A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

  “What?” said the guard on the other side.

  “Duchess’s business!” Joshua said, shoving harder. The Duchess’s hand tightened on mine. We both had sweaty palms.

  There were muffled voices inside, and then I heard him. Inquisitor Oberon.

  “—well, open up then, fool, if it’s Duchess’s business—”

  “But sir—”

  The door was flung open, and Inquisitor Oberon stood in it, flanked by a pair of guards.

  He seemed smaller. I suppose having a whole bunch of sharp objects pointed at you makes anybody shrink a little. His robes weren’t quite perfect, or maybe people look less scary when you’re standing with a small army around you. But the eyes—the eyes were the same.

  I realized that I was squeezing the Duchess’s hand in a death grip, and that she was squeezing back.

  “Your Grace,” said Inquisitor Oberon, and even now, I’ll give him credit, it’s not easy to ignore thirty-seven guards, particularly when there are halberds pointing at you. He managed somehow. The guards might as well have been invisible. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

  “On suspicion of treason to the crown,” said the Duchess, her voice clear and ringing, “you are being exiled from the city.”

  Oberon’s eyes widened just a little. “May I ask to know the source of these charges?” he asked.

  Nobody but me knew how bad the Duchess’s hands were shaking, when she said “You have condemned yourself by your own hand, Oberon. The curfews and registration laws against the mage-folk were done without my orders and without my knowledge. This is a blow against the very heart of our people, and a presumption of authority that you do not possess.”

  Oberon’s eyes did not flicker at the charge. His gaze travelled over the Duchess, dismissed Spindle, dismissed the guards…and landed on me.

  “Your Grace,” he said, “for any presumption I have made, I beg your pardon. But I fear that you are being misled. The mage beside you is the true traitor. We have been trying to apprehend her for assault upon her fellow magic-folk for some weeks now.”

  My stomach felt like it was being kneaded by a baker with a savage grudge against the dough. The gingerbread man clinging to the back of my collar moved and patted my neck, as if I were a nervous horse.

  “Mona is a loyal subject of the crown,” said the Duchess. “The false arrest orders you have issued will be dealt with summarily. You, in the meanwhile, will be leaving the city at once.”

  Oberon chose to ignore this last statement. “Your Grace,” he said smoothly, “while your judgment is far superior to mine, I would be remiss as your subject if I allowed this to pass. That is a mage and a traitor. She may be clouding your mind even now. If you will not take my word, the mage Elgar—”

  “Is rottin’ in a cell right now!” said Spindle, who had been about to burst this whole time and clearly couldn’t take it anymore. “He stabbed that other fella in front of us, an’ he killed my sister Tibbie, so shut your trap!”

  Swords and halberds hadn’t impressed Oberon, but that rocked him back on his heels. He opened his mouth and then closed it again and was so plainly at a loss that the Duchess released my hand and stepped forward between the halberdiers.

  “Exile,” she said again. “Now. At once. You will not taint this city a moment longer with your presence.”

  The Inquisitor pulled himself together. “If Your Grace will allow me a few moments to pack—”

  “No,” said the Duchess. “I do not trust you not to try to wiggle away. You are coming with us now. Joshua, see to it.”

  Joshua drew his sword. The scrape of steel was very loud in the corridor.

  Oberon’s guards drew together in front of him. Joshua looked past them to Oberon. “Do not waste your men’s lives,” he said. “There are a great many of us, and in the confusion, I cannot swear that you yourself would go unharmed.”

  Oberon inhaled sharply through his nose. I held my breath. Even now I was nearly sure that there would be something he could say that would turn the tide.

  “Very well,” he said.

  He stepped forward. Our guards relieved his guards of their swords, and the two men joined him in a little wedge of prisoners.

  Joshua went first, with three men behind him. Then came the prisoners, then the halberdiers, then the Duchess and Spindle and I, then a whole mass of other guards, and the entire parade went down the corridor and into the great hall and out into the courtyard.

  There was a prison wagon waiting. I’d only ever seen one from a distance. They’re great rough things with iron bars and strapped iron wheels, and they don’t look any better up close. But Oberon stepped up into it with the same haughty expression he had worn stepping into his official gilded carriage. His guards got in as well, although the second one paused and looked at the Duchess.

  “Your Grace, I have a wife…”

  His tone was pleading. The Duchess nodded. “I cannot allow you to stay,” she said. “But Joshua will see to it that she is given a pension, or coin enough to travel to find you again.”

  The guard nodded. My heart ached for him. What if his wife couldn’t find him again? What if she didn’t want to leave the city? What if he wasn’t a traitor, and we were punishing him for no reason?

  It’s hard to rule a city. I wouldn’t want to have to do it.

  Joshua stepped up onto the wagon’s seat. Two more men joined him, one standing on the wagon’s back to watch the prisoners. Another two wagons—open farm wagons, by the look of them, Joshua must have commandeered someone making deliveries to the kitchen—pulled up alongside, and even more men, including all the halberdiers, climbed into them.

  The Duchess went up to the back of the prison wagon and gazed inside at Oberon. I felt an intense urge to grab her and pull her back, away from the bars, the way Aunt Tabitha used to when I got too close to the animals in the menagerie. What if he was hiding a knife in his socks, or had one of those rings with poison needles in them that assassins carry? What if he’d thought of something to convince her that I really was a traitor?

  But he only looked at her, and said, very calmly, “You could have ruled a dozen cities, if you had the stomach for it.”

  “I have no desire to be responsible for so many lives,” said the Duchess coolly.

  He nodded once. “You always did lack vision. It does not matter. You will regret this night’s work.”

  He didn’t add, “Your Grace.” The Duchess nodded to Joshua, and the prisoners and the guards rattled out of the courtyard, towards the edge of the city.

  * * *

  “Spindle,” I said, as the sound of the wagon wheels faded.

  “Eh?”

  “Did you have to start yelling at Oberon in the middle of the arrest?”

  “Hey, it worked, didn’t it?”

  I sighed from the bottom of my toes. Yes. It had worked. And the Duchess hadn’t pitched Spindle out of the city alongside Oberon for speaking up out of turn. Still.

  “Your Grace—”

  “It’s all right, Mona,” the Duchess said, and managed a weary laugh. “It all worked out for the best anyway.”

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “Well, Joshua deposits him on the other side of the Exile’s Gate, I call an emergency meeting of the council to inform them of the events before gossip gets to them, we spread the word that Oberon’s been convicted of treason in absentia, and then I buy off the nobles who would otherwise protest his loss by handing out his lands and titles as bribes.”

  I gulped. That sounded like a lot of work, and I was already bone-tired. In one night I’d climbed a garderobe, met a monarch, talked to a mage, seen him killed, nearly gotten stabbed myself, and helped evict a traitor. I could use a nap. For about six months or so. “Do we have to be there for all of that?”

  The Duchess laughed. “No. Your job is done, my dears, and you have done it better and more faithfully than anyone could ask. I will probably have to give you medals, and perhaps
a knighthood.”

  I gulped again. A knighthood? That also sounded like a lot of work. I’d have to get armor or something. I just wanted to go home to the bakery and make scones. Or muffins. Or cinnamon rolls. Or all three.

  “Cor!” said Spindle. “Sir Spindle! Can you see it? I’d get a horse the size of an elly-phant, and wear armor and—”

  “Time enough for that in the next few days,” said the Duchess, amused. “Luke—” to one of the guards hovering around the courtyard, “—these two are heroes of the realm. Find them someplace to sleep and see that they have a late dinner or a very early breakfast or whatever it is we’re up to now.”

  Luke bowed to her, and then to us and led us to bedrooms. The bed in mine was gigantic and the sheets were really cold, but a girl came in and built up a fire in the grate. I guess things must have warmed up, but I was already asleep, with the copy of Spiraling Shadows on the bedside table.

  Twenty-Five

  I went home to the bakery the next day. There was an honor guard with me, and when we all walked in, Aunt Tabitha stared at us all blankly for ten seconds and then said, “Mona?” and burst into tears.

  I threw myself into her arms. She smelled like flour and she put her arms around me and the horrible weeks I’d spent on the run got a little farther away. Then I cried a bit, and my uncle cried, and Spindle, who was lounging in the corner getting fingerprints on the glass of the bakery case, snorted and rolled his eyes.

  “We thought you were dead,” said Aunt Tabitha, once she’d gotten herself under control. She started pressing cinnamon rolls into the hands of the guards. “There was all that mess in the basement. But then they put up the posters, and I knew you weren’t dead, because they wouldn’t be trying to arrest you otherwise. I knew it!” She put her fists on her hips. “And I knew that it had to be a mistake, because I’ve had the raising of you for years, girl, and I knew you were no criminal, no matter what some ridiculous constable said!”

  She glared at the guards, as if she planned to take the cinnamon rolls back. They tried to look meek and not as if they were covered in bits of icing.

  “It’s okay, Aunt Tabitha,” I said. “It was all a misunderstanding, and—oh, I’ll tell you everything! But Bob! Is Bob…?” I steeled myself.

  “Bob?” asked Tabitha blankly. “Oh! He was a right mess, and half of him gone, but a little flour and water and he perked right up again.” She leaned in and murmured, “I gave him a bucket of dead sardines from the fishmonger. Don’t tell your uncle.”

  When I went down to the cellar, Bob was so excited to see me that he crawled half out of his bucket, reared up, and wrapped himself around my leg. He’d never done that before. I rubbed his back as best I could, given how sticky he was, and he glorped and burbled happily.

  The gingerbread man rolled his eyes. I think he was a little jealous.

  So that was pretty much that.

  Well…that should have been pretty much that, anyway.

  * * *

  For three days, everything was normal. I wandered around the bakery singing and taking delight in even the most mundane baking activities—dough rising! How marvelous! And the way the steam burst out of the blueberry muffins when you tore into one right out of the oven! Was there ever anything prettier? Aunt Tabitha hugged me rather more than normal, and the regular customers had to hear the story ten times over.

  And then at night, I’d lie in bed and wouldn’t sleep.

  It wasn’t that I wasn’t tired. I was. And it should have been easier to sleep now than it had been in the church, shouldn’t it? All the posters had been taken down and the word had gone out that we did not register magickers in Riverbraid and the people responsible were in a lot of trouble. And Oberon was gone and Elgar was presumably in a cell under the palace on bread and water. Not even good bread. It should have been easier now.

  It wasn’t. I wasn’t afraid, exactly. I just stared at the ceiling and sleep didn’t happen and my mind replayed all the moments that it could have gone wrong. I cried for Master Gildaen. I stared at the ceiling some more.

  I remembered the Widow Holloway saying that she couldn’t sleep after her husband died, walking back and forth in the small hours of the night. I wasn’t quite that brave. So mostly I stared at the ceiling.

  When I gave up trying to sleep, I lit a candle and read a few more passages of Spiraling Shadows. The Duchess had said I could take it, since Master Gildaen hadn’t had any kin or heirs. She hadn’t cried, but her eyes had been a little too bright. Probably mine had been, too.

  The book was interesting. Parts of it were much too complicated for me, and there was a lot about the philosophy of magic that didn’t make any sense at all…something about magic rising up out of the earth like water from a spring and ley lines and its tendency to concentrate in certain vegetables like eggplants. The author devoted a whole chapter to eggplants. I skimmed that one.

  But there were also sections about the magic of sympathy, which was what Master Gildaen had been talking about—how two things that are joined together once are joined together always on some level, and how a wizard can use that to her advantage. It made me want to perform experiments. Thinking about those experiments got me through the worst of the nights, and then I’d get up early and go and bake them.

  The first few were pretty straightforward. I’d already figured out that if I made a little bread-crumb creature, it wouldn’t hold together well unless the material was all from the same loaf. I spent hours with the day-old pastries, trying to work out the limits. It turned out that things all baked at the same time, on the same sheet, generally got along okay, too.

  From there, it was a short step to holding one cinnamon roll and trying to make the rest of the pan do…something.

  “Mercy!” said Aunt Tabitha, the first time she walked in and saw me standing over a pan of cinnamon rolls that had caught fire. She grabbed for the flour and dumped it out over the pan, smothering the flames. “What are you doing?”

  I looked gloomily at the cinnamon roll in my hand. “Failing, mostly.” I’d tried to warm the one on the pan up, that was all, pushing the magic through the cinnamon roll in my hand to its kindred. There’d been some resistance along that weird little mental conduit, so I pushed more magic at it.

  Between the exploding bird and the burning cinnamon rolls, I was coming to the conclusion that more magic was not necessarily the solution.

  These experiments made my head hurt, but in a good way. It was like whipping cream with a whisk. By the end, your arms ached and there was sweat dripping off the end of your nose, but you had all this lovely smooth whipped cream. Your arms feel better in five minutes anyway, and if you do it often enough (and during shortcake season, I do it a lot), you get muscles in places you never expected.

  I felt like I was starting to develop mental muscles.

  The first experiment that went really well was one that didn’t involve me trying to make the dough do anything. I set a scone out on the counter and went downstairs with a scone from the same batch. Master Gildaen had said that war-wizards developed ways to communicate through their various items, and while I couldn’t quite figure out how I’d do that—it’s not like I could make a scone talk to somebody, and you wouldn’t ever eat a scone again if one did—but I thought maybe I could listen through the scone.

  I’m not saying it was easy. Scones don’t have ears, for one thing. But I sat in the basement, with Bob glopping happily beside me, and concentrated on the pastry in my hands, and the one just like it upstairs…

  Warmth. Vibration. These things showed up in my head along the little conduit. They were faint, and felt almost like thoughts, except that I wasn’t thinking them.

  The door opened and closed. The counter rattled a little.

  It was kind of like the most boring daydream ever.

  Aunt Tabitha said something. Uncle Albert said something back. I couldn’t make out the words, only a distant hmmmahmmmummh. Scones aren’t good with language, I guess. />
  Thud. Footsteps. Something plonked down on the counter. The voices came closer. I concentrated very hard, digging my fingers into the crust of the scone.

  “…still wondering if we should leave,” said Uncle Albert. He sounded distant and garbled at the edges.

  “Leave?” said Aunt Tabitha sharply. “Leave the bakery, you mean?”

  “It might be good to take Mona away from here,” said Uncle Albert meekly. “After the unpleasantness. They never did find Elwidge, you know.”

  “That’s over now,” said Aunt Tabitha. “They caught the man doing it. He’s in the dungeon up at the palace.”

  Uncle Albert said something more garbled than usual. I squeezed the scone until it started to break apart in my hands.

  “…they say. I don’t know. First they’re looking for traitors and then they’re looking for wizards and then they found a traitor and now they want wizards again. I don’t trust any of it—”

  “Mona’s here. She’s safe now. She’s fine,” said Aunt Tabitha, in a voice that brooked no argument.

  Then a swooping, stomach-churning flight, pressure—oh god, Aunt Tabitha had picked up the scone! What if she took a bite out of it? What would I feel?

  What had Uncle Albert meant?

  I dropped the scone and the connection ceased immediately. When I picked it up again, gingerly, it was completely inert, but I could feel the connection there, just waiting for me to dribble a little magic into it. Probably I’d feel nothing more threatening than the inside of the day-old case, but what about the rest of the batch of scones? What if I connected magically to one that somebody had already eaten? Would I feel myself being digested or…?

  Well, best not to dwell on that too closely.

  I dropped the scone into Bob’s bucket. He glopped happily over it. I think that might have been cannibalism.

  As spies go, scones were probably not going to be that effective. I might do better with gingerbread men. I was already more sensitive to where my gingerbread man was, and sometimes I got odd flashes through our connection. I suspect I could have seen—or heard—a lot more through him, but I didn’t want to risk damaging the link. He’d been with me for too long.