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The first version of galette des rois got scattered to the pigeons because whether or not the filling was right, the pastry wasn't.
Puff pastry from scratch is a luxury for me. It mostly happens in the winter because it takes time, and the room has to be cool and not too humid, and while I can make both time and temperature happen, it’s not practical when the bakery is boiling before I’ve even turned the Prometheus on: I can do useful things with that heat.
In spring, I hope like heck that none of the commercial suppliers have changed their recipes, and test them all anyway, and then when fall comes I insist to myself that I don’t have the time and - every year so far - I start making my own again.
And yes, it takes me a couple of tries to get it each time, and the first attempts get fed to the wildlife or our most willing customers, and since there are obvious consequences to feeding the pigeons around the coffeehouse too freely, it’s become a fall tradition for me to sit by the gate at Mel’s house and throw out a larger-than-usual quantity of crumbs.
(Thinking about how many clandestine Weres there likely are at the coffeehouse, it’s possible some of those customers get two servings this way. I can hardly ask. I guess I’d consider that a compliment.)
I plated up galette version two on two of Yolande's nicest saucers, the silver filigree set (probably original Kashmir work, from the early 50s and the immigrations after the second independence war) and carried the servings through to Yolande’s breakfast room.
Yolande cut a piece with her cake fork. I listened to the way the pastry crackled. Good.
"Mmmmm," said Yolande, as I took a bite of my own portion. Also good.
Her eyes narrowed. "No kirsch?" she inquired.
(Galette version zero, galette-the-project, was what went through my head the first time after No Town, after Bo, that I came home with a large bakery bag, as usual, as if it could stand in for an explanation of where I’d been and what I’d done - and everything her help had done for me. Normalcy was inadequate. So was baking, maybe, but a glorious, bespoke creation is the first way a baker knows how to say thank you.
Even if the creation I was going for was a traditional pastry she already knew and loved. Glorious incarnation in the twenty-first century, OK?)
Galette version three, which deserved it, didn’t get much critical commentary, because Billy had given his ankle a bad sprain trying out Kenny’s longboard, and my mother still had rage left over after verbally tanning both of them. All I wanted to do was to drink tea and chat about the New Arcadia plan to declare itself the sister city of Valledupar, in Nueva Granada, and what ill-thought-out public decorating schemes this was likely to result in.
(Before the Wars, New Arcadia’s sister township had been Bath. There’s actually a neat history around that, but Bath is no longer standing, which made the Valledupar idea a bit awkward as a relationship metaphor, and, if nothing else, excellent fodder for speculation on which municipal figure would say the least intelligent thing about it in the months to come.)
So we chatted, and we chewed, as two parallel activities. Chewed was the right word. I kicked myself for stretching the pastry and therefore breaking the gluten links. Puff pastry won’t stand for much of that. And the filling - with kirsch this time - was too moist, which hadn’t helped.
"Yes, there is yet something missing," Yolande admitted, to version number four. "The beans."
I must have looked skeptical. I didn't think the possibility of an uncooked bean secreted in a different part of the pastry could change your impression of the part you were actually biting into. Maybe thrill needed to go with galette des rois the way that nostalgia went with madeleines or unbearable sadness went with lemon cake.
(Aimil is in charge of a 'Something Old, Something New' shelf at the library. The shelf is blue, obviously.)
"I could put raisins in," I suggested, not because I thought it was a great idea, but because Zora had once delivered a long rant to me about raisins, and how they should not be added to anything, ever. She had compared the sensation of biting into a cookie or a cake, and stopping at a raisin, to receiving a static shock to the teeth. Raisins: the illusion of bad dentistry. Or the reality, for the unlucky.
“No,” said Yolande, “I confess I am missing something that always varies between bakers. The beans in the galettes that I had as a child were infused with wishes to celebrate the season: Twelfth Night and the Epiphany.”
I had to think about this.
I also had to work not to look disappointed. On the surface of things, I was creating a new staple for the coffeehouse and testing it on Yolande as the highest galette authority, but what I really wanted was to make a pastry every bit as good as a childhood memory. Jossish ask.
An especially jossish ask, because even if I had been able to enchant beans to order, I wouldn’t be leaping two hurdles (or tall buildings) in a single bound any more. I could hardly serve magical beans in a public bakery.
I didn’t think I could bring magical beans within throwing distance of a public bakery.
Magic handlers don’t tend to work in restaurants, because it is easy to combine food and magic. Potions are as old as astronomy. Tisanes are as old as pictograms. What’s hard is controlling the results.
Items that nourish you have their own magic. Think about the non-magical claims made about something as simple as a tomato; ginger; salt. Antioxidants. Carminative properties. Leptin production. Hormone regulation. Soluble fibre. Non-soluble fibre. (Emmy, after her boy Barry started school, started correspondence courses in nutrition and insisted that the rest of us test her on terms. The main kitchen charts describing saturated versus unsaturated fats started to get a bit old, but then Consuela persuaded a journalist intern to use Emmy as the focus of a human interest story about adult education, which was a brilliant advertisement for Charlie’s, and so we lived with the dietician jargon.)
Then think about the magical properties of the compounds in an innocent blueberry muffin. Blueberries (or so say Emmy’s charts) contain iron. Not much, but enough that if you lace them with magic, you tangle with the magical properties of iron. Iron is powerful enough pure; we’re talking compounds. I didn’t get further in chemistry than junior high, but that’s enough to know that different molecular compounds of iron act differently. Rust has different magical properties to the iron in blood, right? Even though they both have iron and oxygen involved.
And then there’s egg, which is magical for chemical reasons and latently magical for a picajillion symbolic reasons, and flour, which I won’t get into, and salt, which is a magical sponge - it soaks things up. And then there’s baking the muffin, which does things to its chemistry and probably shuffles the compounds around, and then there’s digesting the muffin, which also does things to the compounds.
Yolande broke into my reverie. “I could teach you,” she said.
And I hadn’t even got into why I, personally, didn’t want to add mojo to my mixology. Possibly a good thing. That was a whole reverie all by itself.
“Oh,” I said, stalling.
“You have spoken to me,” said Yolande, “of sun-self, tree-self, dark-self ...” (There was no one I could bear to tell about the deer-self.) “... I think that is the wrong - ontology.
“In the keeping of wards,” she continued. “I deal in keeping things separate, and keeping things whole. There is no, hm, shutting the barn door once the horse is gone, yes? Or when another beast is in.”
My apartment was in the end of the old farmhouse that had been converted from a barn. I went off on a mini-fantasy in which living there had also gained me a horse-self. Possibly from an entirely peaceful haunting of the previous space. The horse-self and the deer-self would get along just thor.
“It concerns me to see you draw upon magic only as if it were a resort against darkness - as if it belonged to the dark. In such a way, you draw the dark to you... Those who seek to fight evil must needs seek it out.”
At the lake, I’d been looking for calm; when I travelled to Con’s earth-place, I’d been looking out for my friend; when I’d gone with him to confront Bo, I’d... gone with a vampire to defeat another, much worse, master vampire. I wanted to say that I hadn’t sought out darkness. I wanted to.
“You have succeeded, and success begets success.” She paused, to let the ominous parts of that sink in. “But what flourishes is what is - fed. You are a baker and a magic handler, and these may be reconciled.” Yolande made a little lift-up gesture as though to make light of her words.
She was way ahead of me. I hadn’t actually decided I was a magic handler. I mean, I’d handled magic. But it wasn’t exactly a decision.
This was a decision.
My hand twitched to my hip, where my little jackknife rode everywhere in the pocket of my jeans. I’d started to think of it as an extension of me, as if the little snap that caused it to glow all the time had been the breaking of a barrier between me-ness and it-ness. Speaking of weird ontologies.
Oh again. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of this: every day, I was bringing to the bakery a thing I even identified as magically radioactive. I supposed I trusted it. Well: I trusted it to kill vampires (exploding chests, organs in the process of turning into gore, master sucker and his actual, carthaginian suction) and to save vampires (better to think of Con holding up against the goddess of pain). I suppose I hadn’t actually sat down and asked if it minded keeping its mysterious radiance away from the consumables. Well. I never claimed to be particularly brave about awkward conversations.
Including with myself.
There were a lot of things I thought about only when I had to, so some really unpleasant realizations lately had dawned in conversation. (Your magic handling choices are leading, in a straight line, to things worse than master vampires. Your knife is leaking magic onto food.) Worst, in these conversations, I’d have my bad-Eureka moment and come back to earth to realize that the other person was operating on the assumption that I’d known all along. (Bad cross genes. Thanks, SOF.)
I didn’t want to be a magic handler. But I didn’t want to not-choose in a way that turned into a choice. I didn’t want to always be doing magic in the dark.
“Beans infused with wishes,” I said.
Yolande swallowed a bite of galette and nodded.
“All right,” I said.
We went shopping. Most of what we needed was available in the supermarket - salt cut with ground tukmaria; purified ashes of various plants; a sack of beans. Yolande pulled out a business card - crisp and sharp, I saw - when we paid for the materials, and got a large discount, and had to sign a few forms. Current bylaws allowed certain items to be sold cheaply to licensed magic handlers who provided detailed descriptions of their intended purpose; Mrs Bialosky, among others, was petitioning for the reversal of those laws. Among other flaws, the standard of which items should be included in this category vacillated every week. And resale was a nightmare.
We ran into a snag with food colorings. Yolande stared dubiously at the MegaFood baking shelves: “In my notes for this method, I only have reference to anilines.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. But apparently E123 or E161g weren’t going to cut it. I reviewed our requirements. “You need something bright, soluble in water, not soluble in oil, and...”
“Fugitives are permissible.” She saw my confusion. “They may fade in water or light.”
I thought back through the last few issues of Baking Quarterly, and some of the friends who knew me on the ethernet as Cinnamon. “I can speak to someone,” I said. “We should be able to make something for you...” The echo was conscious in my voice as I said, “It will not be more than a week or two.”
Yolande snorted. It set me off, and there we were, snickering a little at the muffin mix boxes and the cream of tartar.
We drove home, so that I could send a cosmail and take my own car in to work the late shift. We’d used Yolande’s little Ladybird for our materials mission. I baulked at taking Yolande anywhere in the Wreck; it might be good enough for me (and Mel and Dave, who’d arranged it for me), but it could be a rough ride. Yet one more aspect of my life set to me and no one else. Lately, I’d been noticing those.
“We will need a morning, soon,” Yolande said. “The next part will take several hours on a sunny day.”
Whether by chance or design, she was making it easy for me.
Yolande came up with me to my balcony, and put down on the deck a shallow amber bowl. The bowl was thin-walled, and beautiful, and when we half-filled it with warm water, its shadows stirred lazily, echoing the movement of the water, but only that.
Yolande poured a little blue-tinted salt into the water, then about a cup of the beans. “Put your left hand in the water,” she directed, “and stir once anticlockwise; then change it for your right hand, and stir twice clockwise. Then three stirs with your left hand, and so on up to twelve.”
She waited with me as I took off my mittens and did this. It was only November, but it was getting chilly. Under my jeans, I was wearing thick stripey socks nearly to my knees, and the kind of sweater that has a big kangaroo pouch in front for both your hands. Today was bright, but it felt as though the sun wasn’t getting all the way down to the ground. I had to pull, leaning up into the light.
“Now,” said Yolande, “you will help the water evaporate, and concentrate the salt again. You do not need to touch anything for this - you can put your mittens back on. You only need to watch.”
Only a third of the salt crystals were dissolved, if that, and they still drifted slightly at the bottom of the bowl. Most of the beans sat on the bottom, but a few floated further up. I remembered a fairy tale about a boy who has to answer a riddle by things that fall into just such strata: a horse that ate from the top of the barrel was born in the morning, that sort of thing. I wasn’t sure what parts of this I needed to be paying attention to.
The salt swirled, and its shadows swirled with it, and the bowl’s amber made the beans and salt - but not the shadows - glow. The salt’s shadows did funny things; when a large grain hit another, it cast something like a spark, but dark, the shadow flaring out. I could hear the leaves of my tree very faintly, and it occurred to me that they were like the sound the salt might make, moving across the bowl’s surface, if there happened to be no water and I had very acute hearing.
“Good,” said Yolande. “I will let you be.”
It felt like hours. It was similar to when I’d sat in Oldroy Park and watched the tree breathe. The water stilled soon enough, except when a breeze disturbed the bowl’s surface; the drift of the salt slowed. But as these movements stopped, I began to notice, in the shadows, the sliding of the water upwards and away. I felt sunlight strike the water: I imagined, by the way I noticed it, that I increased this. I felt the boundaries of light and water shift, as though the air were breathing the water in – as though my tree were breathing. I felt the salt dissolved in the water break away and group together on the beans. Then the water was gone, and Yolande touched my shoulder.
“What do you see?”
I picked up a bean without waiting for permission, and squinted at it. It was taupe and tan, mottled like an egg. A little salt flaked off as I picked it up, but most of the salt appeared to have contracted into thin whorls and patterns across the bean, catching the light a little, like silver-blue fretwork. “Lace,” I said.
“There,” Yolande said. “When you do that with the final ingredients, that will be the net that keeps the magic in.”
Mom discovered me on the phone with a Baking Quarterly columnist, taking notes for Yolande. What I wanted was a type of dyestuff called a lake, which was causing new complications because it also involved metallic salts. The person on the other end of the line was saying things like Is a suspension okay instead of a solution? and maybe you should talk to a druggist. I wondered what had brought Mom down to the bakery when I was actually there. Must have been the smell of project management in the air.
Still listening, I put my hand out for the charm she had inevitably brought for me, and she gave me a twist of paper. This charm was a flat panel of knots, the string sprayed with something green that made it lie stiff, and at every knot there was a tiny metal ivy-leaf shape. It was pretty. It was pushy of Mom - ivy was fidelity, which might be a stronger than usual hint about me and Mel - but as I turned it over in my hand I thought instead about severed loyalties knit together.
“Thanks, I’ll have to ask my client,” I told the baking columnist. “I don’t know what’s important about the salts she’s already using. I don’t know about suspensions. I think the water just has to evaporate and leave a residue.”
The columnist was getting confused.
Mom was not the type to hang around for someone else to finish a phone conversation; she got bored far too easily. She scribbled a note for me: TAKE BETTER NOTES FROM CLIENT, which wasn’t very helpful, but was sort of to the point. Maybe we’d fight about it later. If I were smart, I’d figure out something else to fight about. I didn’t have the right words to explain to my family what I was doing, not yet.
By the time I had the right kind of colorant for Yolande, there were a handful of beans left in the original sack we’d bought; and a double handful that were netted and perfect: green and gold and purple. (Mostly green. That was the first coloring agent I’d got right.)
I tilted the jar: this created an absolute cacophony of shadows, as if I'd set a flock of birds flying, but it was strangely easy on the eye, the way watching a real kaleidoscope used to be. I would miss this part. You’d think it would be skegging boring - literally watching paint dry - but it focused me: it was the closest I’d ever come to meditation. I am bad at closing my eyes and thinking of nothing. That’s probably not a surprise.
I supposed I didn’t have to stop putting things in salty water and evaporating the water. But perhaps I should ask Yolande what uses these ‘nets’ had before I made them all over the place, like a happy little spider. (Spider-self, meet tree-self and deer-self and sun-self...) Well, I could put a net around my knife.
"How do I put wishes in these?" I asked.
"What shall we wish for?" Yolande replied, watching the jar too.
I waited, in case this was a rhetorical question, but it wasn’t.
“Health? Wealth? Luck?”
Yolande said nothing.
Those were all carthaginian awful ideas. Wishing for health was probably the safest, but... I had a vague memory that healing magic, if not practised by a healersister or healerbrother, or based on actual medicine, affected you the way that... hm... Con’s loan had, in giving me the ability to see in the dark. That ability had no real relation to my eyes, and if I somehow lost it, or gave it away, my eyes would be just as they’d been before. Possibly worse for the neglect. Wishing for health was like wishing you could have a second, magical liver, of uncertain longevity, substituting for your own until... it didn’t.
Wealth: hah, talk to the bankers and the economists. There were wards and charms that could help you make sensible budgeting decisions; anything beyond that ventured on sorcery.
Luck was available to all and abused by all and the study of fifteen established religions in this country alone. The Murphy’s Lorists scared me.
“No,” I said. “Okay then, what?”
“We don’t wish for a pony,” said Yolande, with asperity. “We start with what a bean can already do. Food can make us feel comfortable and safe, or refreshed and willing; its chemicals have the building blocks of things our body needs; a bean is the seed of new life.”
“Mood enhancers?” I said. It was kind of a letdown.
Yolande said, “Not exactly. A wish should be a finer balance between a want and a need.”
Then I caught up to something she’d said earlier: “A pony?”
For once, Yolande didn’t seem to want to meet my eyes. She hesitated, then said, “Violante is visiting after the solstice, with Abi, Domenique, and Élodie. I would like you to celebrate Twelfth Night with us; I would like to have galette des rois, in its final version, then.”
I got a sick feeling in my stomach.
“I don’t know what I’m doing yet,” I said.
“You will by Twelfth Night, or I am no teacher,” said Yolande.
“Kids, Yolande,” I said. “I can’t - what about Wonka?”
“That scenario was thoroughly dissected in my master’s workshop,” said Yolande. She saw my expression. “At the time that it unfolded,” she added pointedly. “In fact, my colleague Ancilla was part of a committee formed to determine if such a thing were possible here, and what safeguards needed to be improved.”
“And your conclusions?” I said.
“The concept was cruel and unusual; several of the children ought to have suffered transformations far more severe than occurred. The magical safeguards were, in fact, good; it was the thing they were safeguarding against that was reprehensible.
“We are not experimenting here, Sunshine,” she said. “I am updating the method, but it is an old one; you will do no harm to anyone.”
I still felt sick. I’d been a child among magic handlers, most of whom loved me, some of whom - associates and allies - had had more callous ideas. In the years after my mom left my dad, certain childhood memories had changed shape, because I’d realised that they contained a certain danger, which had been hidden from me then.
I didn’t know what to say.
“And if I tell you that Violante will explain to my great-nieces what they are biting into? That they may choose to decline? That I believe most firmly that the children of magic handlers should be given small tastes of this world, in safe surroundings, so that they may trust themselves and it?”
Yolande had been a child among magic handlers. She must have been.
I still couldn’t say anything.
“Well,” said Yolande. “You are alarmed by the idea of what you might do: so, we will fill a bean with a wish, now, and we will try it on you, and you will experience for yourself the rough form of this incantation, before you have practised it and polished it and protected it.”
“Will it be - unsettling?”
“Very,” said Yolande. “But safe enough. What would you like to wish for?”
This felt like being asked, did I want to try sword-swallowing first, or the cannonball launch, or the fire hoops? But Yolande was calm. She was studiously calm.
I thought about Pat’s predictions that Good would lose to Evil in under a century, and my knee-jerk-ish reaction (very jerkish reaction, I know) that if I didn’t handle magic, well, I wouldn’t have to be around to see that. Here I was, handling magic. I needed to give myself some way to deal with that.
“Let’s try hope,” I said.
Using the plant ash, Yolande drew a neat glyph on a small, unmarked handkerchief of cloth: the flower in stony places, a stylised rose enclosed in a bold square. The bean went on the centre of the cloth, and then she placed the cloth in my hand and folded my fingers around it. Drily, job-interview style, she said, “Describe for me a moment in your life when you felt hope.”
“Um.”
“Or simply think it, if you’d rather.”
I thought about Miss Yanovsky telling me just how I was going to manage to get through high school. I thought about the first, and then the second time that Aimil had said ‘hey’ to the scrubby girl sitting with her books at Charlie’s. I thought about Charlie building the bakery.
I thought about driving out to see Yolande’s house. I thought about the dream with my grandmother, after Bo - when she hadn’t said that everything would be all right, and yet, she’d soothed me. I hadn’t known how much I still hoped to hear from her: somehow, she’d come.
Some of these thoughts were sad thoughts, I realised.
“That should do,” said Yolande.
With a very sharp knife, she cut the tip of the bean off, and handed the rest to me. We bit into our fragments.
I had a sudden nervous image of when the spy bites into the cyanide cap: well. I did kind of froth at the mouth.
In the local airport departure lounge, they have a verse from Tennyson on the wall: the relevant bit, I guess, is ‘Pilots of the purple twilight’, but my mind had stopped, for now, on ‘all the wonder that would be.’ That was what I was seeing, right now. I was seeing everything perfect and amazing that could possibly happen. I was seeing pure, astonished happiness on the faces of everyone I knew. I was seeing Kenny in a gleaming, polished lawyer’s office. I was seeing Billy’s wedding. I was seeing Mel roaring down the road on a Musimon - they only ever made fifty Musimons - and in fact this was Serena Dutton’s own Musimon, the one that got stolen from a hotel garage in ‘83. I was seeing my father and my grandmother cross a street towards me. All of these things flashed and popped like bubble bath in my head. I saw newspapers a hundred and fifty years from now with stories about Mars colonies and fine art instead of codified resistance messages.
I heard myself thinking I can do this, “I can do this,” because what I was seeing was the path that led from here to there and my place on it. Even for the impossible things: what I must do to achieve them was also impossible, and yet important, glorious.
I thought of all the things I wanted for myself and the people I loved, and I knew that I could and should try to bring them about.
Then the flashing, popping feeling of excitement faded, and I was left with all those visions, and a sense of pure and total responsibility for them, and I slid to the ground next to Yolande’s chair and sobbed as if my heart was broken.
It was quite a performance. I don’t remember all of it. I have said I get nasty when I cry: pretty soon, the things I hadn’t wanted to say about children and magic came out, about how that didn’t sound safe or responsible at all and I couldn’t bear to be part of it. I think I accused Yolande of being a glangy mentor figure at one point. It went on for some time.
Yolande didn’t say very much. Mostly she was just there.
At one point I was coherent enough to say, “Can you give me anything to... tone this down? Can we skip this?”
Yolande said, “It would not be wise.” I gulped and sniffled and didn’t press the issue. I suppose I was grateful she hadn’t just skipped to no.
But by then it was nearly over. I haven’t done this since I was seven, but: I actually cried myself to sleep for a little while, sitting outside on the cold ground, with Yolande’s hand resting lightly on my hair.
We had a real conversation about this several days later. Yolande spoke to some of the concerns I had raised in my giant fit of rave. Tactfully, she did not phrase them as I had. I agreed with her about the really important parts and tried to tuck the others away, like loose ends to weave back in to my usual inner ball of nerves.
It was kind of weird, but because I’d said I can’t imagine how bad this could be, and she’d said, I’ll show you, I trusted her.
It was also kind of weird to learn that what I was really afraid of wasn’t time running out for good guys, for the world. It wasn’t a bad-cross-gene psychotic break. (Heck, if that hadn’t had chances handed to it on a silver platter...) What I was afraid of was doing the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, until I was powerful and competent and important and every next thing I had to do was more terrible than the last. And everything I really wanted was something I had already lost.
Which sounds terrible, but I was trying to think of it like this. Some people’s fears are attacks by bears. Some people’s fears are dying alone. Some people’s fears are the kraken. Some people’s fears are giant balls of fire. Mine was increasing and perilous supernatural responsibility with a side of guilt.
Thing is, these things are bad. The kraken is very bad. But the kraken only shows up about every century or so - usually after a major underwater earthquake. So it kind of sucks to live your life with that kind of ratio between this will never happen and but gods and angels what if it does. I thought I was probably still at the point where I could stop my life careening off into sorcery. I might be in time to stop myself from being Sunshine, Arbiter of Dark and Light, The Only One Who Could Save The World (okay, the state; the town; the hour. But you know. I’ve never been one to let a good exaggeration pass me by).
Hanukkah, and then Christmas, had the usual patterns of crazy hours because of different staff with different leave patterns. Solstice, of course, was a public holiday in Jefferson State; a long ago president, possibly-the-seventh-but-don’t-quote-me-I-failed-history, had proposed this as a solution to one-nation-not-entirely-under-the-same-God vs. commercialisation of religious occasion vs. need for nation-building in form of common holiday. There is a hilarious nineteenth-century astrology propaganda text which “proves” that all winter solstices have always been auspicious days for gift giving, in all cultures, back to the history of forever.
I made cinnamon rolls. I sent four panfuls of Bitter Chocolate Death to the SOF field agents’ end of year party. I bought Kenny and Billy a shared ultramodern game console, which made them nervous (useful thing to do to baby brothers). Mom renewed my subscription to Baking Quarterly with a comment about how she was glad I was getting so much use out of it (thank you, Mom, I realize you remember everything and overlook nothing).
For the beans, Yolande and I settled on three themes. A traditional triad: Wisdom, Courage, Serenity. And then practice, practice, practice.
I tipped back a shot with Mel on a day that wasn’t quite a holiday but somehow involved two hours off together, and we slumped contentedly together in front of a late-afternoon fire. I even made something to give to Con. It was not a baked good. It was a little more like a map.
On the 5th, when a light snow had settled and I’d loaded the Wreck up with charms for a smooth and safe journey, I went to pick up Yolande’s family at the airport.
Quick-but-heavy rundown on Yolande’s family: Violante was Yolande’s brother’s granddaughter. Soon after I’d moved in, Yolande had introduced me to her “niece”; it was only after I’d learned about the wardskeeping that Yolande had revealed they were separated by a further generation. Though perhaps I could have guessed it from the namesake thing.
Violante had three daughters: Sabine, or, usually, Abi; Domenique; and Élodie. I’d never met Violante’s husband, and that was the fault of the Voodoo Wars. His unit in Tennessee was hit by a curse sweep. There were various horror stories; his curse was mostly sad. It closed around him like a trap: first he couldn’t leave the country, then he couldn’t get more than a hundred miles out of home, then he couldn’t leave his town. But they knew how much time they had left, which was why, after Abi and Domenique, they decided to have Élodie. Élodie, by the way, was coping better than expected following Michael’s death. Domenique was not.
Quick rundown on why I had to pick them up from the airport: Violante didn’t live very far away, so usually, she drove, but this time, they’d been seeing Michael’s family for the solstice before visiting Yolande; and Yolande’s car wouldn’t take everyone and their bags. And Yolande and I sorted that out in about that many words, because: Yolande. Yolande didn’t go in for order and counter-order.
Violante’s wave caught my eye just as I passed the Pilots of the purple twilight mural: good thing to be distracted from. She was smiling, but tired. No one else was smiling. Domenique was standing three feet from her mother and sisters, facing away, with a promising entry in the Best Scowl in Pre-Teen Girls category. Abi was watching her disapprovingly, radiating why can’t I fix this tension. Élodie had put one large duffel on top of another large duffel and had enthroned herself cross-legged on the top, eyes closed, chin in hands, siddhartha in training.
“Hello Rae! Hey, El, you have to move now.”
Élodie opened her eyes. “Why? You can use the handles at the bottom.”
Abi looked extremely embarrassed at the idea that her baby sister was ordering her great-aunt’s friend to assist in a Palanquin of Five-Year-Old, and drew breath to explain the inherent breach of manners.
“What about the other bags, sweetheart?” Violante said.
“Oh. Okay.”
She hopped off, and marched over to me while the others were collecting the bags. “Hi Rae.”
“Hi Élodie. You can call me Sunshine too, you know.”
“I know.”
Which was about as long as it stayed civil, because Domenique caught up, gave her sister a really vicious pinch for “not helping”, and was pulled aside for some short, terse words from Violante; meanwhile, Élodie unzipped all the zips on Domenique’s bag in revenge and was grabbed by Abi before she could start pulling things out of it and tossing them all over the concourse.
Abi ended up in the front seat so that Violante could sit between Domenique and her sister. It wasn’t really a drive for ‘how’s school, girls?’.
“How’s things, Abi?” I said anyway, as she slid in beside me. She gave me a Yolande-style straight look, said, “Well, they’re okay,” and smiled reassuringly.
I continued, “Sorry to say, there’s no CD player, and the tape deck’s broken. We could sing, or...”
“Or?” said Domenique - aggressively.
“My brothers are just starting high school,” I said. (Well, Kenny had just started tenth grade.) “I used to tell them stories on long trips. You up for that?”
“Fairy stories?” said Élodie.
“Not fairy stories,” said Domenique.
“Fairy stories last,” said Abi, arbitrating between Élodie and Domenique and humouring me.
There were enough stories from the coffeehouse to last for half the drive. I told the joke about the were-pigeon and the street cleaner. I told a story about Mr Cagney in which certain details (such as his downfall) were greatly exaggerated. “Did that really happen?” asked Abi.
“No,” I said, “but it could have.”
“I wish it had,” said Domenique.
“Is it my turn now?” asked Élodie. “You said you’d tell a story I asked for.”
Which is how I started the story of Jack the Giant Killer. Well, it used to be Kenny’s favourite; and it was kind of on my mind.
There are two ways you can tell the story of Jack the Giant Killer. You can tell it with cunning Jack, sly Jack, Jack to whom the world owes nothing, and who figures he owes nothing to the world: who takes the magic beans in trade because he figures he’s getting one over the guy who’s buying his cow. Beans that could turn into anything: it’s the definition of buying sight unseen.
That Jack climbs the beanstalk out of idle curiosity; that Jack steals the giant’s treasures because they’re beautiful and they’re there - not because his mother is home, hungry. That Jack wouldn’t even know what to do with a golden harp. (But you can spin out that scene if you can improvise a tune or two.)
The other way to tell the story of Jack the Giant Killer is with Righteous Jack. Kenny preferred this one. He’d hate to hear me say it now (perhaps I should save it for a graduation party, or a coming-of-age thing), but he used to feel sorry for the giant: so I used to go with the version of events where Jack is poor because the giant, by killing Jack’s noble father and taking his castle, stole from Jack everything he should have had.
This is a revenge story, of stealing from those who stole from you, of putting the world back in its rightful place after the bad guys mucked it up.
This is about how your dad stood for Good and your mom stands for Good too, but she can’t really fix what’s wrong with the world - no, for that, you have to grow up and be brutal and make morally grey decisions like whether to kill the giantess too (she saved you - but she’ll eat your friends). It’s all on you.
That was the story I didn’t tell. But, glancing across at Abi, I wondered if she’d already heard it. Not Jack and the Beanstalk; just the story about how the world was a mess but the buck stops with you.
If I weren't alive, in a hundred years when we lost the war, what if these girls were?
Abi stayed serious. Even in the last hiding scene, which I filled with all the inventiveness I could invent. (I can go on for half an hour with those scenes. There are so many stupid places Jack can be hiding. And dishes the giant can want to cook with Jack, besides bread of course.)
And then the sky fell down and Élodie chanted with me, “and they all lived happily ever after.” We pulled into Yolande’s drive, and Violante and Yolande took over from there.
There was cooking and gossip for the adults, and there was the attic for Domenique and Abi and Élodie (Domenique wanted to read a book by herself but she didn’t want to exactly be left out). There was eating of food. There was a short, very short reading by Yolande, while I was in the kitchen.
Then there were the beans.
The pastry came out beautifully, I have to say - the crown-like peaks lovely and high, shiny and browned. Domenique stood to cut the pieces, and Élodie, with a die, sat under the table (“does she really have to be under the table?” -Abi; “well, we can’t really put her in a box,” -Yolande; “Great-aunt, you know that’s not what I meant.”) to call out who got what piece.
The first bite was almondy and delicious. Everyone was watching everyone else: I was nervous, the girls were curious, and Yolande had an inscrutable look on her face, but she was looking. Violante just had her mother’s eye out for trouble, even now.
Violante cut Élodie’s section up for her. “No bean,” declared Élodie. I think she had the impression that by taking on the important task of die-rolling, she had nobly forfeited her bean share. There may have been a tiny bit of truth in that, in that Yolande had promised me: no beans for five-year-olds.
Domenique bit aggressively into her forkful: “Ow,” she said, but in indignation, not pain. I caught my breath.
She looked transfixed by something none of us could hear or see; she drifted to the window, looking out at the sleety dark, her expression thoughtful but not worried. After a while, Yolande nodded to me, and to Violante, and we continued eating, a little distractedly.
Abi got the next bean. It spread a look I recognised across her face; that fierce look you have when you’re tired and you’re scared you can’t go on, but suddenly, maybe, you can. I worried for her. I got the sense she was never going to be a person who could put a task down and let go.
She’d got the ‘courage’ bean. I had to admit, I had been wondering if I would get that one. I know when I’m a coward. When I can’t go on, I stop.
Then I bit into a bean.
It was warm. It was like something I could lean into and feel held. I closed my eyes and felt a great re-balancing going on in my head, of what was to be fought for, and what was to be fought off: of what I was scared to do and what I didn’t have to do yet, until it settled, a harness on me that felt light. It was like looking at a staircase to the stars and seeing only the next step. Only one step. Only the moment and the moment’s task.
“Are you all right?” said Élodie.
“Yes,” I said, and cut off, I am wonderfully all right - if Yolande had stayed sheer when biting into the corner of my hope-bomb, earlier, I could keep my dignity now.
Violante smiled at me. Yolande smiled at me.
The tree-self swayed; the deer-self curled up to sleep in the sun. A sun that was coming only from me. I was the sun. And the dark-self was there too, but it was lanced through and through by the sun - the dark-self had stars.
Wasn’t that a little backward? Wasn't the deal, you saw a star and then you made a wish... and then you had your wish, and gods and angels help you if you wished you hadn't wished for it.
But this was more wonderful - do the hard thing, and lo, will come another hard thing; but a wish fulfilled will bring you another star.