A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

  Wake up, I told the dough frantically. Wake up. Get up. We need you.

  The dough didn’t want to. It didn’t like the shape I had chosen. It wasn’t a real shape. It wasn’t baked yet. It was cold and stiff from sitting overnight in the barrels and it was feeling obstinate.

  We don’t have time for this! Get up!

  There were too many different doughs all muddled together. They weren’t combining. I jumped onto the pile and began stomping around, kneading with my boots. You are one. You are the same. Get up!

  My gingerbread cookie yanked on my ear. I looked up and saw one of our guards—nobody I knew, but one of ours—fall down from the top of the barricade. A Carex stood up there, with a bloody sword in his hand, and nobody was stopping him.

  Argonel and Harold leapt up and placed themselves between me and the barricade, but I knew that we were out of time. Even if we stopped this one, there would be more.

  GET UP! I screamed at the dough. I had so little magic left, I couldn’t see straight, but I had plenty of rage and horror to go around, and I poured it all down my hands and into the pile of dough. GET UP, YOU STUPID THING, GET UP AND FIGHT!

  It got up.

  It was…well, I suppose it was a slug, as much as it was anything. I tried to think of it as a slug, because the magic works so much better when things are shaped like animals or people. So, a slug. A slug with fists. It was only about waist high, but the front pulled itself off the ground and two flailing arms came out, and it slithered across the cobbles towards the barricade and two startled Carex standing on top of it.

  “Gods and devils,” said Knackering Molly. “What’ve you done, baker girl?”

  “The best I could,” I said, and tried to stand up. My knees buckled. I realized, with mild surprise, that the energy that normally went into making my legs work was now going into animating the chocolate-chip slug-monster.

  The slug reached the barricade. Our guards scrambled out of its way. It slimed over the top easily. The dough was sticky enough that it didn’t have any problems with the footing, and anyway, it didn’t exactly have feet.

  One of the Carex hacked at it with his sword. The sword sank into the dough with a gloop! noise and didn’t come back out again. The slug lashed out with a tentacle and knocked them both backwards into the square.

  It wasn’t very fast, but it was scary.

  Still, what could it do against thousands of Carex?

  Aunt Tabitha grabbed my shoulder. I swayed under her hand.

  I’d given too much magic to the dough bird, and it had exploded. If I gave the slug too much magic, it would also explode. If I could just get it out into the main body of Carex, I could pour magic into it and it would turn into a giant mobile bomb.

  I knew, even as I hung limply in Aunt Tabitha’s grasp, that this would be the end of me. I had pushed the magic much farther than I thought I could, but it was done. If I tried to pour that much of myself into the slug, it would be with the energy that kept my heart beating and my lungs moving. I could send it oozing across the battlefield and blow it up, but that would be the last thing I did.

  I thought it likely the golems would keep going for a little while after my death. A few minutes at least, maybe even an hour. Probably not long enough to save the city, but maybe long enough to make a difference. Maybe Aunt Tabitha and Spindle and Argonel would have time to get away.

  “Get me over to the dough,” I choked out. My tongue felt thick and strange in my mouth.

  Aunt Tabitha shook her head. “You’re done,” she said. “I’ve seen corpses that looked better than you right now, Mona.”

  I wanted to laugh. In another minute, that wouldn’t be a problem. “I have to,” I said, forcing the words out. “There’s no other wizards left!”

  I tried to crawl forward. The gingerbread man grabbed my ear and tried to pull me back. I needed that dough for the magic of sympathy. Why were the barrels so far away? If I couldn’t get to the barrels, I couldn’t blow up the slug.

  There was a long pause, while Aunt Tabitha wrung her hands, and then Knackering Molly slid down off her horse and said, “There’s one more, anyway.”

  Thirty-Five

  Raising my head was a greater effort than anything I’d ever felt. If we hadn’t lost another golem, I’m not sure I could have done even that. But the little thread of energy came back to me, and I looked up.

  Molly held my eyes for a long moment. Hers were dark and deep. I don’t know what she read in mine.

  She turned away and went to Nag. He lowered his bony head and they stood with their foreheads pressed together, the living woman and the dead horse.

  “We have to get away—” Harold started to say again, and then the world jumped about six inches sideways and I fell over.

  “Mona!” said Aunt Tabitha. “’Ere, what’s wrong?” asked Spindle. They both grabbed for me, and I realized that neither of them had felt it.

  I looked up. Molly was swaying. Nag’s bones rattled a strange rhythm—tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump—

  I would bet everything I will ever own that it was the sound of Knackering Molly’s heartbeat.

  She walked stiffly around Nag’s side and climbed onto his back. He continued to rattle a bone heartbeat.

  “Do you hear something?” asked Spindle.

  In the square, the Carex fought the slug and arrows hissed and the army roared and steel clashed—but on our side of the barricade, everything seemed strangely silent, except for Nag’s bones.

  Then I heard it. It sounded almost like running water, far in the distance, coming from within the city.

  Knackering Molly bent low over Nag’s neck. She was shaking like a woman sobbing, but she made no noise at all.

  The sound was getting nearer and louder and deeper. If it was running water, it was a flash flood, not a stream.

  “Molly—” I said. She’d done something magical. Something that made the world jump, something huge—

  Knackering Molly looked over at me and smiled, just a little. Her fingers flicked out in a small, ironic salute.

  The road began to shake. Buildings rattled as if the Knocker were thumping into them. Aunt Tabitha yelled, “Earthquake!” but Spindle let out a whoop and pointed down the street.

  Knackering Molly had called the dead horses of the city to its defense, and the horses had come.

  They were made of bone, like Nag, and flashed ivory in the sun.

  Many of them must have broken from the ground or from underground crypts, and bits of dust and dirt still clung to them. Some were so old that there were hardly any bones, just clouds of dust formed into the shape of running horses. The magic that held them together was so much stronger than anything I could do—than anything I’d ever seen—

  It was no wonder the army had tried to recruit Molly. The amazing thing was that they’d ever let her go.

  Aunt Tabitha picked up Spindle with one arm and me with the other and shoved us back against the wall. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Argonel throwing his apprentice into a doorway. The men on the barricades stood and gaped at the horses—first the slug, now this—and then some of the smarter ones realized that anyone standing in the way of that charge was going to be trampled. They scattered.

  The horses hit the barricade and it fell apart under their hooves. Bone dust manes whipped behind them. Watching them leap over the remains of the wall was like watching a great waterfall of bone. I have never seen anything else like it, and if I live to be a hundred years old, I imagine I never will.

  “How many are there?” asked Aunt Tabitha, almost to herself.

  I tried to think of how many there could be. Our city is hundreds of years old and many generations of horses have lived and died within its walls.

  Knackering Molly had called them all.

  They charged into the square and through the gate, into the Carex army, with Nag at their head and Molly on his back.

  When the bone army had finally passed us by—a matter of minutes, I s
uppose, although it seemed to go on for hours—it took a bit before any of us were willing to leave the walls. When you have seen a thing like that, a thing impossible and glorious and horrible all at once, it takes a minute before you can really think again.

  “Oh,” said Aunt Tabitha finally. “Oh my.”

  It broke the spell. Spindle jumped up and down and punched the air and shouted “Hooyah! You show ’em, Molly! Give ’em one for Tibbie!”

  “Is it over?” asked Argonel. “Wizard Mona, do you know?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” I admitted, testing my feet cautiously. They seemed to be working, mostly. “Should we, um, go look?”

  As a little knot, Harold and Argonel and Aunt Tabitha and Spindle and I, plus an apprentice and three or four guards, crept to the edge of the street. The barricade had been pounded into splinters, and we peered out cautiously.

  There was nothing living in the square. The slug monster oozed a slow circuit around the walls. The broken gates had been torn completely off their hinges.

  We inched forward. I leaned heavily on Spindle, partly to keep from falling down, partly to keep him from running off.

  At the gate, we peered out over the battlefield.

  It was a sea of bucking bones.

  Hundreds of dead horses, from nearly full skeletons to roiling dust, were trampling across the Carex. The greatest concentration of horses, after all, was not inside the city but in the bonepits of the knacker yards and slaughterhouses, which are all outside the walls. Hundreds of horses came from inside the city, but thousands rose from outside it, and they hit the Carex army like a hammer.

  The mercenaries were backing away from the city, trying to fight, but bones are worse than bread—if you stab a skeleton with a sword, it doesn’t stop the skeleton, and the odds are good your sword will get wrenched out of your hand in the process.

  “They’re retreating,” breathed Harold. “Sweet mother of us all, they’re actually retreating.”

  Nobody was shooting from the battlements anymore. I suspect that the archers, like the rest of us, were simply staring down with slack-jawed awe.

  We picked our way a little farther out from the wall. The road dipped a little, and we could see the skeletal army’s charge laid out in front of us, an arrowhead of bone driving deeper and deeper into the enemy ranks.

  “They’re nearly through,” said Argonel. “Are they going to turn around?”

  Harold shook his head. “I don’t think we’re dealing with normal tactics here anymore.”

  The arrowhead pierced through the other side. The mercenary army was cut in half. And apparently that was the final straw, because as we watched, the men stopped even trying to fight back. The retreat became a rout and the rout became a desperate, scrambling flight.

  The Carex army broke and ran.

  * * *

  When we found Knackering Molly at last, she was dead.

  I had expected it. I think I had known since the first moment when she pressed her forehead against Nag’s. She had done what I had thought to do with the last golem—poured herself into the magic and driven it forward with her death.

  I had still hoped that I was wrong.

  She was lying in a little clearing in the middle of the battlefield, with five hundred bone horses facing inward around her, watching. There wasn’t a mark on her. She was curled up on her side as if she had slipped off Nag’s back and collapsed from exhaustion, and I imagine that was pretty much what had happened after all.

  “It was the magic that killed her,” I said hoarsely.

  “She allus said that getting mixed up with armies and generals would get you killed,” said Spindle, wiping at his eyes. I could tell he felt guilty for persuading her to come at all…and yet, she’d saved us. If he hadn’t, the Carex would be running through the streets even now.

  The Duchess and Joshua had come down from the walls, and we all walked through that silent army together. Empty eye sockets turned to follow us as we strode past. It would have been unbelievably creepy, but I was so very tired, and the Carex army was routed and there was nothing left to feel but relief.

  And grief. There was still room for grief.

  “She saved us all,” said the Duchess. Joshua leaned down and closed Molly’s eyes.

  A great sigh filled the air, and the bone horses folded up and dropped to the ground. Clouds of white dust roiled up and settled slowly around us.

  Nag was the only one left standing, and as we watched, he went down to his knees and stretched out his head along the ground by Knackering Molly, and then he was only old bones and rags of tattered cloth. That made me cry even harder, because that was when I knew it was really over.

  The Duchess looked at me helplessly. “Mona—you knew her. She saved us. Without the two of you…What should we do? What would she want?”

  Spindle and I looked at each other, but it was Spindle who spoke up. “She an’ Nag should be buried together,” he said, dragging a sleeve across his face. “An’ not in one of those big fancy tombs. She’d think that was stupid. Maybe a park. She would’ve liked a park.”

  “With a statue, perhaps?” asked the Duchess. “We have to do something.”

  Spindle and I looked at each other again. I choked down the lump in my throat and tried to talk. “A statue of Nag would be okay,” I said. “But not a stupid one. It has to have Nag in it like he really was. Not…you know…heroic. She shouldn’t have had to be a hero.”

  “No,” said the Duchess. “No. No one should.”

  Joshua picked Molly up, very carefully, and carried her back to the city.

  Our city.

  And we all went home.

  Thirty-Six

  The army arrived two days later—a day late, as it turned out—but that was okay. Most of the Carex didn’t stop running until they hit the mountains. The army got home in time to mop up some of the stragglers and most of the wounded, all of whom wanted to surrender. They got put to work rebuilding the outlying farms. The Duchess had a certain sense of poetic justice.

  All told, apart from Knackering Molly we lost seven people. Five of those were on the barricades, one was an old veteran who had volunteered to help fight and whose heart gave out in the middle of the battle, and one guard was found in an alley with his throat cut. We’re pretty sure that was the work of the late Spring Green Man. There were a few more on the outlying farms who’d refused to evacuate, but there wasn’t anything I could have done about them, and I tried hard not to feel guilty.

  Joshua says that we took so few casualties (what a stupid word, there’s nothing casual about it) because the golems held them off until Knackering Molly did her part. I’d like to think he’s right. The Golden General offered me a post in the army, but I told them I didn’t want to even think about making golems for at least a year, and Aunt Tabitha pointed out that I was fourteen and not nearly old enough to go traipsing about with the military. Which was sort of embarrassing, but also a relief. It’s hard to say no to someone like the General.

  And I was going to say no. I still liked Lord Ethan, but I wasn’t going to be responsible for turning other people into heroes.

  Oberon’s personal possessions—a ring and some papers—turned up on the battlefield, but they couldn’t identify a body. Spindle has a theory about this, which involves the phrase “mangled beyond recognition.” He is quite gleeful about it. I have a different theory—I think it’s possible that he got away, and left a false trail behind him. As long as he stays far, far away from my city, that’s fine. I’d like to see him punished, but even more than that, I just want him gone.

  Spindle lives with us now. We repainted the room so it’s not pink and doesn’t have a sampler in it. I’m not sure if he really wanted to live with us, but the Duchess threatened to knight him, and if you’re going to be a knight, you have to be a squire first. When he found out that you spend all your time taking care of some guy’s armor and his horse and taking lessons in chivalry, he couldn’t get out fast enough.<
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  There was still the matter of the ceremony, mind you….

  “Stop fidgeting,” said Aunt Tabitha, straightening the folds of my dress. “Don’t wring your skirt in your hands. You’ll get it all crumpled.”

  “It was very kind of the Duchess to do this all at once,” I said faintly, trying not to grab handfuls of cloth and twist them frantically. “If I had to go through this for every single medal, I’d die.”

  “You won’t die,” said Aunt Tabitha. “You’ll do fine.” She fussed with my hair, which was hopeless.

  Everybody will be looking at the Duchess, I thought. Or at Spindle. Compared to Spindle, I was positively presentable. The Duchess would happily have given him a dozen suits of formal clothing, but he was having none of it. We compromised on the page’s uniform he’d worn that long-ago night in the palace. (Two weeks ago. It had been two weeks ago. I felt like I had aged so much in the last two weeks that I half-expected my hair to come in white.)

  Spindle tugged at the collar of his tunic and muttered something in Thieves’ Cant. The gingerbread man stood on my shoulder. He had new icing buttons for the occasion.

  Joshua opened the door and said, “We’re ready for you.”

  “I’m scared,” I whispered.

  “So am I,” Joshua whispered back. “I hate these things. You’re up first, so you get to leave early. I think I’m getting made a Marshal, and I have to stay until the end.”

  This made me feel a little better. At least they weren’t making me a Marshal.

  We stepped out of the room into a narrow corridor with a door at the end. Joshua opened the door, which led onto a courtyard. We were having an outdoor ceremony. Two guards on either side clicked the butts of their halberds against the floor. I gulped.

  “Straight ahead,” murmured Joshua. “Stop on the third step of the dais, next to the General. Spindle, go right behind her, and stop on the second step.”

  We walked in. I went up three steps, staring at my feet to make sure that I didn’t trip and fall. When I reached the Golden General, I looked up.