A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by T. Kingfisher

The door at the top of the stairs was flung open, and my aunt emerged, shouldering into her housedress. Her housedress is large and pink and has winged croissants embroidered across it. It’s quite hideous. Aunt Tabitha herself is large and pink but doesn’t have winged croissants flying across her except when wearing the housedress.

The gingerbread man began to dance a very respectable hornpipe. Don’t ask me where the cookies get the dances they do—this batch had been doing hornpipes. The last batch did waltzes, and the one before that had performed a decidedly lewd little number that had even made Aunt Tabitha blush. A little too much spice in those, I think. We had to add a lot of vanilla to settle them down.

I stared into the face of a dead horse and nearly fainted with relief.

Molly understood, though. When you spend most of your time with a dead horse, you learn to respect other people’s weird pets.

If you have ever tried to stay afloat on a pair of magic bread slices, then you know what it was like. Otherwise, all I can say is that I don’t recommend it. The slices were from one of our big sourdough rounds, so they were a pretty good size, but my feet still stuck out a little over the crust.

The constable stared at me. He could probably have reached out and grabbed me, but he was too flabbergasted. His mouth hung open and his eyebrows were so high they’d vanished under his hair. You’d think he’d never seen anybody ride bread before.

But I couldn’t sleep. My thoughts ran over and under each other, stretching and churning, as if my brain were trying to pull taffy. I’d swear to myself that there was nothing I could do, that I was going to stop thinking and go to sleep now, and then ten minutes later my brain would be going again, jitter-flop, jitter-flop, like a three-legged frog on a griddle.

It seemed like once you agreed that the government could put you on a list because of something you were born with, you were asking for trouble.

When you’re different, even just a little different, even in a way that people can’t see, you like to know that people in power won’t judge you for it.

It should never have come down to me. It was miserably unfair that it had come to me and Spindle. There were grown-ups who should have stopped it. The Duchess should have found her courage and gone to the guards. The guards should have warned the Duchess. The Council, whoever they were, should have made sure the Duchess knew about the proclamations. The Duchess should have had people on the street who reported back to her. Everyone had failed at every step and now Spindle and I were heroes because of it.

“No,” he said. That surprised me. A lot. I don’t know if when you’re an adult, you can argue and be right, but if you’re a kid and you argue with an adult, you’re automatically wrong. Always. It’s a law of nature or something. On the other hand, I’d been right about Oberon, so maybe the laws were in flux right now.

You expect heroes to survive terrible things. If you give them a medal, then you don’t ever have to ask why the terrible thing happened in the first place. Or try to fix it.” He made a flicking gesture with his fingers. “How else are you gonna have heroes?”

Aunt Tabitha tried to say “It was dreadful,” and “It was nothing,” at the same time and produced a garbled sentence that sounded vaguely like, “Notherful! Fing!”

“My dear, I am certain that you can go on about how unworthy and incapable you are for hours yet, but we have very little time. Let us pretend that we have done all that and that I have nodded correctly and made the proper noises, and skip to the point where you say, “I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll try.” Spindle snickered. I said “I…but…bread!”

If you have ever prepared for a siege in two days, then you know what the next few days were like. If you haven’t, then you probably don’t. Well…a big formal wedding is about the same (and because we do cakes, I’ve been on the periphery of a few), except that if things go wrong in a siege you’ll all die horribly, and in formal weddings, the stakes are much higher.

Despite the fact that they were in separate barrels, they were all still Bob. If I shoved an arm into one barrel and told Bob that he was a good and wonderful sourdough starter, the best starter in the whole world, all six barrels glubbed and belched happily.

“Spindle,” said the Duchess, with weary amusement, “what do you know that we don’t?” “Coupla the guys,” said Spindle. “Outta the Rat’s Nest, you know. We ain’t like the army, but this is our city too.” He scratched his chin. “Heard that a couple of ’em went out the smuggler’s tunnels. Slug wouldn’t go, but One-Eyed Benji and Leaky Peg did, and most of Crackhand’s bully-boys.” “The names of these people amaze me,” murmured the Duchess. “Really, the nobles are so unimaginative by comparison. I wonder if Leaky Peg would like a cabinet position?”

It is nearly impossible to be sad when eating a blueberry muffin. I’m pretty sure that’s a scientific fact.

“I meant what I said at the ceremony, you know,” he said. When I looked up, he had a rueful smile—the smile you give to a friend or a colleague, not to a little kid. “Heroism is a bad habit. Once you’ve done it, other people start to expect it. If the city’s in danger again, everybody will remember that you saved them last time, and they’ll forget all the nasty exhausting bits where you nearly died and had to sleep for a week and your headache didn’t go away for three days.”