A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

  “Yes, Aunt Tabitha,” I said meekly.

  * * *

  It turned out that I had to touch the golems twice. The first time I had to convince them not to burn, and the second time I had to get them to stand up.

  “Hands heal quick,” said Argonel, putting one of his on my shoulder. He had such ugly hands. Mine were going to be ugly too, after much more of this. It didn’t matter. If I was alive to have scarred hands, I didn’t care.

  The shields over the top of the cookie sheet were swung away. Under them, the bread had turned a lovely golden brown and risen a bit more. The resulting golem was about twelve feet long and maybe two feet thick. He was going to be an awfully skinny warrior.

  “Up!” I told the golem, fighting the urge to snatch my finger away from the heat. “Get up! We need you to fight!”

  Spiraling Shadows was right. It wasn’t any harder to animate something that size than it was to animate the bad cookies. The problem wasn’t getting it to live, the problem was keeping it together.

  It tore itself off the cookie sheet. The bottom had burned as black as char, despite the magic, and it left large rags of dough behind it. The holes made raw white wounds in its back. “Scrapers!” I gasped to Argonel, my hands deep in the bucket of water. My burnt finger throbbed furiously. “We need to scrape it down—somehow—“

  He nodded. “We’ll take care of it. You take care of him.”

  The golem was swaying unsteadily on the far end of the cookie sheet. It was huge, taller than a one-story house, and it looked ridiculously thin and wobbly. Could it hit the enemy? Would it break apart if it tried? How stupid were we to think of fighting the Carex with something made out of bread dough?

  It took a step forward and tottered.

  Oh, gods, I didn’t think about the feet, they’re gingerbread men feet, how is he going to stay upright?

  I dropped the bucket and lunged for the golem. It didn’t have expressions, but I could feel bewilderment through the magic between us.

  The feet were indeed the problem, or rather the lack of them. Our gingerbread man can balance on the ends of their legs because they’re so small and nimble. The bread golem was about as far from nimble as you can get. Its legs were uneven lumps, same as the rest of it, and if it tried to walk on them, it was going to fall forward on its face.

  “Hold still!” I told it. “Don’t fall! Err—lean against the wall, there, we’ll figure something out!”

  The cookie slumped against the wall. It was gigantic. It had arms like flattened tree-trunks. It was completely useless if I couldn’t get it walking and on the way to the gate.

  Argonel and Aunt Tabitha came up behind me. We were joined by a skinny apprentice with no eyebrows. All of us stared at the gingerbread man.

  I thought I might cry. My brilliant idea, and all these people working so hard on it, and the stupid thing couldn’t even walk. What kind of wizard was I, anyway? And I couldn’t just bake him with more dough at the feet, because dough doesn’t work like that. If you pile up cookie dough, you get wider cookies, not taller ones. Gingerbread men are all kind of flat when you look at them.

  “The base,” said the eyebrow-less apprentice suddenly. “If he had a broader base to walk on, it wouldn’t matter. We could strap some kind of plates to his legs, maybe.”

  “Of course! He needs shoes, the poor thing,” said Tabitha. “Argonel?”

  The blacksmith nodded. “I think…barrels. If he can step into a barrel for each foot, we’ll pack it with straw and lash it onto his legs with harness leather.”

  “Do you think it’ll work?” I asked, looking at the strange, thin, gangly golem. “I thought it’d be more…more…warlike…”

  Argonel paused in between waving apprentices towards the barrels. “Wiz—Mona—I think if I was the enemy and a giant man made of bread came at me, even one as strange as that, I would think twice.”

  Harold, who had been standing a little ways back and scanning the scene with wary eyes, stepped forward. “A soldier’s strength is limited, Mona. If they have to hack their way through your bread dough army, that’s strength they won’t have to use on our men.”

  I sighed. They were right, but it wasn’t enough. I’d hoped deep down that my bread dough men would completely turn the tide, that maybe if I raised enough golems they’d stomp the enemy flat and none of our troops would get so much as a hangnail.

  Instead I had one golem who could barely stand up. How many more would I be able to bake before dawn?

  There was only one way to find out.

  When the next golem was baking, I went back to the first. I suppose I had some notion that he might be panicking—he was blind and couldn’t stand upright on his own—but I really shouldn’t have worried. Bread doesn’t panic. You can throw bread off a cliff and it will fall without a care in the world. It doesn’t have nerves.

  The golem had been told to lean against the wall, and it was prepared to lean against the wall forever if necessary. It wasn’t worried.

  The apprentices, who were wrestling barrels onto the ends of its legs, were a bit more worried. I darted forward and put a hand as high up the golem’s leg as I could reach.

  Lift your foot so they can slide your new shoe on.

  It lifted a large foot.

  “Whoa!” Aunt Tabitha stood on top of a ladder with a mixing bowl full of buttercream frosting. I grabbed for the bottom of the ladder, which had shuddered when the foot it was leaning against moved.

  “Aunt Tabitha!”

  “Just a minute, Mona, dear—I have to give the poor fellow eyes.”

  I held the ladder while the apprentices packed straw furiously into barrels and my aunt leaned out across the expanse of baked face. When she finally stopped slathering, the bread golem had small frosting eyes and a vague, goofy smile.

  “Did you have to make him smile, Aunt Tabitha?” I asked.

  “I thought it might make him look more friendly.”

  “He’s supposed to be trampling Carex mercenaries!”

  “Fine….” She sighed, took another handful of icing and drew slanted, angry eyebrows. “Happy?”

  “Not even a little.”

  The eyebrowless apprentice took the ladder. He had a blister on the side of his face, probably from an encounter with the oven. I glanced down at my burned finger and couldn’t resist rubbing another fingertip over it and making the fluid in the blister squish from side to side. (Oh, like you’ve never done that.) It hurt. I suspected it was going to hurt a lot more before the night was through.

  By midnight, two more golems were leaning against the wall and I had a blister on my middle finger to match the first.

  The barrel shoes worked. When I asked the first golem to march up and down the courtyard, it did. It had a ten-foot stride and splintered a horse trough without even noticing. I started to feel a bit more optimistic about its chances.

  The strain of keeping the golems going wasn’t too bad. I’ve animated dozens of gingerbread men at a time, and three golems wasn’t much. What was really wearing on me were my bad cookie saboteurs out there in the dark. Twenty-three smart cookies was a lot to keep going. It wasn’t exactly that I had to do anything, but I could feel my energy draining away, a little at a time. My muscles were a little more tired than they should have been, and when I stood up, my knees were a little bit wobbly. It felt like I was doing everything while carrying a twenty-pound pack on my back—it hadn’t seemed all that heavy at first, but after a few hours it was really starting to wear on me.

  With the fourth golem baking and the second and third being fitted for barrels, Aunt Tabitha dragged me into the kitchen. “Eat,” she said, shoving ham and pickles in front of me.

  I was glad it wasn’t a sandwich. I don’t think I could have eaten bread right then.

  Unexpectedly, the magical weight on me lessened a fraction. It took me a minute to realize that one of the bad cookies must have been destroyed. I frowned into my pickle.

  I’d been planning on
pulling the magic out of them when all this was done—those things were way too dangerous to be allowed to run around loose—but I still didn’t like the thought that some Carex had wrecked one of my cookies. I hope he hadn’t tried to eat it. They were the enemy and all, but there were limits. I felt like having people eat rat poison cookies went against everything being a baker stood for.

  I’d gotten halfway through the ham when another cookie went, then two.

  The bowl of bad gingerbread scraps was still on the mantelpiece. I took it down and stuck my fingers in it. What’s going on out there?

  I didn’t get anything clear. There was a spatter of images inside my head—flick flick flick. It was like the experiment where I tried to listen through the scone, except that there were pictures this time, because I’d given the gingerbread men eyes. They went stuttering by too fast to make anything out. I smelled fire and heard men shouting and felt the malicious satisfaction of a rat-poison cookie who had just done something wicked. I think one of them was running through grass, and another one was dumping gravel into a shoe. One of them was surrounded by legs and was running between boxes, and then somebody was roaring and there was a frying pan the size of a wagon wheel coming at me—

  I dropped the gingerbread ball. A few seconds later, I lost another cookie, probably the one smacked with a frying pan. I hoped it had managed to do some damage in the kitchen tent beforehand.

  “Mona?” Aunt Tabitha looked at me. “You’re white as a sheet, girl. What’s the matter?”

  My head was throbbing, too. Using gingerbread men as spies was never going to catch on. If I tried to do that for very long, I’d have to lie down with a cold rag over my eyes. Seeing the world through frosting is hard.

  “Nothing,” I said hoarsely. I washed my hands before finishing off my pickles. “Nothing I can do about it, anyway. Time to go raise the next golem.”

  Through the rest of that long, long night, I can only remember two coherent thoughts.

  The first was that I was so tired that if the Carex breached the walls and killed us all, there was an excellent chance I’d sleep through it.

  The second wasn’t so much a thought as a question, and it repeated itself every time I had a breath to spare.

  Where the heck is Spindle?

  Thirty-Two

  An hour before dawn, Joshua came out to the courtyard.

  We’d raised the last golem. There were seven of them, and I knew from one look at Joshua’s face that we wouldn’t have time for an eighth.

  “Time to go to the gate,” he said. “The Duchess is already there, arranging the troops. Mona—”

  He stopped there, because if he kept talking, he had to ask a fourteen-year-old girl to come to the front lines of a battle, and he hated it and he knew he had to do it, and I knew I had to come because somebody had to tell the golems what to do.

  This is a lot to not actually say. I hunched my shoulders and said, “Yes. Let’s go.”

  We loaded the wagons with leftover dough. There was still a lot of it, maybe two wagons full, although Our Lady of Sorrowful Angels only knew what I was going to do with it at the front lines, without an oven. Still, we brought it.

  Between the wagons, bringing their barrel-shod feet down with a sound like gigantic hoofbeats, walked the golems.

  They were staying upright. That gave me hope. Each one of them carried a fence post in one hand to use as a club. (Argonel had offered to commandeer the huge ceremonial axe that the Duchess’s very remote ancestors had used to chop the heads off bulls. I declined. On the one hand, an axe takes a lot more brains to work than a club, and on the other, I still felt kind of bad for all those ancestral bulls.) Aunt Tabitha had put an icing face on each one, although the later golems did not have angry eyebrows, and the last three didn’t even have mouths.

  There was no one else in the streets. We reached the gate just as that odd grayish-brown light that precedes dawn was starting to seep over the walls.

  On our side of the big gate was one of the largest squares in the city. It had to be, to accommodate all the wagons and carts coming in, and to give them space to turn so they can get to their particular roads. Four roads led into it, not including the one through the gate—two running parallel to the walls, and two coming in at angles on the far side from the gate.

  All but one of these roads had been blockaded with overturned wagons and wooden barricades. They weren’t pretty. They looked like a cross between a furniture shop and a hedgehog. There were chairs and beds and big wooden planks nailed haphazardly to fill in the gaps, and some of them had sandbags piled up at the bottom or wedged in between the chairs. Spears bristled out of them.

  The golems could look down on them, but the enemy was going to have to climb.

  “We have recruits manning the spears on the other side of each barricade,” said Joshua quietly. “And every archer in the city is either on the wall or on top of the buildings circling this square. We have to hold them here, or they’ll get into the city, and it’ll be house to house.”

  He didn’t have to say any more. I could imagine what it would be like, huddling in your basement, hearing the doors being forced, and then men with swords bursting in, and…

  “We’ll put the golems in the square, then,” I said briskly, rubbing my palms together. The fingers of my left hand had been slathered in honey, which is good for burns, and wrapped in gauze. They throbbed in time to my heartbeat.

  Joshua nodded. “They’ll be waiting when the Carex break through the gate.” (Not if, I noted. When.) “If they are able to drive them back through the gate, do so.”

  I nodded. I had, in a large bowl, seven lumps of half-cooked dough, which I had pulled from each golem. Argonel had found some paint, and each golem had a drippy armband in a different color, which was also splashed on the bread, so theoretically, I would be able to control each golem individually with the magic of sympathy.

  It had worked getting them to march. We hadn’t had more than a few minutes to test it. I had no idea how well it was going to work with complicated orders. The golems were dumb, even for bread, and I was incredibly tired.

  I’d lost more than half of the bad cookies by now. I had managed to grab ten and twenty minute cat-naps while the golems cooked, but every time a bad cookie went, I had jerked awake again. Nothing like that had happened with the other baked goods, probably because I always pulled the magic out of them before they got eaten or destroyed or whatever. It was a nasty feeling. Exhaustion was starting to creep around the edges of my vision like gray mold.

  When the golems were settled, the last road was barricaded up. The wagons that had brought us here were unloaded and turned on their sides. Soldiers dragged out big wooden barriers—I recognized barn doors from the paint—and braced them between buildings.

  “Argonel…” I said, as the barricade went up, leaving him on the other side with the dough and a dozen replacement barrels.

  “It’s been an honor, Wizard Mona,” he said, smiling down at me. “Don’t worry.”

  “Thanks, Argonel,” I said. “For, you know, all of it.”

  He nodded. We didn’t say anything more, because I was pretty sure if I said too much more, I was going to start crying, and maybe he would have too, I don’t know. Wooden planks filled up the space between us.

  “How do we get out?” I asked Joshua.

  He nodded to ladders laid against the wall. “We’ll pull them up once the fighting starts. Shall we go up now?” Harold came up the ladder behind me, and Aunt Tabitha came up behind him. I could hear the archers shifting and talking quietly on the roof. Somebody told a joke and somebody else laughed, one sharp bark.

  The view from the top of the wall was of darkness, broken by the red glow of Carex campfires. I could see shadows of men moving, but nothing more.

  The Duchess was waiting at the top of the wall. She was wearing armor. When she saw me, she smiled.

  “Mona, my dear…” Her smile faded. “Can we not find armor for her?�
��

  “Mona’s not trained to fight in armor,” said Joshua. “Even if she was, we don’t have much for young girls.” He nodded to an aide, a tall man standing just within earshot. “Krin, run over to the armory and see what you can find for the wizard and her aunt.”

  Aunt Tabitha laughed. “I suspect you’d have an easier time fitting Mona!”

  The Duchess reached out and took Aunt Tabitha’s arm and said, “Madam, we will not lose you or your niece, who have done so much for us, to a stray arrow or a misplaced blow.”

  Aunt Tabitha, who had lost much of her fear of the monarchy in the last day, actually patted the Duchess’s hand and said, “Don’t worry, your grace. It will take a great deal to get rid of me. Someone must make sure that all you wizards and warriors remember to eat.”

  Another of the bad cookies winked out. I was down to ten. I wondered if they’d done anything, beyond leaving me tired enough to curl up right here on the stone wall and take a nap.

  Where is Spindle? Is he out there in the dark? Did he make it back inside the walls? Did he do something stupid?

  My little gingerbread cookie was still out there somewhere too. I didn’t know where. I didn’t have anything to track him with, like the bad cookies, but I was sure I’d feel it if he vanished.

  “Should the Duchess be up here?” I asked Joshua in an undertone. “I mean, if they get into the city…”

  The Duchess had very sharp ears. She came and leaned on the battlements next to me. “I could hide in the palace,” she said. “There are very thick doors. I could spend the next two days cowering in a dark room, while my people die, waiting for the doors to finally be broken down, and the Carex to come for me. But I have cowered enough these last few months. I find that I fear that dark room more than I fear dying out here, in the open air.” She shrugged.