The Confectioner’s Vow

Some maps are not of land, but of what we lose and what we give away.

I was born of earth and cloud. My mother, a mortal baker, drew bread from the soil and steam from stone ovens as if coaxing breath back into the body of the day. My father was not mortal. He was one of the lesser gods—the kind cataloged in old temple ledgers and then forgotten when empires rise too quickly to remember their roots. He presided over sweetness and revel, the nectar hidden in flowers, the laughter that loosens at dusk, the warm hush after harvest when the fields lie down and sing to themselves.

From them both I inherited a craft that was never mine to own.

When I gather nectar, the blossoms do not resist; they lean as if in prayer, anthers dusting my wrists with pollen the color of afternoon. Dew beads even on mornings when no dew should form, rolling into my cupped palms like shy children that somehow knew I was coming. Wheat hums when I grind it—a low hymn of sun and root and the push of seed through dark earth. The millstone turns, and the flour sighs, and the air sweetens the way a room sweetens when the person you love steps across the threshold. Once, a boy told me honey tasted like the sun had melted just for him. He laughed as it stuck to his fingers, as if he were holding daylight itself.

I do not take these things. They give themselves, as if the world recognizes its own name spoken aloud and answers in return.

In the city, marble colonnades throw pale shadows like measured music. On festival days the priestesses carry my confections in procession: honeyclouds spun from dawn-thread and the breath of orange blossoms; sugar ribbons tempered with dew; wafers that hold, for a moment on the tongue, the warmth of sunlit stone. Children know. They bite and their eyes widen as though Olympus has leaned close to kiss their foreheads. They laugh, and the laugh rings bright against the colonnades, and the pigeons lift, and the river flickers as if clapping its many hands.

Adults taste sweetness and nod politely. The river does not rise for them. The plane trees do not lift their leaves.

It is not disdain. It is distance. There comes a day—no one knows when—when a door closes quietly in the body. After that, the world still speaks but it is harder to hear. I have seen it happen in a single afternoon: a boy wipes sugar from his lips, runs, trips, scrapes his palm, and by the time his mother ties a cloth around his hand, his listening has already dimmed. The injury is not to the skin. He learns a lesson about streets and knees and gravity, and in the same hour unlearns the grammar of stones.

Long before I could understand that, I was summoned to the temple of Vesta. The flame there is said to be the breath of the first morning, banked but never extinguished. I stood in the glow and listened while the archon read the terms of my inheritance. The gods are jealous of their gifts. To be born between realms is to owe both.

My vow is simple. I will feed sweetness into every small life I touch. I will carry sugared mercies across districts and deserts, from harvest altars to alleyways, from estates built of marble to kitchens made of clay. I will give it all away before it can rot or harden or be hoarded. In return for this holiness, my tongue is veiled. All that I craft turns to ash for me, so that my hands never falter in pursuit, so that I do not grow possessive of what was given to me to give. I tried once, as a young man, to steal a taste. A crumb broke on my tongue, dissolved, and left only ash as dry as bone. The gods had not lied.

The vow made me a servant. It also made me blind.

Do not misunderstand: the world is not cruel for cruelty’s sake. Nature grieves with me. Trees gossip in soft clicks of leaf upon leaf: we tasted you once, child of cloud; we remember you sweet. Rivers loosen their braids around boulders and brush foam against my ankles in comfort. At the edges of harvest fields, hares sit and watch me mix syrups, as if they have been appointed small witnesses. They do not come near enough to touch, but when I look up, their ears are tilted toward me like questions.

I travel with tins and cloth-wrapped loaves, with jars of nectar and cones of sugar nestled in straw. Powder drifts from my cuffs and leaves small footprints of sweetness on stone. It is an ordinary holiness. I set up wherever there is a patch of shade or a threshold wide enough to welcome a crowd. Children arrive first, as if they feel my approach through the soles of their feet. Their laughter wakes birds sleeping inside statues. Their joy makes fountains leap higher. The city changes shape around them, as cities always do for those who still hear.

Sometimes, on the road between towns, the hills themselves seem to lift and breathe. The cypresses lean together like conspirators to shade me. Cicadas thrum and then fall silent all at once, and the silence feels like a held bowl, an offering. I keep walking. The vow is a rope spun of sugar—sweet, brittle, unbreakable. It burns and it binds and it does not ever loosen.

I tell myself that ash on the tongue is a fair price to keep the world singing.

But there are nights when the bread cools and the street is quiet and the pigeons mutter to themselves on the roof, and I allow myself the smallest grief. Not for hunger. For memory. I remember tasting starlight as a boy before the vow was sealed. I remember eating a wafer made of crystallized rain and feeling the sky enter me like a second breath. I remember laughing with my mouth open to catch an early snow that never quite reached the ground, because my father was laughing and my mother was scolding, and all of it—the laugh, the snow, the scold—was one hymn.

I do not weep for myself. I weep for the moment when wings fold. I weep for the turning away, the quiet door sliding shut, the unlearning. I weep because children are the last faithful priests of the first covenant and they do not know they are priests at all.

Sometimes I am asked why sweetness matters when there is policy and grain-counting and floodworks to plan. I answer as gently as I can: because joy is a kind of architecture, too. It holds weight. It bears spans. The bridges we build in the body are the ones that keep us from falling through ourselves. A city without laughter crumbles from the inside out—no enemy needed. Ask the fig tree what happens when its sap runs bitter. Ask the bees what order sounds like when the queen falls silent. Ask a river what becomes of a city that forgets to greet the morning.

And still I am not allowed to taste.

Once, at a winter festival on the high road, a girl in a red cloak broke her honeycake in half and pressed her share into my palm. Her voice was serious in the way only a child’s voice can be when it is speaking for the whole world. “You made it,” she said. “You should have some.” I bowed and thanked her and did not explain. I could not set the curse aside the way one might set aside a cloak or a badge. I held the cake and felt the heat of it seep into my hand. For a moment it was almost enough—warmth where taste should be, a mercy no god had thought to forbid. Then I gave it back to her and watched her joy ripple out: to her mother, to the women gathered near the brazier, to the men laughing quietly about the snowfall that hadn’t come, to the flock of birds that lifted and set down again as if they could feel the sweetness landing. She looked at me not as a craftsman but as if I were a doorway. In her eyes I saw the last covenant still intact. She was the Believing Child, priestess of joy, holding a sweetness I could no longer claim.

I have learned to read the world in those ripples. My map is not inked on parchment. It is traced in laughter and lifted faces, in fields that sing when the last sheaf is brought home, in a fountain that leaps higher for the length of a single song. I walk by the lines that appear for a moment and then vanish, like the trace of a swallow’s wing over water. I keep them all inside me: the lines, the vanishing, the echo they leave behind.

If there is a day when the gods decide my debt has been paid, they will not need to summon me. I will feel it in the roots of the plane trees, in the loosened shoulders of oxen at dusk, in the hush that falls when a city understands itself whole for a heartbeat. Perhaps then the veil will lift and I will taste what I have made. Perhaps not. It hardly matters. The vow has taught me something even the temples forgot: sweetness is not a private feast. It is the world remembering itself.

Until that day—or until the end of days—I will keep walking. I will keep folding light into dough and dew into syrup. I will keep placing small, dissolving eternities on the tongues of those who still know how to listen. The earth has not stopped singing. Rivers have not stopped clapping their many hands. Stones keep the stories. Wheat hums. Nectar leans. I am only the bearer.

This is the map of who I am: offspring of god and soil, sworn servant of joy, keeper of sweetness. Ash on the tongue, song in the world. And the world, praise be, is still hungry.