“I need a bath,” Severine groaned. “A real bath. Hot. Tub. Soap. Not your cold water from the pump, sorry, Runa.”

  She winced as she put down her pack.

  The walk back up the mountain had been hot and dusty. Severine’s hair was still a glossy waterfall. The rest of her could do with standing under one. Runa, too.

  Shame there weren’t any around here.

  With that thought dangling embarrassingly alluring pictures in her mind, Runa turned to start unloading her purchases. “Tavern’s got a tub,” she suggested over her shoulder. “I’m sure Junilla wouldn’t mind. If she’s not back, ask whoever she’s got looking after the place.”

  It had been Widow Tremblewood, the night before, doling out food and demanding her guests listen to long-winded stories about her many grandchildren in payment for the meal. Some of the guests were her grandchildren. By the end of the night, most of them had looked as though they would have preferred the village starve.

  “Throwing me out already?” Severine complained, eyes wide in mock outrage. “Alternatively, why didn’t you tell me earlier? I could have had so many baths already.”

  Runa snorted. “Are you going to waste time deciding why you’re pretending to be mad at me, or are you going to go?”

  Severine made a noise like a sneezing tea-kettle. It took Runa a moment to realize she was laughing. It seemed to take Severine by surprise, too. She stopped making the noise, blinked, went cross-eyed trying to look at her own mouth, and then realized Runa was watching her and at once attempted to slouch back into devil-may-care insouciance.

  That having utterly failed, she announced, “I’ll go and have that bath,” grabbed her packroll, and darted out through the front door. “And I’ll save you a plate at dinner!” she called as she fled.

  Runa stared after her. The patter of her footsteps retreated down the path. And then, just as she was about to turn back to her groceries and, she presumed, when Severine thought she was out of earshot, she heard a strangled groan of despair.

  Runa let out a huff of surprise. Really? She thought. She’d heard noises like that before—like Ninnius and Anklopher’s enemies-to-horizontal-in-a-bush deal, it came with the territory when you were in the business of shepherding people on dangerous and exciting adventures.

  She’d just never heard it in relation to her.

  “Glop!”

  Nobody in Particular shimmied out from under her collar. It glared suspiciously at the empty space where Severine had dropped her pack by the table, and then the space where she’d disappeared through the door.

  “Maybe if you introduced yourself, she’d save you a plate, too.”

  The volcano sprite sniffed with crackling derision, then scuttled down her arm onto the table. It nosed at her purchases, then flicked its tail at a pile of sacks carefully stacked by the door. There was a note on top from Tam, saying he thought this should be enough for her to be getting on with, and to let him know if she needed more.

  Handy.

  She washed up, put away the groceries, and then stood in the middle of the bakery.

  With a glance at the oven, Runa rolled her shoulders back, and cracked her knuckles.

  “All right,” she said to Nobody in Particular. “You want to show me how to do this properly?”

  Heat waves rose from the little creature’s body as it nodded vigorously. The table beneath its webbed feet began to scorch.

  Runa winced, and held out her hand for it to scuttle onto. She put it down in the opening of the oven. “And that’s why you had to wait for someone else to come along and do the grunt work instead of taking over the baking yourself, huh?”

  An hour or so later, she had a new theory: the volcano sprite just wanted someone to boss around. Even if it had been able to handle flour without toasting it, it knew its true place was tucked comfortably into a bed of embers, croaking orders.

  It directed her to various jars and sacks, and drew her attention to stacks of bowls and other crockery she’d assumed were meant for eating out of. Nope. They were for measuring, and the volcano sprite watched strictly while she followed its instructions to match up measuring bowls and cups to the notes in the recipe book.

  “You’ve been waiting for this a long time, huh?”

  “Glop!”

  But it hadn’t said anything, while she bumbled around like a catbird in an egg shop. Well, no wonder. It had done its best to passive-aggressively shove her in the right direction, and she’d just as passive-aggressively refused to be shoved, all the while filling the world with more and more terrible bread. It must have been ready for her to pack up and leave, before she proved with the cheese scones that she could after all be trusted.

  Under the volcano sprite’s beady eye, she measured, poured, and mixed.

  And mixed some more.

  And…

  “You’re sure?” she asked the sprite.

  It rolled its eyes and nodded.

  Runa shrugged, shook more flour into the mixing trough, and hesitated. “Show me again?”

  With exaggerated slowness, the volcano sprite lifted one front leg, then lowered it again, pushing its claws along the bricks in front of it.

  Runa echoed the movement, slapping her palm into the dough and pushing it forwards. “Like that?”

  “Glop!”

  Whatever you say, she thought to herself, and smushed the dough again. It was like patting the scone dough together, she decided. Except you had to do that with a light touch, or you ended up with hard little nuggets instead of delicious scones. Good for chucking at the smaller types of cursed wildlife, to scare them off, not so good for grumbling stomachs. Ask her how she knew.

  But this dough…

  Maybe this was where she’d gone wrong with the other loaves. Scones were meant to be delicate. You wanted them to crumble apart easily when they were fresh and hot, letting out delicious steam. But bread—good bread—it held together. You could cut a straight slice out of it. Not a gravelly chunk like her new neighbours tried to choke down when she brought the stone bread to Junilla’s.

  The texture of the dough changed as she worked it. She checked with the volcano sprite, anxious that she’d done something wrong, but it nodded at her to keep going.

  She folded and kneaded it some more. The dough was getting kind of sproingy, too. “Is this right?”

  “Glop.” The sprite was getting kind of sick of her constant questions.

  She shook her head, and kept kneading.

  It was a new sort of movement for her. Different to how she’d just mixed the previous batches and left them to their own devices. Kneading worked muscles that weren’t used to working this way, or for this long. She built up a pleasant sort of warming ache in her shoulders and a less pleasant one in her lower back, until she adjusted her stance. She moved back and forth with her whole body, not just shoving her arms around. It helped. The bench being higher would help more, though. Maybe she should talk to someone about that…

  “Glop!”

  Runa blinked. The room was dark, the soft shadows of dusk pulling their hems in at the edges of the soft light from the oven fire. “When did that happen?” she asked out loud.

  “Glop glop?” Astonishment sizzled from the little volcano sprite. Ages ago! Hadn’t she noticed? Hadn’t she noticed it telling her to stop? The dough was probably ruined now!

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Runa squeezed her eyes and blinked again, as though that would help the barrage of sizzling thoughts bouncing around her brain. “You told me to keep kneading,” she complained.

  …and it had been so rhythmic, and relaxing, that she hadn’t noticed the time passing.

  She straightened, winced as her lower back protested, and stretched as best she could without punching through the bakery’s ceiling. Her muscles were feeling it, but it was good. Even the arm that had been all scarred up from the cursed crown exploding on it wasn’t aching too much.

  It was better than yanking them out of the sockets almost falling off a mountain. Or cracking her ribs getting in between her clients and a rampaging hellpopotamus.

  Nobody in Particular skittered out of the oven and up one leg of the bench to inspect what she’d done. The dough sat in the trough, rounded and glistening.

  The little volcano sprite sniffed. It lifted one claw and made a tiny, claw-shaped indent in the dough.

  The indent slowly sprang back.

  It sniffed again, almost approvingly. “Glo—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Runa waved wearily. “Now it gets to rest.”

  And maybe she got to, as well. What had Severine said about saving her a plate at dinner? Runa shot a look out the window. She’d probably missed the whole meal, at this rate. She wondered if Junilla was back. Morrie couldn’t have been serious about her going off hunting catbirds, could they?

  An annoyed sizzling sound from the bench jerked her back to reality. She sighed and rubbed her forehead. Her mind had wandered off into the distance while she worked the dough, and it was having trouble coming back.

  She laid a cloth over the dough, and got to cleaning up.

  Nobody in Particular settled itself on its hindquarters, an almost perfect imitation of any number of Runa’s wizard clients moments before they gave an impromptu and unwanted speech. It opened its mouth to begin—

  “Runa? Are you in there?”

  —and immediately scrambled back into the safety of the oven, as Severine knocked on and opened the door in one movement.

  She didn’t notice the volcano sprite. Her eyes went straight to Runa.

  “You are here. You stood me up!” she announced with apparent delight.

  “Been working,” Runa said gruffly. Severine was shining with cleanliness and good temper, and however many mugs of ale she’d downed while waiting for Runa at the tavern. “Sorry—”

  “Never mind. I brought dinner. Get away from there, I’ll clean up while you eat.”

  She dumped the packroll by the door and marched over, pushing a covered bowl into Runa’s chest and then, when Runa grabbed it, using it to direct her into the chair by the fire. “No sign of this Junilla, whoever she is. I’m beginning to think she’s some sort of hilarious local joke you’re all playing on me. Audella was running the show again. I ought to warn you, she’s not best pleased about our little shopping trip.”

  Runa frowned. “Oh?”

  “She’s worried you’ve gone and got yourself scammed, buying from just anyone instead of asking her advice first and taking her to bully the other shopkeepers for you. Also she has eggs to sell you.”

  “We already bought eggs down in Dawdledale,” Runa reminded her.

  “Ah, but did those come with a guarantee that she only lets her hens roam over the Rim sometimes, except when they get away from her, but not to worry, she gives all the ones that come out funny colours to Tam?”

  “They did not.”

  Severine put down the dishes she’d gathered and dug around in her pockets. “Here,” she said, producing a small, glossy, gold-brown egg.

  Runa stared at it. Severine raised her eyebrows.

  “What colour were the other ones?” Runa asked.

  “I didn’t dare ask.”

  “From the same clutch as the normal-coloured ones?”

  “I think so. And she said something about needing to cook them before they started making noises.”

  “Before they hatched?”

  “No… just… noises.”

  Runa stared at the egg a little longer. It sat quietly in Severine’s hand, a plain, ordinary hen’s egg. Unsuspicious. Normal. Uncursed.

  She gently picked it up and placed it in a dish on the high shelf where the mother-of-bread lived. Then, rethinking, moved the dish farther away from the mother-of-bread. The egg might not be cursed, but cursed wasn’t the only way things could go wrong, and she wasn’t about to risk the bakery’s most important ingredient on a dodgy Cauldroned egg.

  “Be good not to have to head all the way down the mountain to fill the larder,” she said. Unless the egg sprouted legs overnight, in which case there were still plenty of long, steep walks in her future.

  She looked in the covered bowl Severine had brought her. It was the tavern meal she was now very familiar with: another variation of Vegetables Cooked To Mush In Pot, this time with lumps of cured sausage. She pulled a knife from her belt and skewered a piece.

  It was good. Fatty and smoky and rich. Nothing like the overpriced and under-flavored lengths of what she sometimes suspected were actually just old sticks the butcher had picked up from the road, that she bought in Sollus Gate to fuel her travels. “Audella made this?”

  “Like I said, I haven’t actually seen any evidence of anyone other than Audella running things over there. Are you sure it’s this bakery that’s haunted, and not the tavern?”

  She picked the dishes up again, at the precise moment that Runa’s mouth was too full of stew to object that the washing up was her job. And when Severine came back in, she couldn’t find it in herself to object when she put the pot on to heat water for tea. They hadn’t bought tea in town—that would have to wait for a trade caravan carrying some from one of the nearer port cities—but Widow Tremblewood had apparently listened to Severine bewail the empty state of her tea leaf pouch, and had supplied her with a selection of dried leaves.

  “They aren’t tea leaves, exactly,” Severine said as she scattered them into the water. “Herbs, she said.”

  Runa was inclined to be as suspicious of unnamed herbs from Audella Tremblewood as she was of the entirely ordinary egg. But the tea smelled fine, and tasted no worse than what they’d been drinking the last few nights.

  Better, in fact.

  Or maybe that was the company.

  They were both worn out from the day, and exhaustion made conversation easier. Neither of them cared if the other lost the thread of what they were talking about, or picked it up and thought it was something else. Some things they avoided—Severine had locked the door to her personal history tight after blurting out the fact her parents were both dead earlier, and Runa couldn’t begrudge her that. The last thing she wanted was to do was open any doors to her own personal history. She’d spent long enough not looking back. No point starting now.

  Besides, there was so much else to talk about. She and Severine talked about the places they’d been—Severine had spent the last decade bouncing around almost every city Runa had heard of, and many she hadn’t, while Runa had visited about three, and spent most of her time in the sorts of places that made Severine stare at her in horror when she described them.

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she protested as Severine buried her head in her hands and made a low whining sound in response to her telling her about the Shrieking Wastes.

  “That still leaves room for a lot of bad!” Severine retorted. “And you willingly traveled through these places?”

  Runa shrugged. “If someone wanted me to.”

  “Why did they want to?”

  “Magic. Knowledge.” Runa shrugged again and poked the fire. “Nicking off with enchanted whatsits and hoping they weren’t so cursed they’d roll themselves back over the Rim before they could hawk them off.”

  Severine looked vaguely guilty. “People do that?” she said off-hand.

  Runa wondered whether to fix her with a stare that said you can stop pretending, but decided against it. “Sure. There are wizards in Sollus Gate who’ll take the curse off something, for a price. But you’ve got to get it to them first. Easier to go after the plain enchanted stuff, or…” She waved a hand, trying to pull an example out of the air as though that was where she stored her memories. “Try to hunt down some long-dead veteran of the Skeleton Wars and get them to reveal their secrets.”

  “People do that?” Severine burst out, legitimately worried this time.

  Runa let her horns rest against the wall. “Think of the stupidest, most dangerous thing anyone could do in the place where every curse in the world has been dumped to mix together for two hundred years. Someone will have done it.”

  “Oh.” Severine’s face looked drawn. “That’s so inspiring,” she said weakly.

  “It is what it is.” Runa poured them both more tea and stared at the leaves swirling in her mug. “I mean, people don’t change, do they? You can still find some treasure caches where the curses are only on the entrances and exits. When that stopped being enough, someone figured out that you might as well curse some of the treasure, as well, and if some of the treasure, why not all of the treasure? And then it all got swept into one place, and people think, great, that’s way more convenient. I’ll go do all my treasure-hunting on one trip. None of it ever stopped anyone.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what people with treasure to hide even do these days, if they can’t curse it to keep it safe from thieves.”

  “Guards with big sticks, mostly,” Severine said mournfully.

  You seem to know a lot about it, Runa didn’t say. “At least no one ends up cursed into a puddle of goo when they try to break in,” she said instead.

  “Well, it takes longer.” Severine stretched. “But it’s not all hidden cursed treasure in the Cauldron, is it?”

  “Course not. Plenty of non-cursed stuff gets pulled in as well. And like I said, some people are only after information. Like Ninnius and Anklopher. They want to go and see what a battlefield looked like, or what a curse did to the land around it, or anything that got in its way. And then they go away and tell their friends and fight about it, and next season, someone else is back to prove the opposite.” She yawned.

  “And that’s… what makes it worth working there?” Severine asked uncertainly.

  “It’s regular work. You can always find someone who wants to go put their head in a bog-mammoth’s mouth in case there’s gold in there.”

  “You could get regular work other places, though. Places less likely to grow teeth. Why work in the Cauldron?”

  Runa opened her mouth, and reconsidered. No one wanted to hear I like it, actually, and not the way the danger-hunters like it, always looking for a worse curse to bash their skulls against. I like to learn about it. The way it works. The way it’s made what it was into what it is.

  And they definitely didn’t want to hear My folks always told me I was meant for great things, and the moment I set foot in the Cauldron, I knew I’d found it.

  Or Because if I wasn’t in there, with people I had to help survive it, I’d be in there left to my own devices, and I don’t want to find out what those are.

  She took a gulp of tea to cover her hesitation. “Dunno. Habit, I guess. Anyway, I’m not doing it anymore, am I?”

  “Mm. Something about being thrown off a frozen mountain makes you think it’s time for a change, I’ve found. Audella asked when you would have more bread, by the way.”

  Runa looked over at the dough, resting in its trough at the other side of the room.

  “I’m working on it,” she said. “D’you need to head back?”

  “For what?”

  “If you’re taking a room down at the tavern.”

  It was late, and the shadows in the corners of the room weren’t half as deep as the shadows under Severine’s eyes.

  Severine tucked her feet under herself. “Maybe in a bit,” she said. “Unless you’re throwing me out?”