Baker's Magic (Middle-grade Novels)

by Zahler, Diane

  “A … what?” Bee said. The king turned to look at her, and she bowed her head. “… Your Highness,” she added.

  “A moss maiden,” he repeated. “A tree spirit. Each type of tree here has a moss maiden who belongs to it. But they have all been separated, trees from maidens, maidens from trees. In his cruelty, Joris has placed the maidens on another island.”

  “But why?” Anika asked.

  Bartholomew answered. “A tree with its spirit has its own power. Master Joris could not have put the trees here with their moss maidens still within. Or, at least, it would have been far more difficult.”

  Ying-tao nodded. “We would not have allowed it,” she said. Her voice was as soft as the whisper of wind through leaves. “But like the king, we did not know how far Joris would go in his greed. He wanted the land for himself, for his tulips, and so with his magic he separated us from our trees, and then he moved them. Of course we had to go with them. But he kept us apart. It has been like having a limb removed—but always there is pain, as if the limb were still there.”

  Bee could almost feel the maiden’s anguish as she spoke. “Isn’t your tree here?” she asked. “It seems as if every tree in the world is here.”

  “Nearly every tree,” Ying-tao said. “All but mine. Mine is in the walled garden of the palace of Aradyn.”

  The cherry tree! Bee and Anika looked at each other, wide eyed.

  “Then we must bring you back to it!” Anika said. Ying-tao looked longingly at Anika.

  “There is little I wish more,” she said. “But there are others to think of. Others like myself.”

  “Do you mean other moss maidens?” Bartholomew asked. “Where are they?”

  “They are not far, and getting closer,” Ying-tao said. But before she could explain herself, Haleem and Rijkie came crashing through the trees. Behind them were Thoralf and Captain Zay.

  The pirates pulled up abruptly in front of the king. The look on Captain Zay’s face was nothing short of astonishment. She went down on one knee, yanking Thoralf down with her, and swept off her hat.

  “Your Majesty!” she cried. “I am thinking this was one big joke of my mens upon me. A king tethered to a tree—it is absurd and in all ways ridiculous. And yet ’ere you be, altogether King Crispin as in the portraits I ’ave seen, and altogether chained. I am Zafira Zay, captain of the Egbertina-Henriette, and I am utterly your servant!”

  King Crispin blinked in surprise at the tumble of words, but he managed to nod gravely. “Forgive me, madam, if I do not rise to greet you. I am a bit tired. But I would be very grateful if you and your men could find a way to free me from my shackles.”

  Haleem came forward with tools. There was a great deal of hammering and wrenching and a considerable amount of profanity. Brown and red nuts rained down, and Bee picked one up and sniffed it. Spicy and sweet, the scent made her eyes water.

  “’Tis nutmeg,” Thoralf told her.

  Then the shackle broke, and the king was free. Unsteadily, he got to his feet. He put an arm around Anika’s shoulder and took a few steps, testing the foot that had been so long ringed with iron. Then he walked in a straight line away from the tree that held his chain, until he was farther than the chain would have allowed. He turned to look at the others, and for the first time, he smiled. His face lit like a candle.

  Bee noticed now that there was a circle worn in the grass of the clearing around the tree. It must have been where King Crispin walked each day, at the end of his chain. Around in a circle for twelve years—it amazed her that he had not worn through to the very center of the earth.

  “I am free,” the king said in a tone of wonder.

  “And now you must get your strongness back,” Captain Zay announced. “You will come aboard my ship, and our baker-girl will create for you the tasty delicacies, and you will rest and eat and be once again the stout and formidable king to rule Aradyn!”

  Thoralf and Rijkie cheered, but Haleem bent to whisper in the captain’s ear. She pursed her lips, and the enthusiasm leaked out of her like air from a balloon.

  “I forget a thing, a most important thing,” she said. “When you should return to ruling, there will be an end to tulips. An end to us and to our work in relieving Joris’s ships of their bounty. Then we shall all be starving and my mens’ families as well. For as you can see from our hats and our swords and our ship’s flag, we are each and every one of us a pirate. As king, your duty is always to be putting such as we in prison.” She paused, and then concluded in a low voice, “So now I fear we must be leaving you ’ere instead.”

  “Captain!” Anika burst out. “You cannot do that. He is the legitimate king—he is Aradyn’s king! You must transport him back. It is the only noble thing to do.”

  Bee watched with fascination as honor and greed battled on the captain’s face. It wasn’t long, though, before her features smoothed out, and she bowed to the king. “I am mistook, most disgracefully,” she said, as humbly as she could manage. “To be sure we take you back. Forgive this momentary lapse, I implore.”

  The king nodded. “It is difficult when one’s livelihood is threatened, I am well aware,” he said. “But you need not worry. You will never go to prison, not as long as I am king. There will still be some fields of tulips in Aradyn if I regain my throne. And yours will be the foremost trading ship among them all, I assure you. You will not need to steal the bulbs; you can make a fine living carrying them to faraway ports and selling them yourselves.”

  The pirates looked at one another, their eyes wide. It was clear they had never considered making a respectable living. Not to chase other ships, and board them, and fight with the sailors, and steal their goods? They didn’t look at all convinced.

  “A fine offer, to be sure,” Captain Zay said dubiously. “We are full with gratitude, Your Majesty. And therefore, shall we go onward to the Egbertina-Henriette?”

  The king, with Anika still supporting him, walked over to the moss maiden. She stood with her head bowed. It seemed to Bee that she swayed, just a little, with the breeze. “It is not quite so simple as that, madam,” he said to the captain. “We have the trees, and their maidens, to consider.”

  Ying-tao raised her head. “You must go,” she said.

  “I shall not go without you and yours,” he told her, and touched her hand gently. She didn’t pull away from him. “You followed me onto this island, separating yourself from your own tree. I know well the heartache that caused you. All these long years, you have fed me with the bounty of the trees, and covered me with leaves to protect me from the weather. You have nursed me through illnesses and brought me water to drink and clean myself. You have been my companion and my guardian. Without you, I would have died in the first week of my captivity. I will not leave you here.”

  The king turned to the others. Already, he stood straighter, and his eyes seemed brighter, his voice stronger. “The other moss maidens are imprisoned on another floating island,” he said. “It drifts not far from here, drawn to us by the bond between the maidens and their trees. Sometimes it is close enough to see, and the maidens keen and weep, and we can hear them. At other times, it is out of sight. But it is never far.”

  Captain Zay clapped her hat back on her head. “Then we shall find this wondrous isle!” she cried. “We shall find it and with our ship bring it right to you, and trees and maidens shall be as one. And then the celebration with rum will commence!”

  “Can a ship tow a whole island?” Bee asked.

  “I don’t know,” the king replied. “With a magical island such as this, anything is possible.”

  “We can but try,” Captain Zay said, and she and her men headed back to the shore. Haleem left them a bag of food, and Bee, Bartholomew, Wil, Anika, and the king sat in a circle as Bee handed around jerky and hardtack, serving the king first and with the biggest pieces. He fell on them as if he hadn’t eaten in a year. Yin
g-tao sat beside him, but she refused to eat. Bee wondered what moss maidens ate. Ying-tao explained that their trees must do the eating for them, getting nutrition from the sun and water and soil.

  “I have been hungry long,” Ying-tao said. “But perhaps I will see my tree soon, and I will eat.”

  As they waited, Anika sat beside her father, stroking his hand, reaching out to touch his lined face, sometimes wiping away an errant tear. At last she introduced Wil, Bartholomew, and Bee, and described their adventures. The king listened intently. “I am more grateful to you than I can say for what you have done for my daughter,” he said when the story was finished. Bee felt the heat rise in her face. Oh, to be thanked by a king!

  Then King Crispin turned to Bartholomew. “So we are both newfound fathers, Master Bartholomew!”

  “A daughter is a wondrous thing, Your Majesty,” Bartholomew replied, and the king put an arm around Anika, squeezing her.

  “You speak the truth!” he agreed.

  Night fell, and they curled on the ground in the chilly breeze that had stirred up and tried to sleep. Warm autumn sun woke them at daybreak, and moments later they heard someone coming through the trees. They sat up, rubbing eyes and stretching the stiffness from their limbs, to greet Haleem.

  “We have done it!” he announced. “We found the island and used grappling hooks to hold it. A lucky wind came up to help us pull. It’s right offshore. We can’t see any of these maidens, though. And there’s no place for them to hide that I can tell.”

  Bee sprang to her feet, and the others followed. Ying-tao came out from among the trees and helped the king to rise. As quickly as they could, they moved through the forest to the shore. There, as Haleem had said, an island floated, not more than a few yards from where they stood. The Egg-Hen lay just off its shore. The island was bare and very small, with a rocky outcropping in its center.

  “Could you not pull it right to this isle?” King Crispin asked Haleem.

  “Nay, Your Majesty. It will come no closer. The islands seem to push each other away.”

  Bee looked closely at the barren island. As she watched, a figure emerged from the rocks. It was a tall woman gowned in greenish-yellow, long limbed and graceful. Another followed, this one small with bright hair the exact color of the orange Bee had tasted the day before. Then another came, and another and still another, each different in appearance and dress. They moved to the edge of the isle, gazing at the island of the trees. Bee could see the longing in their eyes as they stretched out their arms to their trees, so close and yet unreachable.

  “There must be a cave below the rocks, where they have been living all this time,” Bartholomew said. “But I suppose they cannot swim. Could the pirates row them across?”

  “The gangplank!” Bee cried, remembering Captain Zay’s threat on the first day they’d met her. “Is it long enough to reach between the islands?”

  Haleem called to the ship, resting between the two islands. “Throw down the gangplank, mates!”

  Four of the pirates came to the ship’s railing carrying the gangplank, a long wooden board. They hoisted it and tossed it overboard, and Haleem and Rijkie swam out and pulled it so one edge was on the shore of the treed island. Then they pushed the other end around.

  But it didn’t reach.

  Quickly the pirates took hammer and nails and everything wood they could find from the Egg-Hen—benches from the dining room, loose boards kept for repairs, even a chair from Captain Zay’s own cabin—and cobbled them together into extra length for the gangplank. And they tried again.

  The plank touched the shore of the moss maidens’ island, and in seconds the maidens leaped onto it and skimmed across. They seemed to have no weight at all. The gangplank didn’t even tremble under their mad rush. Bee saw the tall maiden run up to a lofty tree whose green-yellow leaves exactly matched her gown. She spread her arms wide, and it almost appeared that the tree did the same. There was a moment when both tree and maiden wavered in the sunlight, and then the moss maiden disappeared, simply vanished, into the tree’s embrace.

  All around them, trees and maidens reached for each other. A golden-haired maiden hugged a tree with big golden blossoms on its branches, and a maiden with bright red hair clasped one with red berries drooping from it. The tree with the papery white bark that Bee had noticed the day before attracted an older maiden, her face lined but still lovely. As they merged, her hair, pale as a sheep’s fleece, fused with the bark. Bee thought she could almost see the face of the maiden in the whorls and knotholes of the tree’s trunk. A tall maiden with nut-brown skin and red lips ran past, and Bee knew that she was headed for the nutmeg tree that had held King Crispin chained for so many years.

  The look of joy on the maidens’ faces as they met their long-lost trees after years of separation was lovely to see, and almost without thinking, Bee reached for Bartholomew’s hand. He took hers without speaking, and they watched in delight until the moss maidens had all disappeared—all but Ying-tao. Her beautiful face showed gladness and sorrow in equal measure. Bee’s heart ached for her.

  “Now,” Anika said at last, “we can return to Aradyn. We can take Master Joris to task, and Papa can regain his throne.”

  “But … the trees!” Bee protested. “We can’t leave them here, on this island. We must bring them back too!”

  Haleem cleared his throat and wiped his eyes. He had obviously been very moved by the reunion of maidens and trees. “Nay, we can’t pull this island. It’s far too heavy with all the trees. I can’t see how we could get them back.”

  Bee and the others looked at the ship bobbing in the sea in front of them, and then turned to gaze at the trees behind them Their branches seemed to dance in the breeze, celebrating the reunion with their maidens. The king shook his head slowly, and Bee felt her heart sink. She had no idea what to do.

  CHAPTER 18

  Thoralf and Haleem rowed everyone back to the ship—everyone but Ying-tao, who insisted on remaining on the island with her sisters and the trees until their return to Aradyn. On board, they explained the problem of transporting the isle of trees to Captain Zay, who pursed her lips and shrugged. She had no solution either. She called a meeting in her cabin after supper, and in the meantime, Bee went down to the galley. Her fingers itched to sink into flour and butter.

  With the pocketful of nuts and spices she’d collected on the island, she whipped up a batch of cookies, studded with walnuts and flavored with cinnamon bark and the nutmeg that she grated from one of the brown and red nuts that had fallen beneath the king’s tree. As she baked, she tried to open her mind and let her imagination range, and she said, over and over, “We will find a way. We will find a way!” The cookies would be filled with ingenuity and determination—she hoped.

  After a meal of stewed meat, which the king and Anika took with the captain, Bee distributed the cookies to the grateful crew, and then took a plateful to the cabin. Wil and Bartholomew joined her there, and once again they sat around the captain’s table. Now the king sat in Captain Zay’s big chair, which Bee could tell annoyed her a bit. But the captain took a cookie, as did the others, and chewed with pleasure.

  “So,” said the captain, reaching for a second. “Now the trees all ’ave their spirits as they should. But our king is saying this is not enough and we must bring these trees to land. What way are we to be doing this thing?”

  There was a long, somber pause. Then Bartholomew cleared his throat. “I might have an idea,” he said.

  “What?” Bee asked him, passing him another cookie. He took it and chewed pensively.

  “The island is not thick, and the trees’ roots are deep, some of them. Perhaps the trees could sink their roots through the island to the sea and use the roots as oars, if the moss maidens so instructed them. They could row us across the water.”

  “What a spectacular concept!” Anika exclaimed.

  “But
the seawater … ,” Wil said. “Wouldn’t the salt kill the trees?”

  “The moss maidens would have to tell the trees not to drink,” Bartholomew said. “I think it could be done.”

  “It’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” Bee said. “Bartholomew, you’re a genius!”

  “Only if it works,” Bartholomew said modestly. He took another bite of cookie and seemed to grow more certain. Bee smiled to herself.

  “When the day returns, then, ’edge wizard, we will be seeing what takes place,” Captain Zay proclaimed.

  They bade the captain good night and went down to the sleeping chamber. King Crispin had refused Captain Zay’s half-hearted offer of her own cabin for the night. He looked at the hammocks dubiously, but with a boost from Bartholomew—after the hedge wizard begged the king’s pardon—he managed to settle himself without flipping back out onto the floor. The others clambered into hammocks, and some of the pirates joined them, leaving the night crew to guard the ship.

  Bee was up early, making johnnycakes infused with confidence and good cheer for all. Limmo bemoaned the lack of maple syrup for the cakes, and then had to explain to Bee how the maple trees could be tapped in spring to produce a thin syrup that tasted, he said, “like sunshine transformed into sweetness.”

  “Why, Limmo!” Bee said. “How very poetic!” She filed the information away for later. If they could bring the maple trees back to Aradyn, she’d be out among them with a bucket at the first sign of spring.

  Haleem rowed them back to the island after breakfast, and they met Ying-tao on the shore, where she waited anxiously. Bartholomew explained his idea to her, and she nodded slowly. “It could be done,” she said. “I will tell the maidens, and they will ensure that the trees do not drink.” She wafted into the forest and was soon out of sight. It wasn’t long before she reappeared.

  “Can the trees reach the water with their roots?” the king asked her.