Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet (7 page)

So many people all looking at me.

CHAPTER 7

While Allemas is not smart enough to keep me fed, he knows the basics of first aid, though his hands are rough, his touch unkind.

I plead with him in words unintelligible even to myself. My body is strewn out on the kitchen floor, cold except for where the fire blazes in my right leg, muddy save for the tear-cut lines running down my face. My nails dig into the old wood at the bottom of the kitchen cabinets and in the hairline spaces between floorboards. Allemas jerks my injured foot this way and that, immune to the screaming that leaves me raw and hoarse. For a moment I do black out, but not for long enough. He pours some sort of foul, alcoholic drink over the deep gashes and bandages me so tightly I lose consciousness again.

I’m in the cellar for the next . . . I’m not sure. A day, maybe two, before he drags me out and sets me with some sort of splint—unfinished wood nailed into a right angle, a semblance of a leg and foot. Agony reawakens in me when he binds my injured leg to it, strapping my knee tightly to the wood before leaving me in the kitchen. In a moment of clarity, I prop my throbbing appendage onto the counter in an attempt to ease the swelling. It makes my head spin and my hair sweat, and my lungs can’t draw in enough air. My stomach is wrung between hands almost as cruel as Allemas’s.

Allemas attempted to set my bones before binding my injury. I’ll eventually be able to walk, but even after my leg heals, I’ll never run again.

I’m too dehydrated to cry, but the gods will feel it. Somehow I know they will.

“Make me a cake.”

I wipe my face, wet from running it under the pump, on my sleeve. While I haven’t had a proper bath since being taken from Carmine, Allemas has at least given me “new” clothes. They’re his, judging by the size and the strange cut of the fabric. A white shirt and earthy slacks. One leg of the slacks is rolled up so I don’t trip on the length. The other is cut at the knee to allow space for my wooden boot and still-swollen foot and leg.

Allemas tosses me a poorly crafted cane. Where he got it from, I don’t know, and I don’t care. It takes me a moment to stand. I lean all my weight on my good left leg and prop my elbows against the counter, taking slow, deep breaths until I feel steady. Then I stare at him, my body as weak as the water still dripping from the spout.

Allemas repeats, “Make me a cake.”

I swallow. “What do you want?”

“A cake.”

“But what kind?” I glimpse the latest grocery run stacked up on the kitchen floor. Allemas brought his merchandise into the kitchen sometime during my last stay in the cellar. Apparently I only get to stay in the bedroom if I’m on my best behavior.

“What do I need?”

I stare at him, forgetting the constant throbbing of my maimed foot for a moment.
Mercy, wit, beauty, sensibility . . . everything.

The pain returns and I think,
Something that will stick in your throat and never slide down
, and then look away, ashamed for thinking it. This bitter, hateful woman is not who I am.

The maw of blackness inside presses on me, unyielding, and I wonder,
What if it is?
But I banish the thought and push an image of Arrice into my mind, focusing on it until my forehead grows hot. Arrice is the woman I want to be, regardless of what I can’t remember.

For a moment my memory glimmers, something like a flash of light filled with the sensation of claylike warmth. I startle and grasp for it, but the sensation fades too quickly. Something from my life before?

Who am I?
I asked Arrice once, the day after she took me into her home.

I don’t know
, she had said.
But if you stay long enough, I can tell you what you’re not.

I close my eyes and try not to focus on the pain radiating in my leg. For a moment I reconsider my idea for a sleeping cake, something to help me get away . . . but of course, I can’t run. I wouldn’t get far, and I’m not sure what other traps Allemas might have set for me. He didn’t seem surprised by the animal trap.

“What do I need?” he repeats.

I clear my throat and say, “I don’t think you want me to answer that.”

“Oh, but you must. Make me a cake. Make me the way I’m supposed to be. How am I supposed to be?”

I eye him now. He’s leaning forward, his eyes wide and expectant like a child’s. His question sincere.

“I don’t know what you’re supposed to be,” I answer, mimicking Arrice. “I can only tell you what you’re not.”

This deflates him, but he’s insistent. “Make me what I’m supposed to be. But no tricks. I can taste your tricks.”

I rummage through the groceries and find sprigs of mint there, so I decide to lead with them. I pause before mincing it, wondering what on Raea I can make this man that won’t be considered a “trick.” What can I make him that won’t anger him? That he won’t use as an excuse to hurt me?

He stares at me, then the floor, then outside. Twiddling his thumbs. I can’t decide, but that very thought gives me an idea.

Decisiveness. If nothing else, it will help him with whatever business he has on the side. And if he makes more money, we’ll have more food, and I won’t go hungry so often.

I make the cake, thinking back on every sure decision I can remember making. Staying with Arrice and Franc. Staying out in a windstorm to help a cow birth her calf, despite knowing it wouldn’t survive. Opening the bakeshop. Giving the slave that petit four.

I pop the cake into the oven and scrape the excess batter from the bowl with a spoon. Allemas doesn’t stop me from savoring each sugary mouthful.

The cake is half-baked when Allemas suddenly leaps to the back door and presses his face and hands against the window there. His breathing grows loud and strong. He squints, searching, before his eyes begin to dart back and forth.

I limp to the window on the other end of the kitchen and peer out myself, searching. Searching for a flicker of white. Has Fyel returned? But I see nothing, and I wonder if he’s forgotten me, the way I’ve almost forgotten him. My shoulders grow heavy, and I cast my eyes away from the window, picking at the line of mortar where the counter meets the wall.

Allemas puffs over the window, fogging it with his breath.

“What is it?” I ask, testing. Maybe it
was
Fyel, and I just missed him.

Allemas shakes his head and balls his hands into fists. He says nothing until I feed him a slice of cake, after which he declares, “Yes, we will take the job. We will go into the forest. It will be a good trip for us, Maire.”

He says my name like there’s weight to it and watches me as though I’m supposed to react.

Ignoring him, I scrape the last bit of batter from the bowl.

I’m locked in my room—which, though a prison, I still greatly prefer over the cellar—while Allemas leaves the house, again not taking his wagon. He comes back in the middle of the night. I know this because he wakes me.

“Up up up, it’s time to go!” he declares. “Gather your things!”

I rub sleep from my eyes and crack my back; it’s sore from switching from the hard cellar floor to the ratty mattress. “I have no things,” I mumble, but instead of responding he clips something around my neck. I feel it in the darkness—it’s some kind of collar. I grapple for my cane. He then leashes me like a dog and tugs me out to the wagon, where he ties me to the tailboard.

My leg aches so much from the sudden walk that the pain radiates nearly to my hip. I hoist myself onto the wagon to relieve the pressure and examine the knot. I might be able to untie it before . . . and then I recall that I’ve been crippled, that I can barely stand, and I’ll never outpace Allemas on elbows and knees. Though this is not the first time I’ve come to this realization, it still strikes me like a cup of ice water over sun-warmed skin.

I finger my collar as Allemas goes back inside, but I can’t figure out how he clasped it. I am an animal, and my yearning to stretch myself out and find
someone
, even a stranger, to comfort me ripples through the iciness in my belly. What would I do to have Arrice hold my hand, to hear Franc play his mandolin, or to sit close enough to Cleric Tuck just so I could lean my head on his shoulder?

I look up at the stars. They look just as they did in Carmine.

Allemas makes several trips to and from the wagon, loading up every last baking supply he owns. I don’t ask him why; I’m grateful he’s not making me do the work, and I want to be forgotten, if only for a little while. Perhaps he’s in a hurry. Perhaps he’s even sympathetic about my injury, but the prospect almost makes me laugh. Almost.

I sit in the back of the wagon, shoved between sacks of flour and bundles of split wood, while Allemas drives his poor donkey higher up the road. I watch the animal, wishing I could will endurance into it. I can feel it strain with every lurching step. When we stop, I’ll try to sneak it a biscuit.

Propping my feet up on the wagon, I lean back against the flour and watch the stars, finding familiar patterns among their twinkling lights. Arrice and Franc never watched stars with me; these are patterns I recall on my own. Odd, how memory works. How can I be so familiar with the stars, yet so bewildered when I try to think of my parents’ faces or my childhood? Sometimes I wonder if I ever had a family at all.

Sometime before daybreak I fall asleep. I wake again as the sun pulls its heavy body over the horizon. Allemas stops at a stream for the donkey and jaunts into the woods, searching for . . . something. Climbing out of the wagon is slow going because of my wood-locked foot, but I manage it and offer the donkey one of my biscuits. The animal eats it happily. I can feel its relief somehow, as though it were my own.

To my surprise, once Allemas returns, we ride up the narrowing road for only another quarter mile more before he attempts to drive the wagon
through
the dense wood. He doesn’t get far.

“You’ll break a wheel,” I tell him. If that happens, I won’t be able to make the walk back to his home.

“Hmm.” He thinks, looking up at the sky. “Can’t show you, no, no,” he murmurs to himself. “You have to learn, but you can’t learn
that
. Mine now.”

He slips from the driver’s chair and unhitches the donkey. “We’ll go on foot.”

I look down at my splint. Allemas sighs and says, “You ride Maire.”

“Pardon?”

“Maire,” he says, pointing to the donkey. “I named her Maire.”

I stare but make my way toward the beast, swallowing the comment I wish to make. At least he’ll let me ride.

“You can rename me,” he offers, but when I shake my head, his shoulders slump and he loads the donkey with a few supplies before wordlessly guiding us into the woods.

We walk for a very long time. I don’t think the four-legged Maire would have made it if not for the enchanted biscuit I fed her. We walk for so long that the forest begins to look the same, as if we’re looping around and around, but the sun stays constant in the sky, above and slightly to the east. After a while, I realize it’s
too
constant. We’ve walked for hours, yet the sun hasn’t moved or crossed any closer to its western slumber . . . or its eastern rise. It merely stays where it is, watching.

Shivers run up my arms, and I comfort myself by stroking the donkey’s coarse fur. Where has Allemas taken me? These woods are bespelled by a magic I cannot begin to understand. When I hold my breath, I can feel it tickling my exposed skin like glossy spiderwebs.

Eventually the trees open into a wide grove in which sits an old well and a dilapidated house. It’s small and single story, made of weather-beaten wood. Half its roof has collapsed. Its windows have no glass, its chimney has fallen, and one side looks licked by fire, though the surrounding foliage is undamaged. I dismount Maire and limp toward it. The front door sags from its upper hinge. Inside the walls are mostly intact, though they’re splintering. There’s a large woodstove crafted from stone carved into the far wall, and rusted iron bent into an oversized birdcage hangs from the ceiling. An old bed lies to my left, but its mattress is moth eaten.