A Dash of Magic: A Bliss Novel (21 page)

Lily waved to Rose, then held up a small wire birdcage. In a corner of the cage shivered a tiny gray mouse curled up in a ball.

“Jacques!” Rose cried.

“Oh, is that his name?” Lily said. “Clever, to arrange for a mouse as a spy. But alas, he has a weakness for Camembert. I put a chunk in this decorative birdcage, and he could not resist.”

Lily set the cage atop her pantry shelf of ingredients and wiped her hands on her skirt. “Filthy,” she muttered.

Just then, the vast chandeliers that hung from the ceiling of the expo center went dark. An ominous drumroll filled the room, and then the lights burst on, revealing the rotund master of baking at the microphone.

“This is the final countdown!” he bellowed. “Two contestants remain: Lily Le Fay, celebrity chef extraordinaire, and Rosemary Bliss, child.” The applause was deafening.

Rose couldn’t help looking across the aisle at Lily’s kitchen. Throughout her career, Lily had done every low-down, sneaky, cheating thing she could to stomp out anyone who’d gotten in her way. And now she was about to stomp out Rose.

Jean-Pierre exhaled a shaky breath into the microphone. “I would like to say a word now about Lily Le Fay.” He paused a minute to wipe the corner of his eye. “I will do my best to contain my tears, but I promise nothing.”

A white screen the size of the entire gymnasium wall at Calamity Falls Middle School descended from the ceiling, and a Celine Dion song began to play in the background. Images of Lily’s performance over the past four days began appearing on the screen, each “candid” photograph more polished and perfect than the last.

“Lily Le Fay is simply a master,” Jean-Pierre said. “Her baked goods are like professionally wrapped presents: glossy, colorful, and filled with wondrous surprises. And Lily herself is like a present as well. Between her television show and her cookbooks, her patented whisks and bowls and spatulas and beaters, Lily has conquered the world of celebrity baking. It seems there is no stopping her.”

The crowd erupted into a tsunami of applause. The slide show ended with a picture of a smiling Lily licking a dollop of whipped cream off her finger.

Can we just get to the announcement of the category, already?
Rose thought, tapping her foot on one of the tiles of the kitchen floor.

“And then there is, of course, the young Miss Bliss.” Jean-Pierre’s tears ceased as he scratched the coarse bristles under his nose. “In her time here, Miss Bliss has created a blackened cookie, an orange ball, an angel food cake, and a banana bread. She’s been assisted by her very attractive older brother, Thyme, who has spent much of the competition smiling into the cameras. Today she seems not to have combed her hair or to have changed her sweatshirt, which is not so surprising given that she is a middle school student.”

That’s it,
Rose thought, starting to untie her apron.
I’m outta here.

“I never suspected that young Rosemary would survive even the first day of competition,” Jean-Pierre continued. “And indeed, her blackened cookie was a close call. But then imagine my surprise when I tasted her orange ball, her angel food cake, and her banana bread, and found that I had never in my life been so delighted, so charmed, so . . . moved . . . by a simple baked good.”

Rose stopped fumbling with her apron strings as her stomach jumped into her throat.
Jean-Pierre Jeanpierre, the world’s foremost judge of baked goods, has never been more delighted than when he was eating
my
banana bread?

“I have watched Rosemary at her work throughout the week. Not only do her focus, poise, and technical skill rival that of seasoned professionals, but she bakes with a certain level of . . . we might call it grace. Humble grace.”

Humble grace?
Rose thought, dumbstruck.

The master chef continued. “I recognize a quality in her that only one other person possesses, and that person is myself: It is the quality of having been born to bake.”

Rose gulped.
Maybe I could win,
she thought.
Maybe it isn’t all about who has the best ingredients and the most magical help and all that. Maybe it’s about who is the most passionate about baking, and helping people feel better.

Then again, maybe passion just wasn’t enough.

“And now for the surprise theme of the day,” Jean-Pierre said.

Here it comes
.

Whatever the theme would be—whether it was
FLAKY
or
DOUGHY
or
RAW
or
BURNED
or
RANCID
or whatever bizarre thing Jean-Pierre had dreamed up in his angel food cake–assisted sleep—Rose would be utterly unable to execute a dish that could stack up against Lily’s. She had nothing magical at her disposal, not even a girlish giggle or the first wind of autumn. The Dwarf of Perpetual Sleep was asleep elsewhere, and the true queen’s blush had disappeared into the night.

“The theme is
UNUSUAL GRAINS
.”

The room erupted into whispers and gasps as the audience in the balconies expressed their surprise.

“You’ll have one hour to gather and plan, as usual, and then the most important hour of baking in your lives will commence. Go now. Venture forth into your imaginations.”

The bald chef left the stage as the balconies began to clear. Rose leaned back against the counter. What was she going to do?

“Oh man,
mi hermana,
” Ty said. “You don’t look so good. You need to wash your face. Your eyes are all wet.”

Rose went to wipe her cheek with the sleeve of her hoodie, but at just that moment Balthazar appeared and yanked her arm away. “Leave it!” he cried.

Balthazar set down the brocade carpet bag he’d been carrying and pried it open.

“Grandpa Balthazar,” Rose pleaded, “what am I supposed to do? Jeremius took all of our magical ingredients!”

Balthazar pulled a test tube from the carpet bag and held it underneath Rose’s eyelids, which were spilling over like the top tier of a fountain. A few of the tears pooled at the bottom of the test tube. Balthazar stuck a cork in it and handed it to Ty.

“What’s this for?” Ty asked, gingerly pinching the vial of tears between the tips of his thumb and forefinger like it was filled with plutonium.

“I’ll explain,” Balthazar grunted, then turned to Rose.

“You’ll make the polenta,” he said matter-of-factly. “Remember the polenta I showed you in Mexico? Just do that. You whisk cornmeal in a pot with boiling water. You add honey, then a sprig of rosemary, then you add—”

“The burp of the bloated bullfrog, I know,” Rose said. “But we don’t
have
the bloated bullfrog.”

Lily must have overheard, because she hissed from across the aisle. “
Psst
. Rose. Do you mean
this
bloated bullfrog?”

Lily ducked behind her chopping block for a moment. When she stood back up, she was holding a blue mason jar—with the same uncomfortable amphibian Rose had met in Mexico leaning miserably against the side of the jar, holding his belly.

Rose could only stare, open-mouthed, as Lily laughed and tucked the jar back out of sight.

“You’d be so cool if you weren’t so evil,
El Tiablo
!” Ty cried.

Rose turned to Balthazar, her eyes again filling with tears. “Come here,” he said quietly, putting his arm around her and turning her away from the ever-watchful cameras.

“You know I’m not one for sentimentality,” he said into her ear. “But you . . . you’re a good one, Rose. I’ve studied every recipe the Bliss family ever wrote, the life of every magical baker the Bliss family ever spawned, and you’re one of the special ones. You could go on to invent great things. Today you’re going to make the best darn polenta you ever made. Put love in it. That’s the real magical ingredient, and you’ve got that in spades.”

“But Lily . . . ,” Rose said, struggling with her tears. “She . . .”

Balthazar shook his head. “No matter what happens today, I’m sorry to say that Lily will end up destroying herself. That kind of ambition has wrecked civilizations. You just stay good.”

“So I just make the polenta without anything special in it?” Rose asked, wiping her nose with her sleeve.

Balthazar nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “And you know what? Things have a way of turning out special just when you need them to be.”

A
s Balthazar and Rose went over the polenta recipe one more time, Jean-Pierre Jeanpierre reentered the hall.

Balthazar gave Rose a kiss on the cheek and started back to the balcony as Jean-Pierre stepped up to the microphone on the cupcake stage. “You’ll have one hour to bake,” Jean-Pierre boomed. “Be bold. This is your final moment. As we say in Paris,
Bonne chance.
”

The massive baking timer on the wall began its ominous ticking, and Rose moved to her pantry shelf and began gathering what she’d need. Balthazar had stolen Ty away and was whispering to her brother about something or other, probably about how to mop Rose off the floor after losing turned her into a puddle of despair.

Rose was alone—no Booke, no magical ingredients. It felt like she was floating on her back in the middle of a vast indigo lake, her ears submerged in the water so that all she could hear was the sound of her own heartbeat. It was terrifying, floating in the middle of a lake by yourself; but there was still the sun, the clouds, the treetops. There was always something to grab on to.

So Rose picked up the box of cornmeal and a jar of honey, then put one foot in front of the other until she was standing in front of the stove. She measured one cup of water into a small saucepan, brought the water to boil, and added a half cup of the cornmeal, a sprig of rosemary, and two teaspoons of honey. As she stirred gently with a whisk, the tiny shards of dried corn began to swell and thicken into a golden-yellow porridge.

Rose felt one fat tear run down the length of her nose and then watched as it splashed into the cornmeal. When it hit the surface of the porridge, the tear made a curious spot of copper-colored iridescence.

Was she wearing some sort of bronze mascara that she’d forgotten about? Why would a tear turn the cornmeal copper? But the spot quickly disappeared. She continued to stand over the pot, stirring, as her tears plunked into the porridge, making tiny, copper-colored explosions each time.

“Whoa,
mi hermana
! Those are some fat tears, man!”

Rose looked up from the saucepan and saw Ty standing next to her, his apron tied neatly around his waist.

He looked at the cornmeal on the stovetop. “How’s it going? Looks good to me.”

“I’m almost done, actually. But you can get a bowl.”

Ty fished out three small bowls of red ceramic, and Rose ladled the polenta into the bowls, topping each with another sprig of rosemary. Together they arranged the bowls on the wooden chopping block, then stepped back and surveyed the scene. The bowls looked simple, rustic, and completely underwhelming.

From the stage, Jean-Pierre boomed, “Rosemary Bliss has finished with twenty minutes left on the clock, ladies and gentlemen! How brazen!”

“Well, Ty?” Rose laughed, relieved to be finished, even though what she’d finished was a failure. “What’ll we do for twenty minutes?”

“I say we try to psych out
El Tiablo
.”

They looked over at Lily’s kitchen. Lily was stirring a bowl of batter that flashed red, blue, or green, depending on how you looked at it.

“I feel like I’ve seen that batter before,” said Ty. “But where . . .”

“Red, blue, green . . .” Suddenly Rose remembered seeing those alternating colors next to the multicolored panels of a quilt during a backyard picnic months ago.

“The Hold-Your-Tongue Tart!” Rose hissed. “Remember when Lily made us that picnic in the backyard, and then she made us eat that tart—”

“She didn’t have to make
me
eat it,” Ty said. “That thing was
good
.”

“Yeah, but then we couldn’t talk about what she was doing.” Rose shook her head. “I don’t like this. . . .”

They watched as Lily took the box of her Secret Ingredient from the shelf and added a fistful of the chalky powder to the batter. An acrid, chemical stench wafted over from her kitchen, the same stench that Rose had smelled when she and Purdy had first tested the properties of the Secret Ingredient.

“That’s it,” murmured Rose. “The Hold-Your-Tongue Tart combined with Lily’s Secret Ingredient. One will make Jean-Pierre think Lily is great, and the other will prevent him from talking about anything else he might taste, including our polenta. We’re so toast.”

“Nah, I’m still holding out hope,” Ty said. “She’s not even cooking with an unusual grain. She’s completely ignoring the rules.”

“You’re right!” Rose said. “We might have a chance after all, if Jean-Pierre tastes ours first.”

Lily pulled her tart from the oven. She finished arranging tiny leaves of mint on the top of her slice of tart just as the timer rang.

Jean-Pierre hobbled down the black-and-white aisle toward the two kitchens as an orchestra played a coronation march. In honor of the occasion, the master chef had donned a mink-lined red velvet cape with a ten-foot train, which Flaurabelle held out behind him.