The Royal Wedding Cake Gambit – Rough Cut
By Martin L. Shoemaker
Exactly as recorded at the Niles Renaissance Faire, May 18, 2025. Look for a cleaned-up version soon.
This is the Instant Bard. Yep, happy to have you join me. I’m getting started in about a minute here.
Yes, for those of you joining for the Instant Bard, I will be starting in just a moment here. I don’t have anyone who’s, I’m taking up their time, so it’s good enough to start right now. I am Martin Shoemaker, the Instant Bard, here to tell you stories no one has ever heard before, not even me.
With a little help from you, we’re going to make the story here on the spot, and a little help from Red T-Dragon. You probably can’t hear him, he’s not all that fierce today, but he informed me yesterday that we had to have a discussion over who got top billing, because he thinks he’s the star of the show, and the audience yesterday kind of agreed with him. So we have come to a compromise.
On Saturdays, he’s the mascot. On Sundays, I’m the mascot. So this is technically the Red T-Dragon show.
No, that doesn’t mean you get to tell the stories. They don’t speak dragon, and you didn’t study in school, so you don’t speak English. Really, how many of you here speak dragon? Okay, we have one hand.
One hand is not enough. I need to be telling the story in English. So you are going to have to think the story really hard, so I can hear your thoughts.
Now, something else is interfering. I’m hearing somebody else’s thoughts. I am hearing you having an amazing time at the fair today.
What’s your favorite part? Oh, the pizza, the food, because it is amazing food here. Certainly, I’ve always loved cottage in going back many, many, many years. He enjoyed the turkey leg, because he is a dragon, a small dragon.
The turkey leg is bigger than him, but he does enjoy the turkey leg, and there’s the kettle corn, and it has been a wonderful day for the food, but did you ever hear the story of the wedding banquet for Queen Hermia and Lord Bren? If you were here yesterday, you heard the story of how they got betrothed. This is what came after. This was their wedding banquet.
This was back in the days of King Ferdinand of Ferdinand, known far and wide as a fair king, a just king, but not a very wise king. Ferdinand had a tendency to fall for every trick and con that came around. Now, Queen Hermia was technically the queen mother at this point.
She had stepped down after many years of service, thinking her son was ready to lead the kingdom. She was almost always a very wise woman, but in this regard, perhaps her motherly instincts made her believe too strongly, because he fell for many a con, and when it came time to the banquet for their wedding, he agreed to arrange everything. This was the first mistake, because the bakers that he hired were, in fact, not bakers at all.
They were a traveling group of thieves who traveled as bakers because that got them entry to many towns and to many events, and oh, they could bake, but they were no cottage in. They were not excellent chefs, not up to royal standards, but they did their best so that they could fit in, and so came the day to start preparation, because you do not start the cooking for a royal wedding on the day of. You must do much of the work in advance.
So this troop is showing up in five wagons, five wagons of bakers, and five wagons with their cook stoves, their pans, all of their flour. They put on a good show, and they were giving out treats ahead of time, because all of the townsfolk, especially the town children, crowded around wanting to get their taste of the royal feast, because although King Ferdinand and Queen Mother Hermia were generous when they could be, and sometimes too often for him, the whole kingdom could not possibly attend the royal wedding. They wouldn’t all fit, so it was tradition in such affairs that the bakers were handing out tastes in advance.
It would spread the word. It would entice the people who were actually invited to get their appetites wet, to get them ready to come and enjoy the feast, and so they started handing out the treats, handing out previews, and discovered that they had made a fatal flaw. Their head baker store had gotten a good, quote, good deal on cheap flour, and the flour would not rise.
No matter how much yeast they added, this flour was almost enchanted. It would not rise. There was nothing they could do, and then on a lark, one of the bakers went and got some flour from a local miller, just a bag, and it was fine.
The cheap flour was not flour at all. It was apparently cursed. It tasted like flour.
It smelled like flour. It burned like flour. If you’ve ever had a flour fire, you know exactly how dangerous that can be.
It was everything that flour should be, but it would not bake, and eventually store realized they were the subjects of crime. Now they were the victims of someone else’s evil doings, and what were they going to do? Because now they’re on the hot seat. Now they have a queen mother and a king and everyone else expecting that in five days, they’re going to be serving up a feast, which they’re intending to use as cover for infiltrating the castle and robbing the treasury, because apparently robbing the treasury of Fertiland is one of the favorite pastimes of all thieves in the area.
Not many pull it off, but they all try, but now they have got no way to fulfill their obligations to provide treats and fine goods for the wedding. So store goes into a panic. He sends everyone out to all the local bakeries or all the local mills in all the local towns to bring back as much flour as they can, as fast as they can.
They head out and send everyone out purchasing and scrounging, leaving their bakery wagons unprotected. Even store went out. No one stayed behind, and when they came back, their wagons were gone.
Where do you think the wagons are? With the robbers. The robbers have driven the wagons away, and they have taken them into the foothills of the northern marches. These robbers are not trying to rob the treasury.
They’re trying to steal the wagons. They decided, why take the thing which is so well guarded by the royal guard? These wagons were very valuable. They weren’t royal treasure, but they were more than enough to interest the bandit band from the northern marches, who had been watching this entire preparation all this time, and had decided that they would turn the tables on store, whom they highly, highly disliked, because the many times he’d cheated them in the past, and rob him of this most important opportunity.
Sorry, sometimes I stumble over my words. Robbed them of this most important opportunity, and so they had taken off, and no one had noticed, because it happened in the dark of night. So, the palace guards were as surprised as anyone when they got up that morning, and the wagons were not in the field outside the gates.
No one knew where this had gone, but in a land such as Ferdinand, there are many hunters and trackers, and while there’s a lot you can do to hide your trail, you do not hide the trail of five bake wagons traveling off into the mountains. They are going to leave obvious marks, and they apparently knew this, because they didn’t try to hide. Apparently, as best the trackers could read, these wagons left in a hurry, counting on speed, not stealth.
So, it’s fairly easy to track, but it’s going to cost time, and store needs time to delay. He sets his people to work with the grain they brought back, borrowing every cook, stove, every kitchen they can borrow within the within the capital, so that they can prepare what goods they can still manage in the time available, while store heads off after the wagons. Store is on their finest, fastest horse, and so he is able to well keep up with the wagons.
Wagons are not as fast as a sole horse, after all, so he heads off up the trail, and is doing very well, right up to the point where he crossed the Three River Branch, because at the Three River Branch, the trail went into the water, and did not come out, and this is a place where three shallow rivers meet and combine into one large river, and no one could navigate those wagons down the river from there, without them being capsized, and you’d see it, but up, it could have gone up in any one of these three rivers, so we have the north, and the south, and the mid, and which one does he follow? He follows the north, so he is heading north, so now he is heading higher into the mountains, into the northern marches, which are a wilderness area, sometimes known for trolls, and dragons, and giants, and he should be cautious. He definitely should be cautious. He is, after all, an experienced bandit leader himself, but he is angry, and he is fearful that his people are going to be arrested, and while store would happily take the hat off your head, and sell it for a dime, he takes care of his people, and if his people are going to be arrested, he’s going to take that personally, and he’s going to have to break them out of the king’s prison, and that’s a lot of work for one man, so he’d really rather get the wagons back, and get everything back in time, to put together the closest thing to a royal feast they can manage, so he rushes north, out of the water, rushing alongside it, because his horse does not want to stay in that washing water, and he follows, and he follows, and you were right.
The north path was the path. He went almost half the day before he found the sign of the wagons pulling off, but now he’s lost a lot of time, because he was hunting. He was carefully watching, whereas they were fleeing as fast as they can, and these particular trikes now are heading high up, high up the slopes.
This is heading into troll territory, and trolls then, as trolls now, were loathsome, low creatures. They were known to eat horses and men, so now he had to worry about, did the bandits even survive with his wagon? Now he has to worry about if there’s anything to salvage at all, but he’s committed, and Storr has one thing that he is known for. When he makes a decision, he sticks with it.
He follows it where it will take him, so he is committed, and he follows these tracks, and they become harder to track, harder. Now he wishes he had actually hired a tracker to come with him, because he himself is not that proficient, but he wishes he had hired one, because now the traces are starting to disappear as the slope gets more rocky. There are places where things have fallen down, where it’s like, okay, something came through here.
I know five wagons have gone somewhere. Must have been them, but he’s no longer as confident, and he worries that he may have lost everything, when suddenly he sees movement among the rocks ahead, and he pulls his horse off into the last few sparse trees before we get into the rocky area, and ties the creature up, and sneaks forward, and sees a troll guard pacing back and forth. Now trolls, as I said, have not changed much over the years, including the fact that trolls as a whole are not very bright.
Once in a while, you get a troll who actually maybe can read a few words. Once in a while, you get a troll who is able to make a plan for battle, but their usual plan consists of, get him! That’s not much of a plan, but when your average is a seven or eight foot tall creature with muscles like this, maybe they don’t need a lot of planning, but these trolls at least were smart enough to have a guard out, and the guard was watching the trail. Why were they guarding? They expected something.
They were protecting something, and he knows, he knows that beyond that hill into probably the next valley are his wagons, and if the enemy bandits are there alive, that’s their issue. If they’re dead, he only needs to deal with trolls. He will find out.
So when he goes over the hill, what does he see when he reaches the crest of the hill, sneaking behind the back of the troll guard? Nothing? What? No clue. Anybody got a guess what he sees? All right. Nobody’s got a guess? All right.
Well, what he sees then as he crests the hill is he sees a strange, strange sight. The trolls are making the bandits bake them cakes, and Storr and his people at least were somewhat skilled at bakery. These bandits, they are in over their heads so far, but at least they’re not trying to bake the cursed grain.
They have real flour. They are making a mess. They are breaking pots.
They are leaving food laying all over the place. They’re not even cooking up to the standards of trolls, and let me tell you, trolls will eat just about anything, including bandits if it turns out that they aren’t happy with the meal, and Storr thinks, and he thinks twice, and he only sees one path out which is to help his enemy, but he doesn’t see another choice, and maybe, maybe it is sometimes true that bandits have a small sense of honor for service done to them, and he decides to announce himself very loudly, I am Storr, the royal baker, and I am here to bargain for the return of my people, and the bandit chief looks at him with eyes about this big, but keeps his mouth shut. He’s not a stupid bandit chief, and two trolls stand up, older looking trolls, trolls with long gray hair and rotting teeth and drooling a bit, and they say, what? What’d you say? I am here to trade for my people.
I will bake you what you seek. You bake? I bake, but I need my people and four wagons to be returned to me. One wagon! Four wagons are no bake.
Two wagon! He knows that if you show weakness to a troll, it’s all over. The one thing that the trolls will respect is someone who is strong enough to stand up to them. Four wagons! What do I think? I think four wagons.
No! Four wagons for cake! Four wagons for cake, and so they let the four wagons pass, and as they do, the bandit chief passes Storr, and Storr stares in the man’s eyes. Return to the palace and do whatever my people tell you, and this debt is over, and the bandit chief nods as much agreement as they were ever going to get. So now Storr has one wagon, one big stove, one opportunity to cook for the trolls, and he has passable flour, at least not the cursed flour, but he has not a lot of it, and he starts rolling it out and kneading it and putting in the yeast, and they had very fast rising yeast in Fertiland back then.
Quite impressive, none of this rising overnight. It’s a matter of hours to have the dough ready to go, and he looks, and he counts the trolls, and he counts the bags of flour, and he realizes there is no way there are enough cakes for this many trolls. He barely has enough for a few small cakes, or maybe, maybe, you’ll notice how we started this session today looking at the pizza, and he realizes that flatbread covered with something would be a meal that trolls would appreciate.
Yes, little known to history, Storr the thief invented pizza. Now not the pizza you and I know today, because if you study your history, tomatoes were not actually part of the old world until Columbus and other explorers brought them back from the new world, and people have always wondered what was the Italian food? What was the cuisine before tomatoes? Well, I’m sorry to say that it was rutabagas, but trolls like rutabagas. Trolls like stinky, smelly roots that they grub out of the dirt.
They don’t even wash them, and he talks to the two chief trolls and says, if you bring me rutabagas and meat, I shall make you food, and one looks, he’s meat. Stupid! If he’s meat, he’s not cook. He smelled good.
He can’t cook if we eat him. We bring him mutton. Mutton, yeah, and so the very first pizza in the world was not the delicious cottage inn that they serve here today.
Did I mention how much I love cottage inn? It was rutabaga and mutton pizza with a sauce made from tree sap. Well, it’s trolls, you know, they have pretty coarse tastes, and some tree sap, let us never forget maple tree sap, is quite delicious when you boil it down. This wasn’t that.
This was a gummy, stinky sap that smelled almost as bad, almost as bad as the trolls themselves. You want pines, pine pitch, it is not something you cook with, but the trolls were very happy with this. The trolls thought that this was the most amazing dish ever.
The trolls told Storr, we need you to keep making this, this good. You need to stay here and make this for us. And Storr panics, because now his people will probably get away.
The bandits will get away. They didn’t necessarily deserve it, but he could be a prisoner of trolls for the rest of his life. But he’s looking and realizing that they are almost out of flour, and he holds up the bag.
Where did you get this? That’s flour. Yes, where did you get this? That’s in silo. Ah, the silos.
You took the grain from the silos. Yeah, burned down. Great.
So the trolls have been rampaging through the countryside, burning the grain stores. He wonders why word of this has not gotten back to the kingdom. But you must remember, this was before these days of strange boxes in our pockets that told us everything everywhere at all times.
So probably word will reach the kingdom. If luck is the way it has been lately, it will reach in the middle of the wedding ceremony. So he now knows something that no one else does.
Maybe he can parley this into some favor in the court, but he needs to get back to the court. He needs to get away from these trolls. Is there more? No more.
Burn. Yeah, burn bright. Again, if you’ve ever seen a flower fire, when that dust gets in the air, whoosh, it’s like fireworks.
So this is exactly the answer he was hoping for. I can get you more. Where? At the palace.
Let me just take my wagon and no wagon. All right, let me just take, no take. All right, let me just go get, no get, no go.
No go means no dough. He tried very hard not to get angry with trolls. Trolls are stupid.
We all know trolls are stupid. They don’t like anyone pointing it out. So telling trolls they’re being stupid, which he came very close to doing, is liable to get you eaten, pizza or no.
So he calmed down and said, then I shall walk and I shall get flour and bring it back and make for you more pizza. He invented that word on the spot. Don’t let any Italian tell you otherwise.
So he heads off on foot, knowing his horse is tied up in the woods. And fortunately for him, the trolls did not smell the horse and did not eat the horse. And he unties and he walks slowly away until he’s out of sight of the troll guard and gallops as if the trolls are on his heel, ready to devour him and makes it back to the city.
And let me check where I am. Am I going to have time to finish this? I can’t read my clock. What time do we have? 125.
If I go quickly, I will finish this story. If not, I will hand out cards where you can find my website. If you follow the cryptic rune on the back, where I put up all of my free stories and I’ll get a chance to put this one up there and eventually finish it.
And it will be free. So he’s racing back. Now he has another time limit.
He has to get back in time for the wedding. He has to get back before the trolls figure out that he’s never coming back. That could be a while.
Trolls are, again, not very smart. So he’s racing back. He reaches the river.
He’s following the river back. He reaches the three branches and crosses across and gets there and finds that he is too late and it doesn’t matter because the festivities are going strong. The festivities are proceeding as if all the finest food in the world is there.
People are lining up at the wagons. Porters are carrying away plates full of food and everyone is just thrilled. They’re telling him as he passes that, this Chief Baker, that you have produced the finest royal fare ever seen.
And he’s scratching his head and he goes back to his people and he says, what’s going on here? How did you do this? And that’s when Imelda, who is the second in command, the person who runs the scams while he’s not busy, informs him of what she discovered. That whatever the curse was upon the grain was temporary. It was designed to make them give up and leave or to be distracted and leave so that the wagons could be taken.
And yesterday morning, all of the cakes started to rise and they had been attempting to bake these cakes for five straight days. And so now they’ve got so much food rising quickly, rising better. When the curse lifted, it was almost the other direction, that they can’t stop shoveling out fine tasty treats faster than they can go.
It’s flooding their wagons. The wagons now that have returned, they can’t get inside because the food is popping out so fast. They’re handing it out hand over fist because it’s the only way they can ever get back into their own wagons.
And this was quite a feast. This was the royal feast that lasted an entire season and fed the entire populace all through the winter because that flour, once released from the enchantment, just wouldn’t stop. And they found themselves appointed as the royal chefs for the next five years, which was not at all what a thief group had planned, but it’s a living.
Thank you. Now again, I will have to see if the little gremlin in my hand properly recorded all of this. If it did, in the next two days this will go up on my website along with other free stories.
I have cards to give out if you want to get the free stories. Now, I will be honest, I sell books. The free stories will include ads for my books.
I hope you love my stories enough that you buy my books, but these stories are free. They will always be free. When I perform as the Instant Bard, those are free stories that I hope turn into sales.
Thank you. Yes. Yesterday’s story was pretty good too, so that one will be up there hopefully tonight.
Thank you all for participating and being a great audience. I appreciate it. And fingers crossed that the gremlin heard what everything I said and recorded it.
Yesterday’s recording went very well, so today’s should be similar.
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