It’s my job, she could have said. Or Because I’m good at it. Or Because I’ve spent my whole life avoiding the path that leads me to being the sort of person you might sell one of those swords to, and come back a year later to find a village in ruins.

  Runa swallowed. “Like I said, you’re knackered. If I threw you out, I’d just find you on the doorstep next morning, fast asleep.”

  Severine's look of desperation faded, replaced by a questioning half-smile. “That wasn’t your only option. I brought a load of valuable enchanted swords into your home, and you didn’t hit me on the head and try to steal them.”

  “Why would I do that?” Runa retorted.

  “I don’t know. I’ve not stopped to ask, previously.”

  Previously? Runa thought.

  Severine’s smile widened. “And you didn’t—”

  She paused and looked over her shoulder to her packroll. She’d pulled so many swords out of it, but there was one that must still be hidden inside.

  “That ugly greatsword didn’t want an oil and polish too?” Runa asked when Severine didn’t say anything else.

  “N-no.” She turned back to Runa, her eyes searching, and then her expression cleared. One corner of her mouth hooked up in a smile. The eyebrow on the same side twitched up as well, as though it didn’t want to be left out. “Wouldn’t be much point, would there? I’d say it needs a grinder taken to it, but by the time you ground out all those pitted bits there wouldn’t be any sword left. You… gave that back to me, as well. Did you mean to do that?” she asked, her voice wavering slightly.

  “Yes. No offense meant, but it doesn’t look like the sort of sword I want to get caught holding.”

  Was that too rude? But Severine didn’t look offended. Her grin widened.

  Runa was lost. “If you’re thinking I’d like it as payment for saving your life, the answer’s no.”

  “Hah!” Severine slapped a hand over her mouth. “No—best to stay clear of that one. If you can stay clear.”

  Strange thing for a trader to say, Runa thought. But maybe she took the overwhelm-the-customer-with-confusion approach to her job. Runa had come across more of those than she wanted, when she’d ventured out of the Cauldron into Sollus Gate. They would chatter and joke and suddenly your coin-purse was empty and you were walking away with a load of stuff you never wanted, ugly swords included.

  She wouldn’t mind if Severine kept chatting.

  “You don’t want any of the swords,” Severine said slowly. “You’re happy for me to stay. And I am exhausted,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “I clearly need whatever help I can get.”

  “I can tell.”

  “What gave it away? Falling asleep in this chair every night?”

  “Something like that.”

  “All the more reason for me to take a break.”

  Plenty of people glared or looked scared when they found themselves looking so far up, and at the tusks and horns they found when they got there, but not Severine. Her eyes shone with warmth.

  “Enough about that. The swords are all fine, we’re both alive, so… How about that breakfast?”

  Severine cleared away the swords while Runa set the table. She stole glances at the other woman as she dug out more cheese and dried fruit, but didn’t manage to see exactly how Severine managed to stow all the daggers about herself.

  They sat together at the small table to eat. Runa’s knees jutted out either side, her legs too long to fit under it. Severine fit perfectly, and it was a strange novelty, to see the bakery’s furniture used by someone the size it was meant for.

  She wondered if the volcano sprite felt the same way, or if it was still glaring suspiciously at Severine from wherever it had hidden itself away.

  Severine poured the tea and raised her mug. “Here’s to not falling off mountains or getting skewered by a restless skeleton,” she announced.

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  Runa raised her mug, and was thoroughly unprepared for Severine’s ambush.

  “So.” Severine leaned forwards, elbows on the table, mug delicately balanced between her long fingers. “What’s your story, Runa?”

  Runa fought the instinct to tense. She got the question a lot. People wanted to know why the person they’d hired to shepherd them around the Cauldron would want a job doing that.

  She still wasn’t good at answering it.

  Runa took another sip of hot water, trying to find a way around telling the truth. She never told the truth, in these situations, but it was harder to get away from it right now, because the situations were so similar.

  I met a girl who made me feel like you do, but when I actually talked to her it all went wrong, so I hopped on a vagrant curse and threw myself into the most dangerous region in all the world, because that seemed easier than having a conversation about it.

  Ugh.

  “It’s a long story,” she hedged. “What about you? How’d you get into the magic sword business?”

  “Oh, you know. It was this or die horribly.” Severine stretched. “More water?”

  ***

  There was still no sign of Junilla. Audella Tremblewood was settling contentedly into her empty throne, keeping the tavern running, making arch pronouncements about adding something new to the menu and watching the road for potential guests.

  “Not that we have many,” she explained to Runa when she dropped off the day’s bread. “It was good luck that Junilla had the space when the storm hit, but I’m sure we’d all appreciate a few new faces. Other than the two of you,” she added belatedly.

  “You mean new faces who are also paying guests?” Severine asked with a grin.

  “Well, it does keep things moving, doesn’t it? Speaking of which, Runa, did our Errant pass on my little message?”

  The egg. Runa had forgotten all about it. “He did.”

  “And?”

  “It’d be nice to get the basics without having to go all the way down the mountain,” Runa admitted.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Audella’s eyes narrowed in triumph. “Exactly! Don’t know what the boy was thinking. Anything you need, you let me know. So long’s it’s eggs, poultry or hard liquor,” she amended. “Most years I have pig, too, by arrangement with the farmers who keep sows in the forest, but my boar’s been missing these past six months. Went over the Rim, right before the Cauldron went and stirred itself up and took him off too far to find his way home. Ah, well.” She sniffed, wetly. “If the gods didn’t mean us to face these trials, they wouldn’t have buggered off and left us to our own devices.”

  Speaking of people disappearing… “Any idea when Junilla will be back?”

  “When she’s bombarded her man with enough letters that he lets her reel him back in, I expect,” Auredda declared with arch mischief. “That wizard, I mean. That storm knocked a few charms loose around the village and of course she thinks it’s her business to bother someone to come and re-enchant them. Clean water and the like. You haven’t had any problems with that?”

  “All the charms around the bakery are working.”

  “Except the cellar full of broken jars and barrels,” Severine pointed out with a grimace.

  “Oh! Yes, Errant said something about that. Hop along to the mill after this and see what he’s after.”

  Severine waited until they were outside to raise her eyebrows. “Hop along, should we? As though we don’t have anything else to do?”

  There was one thing they did need to do at some point that day. But that could wait.

  The walk to the mill was much nicer now the way wasn’t snowed over, and the smell of wildflowers filled the air.

  The watermill was outside the main village, slightly farther along the Rim without getting too close. From conversations with Errant, Runa knew it had been built after Pothollow was dragged up the mountain, from the mangled remains of the previous mill.

  Dragonflies buzzed over the rain-fed millpond, and a fisherbird stood watch in a branch over the water, diving for its meals. A narrow channel led down to where the big wheel turned slowly, no longer frozen or buried in snow. The mill building itself was stone, as was the cottage next door where the Millers lived, with cheerful flowers in the window boxes and a small garden to one side.

  Tam and Errant invited them to stay for lunch while they talked business, and Runa gained a new understanding of what the village expected of their local baker.

  She’d assumed—largely on the basis of Junilla letting her assume it, she realized now—that as baker, her job was to make, well, bread. And then what she made, people would eat.

  Apparently, that wasn’t the half of it.

  “Nobody’s left any orders with you?”

  “Only Widow Tremblewood wanting more stone bread. And Junilla, I suppose, but…” But that’s more her accepting whatever terrible bread I unload on her.

  Less terrible the last day or two, admittedly.

  “Well, don’t let them know you’re open to orders, that’s my advice,” Tam said blithely.

  Errant shook his head. “Ignore him. He’s only saying that because the old baker had a bee in his bonnet about making stuff people actually wanted to eat.”

  Runa, who had only recently started making bread people could eat without a pickaxe, winced.

  “I don’t see how I could be doing more than I am now. There’s only one oven,” Runa said.

  “See?” Tam sounded triumphant. “Don’t bother her, Errant. We’re meant to be doing our best not to scare her off with too much work.”

  Runa frowned. “What?”

  “So you can scare her off with your corn instead, you mean?” his husband retorted mildly. To Runa, he explained, “The baker before you—Bracklethorn—acted as though baking what people actually wanted was taking away from what he saw as his true calling.”

  “Those tiny cakes,” Tam added, shaking his head. “There’s a time for cakes, and it isn’t when everyone is after something to sop up their soup with. Which isn’t to say we wouldn’t appreciate you turning your hand to something sweeter?”

  They both stared at her. Runa folded her arms. “What did you mean, you’re meant to be not scaring me off?”

  “I wondered about that, too,” Severine murmured out of the corner of her mouth.

  Tam made an exasperated noise. “Well, what do you think we meant? Junilla’s been trying to find a new baker since the last one got sick of us and ran off. You’re the first person to spend more than a minute inside the bakery without running out screaming about ghosts and monsters.”

  Runa raised one eyebrow. The little volcano sprite frightened people that much?

  Next to her, Severine frowned. “The bakery scared people?”

  “I’d say Bracklethorn cursed it before he left, but if that was the case we’d have watched it lumber over the Rim by now, surely,” Errant said, sighing. “But now you turn up? And you can actually bake? You’re a miracle, and no one here wants to lose you.”

  Runa stared at him.

  She stared at Tam, just to check. He nodded.

  Gods and liches.

  “But I can’t bake,” she said, into the unbearable silence of them both staring approvingly at her.

  “What do you call all the bread you’ve been making, then?” Tam demanded.

  “I call it inedible, most of it!”

  “Well, you’ve improved a lot these last few days.”

  “That’s not—” Runa cut herself off before she could say That’s not me, it’s the volcano sprite who’s been frightening everyone off telling me what to do. She bit her tongue. “You’re serious?”

  “Deadly serious. Why do you think Junilla smacked Tam here every time he tried to tell you about his horrible corn?” Errant put a fond arm around his husband’s shoulders. “Besides all that, you’re one of us now. We don’t want to lose you.”

  Runa didn’t know what to say. “Bracklethorn left his recipe book behind. I’ve only been making what I could find in there. And I won’t be making anything unless I can replace the supplies I’ve used.”

  She hesitated, and wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t sure why she was feeling anything she was feeling.

  She’d already decided to stay and keep working at the bakery. She’d already admitted to herself that she liked it—liked all of it, liked the baking, liked the opinionated little volcano sprite, liked Pothollow and the way people here accepted her without question.

  But the fact that they didn’t just accept her? They wanted her here?

  Runa cleared her throat. “Audella said you wanted to see me about something?”

  The something, it turned out, was an old piece of equipment Tam had hauled out from somewhere it hadn’t seen the light of day in years. It looked like a giant, flat sieve, but magic glimmered along the edges as he blew on it.

  “No point wasting any of that muck we shoveled up from your cellar. This’ll sieve them out. Bracklethorn may have refused to put those stores to any good use, but that doesn’t mean you need to.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Good question…”

  The magical sieve had been stored in the very back of the Millers’ attic because sometime between its purchase and now, the knowledge of how to use the thing had been lost. There was also, Runa suspected, the possibility that previous Millers had been more in the business of selling more flour to any customers who dropped theirs in the dirt, rather than helping them sift it out, and perhaps a few Millers who, if a sack of flour got somehow mixed up with a sack of sand, didn’t consider it anyone’s business except theirs and the scales.

  Between the three of them, Runa, Severine and Tam had enough experience with spelled tools to coax the spell awake again, and eventually, with Errant supplying copious mugs of herbal tea, they worked it out.

  “You have to sit here and think about wanting it to sieve a specific thing out?” Tam was appalled. “I thought magic was meant to make things easier!”

  “Some people might say sitting and thinking is easier than sitting and picking flecks of broken crockery out from flecks of wheatmeal,” Errant pointed out.

  “And you have to know what it is you’re sifting, to think about it.” Runa did her best to keep her voice neutral. Severine glanced at her. Not neutral enough, then.

  “What happens if you stop thinking about sifting?” Severine asked. “Or start thinking about sifting something that isn’t in the sieve?”

  The answer, it turned out, was nothing.

  They were sitting in the small courtyard outside the Millers’ cottage. Runa urged Tam to move a bit further from the cottage with its overhanging thatch roof, just to be on the safe side, and he settled down with the sieve and the basket again.

  He shook the sieve.

  “Wheatmeal flour,” Tam announced. “Last harvest’s, I think. It doesn’t smell too badly of the preservation spells.” A fine downpour of pale white flour drifted down into the basket they were using to collect… well, it all looked like flour, to Runa. That was the problem. “But too badly! Is bad enough! If I’d known he was just going to sit on them like a hen on an addled egg, I wouldn’t have bothered milling the wheat to flour in the first place—”

  “Is this part of the experiment?” Errant asked, coming back with a plate of cheese and fruit. “And what’s this about you doing the milling?”

  “We wouldn’t have bothered,” Tam corrected himself without missing a beat. “And as for—oh, look, it stopped working.”

  He shook the sieve again, experimentally. Despite the holes in the base, nothing came out.

  “So you have to have what you want to sieve in mind to make it start, but you can’t stop thinking about it, or the sieve stops,” Severine said.

  “What is the point,” Tam complained, dropping the sieve.

  “Better than the alternative.” Runa picked up the sieve and inspected it.

  “What alternative?”

  She met Severine’s eye, and without a word, they each agreed not to mention any of the very many ways magical objects could go awry if you approached them wrong. “Filling the basket with all the grot you just managed to sift out of it,” Runa said instead, and as she looked away from Severine she was filled with a strange sort of warmth. What a relief: someone else who understood about how magical things might up and bite you, but also that you might not want to have a whole conversation about it. “You’re sure you don’t mind us taking it with us?”

  “Go ahead. It’s not like it’s getting any use here.”