Sunshine

Dessert shift that night was notable only for the number of people who wanted cherry tarts. They were catching on. Rats. I didn’t really like little electrical gadgets—most of the other so-called home bakeries in town used kneading machines, for example, which I thought beneath contempt—but there was no way I was going to be making cherry tarts without one. I’d already said I would only make individual tarts and customers had to order them with the main course to give me enough lead time. And they were still catching on. I didn’t want cherry tarts to turn into another Death of Marat. When I was first installed in my new bakery and messing around with the heady implications of Charlie’s having built it for me, I’d been having fun with puddings that look like one thing and you stick a fork in them and they become something else. A Gothic sensibility in the bakery is not necessarily a good thing. I’d made this light fluffy-looking number in a white oval dish with high sides and presented the first one with a flourish to a group of regulars who had volunteered to be experimented on. Aimil was the one with the knife, and she stuck it in and the raspberry-and-black-currant filling had exploded down the side and over the edge of the dish onto the counter. It was, I admit, a trifle dramatic. “Gods, Sunshine, what is this, the Death of Marat?” she said. Aimil reads too much. Everybody at Charlie’s that night wanted a taste, and the Death of Marat, the first of Sunshine’s soon-to-be-notorious, implausibly named epic creations, was born, although I think most of our clientele thought Marat was some kind of master vampire. (Aimil is good at names. She’s responsible for Tweedle Dumplings and Glutton’s Grail and Buttermost Limit too.) The problem is that for months after I was getting constant requests for the damn thing, and light, fluffy puddings with heavy fillings are a brute to make. Our long-time regulars still ask for it occasionally, but I’m older and meaner now and say “no” better. I will make it if I like you enough. Maybe.

Well, the cherry season doesn’t last long around here; I’d be back to apple pie before Billy’d had time to miss doing the peeling. (Unless I found some other source of cheap child labor I might have to get an electric peeler in another year.) It was true that Charlie’s did almost everything from scratch and that anything that one of us wasn’t good at didn’t get done at all, but it was also true that our loyal customers were compelled to be biddable. If I decided I didn’t feel like doing cherry tarts outside of fresh cherry season they could like it or eat at Fast Burgers ‘R’ Us.

When I got home I fished last night’s sheets and nightgown out of the tub where they’d been soaking the bloodstains out (just like the Death of Marat without Marat), hauled them downstairs, and stuffed them in the washing machine. If Yolande had noticed the amount of laundry I’d been doing in the last two months she never said anything.

I put Altar and Sordid Enchantments on one of the hip-high piles of books to read next in the corner of the living room, and got out the silver polish. Not standard equipment in my household: I’d bought some before I came home. The glyph came up beautifully. Except I still couldn’t make out the figures.

It was weirdly heavy for plate. And doesn’t plate tend to look platy when you’ve shined it up? Maybe I only knew cheap plate. Even so.

The symbol at the top was round, with snaky and spiky lines woven through it. The symbol at the bottom was narrow at the base and fat at the top. The one in the middle…might conceivably have four legs, which would presumably make it some kind of animal. Right. Two squiggles and an unknown animal.

The top squiggle could be a symbol for the sun. The bottom squiggle could be a symbol for a tree.

And if it was solid silver—even if the round squiggle wasn’t the sun and the fat-on-the-top squiggle wasn’t a tree—it was still a shoo-in as an anti-Other ward. None of the Others liked silver.

Whatever it was, looking at it made my spirits lift. For someone under two death threats—plus, I suppose, the incompatible threats of Pat and Jesse’s idea of what my future should include, supposing I had a future, because, if I did, I would spend it incarcerated in a small padded room—this was good enough. I put it in the drawer in the little table next to my bed. I slept that night, you should forgive the term, the sleep of the dead.