Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet (11 page)

He says he is my master. He thinks I don’t write. He is stupid.

CHAPTER 11

I stay at the house in the grove for four more weeks, without further visits from Fyel. I bake sheet after sheet of unnaturally hard gingerbread. I mix vat after vat after vat of icing to hold it to the house’s weathered sides, so much so that the very thought of sugar becomes nauseating to me, and the smell of gingerbread has forever soaked into my skin. I spin sugar for the windows and bake gingerbread for the door. A sweet bun is its handle, studded with chocolate pieces and dusted with powdered sugar, hard and barely chewable, like the gingerbread.

I do make biscotti—not for the shingles, but for the brickwork on the chimney, just where it juts above the roof. The rest I do with date bars and marshmallows, because I’m so tired of gingerbread.

Alger appears a couple hours after I place the last cookie on the eave, just after I wash sugary paste from my hands and arms and nourish myself with a wrinkling tomato. No wagon, no donkey. He just appears, and with him is a woman whose nationality I can’t begin to guess. She’s old, with a wide-set face and wide-set frame, as if she’s eaten far more butter and sugar than I. Her skin is even fairer than that of the marauders who attacked my village, and her eyes are large and brown. She looks at the house and cackles, knitting and unknitting her fingers. Once she’s had her humor, she hands a rather large purse of coins to Alger, not to me.

I follow Alger into the forest, walking until the house and its glade are no longer visible. Then Alger puts a burlap sack over my head—the same one I wore after he purchased me—and tells me to cover my ears, because it’s “easier this way, and no-no peeking or you’ll be in trouble.”

He grabs my shoulders, and a spinning, soapy feeling engulfs my stomach. I lean on my good foot and would have collapsed if not for Alger’s painful grip.

The dizziness fades, and Alger yanks the sack from my head. I jump at the sight of the house—
his
house—before us.

“How did you . . . ?” I turn to study him, searching for some sign of the magic he used to spirit us here. But he merely grins and shoves me toward the front door.

There is a whole other world of spells and sorcery coexisting with my own. Alger knows it. This woman in the woods knows it. I believe, somehow, that Fyel knows it.

I am completely ignorant about this hidden realm, but when I bake, I scrape my nails beneath its door.

I get one day of rest, one day of bread and butter and cheese and potatoes—no fruit, no sugar at all. One day to lie in a bed that, compared to the broken thing in the gingerbread house, is remarkably comfortable. One day to peel back the bandages over my leg and inspect its healing. And it
is
healing—the swelling is gone, though I can’t for the life of me figure out how to remove the wooden boot-like splint. I still need it, but my calf and ankle itch so terribly that I grit my teeth and knock the thing against the bed in an attempt to scratch my skin. My ankle is stiff and immobile. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to turn it again.

One day alone in my bedroom with its bricked-up window. One day without Alger and, unfortunately, without Fyel.

Does he know I’ve moved? When he goes to the glade and sees my absence, Alger’s house amid the blazeweed should be his next guess for where I am.

I picture the apparition in my mind, and my stomach stirs. “
Would you deny it if I said yes?
”

Of course, it was another evasion, not an answer, and for some reason, his refusal to answer that question bothers me more than the others.

So. I receive one day as a respite from men in general before Alger twists and slides all the locks decorating my door, wrests it open with a flourish, and announces, “I found another job.”

I don’t even bother to sit up in bed. My muscles are still sore from tiling the chimney with biscotti. “You made so much from the house,” I say. More money than I’ve ever held, certainly. “Do we need to get to work so soon?”

I say “we” because it’s inclusive, and because I need Alger to like me.

“Who knows when the famine comes?” he sings, and then he begins twirling in the center of my room, singing a tone-deaf melody that sounds like a children’s song. If so, it’s not one I’ve heard.

Who knows when the famine comes

To eat your corn and home?

It feasts upon the old and young

Until they’re all but gone.

“That’s a terrible song,” I quip, and he stops his dance and faces me.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s about terrible things.” I finally sit up. “Have you ever seen famine or carried the casket of a dead child?”

He shakes his head no.

“They’re very sad.” Arrice and Franc buried a baby boy once, but that was long before I met them. Still, the thought makes my chest hurt. “Don’t sing that song anymore.”

He doesn’t argue with me. Rather, he nods, and I’m surprised by his acquiescence.

“She’s a widow,” he says. For a moment I think he’s referring to the song, but as he continues, I realize he means our next customer. “She says she’s a widow, and she wants little cake boys. She looks like a goat.”

Standing, I say, “Cake boys?” I struggle to understand the concept, but the loose grin on Alger’s face tells me all I need to know, and I’m suddenly very,
very
tired. “I can’t make living things out of cake.”

I say it so matter-of-factly. A month ago I would have gawked and stared at the request. I wonder if this change should worry me or not.

Glancing out the window, I search for a flare of white. It’s more of a hope than an expectation, of course, and I don’t see him.

“You should try,” Alger suggests.

I rub my eyes. “No, I can’t try. This is very different from the gingerbread house and everything else I’ve made. You can’t toy with life.”

“This is
life
, Maire!”

I freeze, hands still on my eyes. I draw my fingers away and look back out the window. Wisps of the clipped memory float away from the dark void inside my mind. I don’t know why or when those words were spoken, but what really disturbs me is that the voice that spoke them was Fyel’s.

I shiver. My head hurts. Ignoring the quickening of my pulse, I look at Alger and say, “It’s not possible.”

Alger folds his arms and sniffs, very similar to a child’s pout. “You tell her, then,” he says, then breaks his posture to grab and haul me, splint and cane clunking, down the stairs and outside.

Burlap sack, covered ears, and the world spins around us.

Alger guides me, one hand on my shoulder, over brush and stone for a long distance before he takes off the burlap sack. I suck in clean air and rub itches from my face and neck. I scowl at him, but he only looks forward.

I follow his gaze. We approach a small village, one that reminds me enough of Carmine that a sore lump swells at the base of my throat. I swallow against it again and again, willing it small, grateful that, for now, I’m not required to talk. The soil here doesn’t have the rusty hues of Carmine, so I know we’re nowhere near the Platts. Are we even on Dī? I eye the people we pass, searching for any who might resemble me, searching for a blessing in disguise, for any useful information I can glean. There’s a mix of people here, many of whom look like Arrice and Franc and Cleric Tuck, others who have fair or yellow-toned skin. Most have dark eyes. None like myself. I don’t see many mountains, so I wonder if we’re in a coastal town, but we’re too integrated into the city for me to see ocean.

I eye Alger as we walk. I swallow again and manage to say, “Where are we?”

“Questions, questions, questions. But what about mine?” he replied.

“What
are
your questions?”

He doesn’t respond, only walks, leaving uneven footprints in the dirt on the road.

I marvel at the houses. They’re narrower than the ones in Carmine, but the biggest difference is that the roofs stretch all the way to the ground. A childish part of me wants to climb up them and leap from house to house, but of course there’s Alger, and there’s my broken ankle, suddenly heavy.

It’s strange to see so many people with yellow-toned skin milling around, free to do as they please. The majority of their kind I’ve met in recent memory were slaves. But here they walk about casually, eyeing Alger and me with suspicion, working and conversing and being
happy
. I feel like I’m at the beginning again, back in my bakeshop with that armored cart outside my window, only this time I’m the slave, waiting for someone to offer me a piece of charity.

At least I’m not in chains.

As if reading my thoughts, a woman with pollen-colored hair frowns at me as she passes us. Her shoulder collides with Alger’s, jostling him.

Alger sticks his tongue out at her and pushes me down a small lane, this one paved with worn cobblestones. A crow perched atop a roof watches us as we pass, her dark feathers frayed and her head bobbing. She’s old, and she’s hungry. There are songs about crows being the bearers of disease and misfortune, and I remember how a huge flock of them blotted out the sky moments before the marauders charged Carmine. Moments before my life was turned on its head.

I shiver, and in that moment I am grateful to have company, even if it’s Alger.

Alger stops at a blue house with peeling paint and raps his hand on the glass window in the door. It’s high and tinted amber, so I can’t see inside, only hear the soft footfalls of the person within.

The slender woman who opens the door is a bit older than Arrice, with tawny, gray-streaked hair swept up into a bun. Her long apron bears years-old stains, and her hands are pocked with the calluses of labor.

She recognizes Alger immediately. “Oh, please come in. I worried you wouldn’t come . . .” She notices me, and a warm smile crinkles the skin around her eyes. It’s a smile that makes me forget myself for a moment, that makes me feel bathed in the sun as I walk home from the bakeshop, leftover treats in a bag over my shoulder, humming one of the songs Franc picks on his mandolin after dinner. I smile back, and it’s like I’m releasing a breath I’ve held so long it had become nearly solid.

“Come in, please,” she repeats. Her voice is soft, and she steps aside to gesture into the hallway. I enter first.

My splint taps against the hardwood floor as I walk. This woman’s house is everything Alger’s is not: it has character and life, filled with homey things that bear the imprint of its owner. Bouquets of dried flowers hang on the wall of the hallway beside a mirror that boasts a tiny, smudged handprint. Dust speckles between its fingers, as if the print was left a long time ago and never wiped off. There’s a small sitting room to the left, and in it is a hutch that displays a porcelain tea set and a handmade rag doll, a flute, and other assorted trinkets. Everything smells like rosemary and violet, and the air feels warm—the encompassing, sweet warmth of an oven and a kettle, not the oppressive heat of the beating sun.

“My name is Daneen,” the woman says as she guides me into the kitchen. It’s small and quaint, with tiled walls painted with looping blue designs. There’s an oven similar to Arrice’s and more dried flowers on the walls. “What is yours?”

“No names, no names,” Alger whines. He presses his palms to his ears for a fleeting moment. “She will work. She will make them.”

Daneen nods. “Of course. Can I get you something to eat?” she asks Alger.

Alger begins to nod, but then winces, clutching himself as he did that morning in the woods. Muttering through his teeth, he turns back the way he came to suffer alone. I take a step in his direction but don’t follow. I have my orders from Alger, after all, though in truth it’s Daneen’s affection that keeps me.

Daneen has already set out baking pans and a bowl, along with a few small packages of ingredients and a set of measuring spoons. She clasps her hands and smiles, looking at me.

I take a deep breath and force my shoulders to relax. “My name is Maire,” I start.

“That’s pretty. Not one I’ve heard before. Maire.”

“Thank you.” That smile touches my lips again. I wish I could stay here and hide behind this stranger’s skirts, but Alger would take none too kindly to that. Looking Daneen in the eyes, I say, “I don’t know what he promised you, but I can’t make . . . anything
living
. He said something about children . . .”