Baker's Magic (Middle-grade Novels) Read online

  “Perambulate?” Bee had no idea what the princess meant.

  “Walk. And you can tell me all about being a baker.”

  “And you can tell me about being a princess!” Bee agreed, delighted.

  “There’s very little to disclose,” Princess Anika said, hooking her arm through Bee’s. “It’s the most monotonous life in the world. I eat alone at breakfast, study with a tedious tutor all morning, walk in the garden, dine with Uncle Joris, and go to sleep. And the next day, the same.” They took a turn around the fountain and then went to admire the roses.

  “That is boring,” Bee agreed. “Can’t you do other things? Ride horses, maybe? Take dance lessons?” She tried to think of what else princesses might do.

  “Uncle Joris would never permit it,” the princess said with a sigh. “Sometimes I help him catalogue his collections.”

  “I think I saw some of his collections,” Bee said. “One of them was … a little horrible.”

  Princess Anika grimaced. “Oh, the animals? They are horrible, you’re right. When I was younger, I used to pretend they were alive, and I’d converse with them. Now I have a real one, though.”

  “A real what?” Bee asked.

  “Come see!” Anika pulled Bee over to a little circle of boxwood. In its center was a basket, and in the basket, a tiny ball of spikes was curled on a pile of fancy embroidered pillows.

  “A hedgehog!” Bee exclaimed. “Is it alive?”

  “Of course he is!” Anika reached into the basket and ran her hand down the hedgehog’s back. It uncurled a little, raised its nose from the under the protection of its tail, and blinked its beady black eyes sleepily.

  “Isn’t it prickly?”

  “A little. You just have to be prudent when you caress him. His name is Pepin.”

  Bee put out her hand cautiously and touched Pepin’s back, near his head. He followed the movement of her hand with his eyes. He felt very strange—bristly and soft at the same time.

  “I transport him in a little pocket, see?” Anika showed Bee a hammock-shaped pocket attached to a belt at her waist. “It’s padded, so he doesn’t impale me.” She picked up the hedgehog and gently placed him in the pocket. He peered out at them. Bee smiled. What a peculiar pet!

  “I want to show you something else,” Anika said. She pulled Bee around a tall hedge. There was a swath of grass, and in the center was the plant she had seen from the window, taller than any plant Bee had ever seen. It had dark green leaves and was covered with pink flowers. Beneath it spread a carpet of fallen petals.

  “Oh,” Bee breathed. “It’s beautiful! What is it?”

  “It’s a tree,” Anika said proudly. “The only tree in Aradyn.”

  “A tree?” Bee walked up to the plant. It had a thick, rough, reddish-brown stem holding it up, and gnarled brown stalks that split off into smaller and smaller stalks, ending in leaves and flowers. She had never seen anything like it.

  “What is a tree?” she asked. “Some kind of flowering bush?”

  Anika shook her head, pleased that she had surprised Bee. “A tree is a tree. A thing unto itself. This one is a cherry tree. It has flowers now, and later it will bear fruit.”

  “Fruit? Like berries?”

  “They’re a little like berries. Sweet and delicious—oh, you could certainly bake something with them!”

  Bee picked up a handful of petals from the ground and tossed them in the air, letting them rain down over her. “Why is there only one? Why have I never seen another?”

  “Uncle Joris collected it. It’s the only one remaining. Long ago, there used to be trees everywhere, or so he says. But he removed them.”

  Bee sank down on the ground beneath the tree, fingering the petals. “But why? How did he get rid of them?”

  “I don’t know how. Their roots took up a lot of room and consumed the goodness from the soil, he said. He needed them gone for his tulips.”

  “Did he have to take them all? Couldn’t he have left some?”

  Anika shook her head. “He is a man of extremes. And perhaps not entirely reasonable about his collections. With only a single tree remaining, it becomes immeasurably precious.”

  “And the tulips are his?” Bee remembered that Master Bouts had said that the mage had planted them.

  “Oh yes,” Anika confided. “They’re all his. They’re tremendously valuable, you know. Some of the bulbs are worth thousands of coppers. He sells them to other kingdoms.”

  Bee was quiet for a moment, taking this in. “But the tree is so beautiful,” she said at last. “It’s sad that it’s the last one.”

  “I know,” Anika agreed. “I love it. I like to sit under its branches when the sun is out and shining through the petals.” She joined Bee on the ground, and they lay back and looked up through the leaves. Pepin crawled out from his pocket and began snuffling through the grass.

  It was peaceful there, under the tree, and Bee closed her eyes, feeling drowsy. She knew she should get back. It was so nice to lie here with Anika and talk, though. She liked the princess very much. Anika wasn’t at all stuck up or prissy, as Bee had feared she might be. And though she was older, she spoke to Bee as if they were equals. Maybe, Bee thought, that was because Anika hadn’t had much practice talking to people.

  A shadow fell across Bee’s face, and she blinked her eyes open, then sat up fast, her heart leaping. A tall form stood at their feet, a man in black robes with a long, narrow face. He had a shock of dark hair with a white stripe running through it, like a skunk. His hands were clasped before him, and his thick eyebrows angled down toward his nose, making him look quite displeased.

  “Uncle!” Anika exclaimed, sitting up too. She sounded nervous, as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t.

  “Who is this person?” he asked in a gravelly voice. His gaze on Bee felt almost hot, and she shifted uncomfortably and got to her feet. The mage walked slowly in a circle around her, surveying her closely. Bee noticed, to her astonishment, that as his heels struck the ground, small sparks flew upward.

  “Who gave you permission to come into my garden?” the mage demanded.

  Bee looked down. “Nobody, sir,” she said. She didn’t want to tell on the cook, despite the woman’s rudeness. “I came out on my own. I saw the princess from a window and wanted to meet her.”

  “You are a very presumptuous girl,” he snapped. Bee wasn’t sure what he meant, but it didn’t sound good. The mage turned to Anika. “Your tutor has been waiting for you,” he said sternly. “You are very late. Why do you waste his time—and yours?”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle,” Anika said humbly. “I was talking to Bee—I forgot the time. Did you try her extraordinary pastries?”

  The mage frowned. His long nose almost touched his long chin. “There was a plate of them outside my study. This is … Bee, you said?”

  Bee made her awkward curtsy. “Yes, milord,” she said. “I’m the baker’s apprentice.”

  “You made the sweets?”

  “I made the tarts. Master Bouts baked the rest,” Bee said. “I do hope you liked them.”

  “I liked them well enough,” the mage replied curtly. “You may bring more next week. With extra buns.”

  “Of course,” Bee said, and curtseyed again. “I should go now. I’m sorry for making the princess late.”

  “It won’t happen again,” the mage suggested. His face twisted in a peculiar smile that showed his teeth. It made Bee far more uneasy than his scowl had.

  “No indeed!” Bee agreed. She backed away, knocking her head on a low-hanging branch and making a shower of petals fall onto Master Joris’s hair. She almost wanted to laugh at the way he looked with his black and white hair all sprinkled with pale pink petals. But he glared at her, and the urge to laugh disappeared.

  Picking up her skirts, she turned and hurried from the g
arden, feeling the mage’s eyes still on her. She trotted through the maze, which, to her astonishment, allowed her to move in nearly a straight line from one end to the other. Then, breaking into a sprint, she wound back through the dusty, echoing palace halls and, with a gasp of relief, pulled the heavy front doors open and escaped outside.

  CHAPTER 6

  When Bee got back to the bakery, it was nearly closing time. She was afraid Master Bouts would be annoyed that she’d been gone so long, but he just nodded at her and handed her an apron when she came in. The customers turned to her, faces full of curiosity. Everyone, it seemed, knew where she’d been.

  “What was the palace like?” Mistress Tenbrook asked eagerly, her lace cap bobbing atop her gray curls. “Was it beautiful? Full of paintings and fine furnishings?”

  Bee tied on the apron and joined Master Bouts behind the counter. “Not quite,” she said. “It was a little old. And surprisingly unclean.”

  “Really!” Mistress Tenbrook exclaimed. She and the other women looked scandalized. “Do they not have servants?”

  “I only met the cook,” Bee said. “And I didn’t see any other servants besides the butler.”

  The bell above the door jingled, and Wil came in. “You’re back!” he said. “Did you meet the mage? Did he like your pastries?”

  Bee finished packing up an order before she answered. The customers all waited; no one wanted to leave the shop before hearing all about it.

  “I did meet him,” she said finally. “He was a bit … strange. But I’m pretty sure he liked the sweets. He wants more next week.”

  “What did he say to you?” Mistress Van Vleet demanded. “He never speaks when we see him in town. I don’t know anyone who’s ever even heard his voice.”

  “I asked him if he liked the pastries. He said …” Bee tried to remember his exact words. “He said, ‘I like them well enough.’”

  “Well enough, eh?” Master Bouts said, chuckling. “I suppose that’s high praise from him.”

  “He liked your buns best,” Bee told him. The ladies all clucked like hens, pleased that the buns were favored, pleased that their own baker was now the palace baker. Nobody asked about the princess, and Bee was glad. She didn’t want to share Anika with the crowd.

  But when the last of the customers had gone, satisfied with their bread and their gossip, she told Master Bouts and Wil about the rest of her afternoon.

  “Master Joris was horrible,” she said, wiping down the counters with a damp rag. “Tall and mean. He didn’t say one nice thing. And Anika seemed a little afraid of him.”

  “Anika?” Wil repeated. “You’re on a first-name basis with the princess now, Lady Baefje? What quick work!”

  Bee frowned. “She told me to call her that. I wouldn’t have, otherwise.”

  “And what is she like, our princess Anika?”

  “Oh, she’s lovely!” Bee said. “So kind, and really very funny. She speaks a little oddly, with the biggest words. It’s hard to understand her. She seems terribly lonely there, though. Oh, and she has a hedgehog for a pet!”

  Wil’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a prickly pet!” he said. “And is she beautiful, as a princess should be?”

  “I think she is,” Bee said.

  “It is a shame that Master Joris keeps her hidden away,” Master Bouts said. “Sounds as if she could use some company. He never entertains, from what I’ve heard. Poor girl, to spend most of her life alone with nothing but a hedgehog for company.”

  “Well, a hedgehog, a tutor, and Master Joris,” Bee corrected. “I’ll try to see her again next week, when I go—if I’m the one to go.”

  “And who else would it be?” Master Bouts asked. “Now off with you, Wil—here’s your bun. It’s time for our supper.”

  Over cheese omelets, Bee described more of the palace and the princess to Master Bouts. The baker was amazed to hear of Master Joris’s collection of dead animals and shocked by the details of the dirty kitchen and the sour old cook.

  “It’s no wonder the mage gets his pastries elsewhere!” he said. “You would think a palace would have the best and nicest of everything.”

  “You would think,” Bee agreed. She wiped her plate with a heel of bread and chewed the crust thoughtfully. “Master Bouts,” she said. “Have you ever seen a tree?”

  “A tree!” the baker exclaimed. “Why no, that I have not. I don’t believe anyone in Aradyn has ever seen one. What made you think of that?”

  “There is a tree in the palace garden.”

  Master Bouts’s eyes widened. “A real tree? What did it look like?”

  “It was beautiful,” Bee said. “It had a brown trunk, thick as my waist, and stems called …” She tried to remember. “Branches! Green leaves, like a boxwood hedge, only lighter colored and much bigger. And little pink flowers. Princess Anika said it was a cherry tree.”

  “Well, I never,” Master Bouts said, astonished. “Was there only the one?”

  “It’s the last one, the princess said. She said Master Joris got rid of all the others. Do you know about this? What did he do—did he cut them down?”

  Master Bouts shook his head. “I don’t exactly know. They all disappeared at once, I heard. I know that long ago, there were trees here. More than a hundred years ago. All different kinds of trees. Things grew on them that bakers used, that I’ve always longed to use.”

  “What sorts of things?”

  “Nuts, for one.”

  “Nuts?”

  “Walnuts. Pecan nuts. Hazelnuts. Like in the recipes in A Booke of Baking.”

  “What do they taste like?”

  “I’ve no idea. They’re crunchy, I believe. I’d like to find out, though—that I would!”

  Bee tried to guess what nuts might taste like, but it was too hard to imagine a flavor she’d never experienced. “The princess said Master Joris took away the trees so there was room for the tulips to grow.”

  “Yes, that’s what I heard as well,” Master Bouts said. “He wanted them all gone. Still, the trees were useful, in their way, or so the old-timers tell us.”

  “Useful how?”

  “You know how the autumn storms come?” Bee knew it well. Every fall, gales lashed the coast, traveled up the canals, damaged houses, and sank boats.

  “The storms wash away the soil, and they’ve gotten worse. Or the soil has gotten weaker. Every year we lose more land. The trees had deep roots, they say, much deeper than a shrub’s. They held the soil in place, like a mother would hold a child.”

  Bee nodded. “I remember the big storm two years ago. It nearly washed away the house where I lived. And the beach where the fishermen kept their boats—that was gone. Just gone.”

  “That was one of the worst ones,” Master Bouts said, shuddering. “Another like that … well, I don’t know how many more of those we can take.”

  The family Bee had lived with, the Sutphens, had said something like that after the big storm. Master Sutphen, who fished all summer and grumbled all winter, had lost his boat in the storm. He stood out in the gale, railing against the rain and the howling wind, howling himself and shaking his fist helplessly at the sky. The relentless waves swallowed the strand and the little patch of garden that Bee and Mistress Sutphen tended and almost pulled the house itself into the sea. The rest of that fall and winter, Master Sutphen and the other fishermen had built a dike, an earthen dam, to try to keep the sea back, but the next autumn a storm washed most of it away as well.

  “And the storms hurt Zeewal too?” Bee asked. The town was nearly a mile from the sea.

  “They race up the canal and pull the sea with them, over the banks. We had two feet of water in the streets after that gale. It took months to clean up. There’s nothing to hold the water back. And when the sea retreats, it takes part of the land with it.”

  Bee carried the supper dishes to
the sink and scrubbed them clean as Master Bouts lit his long brown pipe and puffed smoke rings. It was hard to believe that there had once been trees everywhere. She tried to picture the land with trees instead of long grasses and fields of tulips. How different it would look!

  “Do you think Master Joris knows that the sea is taking the land?” she asked the baker. He blew a smoke ring through a larger smoke ring before he answered.

  “I don’t think he much cares. He doesn’t love the land, or Aradyn’s people, for that matter. He only loves the money he gets for his tulip bulbs.”

  Bee could believe this, after meeting the mage. He was a strange, harsh man.

  “But what about the king, before he died? Why wouldn’t he make Master Joris put back the trees?”

  Master Bouts shrugged. “It’s only in recent times that people have begun thinking that the trees might have helped. Most likely the king just didn’t know. And people have forgotten the bounty trees once gave. They think the way things are now is the way they always were. Many have never even seen the king—he’s been gone a long time.”

  “Poor Princess Anika,” Bee said softly.

  “She’ll set things to rights, once she reaches her majority. When she’s eighteen, she’ll be queen, and Master Joris will just be Aradyn’s mage, nothing more.”

  But Bee wondered—how could Anika possibly bring back what was gone?

  For the next few days, Bee experimented with her baking. After seeing Anika’s reaction to her tarts, she was pretty certain that Master Bouts’s outlandish idea about the baking magic might be right. Bee had danced about with Wil when she made the tarts, and Anika had danced when she’d eaten them. She was less sure about the effect on Master Joris. Maybe it didn’t work on mages—or maybe the fact that he didn’t shout at her and chase her out of the garden was as close to dancing as he came.

  The first part of the experiment took place after Bee had an argument with Mistress de Vos, who insisted she’d paid for a cake when she’d only given a single copper for a loaf of bread. Quickly Bee ran back to the kitchen and mixed up a tart crust, letting her anger flow freely as she cut the butter into the flour. Then she fed the tart to Wil. She decided it would be better to experiment on a friend than a paying customer.