Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet

by Charlie N. Holmberg

Letting out a deep breath, I inspect my heel. It’s still swollen and colored a deep fuchsia. I want to think the color looks a little better, but it could be a trick of the light. I was not able to pick all of the minute blazeweed thorns out of the flesh. They’ll have to stay there until my skin forces them out, or until I get my hands on some tweezers.

  It takes only an hour to settle my plans, but a day and a half for Allemas to return, which translates to a day and a half without food or water. The moment he frees me, I rush to the kitchen and pump water into my mouth, then find some withering carrots to munch on. Allemas watches me with a curious expression.

  “You can’t just lock me in there and leave,” I say once I’m satiated. “I’ll die, and then you’ll have wasted your money.”

  He nods slowly, his lips half-pursed. Had he really not thought of that?

  His expression brightens. “I think I found a new customer,” he says. I get no more details than that, and I hardly care.

  I look out into the backyard, then around the kitchen. If I run, I won’t be able to take provisions with me. How kind will the forest be to me?

  Will Fyel find me? Will he even be able to help?

  Sighing, I rub my eyes. I cannot depend on the strange spirit, but he hasn’t proved himself untrustworthy, not yet. And so I choose to hope, and in my memory, I taste lavender.

  There is little to eat in this house, so—without Allemas’s by-your-leave—I start to make biscuits. He doesn’t stop me, only watches as I cut the butter into the flour. I infuse the dough with the resilience of bones and mountains, the endurance of the ocean, the strength of angry winds. I think of the sturdy stonework of the shrine to Strellis in Carmine and Cleric Tuck’s broad shoulders, gods bless that he’s safe. I have made biscuits like these before, but never with such concentration. I need these to fill my belly for a long time, even if they’ll fill Allemas’s as well.

  Part of me regrets the decision as I watch the biscuits bake, for thinking of sturdiness and Cleric Tuck has made me think of Carmine, of Arrice and Franc and the bodies littering the street, of the men and women penned to be sold alongside me. I’ve tried not to linger on any of them too long, tried to distract myself with Allemas, my goal of escaping, and Fyel, but Carmine always lingers nearby like the scent of sugar. I hate not knowing. I hate worrying, for it only makes a bad outcome that much worse. I look skyward, to the silent gods, and blink to keep my eyes dry. I don’t know how Allemas will react to tears.

  The biscuits are done, and I’m suddenly ravenous. I eat one straight out of the oven, blowing on each piece before chewing. Allemas does the same and shrieks when the thing burns him.

  He locks me in the cellar for the rest of the day.

  I’m glad the biscuit burned him.

  I don’t find any pleasure in the harm of others, even those who corral me like a dog, but Allemas is fast becoming an exception. And, because he sees his own mistake as an act of retaliation on my part, he has decided I need to move the stones again. For discipline.

  “All over there,” he says, pointing to the side of the yard that is free of stones, “and then all back again. And if you don’t do it before sundown, you’ll pick a bouquet of blazeweed. This is learning. You need to learn.”

  Those last two lines were spoken more quietly than the others, and he stopped looking at me as he said them. Talking to himself again? No, talking to me.

  He is hard to understand, but I don’t argue. I see this as my chance to escape, so I lift the first stone before he retreats into the house. He grins an uneven smile and waits until I place the stone and lift the next before stepping into the kitchen, mumbling, “It’s a big job she wants, but we can do it,” as he goes.

  “She” refers to the earlier-mentioned customer, I presume. I retrieve and drop a second stone. Crossing the yard, I scan the house.

  One of the second-story windows has a rotting planter box hanging off it. There’s a trellis almost a full story high that holds the skeleton of dead vines—creeper ivy, I believe. The roof is lower in one place than another by a few feet. The dark brown shingles look new.

  I check the window. Allemas is looking at me but turns away as I cross the yard. His face doesn’t return to the glass.

  I grab a new rock. I think the trellis could hold me. I’ll have to jump from its top to reach the sill of a window. Do I have enough arm strength to hoist myself up?

  I check the window. Empty, but for how long?

  I have to go now. Now. Now. Now. Before he comes back. I might have time—

  Now.

  I drop the rock and bolt for the house, grabbing two fistfuls of trellis. I hoist myself up. Ivy snaps under my bare feet. The trellis wobbles under my weight. I skitter to its top and leap, grabbing the windowsill.

  It’s dirty. My fingers slip, but, thank the gods, so many years of constant kneading and whisking have given me just enough shaking strength to pull myself up. I get an elbow on the sill and scramble until I lift a knee over its edge. I can barely fit on the narrow space, but I grab the gutter for balance.

  It creaks. One of the nails holding it in place comes free.

  The corners of my vision darken, and my heart speeds until the beats seem to blend together, and my legs and arms tingle as though filled with air. I stand and grapple for the roof ledge. Find it. It’s easier to pull myself up the second time.

  I sprint across the shingles. Reach the edge. Look down. Another planter box juts out of a window below me. I turn and lower myself down, belly against the roof, inching out until my toes touch it. A splinter digs into my swollen heel, but I barely feel it.

  The planter box breaks and I fall.

  I hit the earth hard across my thigh and hip, but my palms slap against it and keep my head upright. Dust flies around me as I twist about, trying to find my feet. For a moment I don’t feel them, and I cough, grappling with direction. As the dust clears, however, my mind comes back to itself, and I shove myself upright.

  Allemas shouts from within the house.

  I run.

  I no longer want the road—it’s too open, too direct. I want to hide. I want to be invisible.

  I dash into the woods.

  Plants and weeds whip about my ankles as I run. Rocks and thistles cut into my feet, but I keep running, leaping over tree roots. I topple and slide where the ground suddenly declines, and my body sinks into moist earth. Clover stains my slacks. The earth beneath me pushes up, softer than it did in Carmine, and I’m on my feet again, racing deeper into the wood. I stumble over one tree root, jump from another. Something dark, perhaps a hare, leaps across my path. I race past it, splitting a bush open with my body, and slip again. This time I don’t fall. I slide down a shale-studded incline and sprint toward a glade, dodging trees—

  I hear the snap before I feel it.

  Snap. Pressure. Jerking. Falling, crashing. Pain.

  Pain.

  Pain.

  I scream.

  Lightning courses up my leg, hot and cold and clawing and chewing and eating, worms of glass burrowing into skin and muscle, scraping the bone beneath. Devouring my ankle, my leg. Cutting. Slicing. Crunching.

  I bite down on my voice, but it trickles through my teeth as stifled wails and whimpers. I try to crawl forward, but the metal clenches and scrapes. My body is ten times the weight it should be. My face is drenched in my own tears, which fall like rain to the mushroomed earth beneath me.

  I turn my head just enough to see—not blazeweed, but a silver mouth clamped around my leg. A trap, like the sort used for animals, about a foot across. Its jaws clamp just above my ankle, forcing my foot to jut at an odd angle, mutilated and crooked. Blood oozes around its teeth. My hands and nose grow cold. My fingernails dig into the soil, and my whole body won’t stop shuddering.

  Footsteps sound in the foliage behind me without pattern. An uneven gait, ever changing.

  “I told you not to run,” he says. He stops, shuffles. Grunts.

  The teeth rip out of my leg
, and I scream a second time, startling mourning doves from the canopy above me. My hands waver before my eyes. My fingers double, like I’m looking at them through a screen of egg whites.

  Allemas does not pick me up. Instead he grabs both my wrists and drags me back toward the house. My ruined limb hits every bump and dip along the way. Despite my pleadings to the gods, I never lose consciousness.

  I scream and scream and scream.

  So many people all looking at me.

  CHAPTER 7

  While Allemas is not smart enough to keep me fed, he knows the basics of first aid, though his hands are rough, his touch unkind.

  I plead with him in words unintelligible even to myself. My body is strewn out on the kitchen floor, cold except for where the fire blazes in my right leg, muddy save for the tear-cut lines running down my face. My nails dig into the old wood at the bottom of the kitchen cabinets and in the hairline spaces between floorboards. Allemas jerks my injured foot this way and that, immune to the screaming that leaves me raw and hoarse. For a moment I do black out, but not for long enough. He pours some sort of foul, alcoholic drink over the deep gashes and bandages me so tightly I lose consciousness again.

  I’m in the cellar for the next . . . I’m not sure. A day, maybe two, before he drags me out and sets me with some sort of splint—unfinished wood nailed into a right angle, a semblance of a leg and foot. Agony reawakens in me when he binds my injured leg to it, strapping my knee tightly to the wood before leaving me in the kitchen. In a moment of clarity, I prop my throbbing appendage onto the counter in an attempt to ease the swelling. It makes my head spin and my hair sweat, and my lungs can’t draw in enough air. My stomach is wrung between hands almost as cruel as Allemas’s.

  Allemas attempted to set my bones before binding my injury. I’ll eventually be able to walk, but even after my leg heals, I’ll never run again.

  I’m too dehydrated to cry, but the gods will feel it. Somehow I know they will.

  “Make me a cake.”

  I wipe my face, wet from running it under the pump, on my sleeve. While I haven’t had a proper bath since being taken from Carmine, Allemas has at least given me “new” clothes. They’re his, judging by the size and the strange cut of the fabric. A white shirt and earthy slacks. One leg of the slacks is rolled up so I don’t trip on the length. The other is cut at the knee to allow space for my wooden boot and still-swollen foot and leg.

  Allemas tosses me a poorly crafted cane. Where he got it from, I don’t know, and I don’t care. It takes me a moment to stand. I lean all my weight on my good left leg and prop my elbows against the counter, taking slow, deep breaths until I feel steady. Then I stare at him, my body as weak as the water still dripping from the spout.

  Allemas repeats, “Make me a cake.”

  I swallow. “What do you want?”

  “A cake.”

  “But what kind?” I glimpse the latest grocery run stacked up on the kitchen floor. Allemas brought his merchandise into the kitchen sometime during my last stay in the cellar. Apparently I only get to stay in the bedroom if I’m on my best behavior.

  “What do I need?”

  I stare at him, forgetting the constant throbbing of my maimed foot for a moment. Mercy, wit, beauty, sensibility . . . everything.

  The pain returns and I think, Something that will stick in your throat and never slide down, and then look away, ashamed for thinking it. This bitter, hateful woman is not who I am.

  The maw of blackness inside presses on me, unyielding, and I wonder, What if it is? But I banish the thought and push an image of Arrice into my mind, focusing on it until my forehead grows hot. Arrice is the woman I want to be, regardless of what I can’t remember.

  For a moment my memory glimmers, something like a flash of light filled with the sensation of claylike warmth. I startle and grasp for it, but the sensation fades too quickly. Something from my life before?

  Who am I? I asked Arrice once, the day after she took me into her home.

  I don’t know, she had said. But if you stay long enough, I can tell you what you’re not.

  I close my eyes and try not to focus on the pain radiating in my leg. For a moment I reconsider my idea for a sleeping cake, something to help me get away . . . but of course, I can’t run. I wouldn’t get far, and I’m not sure what other traps Allemas might have set for me. He didn’t seem surprised by the animal trap.

  “What do I need?” he repeats.

  I clear my throat and say, “I don’t think you want me to answer that.”

  “Oh, but you must. Make me a cake. Make me the way I’m supposed to be. How am I supposed to be?”

  I eye him now. He’s leaning forward, his eyes wide and expectant like a child’s. His question sincere.

  “I don’t know what you’re supposed to be,” I answer, mimicking Arrice. “I can only tell you what you’re not.”

  This deflates him, but he’s insistent. “Make me what I’m supposed to be. But no tricks. I can taste your tricks.”

  I rummage through the groceries and find sprigs of mint there, so I decide to lead with them. I pause before mincing it, wondering what on Raea I can make this man that won’t be considered a “trick.” What can I make him that won’t anger him? That he won’t use as an excuse to hurt me?

  He stares at me, then the floor, then outside. Twiddling his thumbs. I can’t decide, but that very thought gives me an idea.

  Decisiveness. If nothing else, it will help him with whatever business he has on the side. And if he makes more money, we’ll have more food, and I won’t go hungry so often.

  I make the cake, thinking back on every sure decision I can remember making. Staying with Arrice and Franc. Staying out in a windstorm to help a cow birth her calf, despite knowing it wouldn’t survive. Opening the bakeshop. Giving the slave that petit four.

  I pop the cake into the oven and scrape the excess batter from the bowl with a spoon. Allemas doesn’t stop me from savoring each sugary mouthful.

  The cake is half-baked when Allemas suddenly leaps to the back door and presses his face and hands against the window there. His breathing grows loud and strong. He squints, searching, before his eyes begin to dart back and forth.

  I limp to the window on the other end of the kitchen and peer out myself, searching. Searching for a flicker of white. Has Fyel returned? But I see nothing, and I wonder if he’s forgotten me, the way I’ve almost forgotten him. My shoulders grow heavy, and I cast my eyes away from the window, picking at the line of mortar where the counter meets the wall.

  Allemas puffs over the window, fogging it with his breath.

  “What is it?” I ask, testing. Maybe it was Fyel, and I just missed him.

  Allemas shakes his head and balls his hands into fists. He says nothing until I feed him a slice of cake, after which he declares, “Yes, we will take the job. We will go into the forest. It will be a good trip for us, Maire.”

  He says my name like there’s weight to it and watches me as though I’m supposed to react.

  Ignoring him, I scrape the last bit of batter from the bowl.

  I’m locked in my room—which, though a prison, I still greatly prefer over the cellar—while Allemas leaves the house, again not taking his wagon. He comes back in the middle of the night. I know this because he wakes me.

  “Up up up, it’s time to go!” he declares. “Gather your things!”

  I rub sleep from my eyes and crack my back; it’s sore from switching from the hard cellar floor to the ratty mattress. “I have no things,” I mumble, but instead of responding he clips something around my neck. I feel it in the darkness—it’s some kind of collar. I grapple for my cane. He then leashes me like a dog and tugs me out to the wagon, where he ties me to the tailboard.

  My leg aches so much from the sudden walk that the pain radiates nearly to my hip. I hoist myself onto the wagon to relieve the pressure and examine the knot. I might be able to untie it before . . . and then I recall that I’ve been crippled, that I ca
n barely stand, and I’ll never outpace Allemas on elbows and knees. Though this is not the first time I’ve come to this realization, it still strikes me like a cup of ice water over sun-warmed skin.

  I finger my collar as Allemas goes back inside, but I can’t figure out how he clasped it. I am an animal, and my yearning to stretch myself out and find someone, even a stranger, to comfort me ripples through the iciness in my belly. What would I do to have Arrice hold my hand, to hear Franc play his mandolin, or to sit close enough to Cleric Tuck just so I could lean my head on his shoulder?

  I look up at the stars. They look just as they did in Carmine.

  Allemas makes several trips to and from the wagon, loading up every last baking supply he owns. I don’t ask him why; I’m grateful he’s not making me do the work, and I want to be forgotten, if only for a little while. Perhaps he’s in a hurry. Perhaps he’s even sympathetic about my injury, but the prospect almost makes me laugh. Almost.

  I sit in the back of the wagon, shoved between sacks of flour and bundles of split wood, while Allemas drives his poor donkey higher up the road. I watch the animal, wishing I could will endurance into it. I can feel it strain with every lurching step. When we stop, I’ll try to sneak it a biscuit.

  Propping my feet up on the wagon, I lean back against the flour and watch the stars, finding familiar patterns among their twinkling lights. Arrice and Franc never watched stars with me; these are patterns I recall on my own. Odd, how memory works. How can I be so familiar with the stars, yet so bewildered when I try to think of my parents’ faces or my childhood? Sometimes I wonder if I ever had a family at all.

  Sometime before daybreak I fall asleep. I wake again as the sun pulls its heavy body over the horizon. Allemas stops at a stream for the donkey and jaunts into the woods, searching for . . . something. Climbing out of the wagon is slow going because of my wood-locked foot, but I manage it and offer the donkey one of my biscuits. The animal eats it happily. I can feel its relief somehow, as though it were my own.

  To my surprise, once Allemas returns, we ride up the narrowing road for only another quarter mile more before he attempts to drive the wagon through the dense wood. He doesn’t get far.