“My mother’s mountains are the Rising Islands That Lure the Sun, and her waters are the great ocean all around. My father’s mountain is the Old Man and his waters are the silver beneath the glacier, I guess. My—”

  She hesitated. It wasn’t the right way to say it. Not the whole thing. But there was a gap twenty years long, where any place she might have claimed as her own ought to be. She cleared her throat. “Their mountains sheltered me, and their waters held me. But—I live here now. I guess the Cauldron’s the closest thing I have to a mountain.”

  She wasn’t sure whether she should lay claim to any of the curse-ridden rivers that ran through it. She wasn’t even sure she should put any claim on the Cauldron. It was a monstrosity, an enchanted midden of all the worst parts of the Skeleton War, left to fester and boil while it waited a purification that would never come.

  Maybe the mill pond would be a better bet.

  “My name’s Runa,” she said instead. Your name was always the last part of how you introduced yourself, where she was born, not the first. Nymphs or humans or the occasional waterlogged dwarf, in the Rising Islands, that was how everyone did it.

  The trolls up north, her father’s people? With them you just sat and stared at the moon and the stars and maybe said some poetry, and if you didn’t know someone’s name by then, it was rude to ask. And if you actually told someone where you were from and who you were? They looked at you like you were the dumbest asshole ever to fart your way up the mountain.

  She fell silent, leaving space for the little creature to introduce itself.

  It didn’t.

  The silence grew, and spread, bubbling out like mother-of-bread from the jar on the shelf. Runa’s cheeks heated up. Okay, well, shit. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do! Maybe the little creature felt the same way about the islands as she did about the northern mountains. Couldn’t she have thought of that before she went and made an ass of herself?

  All right. She messed up. How was she going to fix it?

  One thing seemed like it might be a priority.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The silence from behind her didn’t change. It just suddenly felt like listening.

  Runa let out a quiet breath of relief. Okay. That was the right thing to say, then.

  “You welcomed me into your bakery. And I get the feeling that isn’t something you do for just anyone, what with Junilla saying the place was haunted, and her and Tam both being so surprised to find me here that first morning. What’d you do, scare off anyone else that tried to pick up where the old baker left off?”

  The texture of the silence changed again. Yes, it had run them all off, and was extremely smug about it.

  “Scare off the baker in the first place?”

  This time, the silence was tinged with… regret? Embarrassment?

  “Huh.” Runa tipped her head back, scratching her horns on the bricks. “Well. You let me in. And you tried your best to show me how the hells everything in here works. So thanks, and sorry for not trying as hard at it as I could have.” She took a deep breath. “I want to start again. I’ll try harder this time. Listen to what you’re trying to teach me. If you want to give it another go.”

  The silence stretched out, unchanging. Runa waited. She wouldn’t blame the little creature for not believing her, or for not accepting her offer even if it did believe her. She’d been as careless with its hospitality as she had been with everyone else’s.

  At last, movement. The gentle shuffle of hot embers, and then proximity heat against the side of Runa’s face. Orange-red moved at the edge of her vision. She didn’t turn her head, but she tracked the creature’s movement by sound as it crept in lizard fashion down the bricks.

  Its gaze burned suspiciously over her, and then a single, webbed claw landed on the bare skin of her shoulder.

  She glanced down.

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  Volcano sprites weren’t common, even in her mother’s part of the world. There was too much water around for them to feel entirely at home in the smaller islands, and they tended to stay in the larger volcanoes, cared for by the older nymphs. But there had been enough of them around that Runa recognized this one. It resembled a salamander, with its squashed body and finned tail like a frog caught still part-tadpole and stretched out flat. But there the resemblance ended. Her mystery assistant’s body was the mottled orange-gold of a live coal. Its feathered gills—three each side of its broad head—flickered like flames. The two beady black eyes, staring directly at Runa, were the only cold thing about it.

  Heat rose in waves from the lizard’s body. The edge of Runa’s shirt, a finger-width away, started to singe.

  Against her skin, the volcano sprite’s claws and soft belly felt… warmish. Maybe slightly toasty.

  Someone who was only a troll would have been roaring in pain by now. Or maybe weeping a poem about it.

  “All right,” she said softly. “So you figured out what I am too, huh? Between you and Corvin I’m not going to have any secrets left.”

  “Blop.”

  And the volcano sprite had kept its whole existence a secret, this entire time. Made sense. In the islands, nymphs and sprites shared the hottest parts of the lava pits and flows that the islands grew from.

  But here?

  She bet lots of things came out of the Cauldron, this close to the rim. A lot of people might see something like the volcano sprite and throw it back there, assuming that was where it came from.

  She shook her head. A volcano sprite a thousand miles from home, holed up in an old bakery, keeping the mother-of-bread alive while it waited for someone to replace the baker it had scared off.

  “You’re a long way from home,” Runa murmured. One of her eyebrows lifted and she sighed at herself. “We both are.”

  It narrowed bulging eyes at her.

  “You knew I was part nymph from the moment I bust down the door, huh?”

  Duh, its beady little eyes suggested.

  “That’s why you didn’t scare me off.” Because she wasn’t going to look at it, scream, and boot it into the Cauldron.

  Or was less likely to, anyway.

  The volcano sprite nodded.

  “Fair enough.” And now, the question that had gotten her frozen out of her father’s halls almost the first moment she set foot in them. “What should I call you?”

  The volcano sprite eyed her again. The air around it twisted with heat. It made Runa think of thick lava enveloping her limbs, of watching her mother and aunts shape new pieces of the world.

  It made her think of being small, which she’d never been, so that must be the volcano sprite thinking it. It made her think of people reacting to her with fear and wariness, which, okay, that was more familiar. And that particular memory of the volcano sprite’s was tinged with the suggestion that it might, after all, have set something on fire, so maybe the wary people had a point.

  It nudged a question at her.

  “What have I been calling you?” She grimaced. “Well—Nobody in Particular, because you kept hiding yourself away, and I thought…”

  It sizzled with glee.

  “Really?” Runa raised one eyebrow. “You want me to keep calling you that?”

  It wanted to stay secret. Having a name would make it less secret. She might use the name, and then people would suspect it was here. But if she called it that…

  “You want me to hang around the bakery and do the baking for you… but you don’t want anyone to know you’re here?” She shrugged. “All right, Nobody.”

  Satisfaction curled like heat waves from the little volcano sprite’s body.

  She nodded at the woman sleeping in the chair next to them. “Guess you’re not going to introduce yourself to Severine, then?”

  It gave her a flat look.

  “Right. That’s a no. But while she’s catching up on some sleep…” Runa rose slowly, not wanting to unbalance the little creature. “There’s only so far you shoving jars at me can go. I haven’t been everything you dreamed of in a new baker.”

  It glanced at the empty plate that had been full of cheese scones. “Glop,” it said, encouragingly.

  “They weren’t bad,” she accepted. “But it’d good to have a few pointers for the real thing, now we’re introduced to each other. Soon as I’ve got more flour, and the mother-of-dough’s grown bigger again.”

  The volcano sprite stared at her in disbelief.

  “Well, it usually takes overnight, right? I used a bunch for the scones, so we gotta wait for it to grow back.”

  The creature kept staring.

  “Like mushrooms,” she said. “That’s how it works, right?”

  Its eyes, very slowly, rolled up towards the back of its head.

  “Anyway, it’ll have to wait until I’ve got more supplies in. You want to come with me into town tomorrow, or to the mill?”

  The volcano sprite froze. Had it been further than the bakery, since it arrived in Pothollow?

  It glanced over at Severine, who was still snoring lightly in the armchair.

  “She’s coming, too. Don’t worry. You don’t have to say hi to her if you don’t want to.”

  “Glop.” She didn’t need the psychic feedback to hear the disapproval in that one.

  “No, you’re right, I didn’t talk to you about inviting her to stay. But be fair. She didn’t talk to me about it, either. She just fell asleep in the chair.”

  “Glop.”

  “Again. Yeah. Good point. She might make a habit of it.”

  Runa wasn’t sure she’d mind if she did.

  “So… are you in?”

  The volcano sprite skittered onto her shoulder and clung there, wrapping its tail around her neck to keep its balance. She tugged her shirt collar further down so nothing would catch fire.

  Nobody in Particular felt strangely damp against her skin despite its heat, like a fresh steamed roll had landed on her shoulder. She could feel the pitter-patter of its heartbeat.

  It glared at Severine, and at the mostly-empty jar of mother-of-bread, and then it looked back at the plate of scone crumbs and sighed, like a bubble of steam against her neck.

  “Glop!”