Cleaning the cellar was all the worst parts of housekeeping rolled into one, but the scrubbing eased the last of the cursebreak tingling from Runa’s arm. Not all of the supplies were ruined; a few jars and barrels had miraculously survived, and once Errant heard what they were doing he insisted they sieve and sort what was left. There were grains and seeds that hadn’t been milled, nuts preserved in honey, honey on its own, strange spices and dried herbs Runa had no idea about.

  “And he just kept it all down there? Why not use it?” Severine wondered out loud as they broke for a rest, and to eat the rest of the cheese scones. The rescued pots and jars were lined up along one wall, accusingly. “Was he saving it for something special? Then why didn’t he take it with him when he left?” She hesitated. “Er. He did leave, didn’t he? I’m not sitting here questioning the motives of a dead man?”

  She was asking all the questions Runa wanted to ask, but had kept to herself.

  Errant sighed. He was sitting against the wall, the bakery having run out of chairs once Severine and Tam sat down. “He was alive when he left. That’s all we know. Great-Aunt Audella wrote a few letters by hunting catbird, but either they went to the wrong person or he figured she was only trying to keep in touch for the gossip.”

  “Why’d he leave, though?”

  Errant tipped his head back, considering. Tam took the opportunity to drop crumbs of scone into his mouth. “I don’t think he—umph—ever really enjoyed it, to tell the truth. The job. He—umph—darling, I’m trying to talk—”

  Runa counted the remaining scones. There was one fewer than there should have been, and she wondered when Nobody in Particular had scampered out to steal it.

  The little creature always took something from the daily bake. But it was never this quick about nicking something from the stone bread or flat batches. Something small and warm that might have been pride blossomed in her chest. “Was he not very good at it? The baking, I mean.”

  “The opposite. People would get up before dawn to make the walk up from Dawdledale before his loaves sold out.”

  Oh.

  The small warmth in her chest faded.

  “Doesn’t mean he was happy about it, though,” Tam added. “Never met a man so miserable to do a good job. Even Corvin enjoys the satisfaction of being unbearably smug when his potions work, and they always work. Are there more of these scones? Some wretch just ate all of mine.”

  Runa nodded towards the plate. “Help yourself.”

  “I think he was sick of it,” Errant mused as Tam snagged another scone. “Tam’s right, he didn’t take any joy in it. I know he was in the market for an apprentice. Nobody here was much interested in working for him, so he sent off to a few other towns to bring someone in.”

  Runa had laid another fire in the oven. At Errant’s words, a log fell with a crunch.

  She flicked a look sideways. Something scuttled back into the shadows at the back of the oven, and she felt a twinge of… guilt?

  “Must have gotten sick of waiting for someone to take the job, because it wasn’t long after that he up and left.”

  “Maybe he got frightened off by whatever’s haunting this place,” Runa mentioned mildly. Something skittered on hot bricks.

  “Oh, that was after. Couple o’ Fennewic’s lads broke in for a laugh. Said a bog-ghast tried to eat them.”

  “People believed that?”

  “Well, no. But there were sounds, you know. Strange lights. That feeling you get on the back of your neck, when you’re not wanted.”

  “Tam, you’ve never paid attention to anyone telling you you’re not wanted in your life.”

  “True, but I kept my distance, didn’t I? I’ve been beloved everywhere I go all my life. No need to let some bog-ghast change that.”

  “So nobody came in to replace the old baker?”

  “Well, you can’t be too careful, this close to the Cauldron, can you?”

  Runa raised her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything about watching the entire village stroll merrily into the Cauldron only the day before, to pick flowers and sweet, hopefully uncursed berries.

  Tam took another scone. “You can make more of these for dinner at Junilla’s tonight, right? Now we’ve replenished your stocks of floor-stomped flour and butter with crunchy bits in. And that round thing that might have been a cheese.”

  “There’s no way that was ever a cheese,” Errant interjected.

  All these things required money. Runa sighed. “About that…”

  The Millers waited patiently while she explained her complete lack of funds. After she finished, they both waited politely for another beat or two, and then Errant cleared his throat.

  “I think you’ll find people around here more than happy to help you out without worrying about the money side of things,” he said slowly. “But if that isn’t what you’d prefer, or if you’re thinking bigger than what barter or begging can carry, why not head down to Dawdledale in the morning and send for your money from the Guild?”

  “It’s two months or more travel there and back—”

  “But you’ve still got the medallion, don’t you? People around here will give you credit based on that. Same as in Sollus Gate, I expect.”

  Runa opened her mouth to inform him that the only thing traders in Sollus Gate offered to the sight of a guild medallion was higher prices, and closed it again. “All right,” she said at last. Rolling up to the good shopkeeps of Dawdledale with empty pockets and hard evidence she was in the sort of business that might end up with her dead before she could pay her debts could be tomorrow’s problem. “But I’d better get some scones on for tonight first.”

  ***

  The cheese scones were best straight out of the oven, before they could cool down and reveal they were secretly lumpy and weird. There was still no sign of Junilla at her tavern that night, but the place was open, the fire and lanterns blazing and hot stew and scones for all.

  Severine had brought her pack with her. Runa had shoved away a surge of disappointment and told her she was sure it wouldn’t be a problem if she took a room there and settled it when Junilla returned from Dawdledale, but somehow, at the end of the night, they walked together along the dark path back to the bakery.

  The bakery was warm inside. There was dough to make, and the rescued ingredients to sort and socks to darn and all manner of other things that needed Runa’s attention, but all her attention had already been stolen.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  “Should’ve bought more tea leaves,” she grumbled as she tipped the last of Severine’s stash into the pot. “Tam and Errant get theirs in Dawdledale. I need to head down to send a message to the Guild, anyway, so I can pick some up then.” She glanced sideways. Severine was already sitting in the chair she had no reason to be thinking of as her chair, pulling her blanket over her lap while her hair waterfalled gently over her shoulders. “Uh. If you’re heading out tomorrow, we could walk together?”

  “Heading out?”

  “Leaving. If you—you said about your work always taking you places…”

  Oh, good, she hadn’t lost the knack of tripping over her own tongue trying to talk to people. Not people. Only Severine.

  She took a breath that was meant to be steadying. “I mean—”

  “It does.” Severine’s eyes reflected the warmth of the firelight, but were lit by their own warmth, too.

  Runa froze.

  “But…” Severine glanced at her pack. “Maybe it doesn’t have to. For a while, at least.”

  “You did almost die,” Runa pointed out when she could say something again. The pot began to steam. She let go of it.

  “Oh, a day without danger isn’t worth living!” Severine stretched lissomly, tossing on another one of those bright grins, then winced as something pulled in her neck. “Though sometimes I feel I would be willing to be convinced otherwise.”

  “Do you need convincing?”

  Severine’s smile wavered. “Maybe? It’s hard to… stop. Sometimes. If what you’re stopping is everything you’ve been doing since you can remember.” Her gaze dropped, dragged towards the pack again, and she resolutely pulled her knees up and looked at the fire. “If you don’t know what will happen if you do stop. Maybe it’ll be fine. Maybe—you leave town, and everyone talks about what an asshole you were and says your old house is haunted, but that doesn’t matter, because you’re off doing the thing you wanted to do all along.”

  Runa sat down slowly. “Maybe you can’t get back to your clients until it’s too late, but instead of everyone’s-dead too late, it’s and-then-they-saved-themselves too late.” She felt heavy.

  Severine’s mouth hooked into her strange half-smile. “I did say I was sorry about that, didn’t I?”

  “Don’t be. You three saving yourselves doesn’t need to change anything. I could still go back to the Guildhouse, pick up another job… It only needs to mean something if I make it mean something.”

  If she decided to go down the mountain in the morning and write to the Guildmaster to send the coin from that last job to her here in Pothollow, instead of traveling back to Sollus Gate herself. If she decided to stay, instead of let the decision be made for her by weather and injury and the Cauldron’s bad temper.

  “If you decide this is where you want to be, instead of vanquishing monsters in the Cauldron?”

  Severine’s quiet words were so close to what Runa herself had been thinking, she winced. “Something like that.”

  And it isn’t like I’m any good at it, she thought as she checked the pot. Tea-dust swirled in the hot water. In a few minutes, it would be drinkable, but it wouldn’t be what anyone thought of when they thought tea.

  She’d still drink it, though. The same way the people here still ate her horrible, stodgy bread.

  They’d liked the scones, though. She could do that again. And… there was something else she could try. If she was doing this.

  She dug out two mugs for the tea.

  Severine blinked at her, as though trying to put together Runa the baker with everything else she knew about her. Runa didn’t blame her. She was still trying to put it together, herself. Severine knew her as Runa the guide, Runa the rescuer, Runa who slung Severine over her shoulder and saved her from two mountain ranges smashing together, and then saved her from being skewered by a walking skeleton.

  Not Runa the baker.

  Not that she was a baker.

  Or was she, now? Was that better than the alternative? Did she want to be a baker, or did she just not want to trudge back into Sollus Gate and find more clients and do this whole thing over again?

  Ugh.

  But Severine sighed, and looked wistful. “It must be nice, being able to do something that you don’t have to do.”

  And that made up her mind.

  “I’ll head down to Dawdledale in the morning,” she decided out loud as she poured the tea, so that she couldn’t change her mind later and pretend like this had never been the plan. “I’ll ask the Guildmaster to send my money here, so I can pay Errant and Tam for more flour and whoever else for the other things the bakery needs.”

  Severine’s smile brightened. “I’ll buy those supplies. And some proper tea, tomorrow. And you can pay me back when your money comes in. If we’re both staying here.”

  Her eyes glowed as she leaned forward to take the mug of hot almost-tea. Runa found herself smiling back.

  It felt like some sort of transgression. Like she wasn’t meant to do something like this—scheme at a different life, conspire to rest in a warm bakery and try her hand at something new instead of what she had always done. What she was good at.

  “Deal,” she whispered, and clinked her mug against Severine’s.

  Energy fizzled under her skin. Not the sickening dread of the cursebreak scars, but a jumpy, nervy excitement she couldn’t ever remember feeling before. As though now she’d made the decision to stay, she wanted to make something of it, right then and there.

  The opposite was true of Severine. Deciding to stay seemed to have cut some sort of string inside her, letting—or forcing—her to relax. They talked more, but her voice was already blurred from exhaustion. By the time she got to the end of the sentence, she was an eyelash-flicker from sleep. Runa was still gathering her own words to offer her the bed upstairs when Severine’s head tipped back and she started—delicately—to snore.

  Runa reached forwards and plucked the half-full tea mug from Severine’s hands before it could tip over. She grabbed her own mug, too, and the bowls, and took them to the washtub in the next room, and washed and dried and put away and finally forced herself to stand still and face up to the words still echoing around in her mind, bouncing from one side of her skull to the other like there was nothing in between.

  It must be nice, being able to do something you don’t have to do.

  Because, to her surprise… it was.

  It was nice.

  She’d been so focused on getting out of Pothollow. But if there was no need for her to leave—and that thought still curdled in her gut, sure, but if…

  If she wasn’t going to leave, then everything that had annoyed her so much about Pothollow and how goddamn friendly everyone here was suddenly looked a lot different.

  And everything she’d done suddenly annoyed her.

  The stone bread that shouldn’t have been. The flat bread that was meant to be … well, she wasn’t entirely sure what shape it should be, just that it wasn’t meant to be flat, and that was the problem, wasn’t it?

  She’d been sleepwalking through her time here as though it didn’t matter if she did a bad job at the job she kept telling herself she wasn’t doing. But it did.

  And if she was going to stay here?

  Some things were going to have to change.

  She dried off her hands, hung up the cloth, and walked slowly back into the baking room. Tomorrow’s dough rested quietly in its comfortable troughs. The fire, long past crackling, was a pile of glowing red and orange embers. The only noise in the bakery was the sigh of the embers and the gentle snoring coming from Severine, curled up in the armchair.

  Runa drew a steadying breath. She’d gotten through a whole conversation with a woman she’d been nursing a secret crush on for weeks, and whose sudden appearance in her cellar had struck her like a cold fish across the face. This couldn’t be scarier than that. Right?

  She pushed a few more logs against the embers, careful not to disturb them or anything that might be hiding within.

  Then she sat down, back to the fire-warmed stones, arms resting on her braced knees.

  “All right,” she began, her voice low. How to begin?

  There was always the way you were meant to begin. But she hadn’t done anything like that in years. She wasn’t even sure she still remembered the words. She’d had this sort of thing embarrassed out of her in her father’s halls, and in the Cauldron, you didn’t exactly stop and do a whole formal introduction every time you ran into another group running away from a toothy oak or whatever.

  In the Cauldron, you trusted everyone, because you’d quite like them to toss you a rope or pull a rampaging monster off you on the understanding you’d do the same for them. And you mistrusted everyone, because chances were they’d see the monster coming at you and steal your horse, instead. But they would be gone the next day. Off over another horizon, on another adventure.

  Here? People stuck around. You had to deal with them every day.

  Which made it kind of important to know who you were dealing with.

  No One In Particular had already trusted her enough to let her into the bakery. It was well beyond time she let it know who it was trusting.

  The way she hadn’t let anyone else know.

  She wiped her sweaty palms on her trousers.

  “I never introduced myself properly. I’m Runa.” She cleared her throat. Normally, this was where she would say I’m a Cauldron guide, but that wasn’t the truth anymore, was it? She could say she was the baker, but the creature knew that, and knew exactly how true that was.

  Besides. They were both far from home, but it was the same home. So she did something she hadn’t done since she left the lands she grew up in for the first time.