A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

(Mind you, I have always felt that kids like much darker books than adults are comfortable handing them, but I also understand that parents and librarians are the ones who control the book buying, and a weird little anti-establishment book with carnivorous sourdough and armies of dead horses was too hard a sell.)

“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.”

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a cookie look smug.

The slug reached the barricade. Our guards scrambled out of its way. It slimed over the top easily. The dough was sticky enough that it didn’t have any problems with the footing, and anyway, it didn’t exactly have feet.

And because I was really going to die, right this minute, and it didn’t much matter anymore, I said, “You’ve got something stuck in your teeth.”

He blinked. I guess this is not the sort of thing that people say when you’re about to stab them. “What?”

“In your teeth. Um. Sort of green—”

“What is wrong with you?”

This was an excellent question. I was sort of wondering that myself.

I sank my fingers into the dough. Generally when I had the cookies do this, it was a dance number to amuse the customers, but…

“Are they doing the can-can?” asked Harold in disbelief.

“Battle can-can,” said the Duchess wisely. “Very old tactical maneuver. Used to defeat the waltzing berserkers of West Quillmark, as I recall.”

“You just made that up.”

“Well, obviously.”

The mercenaries looked at their leader and at the golem. They did not look up the wall, thankfully, where they might have seen a fourteen-year-old girl scowling ferociously into a bowl full of bread dough.

Aunt Tabitha, who had lost much of her fear of the monarchy in the last day, actually patted the Duchess’s hand and said, “Don’t worry, your grace. It will take a great deal to get rid of me. Someone must make sure that all you wizards and warriors remember to eat.”

The cookies were grinning like wolves, if wolves were flat and golden brown and smelled vaguely of cayenne. It occurred to me that something made of rat poison and mischief was probably going to have better ideas about how to harass a sleeping army than a mere human baker.

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