“And then I made the mistake of saying I could help by cutting a portal to get them back to Sollus Gate. It would have been faster to walk!”

  “The Cauldron messes with all sorts of magic,” Runa told her. She was paging through the recipe book, looking for anything that didn’t take at least a day to prepare. Morning had dawned quickly, and with it, the realization that she hadn’t prepared any dough for the day’s bread.

  Which, of course she hadn’t. She hadn’t expected to be here. And then she’d been… distracted.

  She glanced sideways at the distraction, who was currently throwing her hands up in disgust.

  “I know that now,” Severine exclaimed. “But it might have been nice to know it before I walked into a cave that turned out to be some giant, monstrous maw. Or a building that turned out to be a giant, monstrous maw. Or—any of the others! Why so many things that turn into giant mouths?”

  “I guess whoever came up with that one thought, if it worked once, it’ll work another thousand times,” Runa suggested.

  “Yeah, and it did,” Severine said, disgusted.

  “So, you saw…” Runa furrowed her eyebrows, frowning past the scribbled ink on the page in front of her to her own memories of things that turned into giant mouths to eat you. “The Hungering Hills, Isnta Village—”

  “It’s called what?”

  “Because it isn’t a village.” Runa smiled as Severine groaned and flopped back into the armchair. “What about the Slow Boil?”

  “Do I want to know what that is?”

  “One of the swamps. The whole thing is simmering hot and it has these big mud bubbles on it that look solid, but if you step on ‘em they pop and send you down too deep to climb out.”

  “And does it have teeth?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Severine thought about it, her mouth pressed into a sulky line. “Smells like lobster?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Then I think so. Don’t tell me it has teeth too.”

  “If you go down deep enough.”

  Severine made a face.

  “So you were cutting new portals with that knife, and they kept dropping you into big monstrous jaws full of teeth?”

  “That’s what I get for trusting a knife,” Severine said glumly. The knife in question had disappeared sometime between when they climbed out of the cellar and now, but she narrowed her eyes vengefully at her packroll.

  “Dunno about that. Most of those mouths spit out at the same place, if you make it past the teeth.”

  Severine’s mouth dropped open. “No.”

  “Don’t ask me how I know, but it’s the truth.”

  “Then…” Her eyes widened. “It was trying to help! Oh, gods. We didn’t need to give up and walk the rest of the way after all, we could have just let ourselves be gobbled up by a broom closet with a grudge.”

  Runa nodded absently as she flicked another page. None of the recipes would be ready in time to bake this morning. And the loaves turned out bad enough when she followed the instructions. What were her chances if she didn’t?

  “Well, we made it back to Sollus Gate. Ninnius and Anklopher thought you might be at the Guildhall. You weren’t—obviously—and everyone was really worried about you.”

  Runa paused with her finger in the recipe book and looked up. “Really?”

  “They knew you were alive, though. The… beads said you were alive? And the Guildmaster said she thought the Cauldron liked you too much to kill you.”

  That was even more unsettling than the thought that anyone at the Guild was worried about her in the first place.

  “Huh,” she said out loud.

  “They said they would hold your fee for you when you got back.”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Huh.”

  Runa opened her mouth. She closed it again.

  That was in the rulebook. Fees got held until the guide was proven dead, because otherwise, they were sure to turn up alive and angry about where their money went. But…

  “They were worried?” she asked.

  Severine nodded.

  But I spent as little time there as possible, she wanted to say, and under that thought was another one:

  But nobody ever worries about me.

  She slapped the second thought away before it could dig its claws in. Of course nobody worried about her. Look at her. You could flip her sideways and sail across the ocean on her. She was at more risk of being taken out by a low doorframe than anything she tripped over in the Cauldron.

  She changed the subject. “My beads changed, too. Yesterday. Does that mean you got out of the Cauldron yesterday morning, and the first thing you did was turn around and head straight back in? You use your portal knife for that, too?”

  Severine rubbed her face. “There was something I needed to do.”

  Uh-huh. Like steal a magic sword off a skeleton that ended up being more active than you bargained for.

  “Speaking of which, you wouldn’t happen to—ah.” Severine’s eyes went to the greatsword, still propped safely out of the way in the corner of the room. In the firelight of the night before, its stained blade had gleamed like oilslick and the rubies set into its hilt had glinted as though they were watching everything Runa and Severine were saying.

  In the steady golden light of the morning, it still looked ugly and malevolent.

  “Oh, good. There it is,” Severine said, with a sort of glum resignation.

  “That’s one ugly sword,” Runa said, and Severine made a face.

  “Careful, you might hurt its feelings.”

  “Never heard of a magic sword having feelings before.”

  Severine went still, like a rabbitwraith that had just spotted its prey. “You can tell it’s magic?”

  Not hard to figure out when the damn thing zapped me the moment I picked it up. “Sure,” Runa said out loud. “Spend long enough in the Cauldron, you get a knack for it. And you have that magic portal knife, and those daggers you were clinging to when I pulled you off that glacier.”

  Severine waited for a moment, as though there might be more coming, and then seemed to snap out of it. “Oh! Yes. I suppose you would have noticed that, too. Well.” She put on a blinding smile. “It’s strange, the things you pick up on the road, isn’t it?”

  Yeah, when you’re fossicking for artefacts in the most cursed place in the world. Runa didn’t say anything. If Severine wanted to pretend she wasn’t in the business of finding and hawking magical objects, it was no skin off Runa’s nose. And it didn’t take a genius to figure why she might want to lie about something like that. Severine wasn’t a fighter. She’d held the sword and thrown it to Runa last night like she was afraid it might bite her.

  There were plenty of people who’d see someone like her, and not think twice about doing whatever violence they thought necessary to steal any magic objects she was carrying.

  So Runa kept her mouth shut. Anyway, she was kind of enjoying herself. Chatting with the most beautiful woman she’d ever laid eyes on, without stuttering, speaking only in grunts, or worrying she’d blush so hard her clothes started smoking.

  And without succeeding at finding a recipe to follow for the morning’s baking, either.

  She sighed and shut the book, and looked up at the exact right moment to see Severine reach her arms up and arch her back in a stretch that sent the blanket tumbling to the ground.

  Severine caught Runa’s eye, and whatever she saw on the half-troll’s face made her break into a wide grin.

  “You fed me last night, so this morning’s on me. Is there somewhere to get breakfast in this village?” She flicked her hair back over her shoulder, and a tendril slithered back over.

  Runa gathered her rapidly dwindling supplies of conversation. “Uh. There’s the bakery…”

  “Perfect!”

  “But you’re standing in it. It’s here. Uh, and I haven’t managed to bake anything yet this morning.”

  Severine’s eyes went round. “Oh. Oh! Really?” Her eyebrows drew together. “Did the wizards know you have a secret life as a baker?”

  “It’s hardly a secret life. I’ve only been helping out while I was here, waiting for the Cauldron to open up again.”

  Which was mostly true. She flexed her arm. The scars from the curse breaking had faded to nothing, but there was still a twinge under the skin. A memory of almost being torn apart by wild magic. “Took longer than I was expecting,” she said out loud. “And I’m not that good at it, anyway.”

  A simmer of agreement prickled at her from somewhere in the back of the oven. She scratched the back of her neck.

  She wasn’t good at it. But—she was here, and there wasn’t anything else to eat, unless they headed down the mountain, which would take hours, or to the tavern, and she didn’t even know if Junilla offered breakfast if you weren’t staying with her.

  And…

  She rested her hand on the counter. The whole time she’d been here, she’d been going off the recipe book, because she figured the people of Pothollow would want more of what the old baker had made.

  But she could do other things. Things that weren’t precisely bread. But close.

  “I’ll put something together,” she said before she could chicken out. “If you want to wash up, there’s a pump out the back.”

  “Because I’m covered in dirt and grit—oh, right, yes, that’s actually quite a lot of dirt. Yes. I’ll go and do that. Out the back, you said?”

  Runa waited while Severine bundled herself out to the washhouse, then planted her hands on the benchtop.

  From its lair deep in the oven, Nobody in Particular hissed with irritated menace.

  “I know,” Runa told it. “You don’t like having other people about. The only reason Junilla and everyone else are keeping me around is because you let me in in the first place, and now I’m letting strangers who popped in through the cellar stay the night?”

  She waited. The creature didn’t reply, but the sensation of irritation prickling against her skin grew stronger.

  She sighed. And I think I know why you let me stay in the first place when you didn’t let any of the locals in, she added silently. Because I only got a glimpse of you, but I think I know what you are, all the same.

  And even if she was wrong about that, the creature hadn’t welcomed her into the bakery out of the good of its heart. It wanted something out of the deal.

  And she wasn’t holding up her end.

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said out loud.

  And if it doesn’t work out, at least it can’t end up worse than the stone bread.