Baker's Magic (Middle-grade Novels)

by Zahler, Diane

  Mistress Weatherwax, her face pink with effort, slid an enormous earthen pot into the oven. She called out to Bee.

  “Stew enough for all! Do you have strength to make some biscuits?”

  Bee sighed. Her arms and shoulders ached from stirring; her mind was tired from focusing on the bibingka. But she pulled a bowl from the cupboard, took the flour and buttermilk Mistress Weatherwax handed her, and began to measure and pour. And while she did, she thought of Anika: how dear she had become, and how she wanted more than anything to keep the princess safe. From her heart to her hands to the biscuit batter, that desire to protect flowed.

  The Weatherwaxes, the king and princess, the pirates, Bartholomew, and Bee ate slowly and wearily. Bee and Captain Zay sat next to each other. As the captain tasted her biscuit, she looked thoughtfully at Bee, and Bee shrugged. If it worked, it worked. She could do no more.

  After supper, King Crispin stood. When the others tried to stand as well, out of respect, he motioned them to sit.

  “Dear friends,” he said, leaning a bit on the table to keep the weight off his injured leg. “We are so grateful to you for your generous hospitality, and for your tremendous efforts on behalf of our kingdom.”

  The king continued, “Master Joris, who was your mage, has demanded my presence—that of myself and my daughter—at dawn on the morrow at the palace. And we are decided to accede to his demand.”

  Accede? Bee was puzzled. It was clear where Anika got her formal ways of speech. But Mistress Weatherwax knew what the king meant.

  “Oh, Your Majesty, you cannot!” she protested. “Forgive me, but you should not take that child into certain danger.”

  Anika stood then too, drawing herself up. “I am no child, mistress,” she said gently. “I am sixteen, and I am the princess of the realm. I would not countenance my father facing this peril alone, not so soon after reuniting with him.”

  “But—” Captain Zay burst out.

  “Nay, Captain,” Anika said. “It will be just we two. You have accomplished enough.” The captain scowled and turned away.

  Bee bit her lip. “We will make our own plan,” she said in a very low voice to the captain. Immediately, Captain Zay’s eyes lit up. “Later,” Bee added, looking around the table to be sure no one noticed.

  The king and Anika climbed the stairs to the bedchambers to get a few hours of rest before they had to meet the mage. As soon as they were gone, Wil, Bartholomew, and Bee huddled with Captain Zay.

  “We can’t let them go alone,” Wil said.

  “My mens will protect them,” Captain Zay vowed. “Our swords against the mage—he will be as a mewling babe before us!”

  Bee shook her head. “No swords. At least—not unless everything else fails.” She remembered Wil with his sword on the pirate ship.

  “Do you have something in mind?” Wil asked her.

  “Only that we be there,” Bee said. “Though how we get there undetected—well, I’ve no ideas about that.”

  “Leave that to me,” Bartholomew said. “Rest now, child. I’ll wake you well before dawn.”

  Bee washed herself wearily at the kitchen sink, glad finally to scrub off the bibingka batter, and went off to a corner to curl up with her blanket. Despite her sore and aching muscles, despite her worry and fear, she was asleep almost before her eyes closed.

  It seemed only an instant later when Bee awoke, Bartholomew gently shaking her shoulder. “It is time,” he whispered. “The king is getting ready to depart.”

  Bee saw Wil raise his head from his own corner of the room, and Captain Zay winked at her from her comfortable perch in the armchair. Anika and her father, cloaked and quiet, crept down the stairs a minute later, tiptoeing through the room, over and around the bodies of pirates who pretended to sleep. They opened the front door a crack, letting in damp, cold air, and then they were gone.

  Captain Zay sprang up. “Prepare, men!” she commanded in a low voice, and the pirates rose noiselessly. They did not want to wake the other Weatherwaxes, still slumbering upstairs.

  Bee and Bartholomew and Wil pulled on their own cloaks, and quickly they and the pirates followed the king and Anika, careful to muffle their steps on the cobblestones. At the canal, the king and princess turned onto the footpath that led to the palace, but the others hung back.

  “What is your plan?” Bee hissed to Bartholomew.

  “It is already in place,” he said. “Look around you at the pirates.”

  Bee looked, but she saw no pirates, nor Wil either. Instead, the footpath was lined with bushes, and each bush was a different shape and shade of green. Or were they bushes? If she looked very closely, she could see that each shrub had a peculiarity. The prickly holly bush had a branch that dipped low, just as Captain Zay’s tricorn hat feather fell over her face. The elderberry shrub had berries just the color of Wil’s eyes that seemed to wink at her. She blinked, puzzled, and the pirates and Wil stood before her. She blinked again, and they were bushes. She looked down at her own hands. Blink, they were branches and leaves. Blink, hands and fingers.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s a good magic!”

  Bartholomew beamed at her, pleased. “With luck, if we move carefully, the mage will not notice us approaching,” he said.

  They moved along the path, a group of mismatched shrubs that inched their way up the canal. The king and Anika hurried ahead of them. At the lake that stood before the palace, they moved clockwise around the water. Bee was surprised to see trees on the banks of the lake. They looked as firmly rooted as if they’d been there forever.

  There was no guard in sight. As bushes and shrubs, they passed through the entrance one at a time, into the palace courtyard. Slowly it filled with greenery where before there had been only weedy cobblestones.

  When they were all in the courtyard, Bartholomew motioned that the pirates should stay planted where they were. The others crept shrubbily to the palace entrance. One of the big double doors was just the slightest bit open. Bee stepped forward and pushed as hard as she could with her shoulder. Wil came up behind her and gave the door a shove. Bee tumbled inside.

  “Sorry!” Wil mouthed, not making a sound. Bee rubbed her shoulder, now just a shoulder again and not a branch, and scowled at him. She was the only one who had been inside the palace before, so the others followed her as she tiptoed through the maze of corridors with their closed doors and dusty furnishings. The building was utterly silent. Bee knew that the rooms held their noises close, that voices would not carry into the halls unless the doors were open. She tried various doors as she moved past them, but all seemed latched.

  Then Bee came to a familiar room—the room with the glassed-in cabinets that held Master Joris’s strange assortment of taxidermy. If she remembered right, the big iron doors to the garden were through the rooms that held his collections. She motioned to the others to follow her, pointing to the cabinets so Wil would be sure not to miss the stuffed oddities inside.

  Only—there were no oddities inside. The glass cabinets had swung open, and the shelves were empty.

  Bee heard a growl behind her, and she spun around. There, in the corner of the room was the fox, its patchy fur bristling, its teeth bared. She screamed and pushed Wil aside as it lunged for him, and it slid across the floor, its nails scrabbling, and came to a halt against the far wall. The stuffed mole and the mouse ran out from behind a cabinet. Before Bee could knock them away, the mouse had grabbed onto her trouser leg with its little clawed feet. It sank its teeth into her calf, and she screamed again, hopping on one leg and kicking with the other, trying to get the thing off her.

  “The birds!” Wil shouted. From perches atop the cabinets and above the tall windows, Master Joris’s stuffed birds launched themselves, their feathers molting as they flew, their wings flapping wildly. They tried to peck at Bee’s cheeks, her nose, her eyes as she flailed at them.

 
“Do something!” Bee implored Bartholomew. The hedge wizard caught a rabbit in midflight as it leaped at him, its hind legs kicking furiously. He held it with an outstretched arm as it struggled. Then he spoke a few words. The rabbit sagged in his grip. The other animals simply dropped to the floor. All the life left them, and they were their taxidermy selves again, but no longer in their alert poses. Just badly stuffed, limp and shedding, crumpled as in death.

  “That’s not his only collection,” Bee said to Bartholomew, panting. She wondered if her leg was bleeding where the mouse had bitten her. Could a dead animal bite through skin?

  “Dear me,” Bartholomew said, dropping the lifeless rabbit with a shudder. “What next?”

  Bee tried to remember. “Um … bugs?”

  She’d barely gotten the words out when a humming, buzzing noise filled her ears. She ducked automatically as an army of flying creatures swooped into the room, diving at the humans and hedge wizard below.

  “Ouch!” Wil cried, slapping something on his cheek. A red welt rose up where a wasp had stung him. Flies, bees, hornets, moths, and dragonflies careened off walls and tangled in Bee’s hair as she danced frantically around the room, trying to dislodge them. Then she saw what moved across the floor. Ants. Beetles. Worms and centipedes. Grasshoppers, crickets, praying mantises. And, no longer pinned in their case, spiders.

  Dozens and dozens of spiders.

  Bee shrieked, trying to pull both feet up at once so the spiders wouldn’t crawl on her. There were hairy ones and giant beady-eyed ones, spiders as big as her hand, and a phalanx of tiny spiders that ran at her. Her feet tangled together and she fell with a crash onto the ground and then scrambled in a frantic circle, screaming and screaming as she imagined spiders scuttling on her hands and feet, slithering up her arms and legs, wriggling onto her back and neck and in her ears and nose.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” she moaned, tears dropping on the floor as she tried to get away. She went limp, eyes closed, wheezing with fear. It wasn’t until she felt something trickling on her forehead that she opened her eyes again. She writhed convulsively, sure it was the cold legs of a spider.

  Her lashes were heavy, and she was freezing cold. Around her she could see nothing but white. It was snowing, snowing hard. It was snow that had tickled her, not spiders’ legs. She peered into the distance. Was that a … mountain? A snow-covered peak? She stood up, checking her legs for spiders. There were no insects anywhere. There was nothing but snow.

  After a few strides through the thick snow, she came up against a sort of wall. It wasn’t visible. It was glass, or something like glass, and she could feel that it was curved as she ran her hands up it. She couldn’t see anything at all on the other side.

  “Hello?” she called, her voice tremulous. Where were Bartholomew, and Wil? Nobody answered.

  She perched, shivering, on a snowy outcropping, trying to figure out where she was. How could this mountainous snowscape exist inside the palace of Aradyn? None of it made any sense. Then she remembered the third collection she’d seen, and what the palace cook, Hadewig, had once told her.

  Bugs, rocks, snow globes … He’ll collect most anything.

  It was one of Master Joris’s snow globes, somehow grown as big as life. And she was trapped inside.

  CHAPTER 24

  Bee beat frantically against the glass sides of the sphere until her hands were sore and numb with cold. She pressed her face against the glass, trying to see the others. Were they in globes of their own? The room outside was barely recognizable. The curve of the globe made the nearest wall appear as if it were only a few inches away, while the far wall stretched into the distance for what seemed like miles.

  She tried to rock the globe, to knock it over. Maybe if it fell, it would crack and she could get out. But it was firmly planted, and when she threw herself against its sides, she only bruised her shoulders as the snow deepened around her ankles.

  Then she heard a series of loud thuds, as if someone were hammering at a door. Right at the spot where she had pressed her face against the globe, an object slammed into the glass from the outside. She threw herself onto the frigid floor. There was another crash, and then a louder one, just above her. A crack appeared in the glass. The next crash shattered the side of the globe, and something whizzed through a hole in the glass, an inch from Bee’s head. She crawled over to the object and picked it up. It was a rock, a pinkish-silver stone the size of her fist.

  The rocks kept coming, big ones and small ones, all different colors and shapes. The glass showered down over Bee, and she rolled into a ball to try to protect herself from the bombardment of shards and stone. One ricocheting rock hit her in the ribs, and she gasped with the pain of it. Then there was silence.

  Bee raised her head cautiously. She could see the room again, its checkerboard tile floor littered with glass, puddles of melting snow, the carcasses of bugs and moth-eaten mammals. She picked her way to the jagged edge of the snow globe and jumped down, slipping on an icy patch. There was Bartholomew, standing at the edge of his own shattered globe. This one had a little snowy cottage in its center. Bee remembered that it had looked very sweet and homey when only a few inches high, sitting on a shelf in the next room. Here, life-sized and dripping water, it appeared considerably more menacing.

  Bartholomew shook snow out of his beard and jumped down. “Dear me. Dear me. Are you all right?” he said.

  “A little bruised,” Bee admitted, feeling the sore spot on her ribs as she breathed.

  “Is that the last of them?”

  “The last of … ?”

  “The collections,” Bartholomew said. “Master Joris’s collections. It is clear his plan is to use them to stop us from proceeding, don’t you agree?”

  Bee tried to remember. “These are the only ones I saw,” she said. “I didn’t actually see the rock collection.”

  “Using them was his miscalculation,” Bartholomew said. “The flying rocks freed us from those infernal globes.”

  “Where’s Wil?” Bee asked suddenly.

  “Dear me,” Bartholomew said again, faintly. He pointed. There was another snow globe still unbroken, in the corner. It was smaller than Bee would have guessed, having experienced one from within, but still taller than she was. She could see an ice-covered pool deep inside, and sitting on the ground in front of it, hugging his knees and shivering in the snow, was Wil. Bee waved wildly, but Wil didn’t notice her. To him, she would probably look as if she were miles away.

  “We have to get him out!” There was a rock lying near her feet, so Bee picked it up and lobbed it at the globe. The rock bounced harmlessly off. She tried again with a bigger rock, but the result was the same.

  “Stand aside,” Bartholomew said. He began moving his hands in circles, and Bee backed away quickly, remembering the spinning island. Bartholomew clapped his hands together hard, and there was a crash that rattled the walls of the room. Plaster rained down on them from the ceiling, sticking to their wet clothes and hair. A crack appeared in the glass globe, and then fissures spread out from it until the entire orb was webbed with cracks. Wil covered his head with his arms just as the whole structure came tumbling down on him.

  “You really must figure out how to control your work,” Bee said to Bartholomew as Wil staggered out of the sphere and jumped to the floor.

  “What on earth—” Wil started, looking back at the wreck of the globe. But he couldn’t figure out what to ask, and Bee had no idea how to explain.

  “I’ll explain later. Come this way.” Bee led them through the broken glass and puddles of water to the huge iron doors, and they pushed through into the palace garden. Now, they faced the hedge maze. Bee started walking, hoping that she could remember the way she’d gone before, but within moments she was completely lost. The maze seemed to have grown taller. Its upper branches overlapped now in a canopy, so the path was not only impossibly twist
y, but dark and gloomy. She could hear voices in the distance that she hoped were the king and Anika, but again and again when she tried to head toward the sound, she found herself at a dead end and had to backtrack. They were getting nowhere.

  “Maybe I can straighten out the path,” Bartholomew suggested.

  “Please don’t make the whole maze explode,” Bee said. She was feeling very tired and cranky and worried about Anika. They could be trapped there for days. They could starve. She hadn’t thought to bring anything to eat.

  Bartholomew tried a few hand motions and mutterings. The hedge quivered, and some leaves dropped to the ground, but nothing happened.

  “I’m afraid that I am not entirely predictable,” Bartholomew said apologetically.

  Bee sank to the ground, then gave a yelp of pain and leaped up again. “Thorns!” she cried, stooping to look. But it wasn’t a thorn that had pierced her backside. It was Pepin, curled in a protective ball.

  Had she crushed him? She touched him with a tentative hand, and he unrolled and waddled off in the direction they’d come from. Bee followed quickly. “Come on!” she said to the others. “Surely he’ll go to Anika.”

  The hedgehog didn’t hesitate but led them through the maze as if he were following a map. Every turn he took was exactly the opposite of the one Bee would have chosen. In a few minutes, they emerged into the grassy clearing where Bee had first met Anika. The fountain was silent and empty. In the distance, Bee could see the cherry tree. And there was Anika, her father’s arm tight around her, standing before Master Joris. The mage was facing them as they came out of the maze. His face darkened with displeasure.

  “Well,” Master Joris said, almost spitting the word. Anika turned quickly.

  “He found you!” she cried. “Oh, worthy Pepin!” She ran to her hedgehog and stooped to pick him up. Then she looked up at Bee, Wil, and Bartholomew. “You shouldn’t have come,” she said, but the gladness in her face told Bee otherwise.