The Butcher Queen, it turned out, was the monarch-consort of one of those small city-states that surrounded the Peaceful Sea. The ones that were too small and plentiful for Runa to have ever got her head around how many there were, or what they were called, the way no one in this part of the world knew the names of all the Rising Islands.

  Junilla—the Butcher Queen—had ruled one of them.

  Or had done, before she disappeared.

  “It’s not as though I kept track of her! I got out. I got as far away as I could. I didn’t think I’d run into her again half the world away!” Severine gnawed on her lower lip. “I thought—she was queen. Why wouldn’t she stay there? Doing queen things?”

  “Butchering?” Runa suggested.

  “Well, yes…”

  “Interesting name,” Runa said cautiously.

  Severine scrunched her fingers into her hair and left them there, as though she was prying the memories free. “It was before I was born. She was a commoner. The king fell in love with her at first sight, and married her even though she wasn’t a noble.” There was a strange, longing twist in Severine’s voice. “It was all very romantic. Like a story, like the way thing are supposed to go.”

  Runa’s shoulders relaxed slightly. “So she wasn’t called that because—”

  “Oh, no, she definitely also killed people.”

  “Junilla killed people?”

  …Actually, that was less surprising than it should have been, now she said it out loud.

  Severine nodded. She had gone a twitchy sort of pale. “Honestly, that sort of thing was all very normal back home. I mean, it was expected that you would at least try to get rid of your enemies. Or just anyone you didn’t like. Does that make it better? Poisoning was popular. There were apothecaries on every corner for a while, not in my town, but in the capital, everyone said. So many that the nobles had to stop poisoning each other for a while because the apothecaries were too busy poisoning each other to get in on the best street corners to sell their—I’m rambling, aren’t I?”

  Runa shook her head. Severine shot her a long-suffering look.

  “Yes, I am.” She sighed. “But it’s your fault for letting me. You’ve been a Cauldron guide for years, leading people from all over the place. You must hear all the stories. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Butcher Queen before.”

  “Never.”

  “Never? But she’s—” An odd series of expressions washed over her face, like scrapings from the bottom of a stew pot bubbling to the top when you stirred it. She pressed her lips together. “You really haven’t?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not just saying that? It isn’t part of your big, strong silent act?”

  “What act?” Runa met Severine’s worried gaze and held it until the line between her eyebrows deepened into a suspicious glare.

  “See? That’s why I can’t trust you when you say things like I’ve never heard of the Butcher Queen.” The soup of Severine’s expressions settled on skeptical but amused, which was better than terrified and sweating. “Ten years is a long time, though.”

  “Mm.” Runa was thinking back, counting—ten years ago she was a Cauldron guide, long past already finding her feet in the job. “Wait. I do remember something about a queen in—Staranza?” She hoped that was right. All those little cities had something-a names. “Something about gold?”

  “Yes! There was something with gold!”

  “Spinning it out of…” Runa reached the end of her memory, and searched for a likely subject. “Thread?”

  “Not… exactly. And she moved on from that pretty quickly once she became queen, anyway.” Severine rubbed her forehead. “That’s it? The Butcher Queen reigned for twenty bloody years, and all the rest of the world remembers is she spun gold?”

  “Might be more. I was always more focused on stopping things in the Cauldron from killing my clients than stories from the rest of the world.”

  The outside world had never held much interest.

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  It was too full of the awkward kind of surprises, instead of the deadly sort, which were so much easier to deal with.

  Maybe if she’d listened more closely, she would have realized the rest of the world was as dangerous as the Cauldron, curses or not.

  Severine’s shoulders slumped. “I thought I’d left all of that behind. That whatever my life was now, at least it wasn’t that. I wasn’t stuck in that world. And now she’s been out here the whole time? She wasn’t stuck there, either? When did that happen? If she didn’t want to be the Butcher Queen, why didn’t she leave earlier? Could I have stayed, instead of—?”

  She bit her lip, and answered her own question before Runa could think of how to respond to that.

  “No. I couldn’t have stayed. I had the blades by then. And there’s only one way out of that,” she almost spat.

  “Would you have wanted to stay?”

  Severine’s gaze became distant. She hadn’t said anything about what her life had been like back then, but Runa could put the pieces together.

  The nobles of the Peaceable Seas filled the dull hours of their lives with casual assassination. The Butcher Queen may have been a commoner before she married the king, but royalty didn’t stay royalty by letting that happen too often. If Junilla was Severine’s mother-in-law, then the life Severine had left behind had involved a lot less bedding down in the dirt than her current one did.

  “No,” Severine said at last. “If you’d asked me then, I would have stayed, but… I was a lot younger in those days. Young, and foolish, and—na?ve.” Her voice tripped over the last word. “Honestly, looking back, I’m surprised the queen didn’t run me through just to stop me from embarrassing myself further.”

  “You’re pretty calm, to be joking about this.”

  “Really? Because on the inside, believe me, I’m panicking.” Severine’s smile wobbled. “Which is terribly embarrassing, of course. Imagine, meeting with someone who tried to assassinate you and being scared.”

  “Imagine,” Runa said, deadpan.

  “So embarrassing. My etiquette—” She stopped, her cheeks darkening. Her eyes flicked to Runa’s.

  Etiquette teacher? Runa guessed. That seemed like the sort of thing a noble girl might have.

  She could have done with one of those herself, a few decades back.

  But that was then. No point looking back.

  Right now, the sun was high. She needed to tend to the oven.

  And Severine was meant to be resting, not squaring up against terrifying older women from her past.

  “You all right?” Runa asked gently.

  Severine sighed, frustrated, and ran her fingers through her hair, frustrated, and admitted in a rush, “I don’t know?”

  “You feel ready to head back to the bakery?”

  “You don’t think Junilla will be there?”

  “Lying in wait?” Runa suggested.

  Severine shuddered. “On the roof. Not that the roofs here are anything like the ones she preferred.”

  “Don’t have to head back to the bakery. It’s a few hours down the mountain to the nearest town. We could make it before sundown. Or you could cut yourself away somewhere.”

  Except, for the first time since she’d met Severine, she didn’t have her packroll of far too many swords with her.

  Severine realized it the same moment Runa did. Her face paled. “I have to go back.”

  There was no ambush waiting for them at the bakery. The place was silent, except for the crackle of the fire and the occasional clank of the volcano sprite hiding among the jars.

  Severine leapt on her swords like a mother duck herding lost ducklings. Runa left her to it. This was priestly behaviour, she supposed. Alternately reassuring and complaining at the blades.

  The red jewels on Bloodburster’s hilt winked at her, and she turned away to focus on her own work.

  “So,” she said, once the dough was rising and Severine had packed her swords back away. “You’re married?”

  “That’s what you’re focusing on?”

  Runa managed to repress a wince. “Yeah?”

  “Good.” Severine pushed herself back to sit against the wall, arms folded and one leg crooked. “Well, as I believe I shouted, or maybe screeched, over at the apothecary’s, that was a long time ago and I don’t think it counts.”

  “You don’t think it counts as being married?”

  “Call me old-fashioned, but I think that for a marriage to actually matter, you need to do more than sort of wanly drift out of the room when your new bride asks you to stop your step-mother from murdering you,” Severine retorted promptly.

  “Huh.”

  Severine sighed. “Anyway, last I heard, he’d remarried and his new wife is very much alive. Which is further proof that I’m not still married to him, if he’s got another wife!”

  “But you did marry him?”

  Severine cut her a sidelong look. “When I was young and stupid and had very little say in the matter,” she said airily. “I hadn’t even realized I like girls better, back then.”

  Oh.

  “That’s… good,” Runa said awkwardly, and Severine laughed.

  “I hoped you’d say that.”

  Runa cleared her throat. “Is it going to cause problems for anyone here?”

  “Who I used to be? Gods no. I mean, if there aren’t any tales about the Butcher Queen here, then no one’s going to know anything about some silly—about me.” Severine bit her lip. “But the Butcher—Junilla…”

  Junilla.

  Runa thought over everything she knew about the innkeeper. The way she seemed to run things. The way nobody wanted to go against her.

  But not in the way you wouldn’t want to go against someone called the Butcher Queen. More like the way you didn’t try to get one over the Guild leader, back in Sollus Gate. Not because they’d kill you, but because it wouldn’t get you anywhere, and everyone would look at you and think, Wow, what was that idiot thinking?

  Junilla wasn’t obviously murderous.

  …Were most murderers obviously murderous, out in the world?

  Runa shook her head.

  “Perhaps she’s left her previous life behind her completely, and came here for a fresh start?” Severine suggested, with willful cheerfulness. “Maybe she never wanted to be an evil murderous queen in the first place! And if she’s been here for years and nothing has happened… It was a long time ago, right? Do a lot of people tend to go mysteriously missing here?”

  “Other than the old baker?”

  “Oh gods.”

  “That was a joke,” Runa clarified, and Severine gulp-laughed and raised her hands.

  “I know. But… still. Still.”

  Still, Runa thought. Junilla’s past was terrifying, and unexpected, and potentially dangerous.

  But it wasn’t as bad as what her own future might hold.

  Maybe.