A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

  My head was starting to hurt.

  Light. Light. You can fly.

  The dough strained, and very slowly started to rise into the air.

  “Come on…” I said out loud. My vision was throbbing in time with my heartbeat. “Come on, you can do it…”

  Slowly, lumpily, with holes opening in its wings, the dough bird flew.

  “I did it!” I yelled, not caring if the lay-brother heard me. “I did it, I did….um?”

  The bird was beginning to vibrate. It was puffing up to two and three times its original size. It spun around the ceiling, bits of dough flying off its wings and splattering against the stones. My gingerbread man threw himself off the windowsill and grabbed my pantleg, tugging me down.

  I tried to grab for the little magical connection in my head. It felt...fizzy. And hot. This is not a nice sensation to have inside your brain.

  The bird let out a whistle of escaping steam and exploded.

  The room rained dough. I got a gob in the face. It was hot, nearly scalding. The gingerbread man took shelter behind my calf.

  When a couple of minutes had passed, and I had scraped the dough off the side of my nose, I surveyed the damage. The bird was gone. The stone walls looked as if they’d been caught in a very lumpy snowstorm. The inside of my head felt bruised. I sat down and clutched it, which didn’t help at all.

  “Let the record show,” I said to the gingerbread man, “that bread was not meant to fly.”

  * * *

  There wasn’t much useable dough left. The bits of bird I managed to scrounge from the corners of the room were weirdly spongy, as if I’d set yeast dough out to rise and forgotten about it for a week. When I tried to give it magic, it wouldn’t take. The magic just slid off it as if the dough had been oiled. I went back to trying the bread crusts again.

  It got easier with practice. I found that if I only used crust from one loaf, it worked better. Two loaves that hadn’t been baked together didn’t want to cooperate at all. (There was no getting it to work with the remaining dough, either—the two rejected each other completely. Dough legs would walk off without the bread-crust body. One actually yanked its own bread-crust arm off and threw it at the wall. Baked and unbaked dough are not friends.)

  I didn’t try to make another bird. I had a feeling that I’d run up against the limits of what even magic bread could do. But I made tiny animals and people, and if I set them a repetitive task, they did okay.

  The gingerbread man wasn’t impressed. I couldn’t blame him. If I’d been able to bake my creations, I could have done a lot more with them.

  Spindle, delivering the only edible meal of the day, stopped dead as soon as he climbed up the ladder. “Cor! What’s that?”

  “It’s a circus,” I said. The bread-crust elephant waved its trunk. “I’m bored.”

  “Never saw a circus for real,” said Spindle, getting down on his knees. “Is this what they look like?”

  “Well, they’re usually bigger…” I said, grinning. He flapped a hand at me. “And a lot more colorful. And I couldn’t do the trapeze. But this is sort of like it.” He’d brought up another meat pie, this one cold rather than molten, and a lump of cheese. I devoured them while he watched the bread circus go through its paces—the elephant posing, the bread girl riding the bread horse (both rather lumpy, since I wasn’t very good at horses) the lion shaking its crumby mane.

  “Must’ve taken you hours,” said Spindle, impressed.

  I snorted. “I’ve got nothing but time. It’s boring up here. And the gingerbread man gets very grumpy if I try to cheat at solitaire.”

  “Mmm. Brought you something.” He reached under his jacket and pulled out a grubby sheet of paper.

  “Hmm?” I took it and unfolded it, smoothing out the creases. “What is—”

  I stopped.

  I stared down at the paper.

  My own face stared back at me.

  Sixteen

  “I found it on a lamp post,” said Spindle. He stuck his hands in his pockets and stared down at the bread circus.

  It was a cheap, flimsy sheet, the sort they print broadsides on. Someone had done a woodcut of me—not a great one, but enough like me to be recognizable.

  “What’s it say?” Spindle wanted to know. I looked up at him, startled, and he flushed. “Not like I can read. I mean, I know that word is “WANTED” but the rest is just gibberish.”

  “Wanted for questioning,” I said numbly. “For murder and suspicion of treason—treason? I’m a baker!”

  “The one doesn’t let out t’other,” Spindle said reasonably. I balled the poster up in my fist. I wanted to cry. What if Aunt Tabitha had seen it?

  “How many of these are there?” I asked.

  “A bunch,” said Spindle, scuffing the floor with one foot. “You must have really made somebody mad.”

  I sat down. My stomach hurt in a way that had nothing to do with all the onions I’d been eating.

  If there were a bunch of wanted posters, then everybody must have seen them. All the people who came to the bakery would think I was a traitor and a murderer. Some of them wouldn’t believe it, but some of them would. Miss McGrammar probably would. Heck, she’d probably be thrilled to know she was right.

  Hadn’t she said something about broadsheets the last time I came in? “You people,” she’d said.

  “I should have put bugs in your scones,” I muttered, staring down at the poster.

  Aunt Tabitha must have seen the posters. They probably would have put them up all over my neighborhood, and that meant that Aunt Tabitha might have to look at them every day.

  I must have said something out loud, because Spindle put out a hand and patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. “It’s not so bad as that,” he said. “They got guards on the street, but they ain’t done nothing to hurt your kin.”

  “How can it not be as bad as that!?” I cried, wadding the wanted poster up in my hands. “I’m a wanted criminal!”

  “Yeah, but at least she knows if they’ve got the posters up, they don’t got you,” said Spindle. “Means you’re alive, too. Ain’t gonna put up posters if they’ve killed you.”

  The knot in my stomach loosened a little. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, you’re right.” They wouldn’t have put up posters if the Spring Green Man had killed me, or if I was in the dungeons somewhere. If that was the case, they’d want me to just stop existing.

  I wondered why they wanted to get hold of me so badly. What did Oberon think I knew?

  What did I know?

  I wracked my brain. I didn’t know anything. If anything, I knew a lot less than the other magickers in town. They’d all been smart enough to leave town. No, surely there was nothing I knew that Oberon would want hushed up.

  Fine, if I didn’t know anything, what had I done?

  My kneejerk response was to yell that I hadn’t done anything, but that wasn’t right. I’d crossed Oberon by being innocent. Was that enough?

  Hell, he must have known I was innocent. If he was working with the Spring Green Man, he knew perfectly well that I hadn’t killed Tibbie. Was he really so petty that one insignificant bakery girl not allowing herself to be framed for murder was enough to hunt her to the ends of the earth?

  The Spring Green Man had said something about being moved up the list. Maybe Oberon was that petty. Or…what if Bob had killed the Spring Green Man? Oberon would come after me for that!

  “There’s some others, too,” said Spindle, pulling more broadsheets out of his coat. They had a curve where they’d molded against his body. “Wasn’t sure if one of them might be about you, so I brought ’em.”

  I smoothed the papers out on the floor and began to read.

  “This one says there’s a curfew,” I said. “Nobody on the streets between midnight and five in the morning, unless they’ve got necessary business.” I frowned. Even if I hadn’t been a criminal, a curfew would have bothered me. I had to walk between my room and the bakery every morning, usually ea
rlier than five. Would the constables consider making bread necessary business?

  “Heard about that,” said Spindle. “They got criers all over town. People aren’t happy about it.”

  “I bet.” There were lots of jobs that happened between midnight and five. The nightsoil men came through, and the lamplighters. Those would probably be considered necessary business, but what about people who stayed out late? Widow Holloway, one of my favorite regulars, couldn’t sleep the night through since her husband died eleven years ago. She usually went out walking in the middle of the night when she woke up. I met her sometimes on the way to the bakery. “It doesn’t matter that I can’t sleep, Mona,” she used to say, in her piping little voice. “When you’re as old as I am, you don’t feel like wasting time sleeping anyway. Maybe that was true, but what would she do if the constables told her she couldn’t go for a walk?

  My eye travelled down the broadsheet. At the bottom, in smaller letters, it said “By Order of Inquisitor Oberon.”

  “You got a funny look,” said Spindle.

  “Ha-ha,” I said hollowly, pushing the broadsheet away.

  “What’s this one?’ asked Spindle, pointing to another sheet. “It’s a couple days old, but people acted really weird when that one went up.”

  “Weird how?” I lifted the sheet. It had a woodcut of a soldier’s helmet on top.

  Spindle scratched behind an ear thoughtfully. “Well, some of them got really mad, and some of them seemed almost happy, in a mad kind of way. And Slug said that he’d always known it, and One-eyed Benji said that Slug was an idiot, nobody’d believe that was true, and Slug said if it wasn’t true, why was it on a paper then?” He grimaced. “Stupid thing is that neither of them can read a word, so neither of them knew what they was talking about, not really.”

  Despite the fascinating saga of Slug and One-Eyed Benji, I turned my attention back to the broadsheet.

  BE A PATRIOT!

  * * *

  Our courageous soldiers have marched out against the Enemy,

  but there’s a battle to be fought at home, too!

  SPIES ARE EVERWHERE!

  * * *

  DO YOU KNOW YOUR NEIGHBOR?

  Could THEY be a SPY or a WIZARD TRAITOR?

  Report suspicious activity to your constables at once!

  * * *

  REWARD OFFERED

  for information leading to the arrest of spies, wizard-traitors,

  and those giving comfort to the Enemy!

  “Good heavens!”

  “What? What does it say?”

  I read the broadsheet to Spindle, who listened with his mouth open.

  “That’ll set the cat among the pigeons,” he said, when I was done reading. “Everybody’ll be claiming that their neighbor’s givin’ comfort to the Enemy. Who do you figure the Enemy is?”

  “Whoever the army went out to fight,” I said. “Carex mercenaries, I think.”

  “Them weird people from up north who are always trying to take over a city?” Spindle whistled. “How you gonna comfort them?”

  “I think so.” I didn’t know for sure. It wasn’t like I’d had a chance to keep up with gossip, up here in the bell-tower.

  “What is it they want?”

  “Their own city, as far as I know.” I scratched the back of my neck. “They live out around the edges, but they’ll go for a city if they think it’s weak. Sort of like wolves watching sheep, you know?”

  “Ain’t never seen a wolf,” said Spindle pragmatically. “And our city’s a lot better than any smelly old sheep.”

  Metaphor was not Spindle’s strong suit.

  “What would they need spies for anyway? They just come up and attack a city, don’t they? You don’t need spies for that.”

  I propped my chin on one hand and watched the bread-crust elephant go through its paces. It walked in a circle, waved its trunk, sat up on its hind legs, walked in a circle again. The bread crust still didn’t show much initiative.

  I knew I was only fourteen, and I didn’t know that much about politics, but Spindle’s question seemed like a good one. Carex spies? In the city? Why? Carex are really pretty straightforward. They raid your farms so you don’t have anything to eat, and then they try to take over your town. If they succeed, everybody dies and the Carex hang out there for a while and eat all the food and take all the money. Then they go find another town. (They’ve managed to do this to a couple of smaller towns over the years, but never to a real city with an army. They keep trying, though.)

  It’s horrible, but it’s not complicated. It doesn’t seem like it would require spies.

  Plus Carex hated magic. It didn’t make any sense that they’d hire magicians to spy for them. The whole idea of wizard-traitors helping the Carex was ridiculous, but here it was on a broadsheet with the Inquisitor’s name on it.

  “I wonder if Lord Ethan knows about this.” In the last war, when the Golden General got his reputation, I couldn’t remember papers like this. Of course, I’d been much younger, but surely I’d remember a thing like that. And dammit, Riverbraid was always good to magickers. It didn’t make sense.

  “So that’s why Slug was happy,” said Spindle thoughtfully. “He always did hate magickers. Never wanted Tibbie in on a job, or Willy Thumbs either. He’s all mean and happy now that the magickers are gone.”

  “Gone?” I asked absently.

  “Ain’t seen hide nor hair of one for days,” said Spindle. “’Cept you and Knackering Molly. And Slug said he actually saw Big Mitch get dragged away by the guards, and there was a notice nailed to the door.” He frowned. “’Course Big Mitch ain’t much of a magicker, and he’s a big drinker, so they coulda been hauling him away for being drunk and disorderly again.”

  I sighed. The papers were making me angry, and under the anger was a whole lot of scared.

  The gingerbread man came down from the slitted window where he kept watch and stood on the edge of a paper. I wondered if he could read. Probably not. Reading’s complicated. Then again, so’s walking and circuses and stuff, so maybe I could enchant one to read if I tried.

  “There’s one more,” said Spindle. “This one’s new today.”

  This broadsheet was clearly new. The paper was still crisp, and hadn’t blurred at the edges of the letters. “Pulled it down not five minutes after it went up,” said Spindle proudly. “I was on m’way here anyway.”

  * * *

  WIZARD TRAITORS ARE EVERYWHERE

  It is VITAL for our SECURITY as a NATION that we

  PREVENT INFILTRATION by HOSTILE MAGICAL ELEMENTS!

  * * *

  All loyal citizens with wizardly talents must register with

  the Loyalty Board within ten days FOR THEIR OWN SAFETY.

  * * *

  The author, I thought gloomily, had clearly never met a capital letter he didn’t like. I was surprised he hadn’t printed WIZARD TRAITOR in red ink. Maybe it would have cost too much. I looked to the bottom of the page, and sure enough, in smaller block letters, it said “by ORDER of Inquisitor Oberon.”

  “This’ll make people really mad,” I said, when I had finished reading it to Spindle.

  Spindle said “Um.”

  I looked up. “Um, what?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck and refused to meet my eyes.

  I waited.

  “Might not,” he said, all in a rush. “Lotta people are a little iffy ’bout magicker talents, even the little piddly ones. M’sister—lotta people didn’t like her for it. Some of the kids. I knocked them down.” He crouched down on the flagstones, looking curiously at the paper. “Couldn’t knock ’em all down, though. And Slug’s bigger than me, a lot, and he knocked me down.”

  It made no sense. No magicker with an ounce of brains would work for the Carex. I don’t know what they do to grown-ups with magic, but presumably they don’t just leave you on a hillside to die. Did people who weren’t magickers know that, though? Was it the sort of thing you paid attention to, if you did
n’t have to worry about it yourself?

  What if Spindle was right, and people were believing the broadsheets?

  I didn’t know what to say. Some of the people at the bakery...they liked my talent, didn’t they? Making gingerbread dance? Most of them did.

  “Some people might think it was a good idea,” said Spindle apologetically. “Not to do anything bad to a magicker, you know, but just to know where they are. Might think a registry was a good thing.”

  “They wouldn’t if they were one!”

  “Hardly anybody is one, though. Or if they are, nobody notices. I don’t know any more’n you and Molly right now.” Spindle thought about it. “Told you about Big Mitch. And Spitter, but I ain’t seen her in a long time either.”

  This was depressing. My hopes that the city would rise up in defense of their magical citizens were dashed before they’d even gotten started. I hugged my knees.

  I’d been moved up the list. Where on the list had Tibbie been? Or Big Mitch?

  Why would Oberon want a list of the magical talented, anyway?

  Because then he’d know where they were.

  And if he knew where they were, he could do something about it.

  What else had the Spring Green Man said?

  “You’ll all be eliminated eventually…” I said slowly, remembering that awful night, crouching in the cellar behind Bob. “That was what he said. And something about a list.”

  Spindle cocked his head. The gingerbread man rubbed his hands together.

  “Oberon wants to know where we all are,” I said. “He’s using the Spring Green Man to sniff us out, but that’s not enough. Either he doesn’t trust the Spring Green Man, or more people than me might have escaped. He wants the complete list so that he can destroy us all. And he’s going to have people registering with this Loyalty Board and doing the work for him.”