“Why do I get the feeling you’re waiting for me to leave?” Severine put her hands on her hips.

  “Uh,” Runa replied. They were back at the bakery. She had the sieve, and she had the buckets of mess they’d carried up from the cellar.

  And Severine was right, because she was waiting to start until she didn’t have an audience.

  “Worried about the magical sieve deciding to start a side-hustle sieving brains out through our skulls?” Severine suggested brightly.

  Worried about showing off how little I know about any of this. Runa gritted her teeth.

  “Or worried you won’t be able to meditate knowledgeably enough on the nature of different flours to make the sieve work?”

  Runa shot her a startled look. Severine’s voice had been mischievous—but there was an echo of that understanding from earlier in it, too. “Something like that,” she admitted.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I’ve got my own business to attend to.” She stretched and headed for the back door. “I’m going to compare all the dried-up bits of leaves and stuff in that tea Audella gave me to the plants in your garden, and then I’m going to ask Tam what the hells his great-aunt dosed me with last night that had me sleeping in a chair again instead of a proper bed.”

  Severine looked as though she hadn’t slept at all. The shadows under her eyes were still deep and dark, and there was a weariness in the way she held herself that Runa was too familiar with.

  “About that—” The words were out before Runa could think the better of them.

  Severine paused, her face a mask of barely disguised curiosity. “Mm?”

  This was the thing from earlier that she’d thought they needed to discuss. And here was the opportunity to discuss it. She just needed to not swallow her own tongue trying to get the words out.

  “There’s a bed here you could have.”

  Severine stared at her. She stared back.

  “Later,” she added quickly, before anything caught fire, or Severine got the wrong idea, or more of the wrong idea, because that whole offer had come out wrong and what if she thought--? “After I’ve had a go with this, and you’ve—the plants…”

  “Later,” Severine said with a grin, and disappeared out the garden door before Runa could get a handle on what exactly she thought later was going to include.

  She turned her attention back to the sieve. Tam was right. She didn’t want to waste any of the old baker’s provisions. Long years in the Cauldron had taught her the value of food, even food that tasted weird because of all the preservation spells on it.

  But Severine was right, too. She didn’t know any of this well enough to sift different sorts of flours from each other.

  “Blop?”

  Nobody in Particular skittered out from the oven and peered at the magical sieve. She explained how it worked and spun it between her hands, wondering where to start.

  Where to start proving to myself that I have no idea what I’m doing, she thought ruefully.

  With an audience, after all.

  “Blop!” Nobody said commandingly.

  Runa sighed. “You’re right. Gotta start somewhere.”

  She scooped a bowlful of mixed… stuff… from the waste bucket, into the sieve. There were a few pottery shards big enough she could pick them out by hand, which she did. Some clumps where flour and seeds and dirt and who knew what else had stuck to smears of honey. Some… butter, maybe?

  Or maybe not.

  And even if it did work, would any of it be safe to eat? Well, maybe if Junilla came back with this wizard she was on the hunt for, he’d be able to run a purification spell through what she sifted out, to get any seeds of illness out of it. Or at least tell her if the sieve was doing that at the same time it filtered everything else out.

  “Flour,” she muttered out loud. “It’s all… dusty…”

  She shook the sieve.

  Nothing happened.

  “Wheatmeal flour.” She tried again, remembering the stuff that had drifted down from the sieve while Tam was experimenting with it. “Sort of… brown. And bitsy. Has some flecks in, not just dust. It’s…”

  She kept trying for a bit longer, but nothing worked. Frustratingly, she could feel it almost working—the end of a rope just out of reach, a shadow just outside of her field of vision.

  If this sieve relied on the user knowing exactly what they wanted, then it was clear she didn’t know enough.

  “Glop,” Nobody said gently.

  “You’re right. I should start with what I do know.”

  Which right now, in the face of defeat, felt like nothing.

  She stirred the waste bucket again. Flours, seeds, butter…

  …Honey.

  “All right,” she said quietly, as though she was frightened if she said it too loud, she might frighten the thought off. “Honey. Travels well. You get nuts preserved in it, sometimes. Other stuff. Meat.”

  Nothing.

  “Bees make it.”

  Nothing.

  “Wouldn’t trust the stuff you find in the Cauldron, but…”

  But the strangely glowing stuff you found in the Cauldron wasn’t the only honey Runa had experience with. Nor was the stuff she paid out the nose for in Sollus Gate, or spread on her scones and terrible bread here in Pothollow.

  It was a long time ago now, but during her ill-fated stay in her father’s lands, one of his vassals had shown her around the hives. In a world she’d assumed was all sky-piercing peaks and bitter icy winds, they were a revelation: a buzz of life and activity, bustling and busy, the bees flying out from their hives to explore the mossy valleys and foothills and buzzing home again at night. She’d found fields of flowers she never would have imagined, following where the bees went. The gardens that fed the halls of the trollish lords and ladies, not just the cold halls themselves.

  The hivekeeper had shown her how to keep the bees calm. She’d been terrible at it. But so long as she kept her distance, she’d been able to watch him extract the honeycombs from the hives, then extract the honey itself.

  The memory washed through her, distant, but clear. Not only how it had looked, but the sounds and smells and taste, the air so thick with sweetness that an afternoon’s work left her ravenous and feeling full at the same time.

  Drip.

  She stared.

  A spoonful of honey was lying in the bottom of the bowl she’d set under the sieve.

  “Glop!” declared the volcano sprite triumphantly.

  “Yeah,” Runa said, stunned. She cleared her throat. “It’s a start.”

  By the time Severine returned, she’d extracted all the honey from that first spoonful of mess and, after some thought, most of the pottery sherds. She was more familiar with broken pots than she was with the contents of them, it turned out.

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  Unless those contents are bones and burial treasures, she thought with a wince.

  The sieve stopped sieving.

  Probably a good thing. her new neighbours seemed open-minded about stuff like harvesting their fruit and veg from the Cauldron, but she imagined they would draw the line at eating skeletons.

  “Any luck with the herbs?” she asked Severine.

  “Oh, that was just an excuse to leave you alone,” Severine replied breezily. “Errant said he would ask his great-aunt what the tea was.”

  “You didn’t want to ask her yourself?”

  “What, and sound like I’m accusing her of poisoning me? I’m not—” An odd look flashed across her face. “That would be rude,” she said at last, with an exaggerated wide-eyed expression that made Runa think there was more honesty behind the joke than humour.

  She is from the Peaceable Seas, she told herself. You heard weird things about those city-states.

  You heard weird things about most places, usually from neighbouring places. Didn’t meant they were true.

  “It’s getting late,” Severine said suddenly.

  Runa nodded. “I’d better get started on tomorrow’s bread.”

  “And…”

  The question Severine wasn’t asking hung in the air between them.

  Runa braced herself, took a steadying breath, and said, “There’s the tavern—”

  Severine’s face fell so fast it was almost comical.

  “But you’re welcome to stay here another night.”

  Maybe she should start preparing the dough now. It suddenly felt like a good idea to have something to be doing with her hands, instead of just standing around not knowing where to look.

  Severine sounded hesitant. “I seem to recall you offered me a bed?”

  “Offer still stands.”

  Runa’s voice was gruffer than she intended. It made the offer sound resentful, not… hopeful? Welcoming? Slightly terrifying?

  “I’d love that.”

  Something released in her chest. She straightened from where she’d been fussing in the cupboards, pretending to do things. “Good. The bedroom’s in the attic, I’ll show you how to get in.”

  “Now?!” Severine looked equal parts excited and surprised. “I mean, uh, yes! No time like the present.”

  Runa pulled on the trapdoor swing. “You’ll have to tell me what it’s like up there.”

  “…huh?”

  Runa turned away so that Severine wouldn’t see her face change color. What did she think, she was inviting her into her bed? In the middle of the afternoon?

  Oh, gods and liches. She really did think that.

  Runa felt hot and cold at the same time. She cleared her throat, and then cleared it again. “I, uh. Haven’t been up there myself.”

  “What do you mean, you've never been up there? It's your house!”

  “I'm only borrowing it.”

  “From who? The old baker no one’s seen in who knows how long?” Her eyebrows quirked. “This Junilla person who acts like she rules the village?”

  Runa shrugged. “One of them, yeah.”

  “And you've never been upstairs.”

  “For one, there aren't stairs. It's a ladder. For two—” Runa gestured at herself. “Look at me.”

  “I'm looking,” Severine said, from somewhere in the back of her throat.

  “I couldn't fit my shoulders through the trapdoor.”

  “Ohhhhh.” Severine blinked and came back to herself. “You couldn't—right. That makes sense. So everything up there is...?”

  “The previous owner's belongings.”

  “The guy who just up and left without taking his stuff with him?” Severine's eyes narrowed. “You're sure there's nothing fishy about that?”

  Runa shrugged, outwardly casual but inwardly celebrating that she wasn’t the only outsider suspicious enough to mistrust the baker’s convenient absence. “Nobody else around here seems to think so.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t tell you, would they?”

  Severine’s grumbling suspicion was oddly refreshing.

  Her voice trailed down as she climbed through the trapdoor. “I'm only saying, if the first thing I see up here is your predecessor, skeletonized and unhappy about unexpected guests...”

  “If you need rescuing again, you know what to do.”

  “Don’t you worry about that. I’m practically an expert at being rescued by now.” Her legs disappeared through the hole. “Bit dark.”

  “Here’s a candle.”

  “Thanks. Oh, and there’s a window. I’ll open the shutters…”

  The darkness beyond the trapdoor retreated, banished by candlelight and the last dregs of afternoon sun. From where she was standing, Runa could see a whitewashed wall and a patch of ceiling. Severine’s shadow moved across it.

  And then she screamed.

  Runa leaped, grabbed the edge of the trapdoor hole with one hand and launched herself upwards. It was a tight squeeze, and something cracked around her shoulder—she thought it was around, not her shoulder itself—but she was moving too fast to care.

  She made it through with minimal scraping.

  And found Severine utterly unharmed, looking around herself with unconcerned curiosity.

  “You're sure someone used to live up here? I've seen livelier tombs.”

  Panting, Runa glanced around and nodded agreement. Severine raised an eyebrow.

  “No comment on that? No, how many tombs are you familiar with?”

  “I've seen a few tombs myself.” She absently reached out to lift Severine's hand with the candle in it to get a better look around, and almost missed the look Severine shot her when their hands met.

  Almost.

  “There’s nothing here,” she said mildly.

  The room was painfully bare. Furniture, yes; any trace of the man who’d once lived here, no. No old clothes left behind because they were too ragged, no broken combs or forgotten shoes or… mending, or… whatever else people had when they lived in one place long enough to accumulate stuff.

  No stuff.

  It made her think how little of her own stuff she had to fill shelves and cupboards with. If she left as suddenly as the old baker had, would there be any sign she’d ever been here?

  Was there any sign she’d ever been anywhere that she’d lived?

  She batted the thought away. There was a way to think about that which was normal, and a way that led to the things she’d been avoiding all her life, and she didn’t want to do either of them right now.

  Severine sighed. “I guess the old baker did take his important things with him. And here we were, cruelly suggesting your lovely neighbours murdered him in his bed.”

  Runa shrugged. “It's important to keep an open mind.”

  “Open to the possibility of squeezing through tight spaces? I thought you said you didn't fit up here.”

  She didn’t. There was more hole in the trapdoor than there used to be. And the attic room itself? The roof was so low she was bent uncomfortably double, and it sloped, so literally every other patch of floor up here would be even less comfortable.

  Unless you were lying down.

  The candlelight caught the music in Severine's eyes.

  Runa kept her voice level. “You yelled and disappeared. Usually when someone I'm hanging around with does that, it means something's trying to eat them.”

  “Whoops.” Severine grinned, remorseless.

  It was hopeless. She couldn’t even hide behind voiceless, furiously blushing silence, because that lichforsaken revelation that Severine had indeed been lying to her every chance she got since she arrived had booted her off the mysteriously attractive woman pedestal Runa had shoved her up on—but not done anything about the attractive bit.

  Runa gave up on standing and sat with a grunt. Now she was looking up at Severine—a situation Severine rapidly remedied by leaning against one of the few pieces of furniture in the small room.

  It was just them and the dancing candlelight, either side of the spear of afternoon light coming through the window.

  “I didn't mean to scare you.” The corner of Severine’s mouth turned up.

  “Didn't scare me. If there was something up here, I'd be able to handle it.”

  “I don't doubt that.” Her gaze was about half admiring, and half questioning. Runa’s stomach flipped.

  “And what can you handle, Severine?”

  Severine's eyes lit up. “I hope I've already demonstrated that I can handle throwing myself at the nearest muscular woman when things get tough,” she suggested, her voice generously sprinkled with hope.

  “And if there are no muscular women conveniently nearby?”

  “I cut a hole in the world to find them.”

  Severine leaned forward. Runa leaned, too.

  The air between them sang with possibility.

  And the life the Cauldron had thrown Runa out of never felt so distant.

  “You could have invited me up,” Runa said, at the very last moment. “Instead of playing games.”

  “You could have told me where your bed was, instead of all this business with the attic,” Severine retorted.

  Runa shrugged. The golden afternoon sun played over Severine’s cheeks, sculpting her jawline and gilding the brown of her teasing eyes. It was hard to pay attention to anything else, or even what she was saying.

  “You could have told me you were a Cauldron treasure-hunter.” Except without the lying, Severine would have stayed up there on the untouchable plinth Runa had constructed for her, and they never would have done this. Whatever this was going to be.

  “A—yes,” Severine said slowly. “I could have told you that. Rather than sneaking around.” She bit her lip, her eyes narrowing as her focus on Runa became more intense. “I was sneaky, wasn’t I? But you’re sneaky too. I can’t tell how much of your whole thing is real, and how much is…”

  “What whole thing?”

  Severine gestured vaguely, somewhere in the distance beyond Runa’s immediate attention. “How you just… go along with things.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Runa was beginning to get a sinking feeling in her stomach.

  Severine looked agitated. “Did you even know what those wizards wanted, out in the Cauldron? Before half the Cauldron came crashing down on you?”

  “You can’t blame them for—”

  “And from the way everyone tells it, the bakery was the first place you set foot in Pothollow, and this Junilla said you could stay here, so you just… became the baker? I turn up in the cellar and you feed me breakfast?”

  “Not a great breakfast,” Runa interjected.

  “It was a great breakfast!” Severine shot back, looking offended. She glared at Runa, then slumped.

  “Look,” said Runa, taking pity on her. “I mean, look at me.”

  Severine’s gaze became strangely solid. “Hng?”

  “I go along with things because, what’s the worst that can happen? I haven’t found a problem I can’t get myself out of yet. And—”

  And most of the time, it’s less awkward to fight your way out of whatever problem your client didn’t want you to ask questions about, than to needle them about it until they hire someone who won’t be able to pull them out of the monster’s mouth.

  Not that Severine had hired her for anything.

  Runa massaged her jaw. “Anyway,” she said, aware she’d trailed off. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I think you’ll find I shall worry about it, actually.” Severine sniffed. “Continually. Which will make a change from—by the way, is there anything you like doing?”

  “What?” Runa blinked, and the words that made it to her lips were, “I’m getting better at baking.”

  Severine’s grin sharpened with delight. “In bed? Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I’m a bit rusty at this. Too much time polishing swords, not enough lessons in flirting with women who keep saving my life.”

  Runa’s brain stopped working for a minute.

  It wasn’t as though she was a stranger to people wanting to climb her like a tree. It was just that when they reached the upper branches, they tended to be disappointed.

  And she didn’t want Severine to be disappointed.

  When she finally managed to speak again, she said, “I’d need to have a bed, first.”

  Severine stopped. An expression of horror washed over her face. “What?!”