Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  My gaze shoots to the breadbasket in her hands. My stomach roars, shaking me down to my hips. I try to swallow, but my mouth is so dry. When was my last meal? I can’t remember.

  I meet her eyes, hopeful. There’s nothing around us but wild growth, and beyond that, farmland. A dirt road stretches through it. I’ve been following it, but I can’t remember why.

  She crosses the wide lane to me, kicking up rust-colored soil as she goes. She kneels beside me, dirtying her skirt, and takes my face in her hands.

  “Are you all right?” she asks, looking me over, tilting my head this way and that. “Are you running from someone?”

  Am I? I touch one of the fading bruises on my body, this one below my ear.

  “I don’t know,” I whisper. “I don’t . . . I don’t remember.”

  Her face falls, yet her brow and eyes tighten. “This won’t do at all. Come with me. Can you walk?”

  I eye her basket again and nod.

  She notices. Without hesitation, she reaches for the top loaf, a beautifully baked bread with braided crust, and rips off the heel. When she hands the still-warm bread to me, I shove it into my mouth before I can think to thank her.

  “Come on.” She takes me by the elbow and heaves me to my feet. “My house isn’t too far from here. Let’s clean you up and figure out what’s what. Come on, dear. What’s your name?”

  “It’s . . .” What was it? Something like . . . “Maire.”

  “My name is Arrice. Don’t worry; you’re safe now.”

  I lie on the battered bed in the broken house, staring at the hole-ridden ceiling above me. I press against that darkness in my mind, sometimes tricking myself into thinking it’s shifting, but I still can’t see beyond the shadows. Arrice is my earliest memory. Arrice, and the forest.

  I brush an ant off my arm. The insects have started to become a nuisance. They’re attracted to all the sugar, though they only forage for the food inside the house. They leave my gingerbread sheetwork alone, which is good, I suppose. I may leave a pile of sugar on the other end of the glade for them, to distract them from my labors.

  Though I dreamed of Arrice, my thoughts wander to Fyel. You fell, he had said. I trace my hairline with my fingertips, all the way back to my neck, feeling for dents or scar tissue. I run them through my hair, searching for evidence of an injury that might explain my missing memory. I find none.

  There were bruises all over my body the day I met Arrice. The bruises had faded to ugly yellow and green things marring my skin, so they were at least a couple of days old. Were they from this fall Fyel spoke of? A fall down a flight of stairs, maybe? There were so many bruises, like I had tumbled from the sky and hit every forest branch on the way down. Like a baby bird with featherless wings.

  I wonder whether Fyel intended it as an allegory. I can’t grasp his meaning if so, though I’m sure Cleric Tuck could translate it. Maybe, someday, I’ll get the chance to ask him.

  I close my eyes and take in deep breaths, soothing the swirling of my head and chest. Everything that’s happened over the last few weeks confuses me. Every word, every deed. Every half-formed clue to the past.

  Regladia. Steel. My head hurts.

  I bathe myself as best I can with a bucketful of water from the well before setting to work. Today it isn’t hard to focus on what I need to influence this cake into brick. I don’t want to think about the other things spiraling through my life. Just cake.

  Alger comes late: about an hour before noon. He brings more supplies, and among them is a crate of vegetables. I still have no idea how he gets so much through this thick forest and out to the glade, especially since I haven’t seen the donkey with him since that first day, but at the moment I don’t really care.

  I shove a raw carrot in my mouth and munch. If Alger notices yesterday’s lack of progress, he doesn’t mention it.

  “Don’t forget the door,” he says, glancing at the slab of wood I had torn off its hinges on my first day out here. “It has to have a door.”

  “I’ll make a door,” I answer between bites. As for the hardware to install it . . . this customer will have to figure that out on her own.

  “Good. Good, good. I’m a good master, yes?”

  I eye him. “Are you looking for my approval?”

  He grins.

  I sigh. “I hardly have anyone to compare you to.”

  He shrugs and turns to his load of groceries. “I’ve brought licorice. She wants the—”

  He chokes on the word and shudders, then grasps his chest and wheezes, hunching over.

  I drop the carrot. “Are you all right?”

  “No no no no no no,” he groans, but he’s not talking to me. He falls to his knees and hugs himself, squeezing his eyes shut. “No no no. Stay in stay in. Mine mine mine!”

  My pulse picks up. I step closer to him, but not close enough to touch him. He’s shivering and grunting, and despite everything he’s done, I feel sorry for him. “Alger?”

  He doesn’t respond, but whatever pains him passes a moment later. He relaxes and takes a few uneven breaths.

  I chew on my bottom lip, eyeing him. “Do you need to lie down?”

  He doesn’t answer. He grips the vegetable crate and hoists himself back to his feet. His eyes have gone crooked. Dark rings circle them, and one corner of his mouth slackens.

  “Stay,” he orders, and he stumbles from the glade, disappearing yet again.

  I stare after him, then focus on the indent he made in the grass. What just happened? I’ve never seen an illness like that. I do not want Alger to die, regardless of what he’s done. Can I help him? Perhaps bake him a cookie of health? I sold those at the bakeshop.

  Shaken, fingering the crystal beneath my shirt, I return to my baking.

  In between bouts of coaxing ingredients to become more than what they are, I start to write a mental list of questions for Fyel, for I’m sure he’ll visit again. I think of simple questions, philosophical questions, riddles, and questions that can be simply answered yes or no. Surely if I hit him with a broad enough barrage, he’ll have to concede something that I can use to patch together this hole in my life.

  I glance at the roof, examining its gaps and missing shingles. How similar we are, this damaged roof and I. I can’t help but smile at that.

  I whip up more icing, switching off between my left and right hand. I’ll have the arms of a man with all this work soon enough, though the thought doesn’t disgruntle me. I think of Alger. I wouldn’t mind being stronger.

  I cut the gingerbread straight out of the oven, while it’s still hot, so that the cake shapes easily. I cut corners and prepare smaller slabs to border the windows. If Alger brings me the right equipment, I might even be able to spin sugar for the windowpanes. Fitting them with glass this far away from any port would be difficult.

  Remarkably, I finish one side of the house up to the roof and get the foundation caked for two other sides. I take measurements with a piece of string and rethink the roof. Biscotti would be strong—and cute, yes—but also time consuming. I’ll do the roof with gingerbread sheets as well, then coat them with icing that will harden in the coolness of night.

  The day has grown late when Fyel reappears, this time in the center of the glade as I’m taking my last measurements. He’s not as solid as usual—his torso is nearly transparent. I wonder if it’s because of the frequency of his visits. After today, I have a feeling it will be a while before I see him again.

  But I’m ready for him. Pinching the string with my fingers to keep track of my latest measurement, I march up to him and begin my assault.

  “How did we meet?” I start.

  He doesn’t appear surprised by my forwardness. In fact, he tilts his head to one side, just slightly, in an almost endearing fashion. He doesn’t answer.

  “You are an increasingly frustrating apparition.”

  “I must be careful,” he answers, his voice smooth and low, like a lullaby.

  “You say you want to help me,
yet you won’t,” I counter, and the endearment leaves his countenance. I feel like that’s a small victory, for some reason. “How did you find me in Carmine? Before the marauders attacked?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “There is a difference between ‘cannot’ and ‘will not,’” I retort, and for a moment I sound very much like Franc. “How do you know me?” I try. “Are we related?” We don’t look it. “Were we friends? Lovers?”

  He twitches ever so slightly but doesn’t answer.

  “Roommates? Coworkers? Did you own me like he does?” I thrust my finger toward the forest.

  “No,” he says, firm, almost cold. I’ve hit a nerve.

  Deep breaths. “Where are you from?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Not Carmine.” A pause. “Not Dī,” I say, naming the continent. “Not Raea?”

  No answer.

  I fold my arms, still pinching the string, and think back to my first conversation with Alger. “How old am I?”

  Nothing.

  Something simpler, then. “What color are your eyes?”

  His lip quirks at that. “Gamre,” he says.

  I feel another little thrill of victory for having gotten a straight answer from him, but it’s short lived. It’s not an answer I can use.

  I pace for a minute, feeling his “gamre” eyes on me, before asking, “Why can I bake the way I do? This”—I gesture to the house—“why can I do this? Do you know that much?”

  “Because you created it,” he says, soft and gentle, his tone contrary to mine. But the riddle only makes my head hurt.

  I sit on the earth, heaving my splinted leg in front of me.

  Fyel hovers a little lower. “Have you found it?”

  The other crystal? “No. It’s not here.”

  He frowns. “Keep looking, as will I.”

  I glance up at that. “It’s so important?”

  He nods.

  “Thank you, then,” I say, and my frustration ebbs. I laugh at myself for a moment, the kind of laughter that borders on tears. “I really am a nice person. Or I was.”

  “I know.” He’s faded more, all outlines and weak shading. Through his shoulder, I see a woodpecker deepening his nest.

  I glance over to the vegetable crate. “I think Alger is sick.”

  He nods, and I wonder if he ever watches us when we’re not looking. I’m not sure how I’d feel about it if he did.

  Heaving a sigh, I claw the ground with my cane and push myself back to my feet. I’m getting less clumsy in my movements, in part because my leg doesn’t ache so fiercely—the regladia has helped with that—and also because I’m used to the splint.

  I glance at the lowering sun, the house, and finally back to Fyel. Our gazes meet, and a cool spiraling sensation fills my chest, smoky and prickling. A sensation that makes me think, briefly, of Cleric Tuck, but . . . different. Stronger.

  I study his face for a moment, then let my gaze travel down his white-adorned body and back up again. His pale lips. His gamre eyes. That look of endearment, and it strikes me. “We were lovers, weren’t we?”

  His lip quirks again. “Would you deny it if I said yes?”

  The forest rustles, and I turn to see Alger trekking into the glade. I glance back at Fyel, but he’s already gone.

  Alger claps his hands, looking much recovered from this morning. “Oh good, good! It will be done soon!”

  I knead the palm of my hands into my chest to dissipate the twirling sensation there.

  The crystal pendant rocks against my stomach.

  He says he is my master. He thinks I don’t write. He is stupid.

  CHAPTER 11

  I stay at the house in the grove for four more weeks, without further visits from Fyel. I bake sheet after sheet of unnaturally hard gingerbread. I mix vat after vat after vat of icing to hold it to the house’s weathered sides, so much so that the very thought of sugar becomes nauseating to me, and the smell of gingerbread has forever soaked into my skin. I spin sugar for the windows and bake gingerbread for the door. A sweet bun is its handle, studded with chocolate pieces and dusted with powdered sugar, hard and barely chewable, like the gingerbread.

  I do make biscotti—not for the shingles, but for the brickwork on the chimney, just where it juts above the roof. The rest I do with date bars and marshmallows, because I’m so tired of gingerbread.

  Alger appears a couple hours after I place the last cookie on the eave, just after I wash sugary paste from my hands and arms and nourish myself with a wrinkling tomato. No wagon, no donkey. He just appears, and with him is a woman whose nationality I can’t begin to guess. She’s old, with a wide-set face and wide-set frame, as if she’s eaten far more butter and sugar than I. Her skin is even fairer than that of the marauders who attacked my village, and her eyes are large and brown. She looks at the house and cackles, knitting and unknitting her fingers. Once she’s had her humor, she hands a rather large purse of coins to Alger, not to me.

  I follow Alger into the forest, walking until the house and its glade are no longer visible. Then Alger puts a burlap sack over my head—the same one I wore after he purchased me—and tells me to cover my ears, because it’s “easier this way, and no-no peeking or you’ll be in trouble.”

  He grabs my shoulders, and a spinning, soapy feeling engulfs my stomach. I lean on my good foot and would have collapsed if not for Alger’s painful grip.

  The dizziness fades, and Alger yanks the sack from my head. I jump at the sight of the house—his house—before us.

  “How did you . . . ?” I turn to study him, searching for some sign of the magic he used to spirit us here. But he merely grins and shoves me toward the front door.

  There is a whole other world of spells and sorcery coexisting with my own. Alger knows it. This woman in the woods knows it. I believe, somehow, that Fyel knows it.

  I am completely ignorant about this hidden realm, but when I bake, I scrape my nails beneath its door.

  I get one day of rest, one day of bread and butter and cheese and potatoes—no fruit, no sugar at all. One day to lie in a bed that, compared to the broken thing in the gingerbread house, is remarkably comfortable. One day to peel back the bandages over my leg and inspect its healing. And it is healing—the swelling is gone, though I can’t for the life of me figure out how to remove the wooden boot-like splint. I still need it, but my calf and ankle itch so terribly that I grit my teeth and knock the thing against the bed in an attempt to scratch my skin. My ankle is stiff and immobile. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to turn it again.

  One day alone in my bedroom with its bricked-up window. One day without Alger and, unfortunately, without Fyel.

  Does he know I’ve moved? When he goes to the glade and sees my absence, Alger’s house amid the blazeweed should be his next guess for where I am.

  I picture the apparition in my mind, and my stomach stirs. “Would you deny it if I said yes?”

  Of course, it was another evasion, not an answer, and for some reason, his refusal to answer that question bothers me more than the others.

  So. I receive one day as a respite from men in general before Alger twists and slides all the locks decorating my door, wrests it open with a flourish, and announces, “I found another job.”

  I don’t even bother to sit up in bed. My muscles are still sore from tiling the chimney with biscotti. “You made so much from the house,” I say. More money than I’ve ever held, certainly. “Do we need to get to work so soon?”

  I say “we” because it’s inclusive, and because I need Alger to like me.

  “Who knows when the famine comes?” he sings, and then he begins twirling in the center of my room, singing a tone-deaf melody that sounds like a children’s song. If so, it’s not one I’ve heard.

  Who knows when the famine comes

  To eat your corn and home?

  It feasts upon the old and young

  Until they’re all but gone.

  “That’s a terrible so
ng,” I quip, and he stops his dance and faces me.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s about terrible things.” I finally sit up. “Have you ever seen famine or carried the casket of a dead child?”

  He shakes his head no.

  “They’re very sad.” Arrice and Franc buried a baby boy once, but that was long before I met them. Still, the thought makes my chest hurt. “Don’t sing that song anymore.”

  He doesn’t argue with me. Rather, he nods, and I’m surprised by his acquiescence.

  “She’s a widow,” he says. For a moment I think he’s referring to the song, but as he continues, I realize he means our next customer. “She says she’s a widow, and she wants little cake boys. She looks like a goat.”

  Standing, I say, “Cake boys?” I struggle to understand the concept, but the loose grin on Alger’s face tells me all I need to know, and I’m suddenly very, very tired. “I can’t make living things out of cake.”

  I say it so matter-of-factly. A month ago I would have gawked and stared at the request. I wonder if this change should worry me or not.

  Glancing out the window, I search for a flare of white. It’s more of a hope than an expectation, of course, and I don’t see him.

  “You should try,” Alger suggests.

  I rub my eyes. “No, I can’t try. This is very different from the gingerbread house and everything else I’ve made. You can’t toy with life.”

  “This is life, Maire!”

  I freeze, hands still on my eyes. I draw my fingers away and look back out the window. Wisps of the clipped memory float away from the dark void inside my mind. I don’t know why or when those words were spoken, but what really disturbs me is that the voice that spoke them was Fyel’s.

  I shiver. My head hurts. Ignoring the quickening of my pulse, I look at Alger and say, “It’s not possible.”

  Alger folds his arms and sniffs, very similar to a child’s pout. “You tell her, then,” he says, then breaks his posture to grab and haul me, splint and cane clunking, down the stairs and outside.