Runa left the tavern with none of the answers she’d wanted, and more questions. But her attempt to dig out information on Junilla’s past ended up less of a failure than she’d feared.

  And more of a potential disaster. A few days later, Junilla appeared on her doorstep.

  Severine was still recovering from what Corvin called her ‘completely understandable exhaustion, I’ve already told you there’s nothing to worry about except making sure she gets some rest, now get out of my shop’. But at the sight of Junilla, she went as pale as though she’d been slapped by another glacier.

  Junilla didn’t look much better.

  The two women stared at each other, like cats sizing each other up outside the local fish shop.

  Runa cleared her throat. “The bread’s still in the oven—”

  “It’s not the bread I’ve come about.” Junilla pointed her chin at Runa as she addressed Severine. “Your landlady here says you’re worried I’m going to murder you in your bed.”

  “I never said—” Runa objected.

  “I’m not worried about you murdering me in my bed. I’m worried about you murdering me out of it,” Severine said defensively.

  “Is that why you’ve barely poked your head out of doors since you saw me? Pity. Pothollow’s a lovely place to spend a little time in between adventures.” Junilla’s eyes narrowed. “But if you’re planning to stay, then Runa’s right. There are a few things we should talk about.”

  Severine tilted her head. “Who says I’m staying?”

  Without moving her eyes at all, Junilla managed to draw attention to the two sets of dishes on the small table, Severine’s boots propped against the wall by the front door, and the several sets of assorted knives she’d spread out over the floor to polish.

  From where Junilla was standing, she wouldn’t be able to see Bloodburster propped in its corner. Without thinking about it, Runa tossed a cloth over its ruby-studded hilt. Just in case.

  “My mistake,” Junilla drawled. “You look ready to leave at any moment. But on the off-chance that you’re not… let’s talk. In private, if you don’t mind, Runa.”

  To Runa’s surprise, Severine nodded.

  Less to her surprise, she found herself fairly promptly turfed out of her own bakery.

  Not that it was hers, but still.

  She loitered close enough to hear if there were any raised voices. There weren’t. It wasn’t long until Severine reappeared, setting foot outside the bakery for the first time in several days.

  She blinked in the morning light.

  “Good talk?” Runa asked.

  Severine nodded. She looked distracted. Not bad distracted, just like her mind was off buzzing around thoughts elsewhere. “Hmm? Yes. Better than I was hoping.”

  “What were you hoping for?”

  “A gold-plated letter of promise that she would never chase me across any rooftops again, trying to slit my throat,” Severine replied promptly.

  “What?!”

  “Harder to run across rooftops here than back home. Though, the roofs are closer to the ground here, so slipping would be less deadly.”

  “Severine—”

  “And slitting throats is bad for business. People might start to worry about what she’s putting in the stew.” Severine put her hands behind her head, tilting her face up to the sky. “So it’s all settled. I’m staying.”

  “That’s what you were talking about?”

  “And catching up. You know. All the news about our mutual acquaintances.” Severine’s nose wrinkled in a rueful grin. “She wanted to make very sure of my intentions towards you, actually.”

  It took a moment for Severine’s words to filter in. And another for Runa’s brain to figure out what they meant.

  “…What?!”

  “I’m a mysterious vagrant who slithers through life slinging swords at people.” Severine’s lips curved in a smile that was more self-deprecating than seductive. “Not the sort of character most self-respecting publicans want on their doorstep or their customers’ doorsteps.”

  “Or their attics?” Runa suggested.

  Severine’s eyes glinted. “Or their attics,” she agreed.

  Junilla emerged a moment later.

  “I’ll have more of those rolls tonight,” was the first thing she said. “You’re getting much better. I’m glad my instincts were right about having you stay.”

  Runa made oh, okay, yes, noises.

  “And Severine?” Junilla patted the cleaver. Her breath came out in a rush. “I never thanked you,” she said. There was none of the previous diabolical glee in her voice. She was being sincere. “But here’s my chance. So, thank you. For changing my life. For showing me a way out. And not getting yourself killed on your own way out, that was helpful, too.”

  No need to ask Junilla if she thought their talk had gone well. She headed back towards the inn with a look of steadfast satisfaction on her face.

  Runa and Severine stared after her.

  “She… she thanked me.” Severine wrapped her arms around herself. “She says I changed her life. And I do that a lot, these days, it comes with the job, but I never thought…” Her hands strayed to the strap of her packroll, and pale grey glossed over her eyes. She swallowed. “Handing out destinies. I handed one to her, and it brought her here? They’re usually a lot more… destiny-y.”

  She looked troubled, and Runa thought of Bloodburster.

  Out loud, she said, “Someone’s got to be destined to run the inns. We can’t all be adventurers.”

  “True! There’d be nowhere to sleep. Far less stew in the world, which I personally think would be a bad thing.” Severine’s expression cleared, but Runa wasn’t sure she trusted her sudden sunniness. She seemed to steel herself. “She said I should come along to dinner tonight. And after that… I’m looking forward to sleeping peacefully at night, knowing my neck is safe.” She tilted her head back again, sliding her gaze sideways at Runa.

  Just in case Runa hadn’t got the message, she batted her eyelashes.

  Runa bit back a grin. “That’s a relief. It’s a nice neck.”

  “Isn’t it?” Severine sighed happily. “I’m glad you agree.”

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about sleeping peacefully, though,” Runa said, casually, as though she wasn’t moving closer so their arms nudged together with each step.

  “You noticed? I’ve been tossing and turning all night. Every night.”

  “Oh.” Runa deliberately furrowed her brow. “Sorry the bed isn’t suiting you. I guess you’ll be getting a room at the inn, now you and Junilla have patched things up.”

  “No!” Severine snapped, before she realized Runa was teasing her.

  “What about your holy duty?” Runa asked. “Speaking of destinies.”

  Severine’s good mood flagged. “They’ve been… quiet. I’m worried I’ve confused them. First trying to give them second thoughts about the whole ‘nag the priestess into getting skewered by a skeleton’ thing, and then saying, oh, actually, please do try to find your fated wielder soon, and don’t worry about me wearing myself to a nub or ending up dead on a mountain somewhere.”

  Severine sobered briefly, but then rallied. “More to the point, the swords don’t have anything to say about beds. Oh, except the Untouchable Rosebud. Its whole thing was being a blade of virtue. You know the sort—the honorable knight lays down his sword between him and the virtuous maiden, to stop them from doing anything. I found a knight for it, a few years ago. Last I heard, he and his fair lady and his sword are still very happy together, not doing anything.”

  “All three of them?”

  “I try not to judge.”

  ***

  Later that day, the sun set over the Cauldron, a tempest of orange and lavender.

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  Severine sat back. “Beautiful.” There was a pause, and then she added, “if you were to look sideways, right now, you’d see I was staring at you as I said that.”

  Heat rushed to Runa’s cheeks, and Severine laughed in delight. “Aw, I didn’t even know you could go that colour.”

  “What colour?”

  “Sunset.”

  Runa cleared her throat. Beautiful? Severine was beautiful. Runa was sturdy, and strong, and had never had enough of her mother in her to be considered beautiful.

  “Is there a book?” she asked.

  Severine blinked, nonplussed. “A book about what?”

  “Pick-up lines. Must have heard that one a dozen times.”

  “You have?”

  Runa snorted. “Try to sound more surprised.”

  Her ears burned at the lie. She had heard it. She’d just never heard it directed at her.

  “I didn’t—I mean—to hear Ninnius and Anklopher talk, you didn’t know what kissing was, let alone anything else.”

  “There’s a difference between not knowing what kissing is, and doing your damnedest to ignore two idiot wizards failing to hide how much they want to jump each other’s bones.” She sighed. “There’s a point a few weeks into most adventures, once everyone’s gotten used to the blisters and the Cauldron-sickness. Maybe someone almost gets eaten by the local wildlife, maybe someone kicks down a door to find a pack of undead on the other side, really annoyed because they just finished fixing up the door after the last lot broke it down. You know.”

  “Like a mountain trying to fall on them?”

  “Or some ancient fortress busting up out of the ground. Yeah. That sort of thing. Gets the blood pumping, and suddenly, the fact that no one’s had a proper bath in a fortnight doesn’t seem as important. We set up camp for the night, watch the sun go down if it hasn’t already, and all the worst lines start to pop up. Like mushrooms.”

  Severine leaned back. She looked good in the golden light of sunset, too. “Do you miss it?”

  “What? Pretending to be engrossed in the horizon while my clients disappear to the not-so-distance of the other side of the campfire?”

  “All of it. Adventuring in the Cauldron.”

  A distant rumble padded out the silence. A mountain wandered across the blazing horizon.

  “It’s all I’ve done for most of my life,” Runa said.

  “It’s hard, trying to do something new. Even if you don’t have a magical armory nagging you to get back to work. I mean, I assume.”

  No, just an entire volcano. “It’s strange. Staying in one place. Figuring out how a life works that isn’t…” She waved a hand towards the Cauldron.

  “Constantly trying to kill you?” Severine suggested. “Full of evil magic?”

  “And idiots needing to be shepherded around.” She stretched. “Sometimes I think they're part of the spell—adventurers, treasure-hunters, wizards, the lot of them. They dig cursed gold out of the Cauldron, drag it out and try to get it purified before the spell reels it back in. Half the time, it works. The other half the curse spreads enough that the Cauldron gets more in return than it lost.” She shrugged. “Guides know the Cauldron. We're not trying to take anything from it, we're just... finding places in it.”

  “Your own place?”

  Yeah, my very own dark fortress of doom. One just popped up recently. Looked comfy, if you like spikes. She clenched her jaw before the words came out. They were too close to not being a joke, and she didn’t want Severine to know that. “The Cauldron isn’t anyone’s place.”

  “But you spent years there.”

  “Decades.”

  “Decades. I realise I’m not one to speak, what with spending the last ten years priestessing. But you must have loved it.”

  Loved it? “I was good at it. I am good at it. I could go back, but…”

  They were getting dangerously close to the sort of thing Runa had never admitted to anyone before.

  She’d never looked back. But she’d never looked forwards, either. Never let herself think too hard about where her life and her choices were taking her.

  Maybe it was time to try something different.

  Like when the curse raced past her twenty years ago, she jumped right in.

  “You were a princess, right?”

  Severine jumped. “Don’t scare me like that!”

  “You were, though.”

  “Yes. If you must put it like that.” Severine tugged at her sleeves uncomfortably.

  “Same.”

  Runa kept her eyes on the sunset, but all her attention was on the woman beside her. Which was probably a mistake. She didn’t want to see Severine’s reaction, but sensing it in other ways might be just as bad.

  She didn’t need to look, to hear Severine’s sudden hiss of breath. To know that her eyes were widening. To see her expression change from What? to Surely not to Not her.

  “Princess of where?” Severine breathed, in far too delighted a tone for what Runa was expecting of her.

  Her throat did its best to close up. “Couple places. My mum’s people don’t have royalty, but nobody would have stopped her calling herself that if she decided to. And my father was lord of a high hall in the northern mountains.” She took a deep breath. “I didn’t fit. Either place. Too big for the islands, too ignorant about the mountains for the mountains, even if I did look like the people there. I couldn’t be what either of them wanted me to be, and what was left felt like…”

  Bloodburster was back in the bakery. Back down the hill, in the village. The distance didn’t stop the back of her neck from prickling.

  Before she left the islands, her mother had told her that it didn’t matter if she didn’t feel at home there. That somewhere out in the world would be a place that felt like her own.

  And she’d found it. She’d found the Cauldron where every curse in the world ended up, and it had almost killed her, and she’d never felt more alive. She’d had to find a job protecting other people from being hurt by it, or she would have wandered back in by herself and… and what?

  And done the sort of thing that would make her a perfect fit for the Blood Lord’s blade?

  Don’t tell her that. The thought was hushed, and shamed, and stuck in her craw.

  “So I ran away. I hopped on a convenient curseland heading to the Cauldron, and I never looked back. But it was just running away from. Not running to. I wasn't figuring out what I did want, just getting away from what I didn't.”

  “Been there,” Severine agreed glumly.

  “And it worked. I was good at the Cauldron.”

  Good at seeing through the tricks of the dead caldera where every curse in the world ended up. Good at finding her place in the place no person should be.

  “But now I have something I want to be good at. And that’s better.”

  Severine scootched closer to her. “You wouldn't go back?”

  “To shepherding assholes around treasure hoards I already led another group around a week ago to clear out? Nah.”

  “And you wouldn't... you said your parents expected something a bit more spectacular...?”

  “What, work on my poetry and lure dragons down from the moon? Sit pretty on some island and boil the sky to see what falls out?”

  “THOSE were your options? That’s—” Severine stared at her wide-eyed, and then deflated. “So no dreams of glory?”

  “I’ve seen enough of what happens after the so-called glory.”

  “No wonder Bloodburster hasn’t managed to get a grip on you.”

  Runa blinked, and Severine continued, “Most people I’ve handed out destinies to—it changes their lives. You’ve seen where adventuring ends up. You’ve seen what happened to everything the Blood Lord and the other Deathless did, you’ve walked through what’s left of their world. You’ve already changed your life. Bloodburster doesn’t have anything to offer you.”

  She sounded excited.

  Runa wet her lips. “Maybe that’s it.”

  “You prefer a life where you’re not constantly on the move.” Severine was getting into her rhythm now, buoyant on hope, and Runa took up the thread of her conversation.

  “Having mountains fall on you, being chased by skeletons…”

  “Pointing swords at people and then they point them back at you.” Severine sounded like she was talking from experience.

  “I’m more of a big stick person,” Runa admitted.

  “And you like being a big stick person?”

  “It has its appeal. But lately… you’re right. I changed my life,” she said, ignoring the fact that it was more like her life changed around her, and she shrugged and got on with it. “Maybe I’m more of a rolling pin person now.”

  “Hard to go past a bit of blunt trauma.” Severine winced. “Ow. Yes, of course, how wrong of me, clearly slicing damage is best and nothing is superior to a good cutting blade.”

  “A breadknife,” Runa suggested.

  “I can offer you a cutlass, an ornery rapier, or an extra-cursed broadsword.”

  “I'll pass.”

  “I thought you might.” She blinked hard. “Good.”

  “Good?”

  “I’ve always thought it’s important to know what you want.” The sunset was back in her eyes, and all the sky’s blazing colors weren’t as beautiful as that warm brown.

  All that fuss, and in the end, who needed a bed for anything important? Not them.