Free Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet by Charlie N. Holmberg

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