minute or two, while the bad cookies looked—insomuch as cookies can—a bit embarrassed. The spoon-wielder set down its spoon and helped the one-legged cookie pry its missing limb off the cookie sheet, and the walnut-throwers put the lid back on the jar and tried to pretend they hadn’t done anything.
“Well, I’ll be…” said Aunt Tabitha under her breath.
My gingerbread man finished his arm waving, turned, bowed, and extended an arm in my direction. The bad cookies looked to me expectantly.
I figured that was my cue. I cleared my throat. “Right. Um. Well, if you are all willing to climb into these sacks here, my friend Spindle is going to take you someplace where you can be as bad as you possibly can. There’ll be a whole lot of people trying to sleep, and I want you to make sure they get as little sleep as possible. Cut all the ropes and knot every lace and…and…”
I trailed off. The cookies were grinning like wolves, if wolves were flat and golden brown and smelled vaguely of cayenne. It occurred to me that something made of rat poison and mischief was probably going to have better ideas about how to harass a sleeping army than a mere human baker.
“Err. Do your worst, then. But not until you’re released from the sack and Spindle gives you the go-ahead. That’s an order.”
The cookies shifted their feet and looked, not at me, but at the stale gingerbread man, who shook a fist (or as much a fist as a gingerbread man can make) at them. Spindle climbed out from under the table, and with remarkably little fuss, the cookies climbed into the sacks. I had been afraid that they would make an untenably large pile, but they all laid down flat and stacked together, so when Spindle slung the sacks over his shoulder, he looked like a tinker with a pack rather than St. Nicholas doing his rounds at Yule.
“You’re sure you can do this?” I asked him worriedly.
Spindle looked at the sacks suspiciously. “’Long as they don’t get any ideas…”
Without any prompting, my gingerbread man hopped onto the sack and climbed to Spindle’s shoulder. “He’ll go with you,” I said. “If they get out of line, he’ll take care of them.” I hoped that was true. I hoped the cookie would keep Spindle safe, or Spindle would keep the cookie safe, or…
“Both of you stay safe,” I said helplessly. “Come back as soon as you’ve dropped them off.” It was full dark out now, and Argonel was at the door of the kitchen. I could see the red glow of our outdoor oven reflected against the side of his face. It was time to make the golems.
“I’ll be fine,” said Spindle. “Won’t get anywhere near ’em.” He switched the sacks to the other shoulder then gave me a quick, awkward hug with one arm. “See you in a few hours. Knock ’em dead!” and went out through the pantry. Aunt Tabitha gave me a suspicious look, as if she knew what Spindle was planning, then very obviously decided not to ask about it, and looked away.
I took a deep breath. I didn’t have time to worry. There was too much else to be done.
“Your oven awaits, Wizard Mona,” said Argonel.
“Don’t call me that,” I said tiredly, and went to go build the city’s defenders out of bread.
Thirty-One
The dough golems were going to be lumpy. There was really no getting around it. They were made out of a couple hundred pounds of dough apiece, and what we wound up doing was throwing head-sized lumps of dough onto the big cookie sheets, creating bigger and bigger piles until we’d built a roughly man-shaped form. The end result was going to be completely flat on the backside, and I was already worried about how we were going to pry it off the cookie sheet—Aunt Tabitha had dumped an entire bucket of warm oil down on the surface, but it was burning off fast.
We’d be lucky if oil was all that burned.
You generally bake bread for about half an hour in the oven, maybe more or less, depending on the size of the loaf. A hotter oven cooks things faster, but there’s a limit on it—you can’t shove dough into a blazing inferno and expect to have baked bread in five minutes. You’ll get a lump of raw dough with a burnt black shell.
I had no idea how hot the outdoor oven was. Hotter than I’m used to, anyway. The blacksmiths were heating it like a forge. Argonel apologized to me twice about the fact that it wasn’t hotter. “Couldn’t work good iron in this,” he rumbled, holding a hand out over the coals.
“Bread’s a little easier than iron,” I said, hoping it was true. I was going to get charred black golems with raw hearts at this rate. Maybe that wouldn’t matter, but…
I gritted my teeth, stuck my left hand into the raging heat, and touched a fingertip to the golem’s head. Don’t burn. You don’t want to burn. There’s a lot of heat there, but just pass it through to the center, you don’t have to burn…
There was a lot of dough to convince. When I pulled my hand out, my index finger was angry red. I stared at it vaguely, and Aunt Tabitha swung me around and jammed my hand into a bucket of water.
“God’s teeth, Mona, are you trying to burn your fingers off?”
The water was so shockingly cold that I yelped. I pulled my hand out, and most of it was fine, except the fingertip. A big watery blister was already forming, and I noticed vaguely that all the little tiny hairs of my arm had burned off.
“I had to touch it,” I said grimly, cradling my hand. “This isn’t all one batch of dough, I can’t talk to it at a distance like I did the gingerbread. It’s not all one thing. I have to make it all one thing.”
She gave me a look of incomprehension, but Argonel nodded. “Not a wizard,” he said. “Worked with a wizard-smith once, though, and he said the same thing. He was always burning himself on alloys.”
“You’re not telling me that you’re going to have to reach into the oven and burn yourself on every one of these things?” said Aunt Tabitha, horrified.
I could feel a hysterical laugh somewhere under my ribcage and shoved it down. I needed Aunt Tabitha to trust me, or at least to not stop me. “It’s nothing compared to what the Carex will do,” I said, staring down at the blister. “If they get through the walls…”
There was a long silence, broken by the hiss of coals and the steaming of too much dough baking too fast over too much heat.
“Honey’s good for burns,” said Aunt Tabitha grimly. “I’ll get the crock and some gauze. And try to remember that you’re the only wizard they’ve got, and it won’t do anyone any good if you hurt yourself too badly to work before the battle even starts.”
A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking Page 20
