by Irene Gallo
The regulars, and she knows them by their orders.
Apple Turnover of Happier Times, aka the bent old woman in the moth-eaten furs. Saffron saves the curtained alcove for her, and for the fifteen minutes it takes to eat that pastry, she’s lost in a haze of remembering. Children, thinks Danny, but Saffron thinks grandchildren. Either way, she lost them during the brief, bloody uprising last spring, they agree on that.
Lavender Macaron of Long-Ago Flirtations, aka the angular man who still owns two silk scarves, despite the ever-increasing privations, despite the shabbiness of his old suit. He rotates the scarves day by day; green-stripe, violet dots. He takes tea with his macaron, and his lips curl in pleasure while he remembers. Obviously it’s a lover, but Danny is sure the lover disappeared in some dramatic way; attacking the palace, or daring to print anti-propaganda sheets. To have something worth remembering, you have to live first, says Danny, and then he looks sadly at his flour-dusted arms, knowing that he only runs a bakery.
Lemon Tart of Profound Regret, that’s the sad one. She’s young, too young to have so much Profound Regret in her life. But she comes every day at ten, testing her sorrow. Profound Regret shows you the biggest mistake you made, the one you brood over, and there are two kinds of people who buy it. The ones that make Saffron’s heart gladden are the ones who buy it infrequently. They descend into the despair of knowing what they did, just as fresh as the day it happened.
Then they go off and change, because of what they saw.
Saffron knows, because they come back to tell her. Not right at first. But they come back, several months later, and buy the tart again. And this time they see something else. Something less terrible. That’s how they know they’ve moved on.
Those are the ones Danny says the whole shop is worth it for. He’d do it all again. Some days it seems like you’re doing so little, but when he helps one of those people, his whole life is justified. On days that are really tough—the stories told about the Duke are worse than usual, the taxes are due, the Profound Regrets are too deep—Danny eats one of his Honey Chocolates of Well-Deserved Pride. He says it always shows him those moments, the ones when he helped people.
Their current Lemon Tart comes day after day. She’s not moving on. Danny thinks Saffron should intentionally mix up her order, give her a Honey Chocolate or an Apple Turnover and see if that helps her mindset change. Saffron is considering the merits of this when he comes in.
He’s supposed to be incognito but Saffron knows him instantly. She’s seen enough Resistance flyers to know how the Duke disguises himself when he wants to move around the city. His red hair is slicked back under a hooded cloak.
She tries not to start, but her body betrays her. She flushes, angry and scared all at once, and she knows he sees it.
“I have a mind to try one of your Honey Chocolates,” he says smoothly.
Her fingers are shaking as she reaches for it. This man of all men does not deserve to relive his best moments. She has thought for so long of Resistance. She could reach for the Mint Chocolate of Deep Despair, at least. After he tastes it, he will know that mint is not honey, and he will punish her somehow—execute her? Torture her, like her sister? But first he will suffer. Oh, he will suffer.
But it would not just be Saffron who suffers. It would be Danny. It would be the part-time employees. It would be the customers, for she is not naive enough to think that he would not seek his wrath on all who saw his humiliation. He must squash any hint of rebellion.
Or you are afraid, says a smaller voice still.
Saffron reaches for the chocolates and his eyes are heavy on hers; it seems he knows her thoughts. She knows why he comes unannounced. So she cannot slip him poison, not unless she has planned for this moment and made an entire tray of poisoned chocolates, and she has not.
“I am most delighted to sample what I have asked for,” he says, and there is a world of meaning in that tongue.
Her eyes close—her fingers close on the wrapper around the chocolate, bring it up. She puts it on the plate with nerveless fingers.
It is the Honey Chocolate.
Her voice shakes as she tells him the price. Her moment has come, her moment has gone.
The Duke takes the chocolate, sits down at a table in the corner. A young man leans casually against the wall, fiddling with his belt knife. He doesn’t fool Saffron. The Duke goes off into a haze of remembering and for eight heart-stopping minutes she cleans the counter and tends to the customers as the Duke looks off in the distance and the young man watches the two of them, his eyes flicking back and forth, watching to see if the bakery worker has lied to the Duke.
She regrets her choice already. She does not need a Lemon Tart to know that.
She regrets it even more when, two nights later, the Duke’s guards take Danny out of their bed in the middle of the night.
She is left to make her own way to the castle and offer herself up as sacrifice. A willing check on any rebellious tendencies my Danny might have. To sell herself to the Traitor King.
A common food-taster.
* * *
Saffron blinks back tears. She has not seen Danny in so long. The Duke does not trust them together. He has taken Saffron’s measure—correctly assessed her as ineffectual, not a threat. She is plain, ordinary, and the Duke is not so foolish as to spend the coin of her in the wrong place. She is much more valuable alive and whole and as a check on Danny. So the Duke left her free rein of the upstairs servants’ quarters—as long as she does not enter the second kitchen. The second kitchen was turned over to Danny; his tools and herbs brought from the bakery, and he is confined to it. The only way they can communicate is through the confections themselves. There is always at least one confection during a meal that he knows will call up a sweet memory of the two of them—something she can feast upon for a week, and remember.
But this banquet has been leading her step by step forward, as if in a story. Both she and Danny know the purpose of the Lemon Tart too well. She has been reminded of how she failed to act, which must mean that he is prompting her that she will need to act. But in what way?
Perhaps it is poison, she thinks. Perhaps he is telling her that this is the only way to strike against the Duke. A slow-acting poison; something she will recognize, but must pretend is fine.
But she can’t imagine Danny choosing that method, even if she ordered him to. And at this point, she would order him to. She stiffens her spine, watches the nobles eating their own lemon tarts. She has spent a year practicing dissembling. Her courage and her warm smiles will not fail her now. She is ready for whatever comes.
Or perhaps there is something else he is reminding her of. Those small jumps that the pastries have been taking. The Lemon Tart memory skipping ahead, to Danny’s disappearance, to her own application at the castle. Those are not part of the original memory. They are linked somehow, just as she saw with the crostini, with the shortbread. Not enough that anyone would notice, because no one understands the subtleties of how the pastries work, not like she and Danny. Were those extra memories there to warn her of something specific?
But maybe that is not it, either. Sometimes she thinks she is going mad. Danny is long gone, and these pastries are normal pastries done by a normal pastry chef, their memories some collective dream that she convinces the nobles to believe in, once a week.
The cheese plate comes and goes while she feels more and more adrift, lost in her own memories, wishful thinking, and nonsense. These banquets will go on for eternity, and she will eat lemon tarts of regret forever, and nothing will change.
For now the after-dinner liqueurs are being passed around, the meal is over, and there has been no dramatic change tonight. She is disappointed; she wants the Duke gone so badly that she almost feels she will run at him herself, with the silver fork. See what damage she can do before they kill her. Danny was always the patient one, the one performing the endless tweaking of recipes in search of the correct formula, the one able to wait unt
il the exact moment. Cooking is all about timing.
Ah, but wait. There is one more plate. Her heart quickens—
But she can tell at a glance it is a chocolate, a dark-chocolate-shelled truffle with an amber-colored drop at the top.
The Honey Chocolate of Well-Deserved Pride.
It makes her sick to think of the Duke eating this confection. Who knows what sort of disgusting thing the Duke will find pride in tonight?
She knows, for Danny has served this chocolate to the Duke before, that there is no outside morality imposed upon the choice of memory. Saffron always, invariably, sees one of the times she helped somebody. Danny sees those as well, or he sees moments of creation, breakthroughs of hard work and study.
The Duke saw a moment he cleverly destroyed a family. He told the table about it, in salivating detail, and the quiet bliss the nobles had found in the chocolates evaporated. Why would Danny grant him such?
The extra-large chocolate is set down before Saffron and she cuts it in two with her silver fork. It is in the last second before she takes her bite that she notices the color of the honey drop on top is a little deeper than usual. Molasses, perhaps, and it is her single clue that this is something different than what she is expecting.
Bitter Chocolate of Agony Observed
She falls, tumbling, faster and faster. It is a moment she has never seen before. She is five, and Rosie is four, and Rosie has been stung by a hornet. In real life she barely remembers this, but she is here now, and Rosie is wailing. She holds up her arm to show Saffron, and Saffron sees the welt. And then—she feels the welt. In seeing the pain of her sister, it triggers her own sense of pain, and her arm stings and swells with it. Rosie runs off to find their mother, and Saffron falls—
She is eleven, and her best friend has taken a header off of the chicken coop. Busted her nose but good. Saffron sees it, and her own face swells in response, painful, aching, broken. She helps her friend home, and at every step she feels the pain of the broken nose. Until the friend is turned over to her mother, and Saffron runs home, the pain dissolving, the memory released—
She is in the bakery, and the enforcer punches Rosie, and Saffron staggers back with the pain of it as they drag Rosie away—
She is at the hanging, and the body falls—
It is last year, and Danny has sliced right through the pad of his thumb with a bread knife. Skin wounds bleed like billy-o, and Saffron carefully stitches it up for him, feeling the pounding of the blood in her own thumb, feeling the piercing tugging of the thread pulling through. Through the roar of the pain she hears Danny musing: I wonder if I could do something with pain.
Why would you want to? says past Saffron.
You wouldn’t think a Lemon Tart of Regret would be useful, and yet … says Danny. There might be something there.
Saffron laughs. Only you would slice open your thumb and wonder how to turn it into a new pastry. Go for it. But leave me out of this one.
Do you know how much I love you? says Danny.
And she is falling away from that memory, falling back to the table, even as her last words echo: I love you too. More than anything.…
* * *
The entire table is looking at her. She has been gone a few minutes longer than usual. Hopefully not so long as to give the game away. Her face, she feels now, is still wincing from the pain of the sliced thumb. She consciously relaxes her jaw, loosens her face, breathes.
She is supposed to entice the Duke to eat this chocolate. And how exactly is she going to do that, with everything she just saw plainly visible on her face to the whole table?
She waves at the servitor to take the other half of her chocolate to the Duke. She does not yet trust herself to speak.
The Duke looks at the half-eaten chocolate, then back at her. “For a moment, I thought your husband had decided he was willing to poison you,” he says. “But now I see he is merely willing to torture you.”
That gives Saffron the thread to walk down. “His skill with confections is the most important thing to him,” she says, and she keeps her head high, not minding that her lip trembles. The Duke understands this. He will see himself in Danny.
“So explain to me why I, and my table, should go ahead and try this particular confection,” he says. “After seeing its most … interesting results.”
She looks evenly into his face. There is only one answer that will work with the Duke, and this is truth.
At least, part of the truth.
“You will see pain,” she says. “Not your own pain, but another’s. A moment of exquisite pain that someone else is suffering.”
The Duke’s face relaxes, just barely, and he laughs. “No wonder you were so conflicted. My little weaklings.” He gestures around to the table. “Go on, then. Eat.”
Her heart sinks, watching as one by one the reluctant guests pick up their chocolates, their faces frightened or stoic by turns. If the Duke does not eat his bite quickly, then this is for nothing. The nobles will spill to him everything they felt, and there will be no more chance to do this again, and she and Danny will be strung up for daring to oppose the Traitor King.
The memories for some of them will be long this time. She cannot help that. One lucky woman, younger than the rest, is shaking off the trance already. “I saw my brother break his arm,” she says, shuddering, and her hand unconsciously goes to her own arm.
Saffron breathes, willing the woman not to say any more. This is confirmation to the Duke that what she said is true. You see someone else’s pain. The chocolate is not poison. His face relaxes a tiny bit more, he is weakening. He wants to try it.
“You can aim for the right memory if you give it a nudge,” Saffron says, and this is true in general of their work, if irrelevant in the case of this particular chocolate where you will see everything. “Wouldn’t you like to see … what you did to my sister?” Her eyes meet his and she is breathing fast, she can’t help it, and he is feasting on every moment of her pain. If this works …
The Duke’s eyes never leave hers as he raises the chocolate and places it on his tongue.
* * *
The linked memories keep the Duke under for three entire weeks, writhing in a remembering coma, first on his chair, then moved to his bed, then moved to the dungeon. For three weeks is enough time for someone to find the food-taster’s grandfather, and let him out, and for the whole chain of command to be rearranged. The Duke is declared incapacitated and relieved of his regency, and kind Lord Searle takes over in his place.
When the Duke finally does wake, the pain and malnutrition have left him wasted away to nothing. His eyes fall on a glass cake stand placed beside his filthy, flea-infested mattress, on the stones of the dungeon floor. Inside is a single chocolate, identical to the one he was served at his final dinner.
If he were stronger, one might call his laugh the laugh of someone who finally sees a worthy adversary at last.
The chocolate, of course, was made by a baker, a simple baker who refused the honor of being Regent Searle’s head pastry chef, and asked only to return home to his two loves: his work and his wife.
The chocolate was placed there by Saffron, who stayed to watch the Duke writhe for twenty minutes before she slipped silently away, knowing full well that that pain will account on her soul; that she will revisit this spot if she ever eats that particular chocolate herself again.
The Duke is never leaving this dungeon. And the only real question is, how does he wish to go?
Trembling hands knock the glass dome to the dungeon floor. It shatters, an echo that remains in the Duke’s ears long after the shards have come to rest.
The Duke takes his last bite of food ever on this earth, and remembers, as he falls.
TINA CONNOLLY is the author of the Ironskin trilogy from Tor Books, and the Seriously Wicked series from Tor Teen. Her books have been nominated for the Nebula and Andre Norton Awards. Her stories have appeared in Women Destroy Science Fiction!, Lightspeed, Tor.com, Strange H
orizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many more, and are collected in On the Eyeball Floor and Other Stories from Fairwood Press. Her narrations have featured in audiobooks and podcasts, including PodCastle, PseudoPod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, John Joseph Adams’ The Apocalypse Triptych, and more. She is one of the cohosts of Escape Pod and runs the Parsec Award–winning flash fiction podcast Toasted Cake.
The End of the End of Everything
Dale Bailey
A horror story about a long-married couple invited by an old friend to an exclusive artists’ colony. The inhabitants of the colony indulge in suicide parties as the world teeters on the brink of extinction. Edited by Ellen Datlow.
The last time Ben and Lois Devine saw Veronica Glass, the noted mutilation artist, was at a suicide party in Cerulean Cliffs, an artist’s colony far beyond their means. That they happened to be there at all was a simple matter of chance. Stan Miles, for whom Ben had twice served as best man, had invited them to his beach house to see things through with his new wife, MacKenzie, and her nine-year-old daughter, Cecilia. Though the Devines had no great enthusiasm for the new wife—Stan had traded up, was how Lois put it—they still loved Stan and had resolved to put the best face on the thing. Besides, the prospect of watching ruin engulf the world among such glittering company was, for Ben at least, irresistible. He made his living on the college circuit as a poet, albeit a minor one, so when Stan said they would fit right in, his statement was not entirely without truth.
They drove down on a Sunday, to the muted strains of a Mozart piano concerto on the surround sound. Ruin had lately devoured most of the city and it encroached on either side of the abandoned interstate: derelict cars rusting back to the elements, skeletal trees stark against a gray horizon, an ashen, baked-looking landscape, though no fire had burned there. In some places the road was all but impassable. They made poor time. It was late when they finally pulled into the beach house’s weedy gravel driveway and climbed out, stretching.