Runa woke early the next morning, feeling more pummeled than rested by her night on the bakery floor.

  The dough looked like it felt the same.

  “Isn’t dough meant to rise?” she asked nobody in particular, prodding it. It deflated. Which she guessed meant it had to have risen a bit. Not that you could tell to look at it.

  She sighed, and checked the book. What was next? “Shape loafs…”

  What did she need for today? Some of this bread, if it turned out even halfway edible. Water. If she didn’t want to turn around again before she got anywhere, she’d need shelter of some sort. A tent, or at least a waterproof sheet she could tie up to make a windbreak. The cloak the villagers had given her was short, but it was good enough as a sort of half-blanket, when it wasn’t soaked through, but she’d hung it overnight and it should be dry by now…

  The dough clung together and separated oddly, but she managed to shape it into… well, into shapes. There was a clonk and a jar of flour rolled across the floor at one stage, but she ignored it and put it back. She’d already mixed in the flour the night before, and the recipe didn’t say anything about more flour.

  Next—hot oven. She built up the fire again, then checked her gear as the bricks heated up and the blobs of dough did whatever they were meant to be doing. Resting again. Lucky buggers.

  Her contract beads were still daffodil yellow.

  Maybe they were broken?

  Because otherwise she would have no explanation for the way her ribs tightened at the sight of them reporting all safe, no injuries.

  It was still dark outside, which made measuring the hours difficult. She hadn’t heard any town bells the whole time she’d been here, and with the sun hiding behind the Cauldron’s mountains and ice wall, she couldn’t use it to mark the time. So she gave it about as long as she thought would be about right, and ran into the next problem.

  How to get the loaves into the oven.

  The bricks were good and hot. She pushed the lightstick into the oven to sweep the embers back, so there was space for the bread, and the heat did its best to take off her eyebrows.

  Okay, so, now she just… chucked it in? Like she had with the campfire scone?

  A double-fist-sized blob of bread hit the hot bricks with a splat.

  Behind her, something croaked in horror.

  Runa stifled a grin.

  “Not like that, huh?” She stood back, looking around the room. Her mystery assistant had been helpful so far, so maybe…

  She took a step towards the counter, as though she was going to pick up another lump of dough and sling it into the fire.

  “Hiss!”

  That was clear enough. She moved away, and caught sight of the long-handled paddles hanging on hooks on the wall.

  Huh. Come to think of it…

  She hefted one in her hands. The handle was long enough that whoever was using it wouldn’t get their eyebrows singed, and that was probably a strong consideration, for people without her particular ancestry. “Guess I could use one of these? Put the dough on the end and…”

  She waited. No hiss of displeasure.

  “All right,” she said with a shrug. “Let’s give it a go.”

  The dough stuck to the paddle.

  The dough stuck to the paddle so hard that by the time she got it off the paddle and into the oven, it was more of a puddle than a blob.

  This time, the hiss sounded more like a moan of defeat.

  ***

  “These are the loaves?” Junilla asked, accepting the cloth bundle Runa handed to her. She opened it, and her face made a complicated expression. “These… are the loaves?”

  “These are the loaves.” Runa managed to keep her voice steady, as though she had no idea why Junilla might think there was anything wrong with the bread. Such as the fact it resembled lumpy rocks more than anything approaching food.

  She also matched Junilla’s near-whisper. The innkeeper hadn’t been lying about the place being full up. It was still early morning, and the spaces in between the tables at the tavern were filled with blanket piles. Some of them were snoring.

  “Oh.” The expression on Junilla’s face grew even more complicated. She looked up at Runa and searched her face.

  Runa relented. “Like I said, I’m not a baker.”

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  “I know that. I guess I was just expecting…” Her eyes flicked sideways. “You used the oven the first night you took shelter in the bakery.”

  “Not to bake any sort of masterpiece.”

  “Well, it must have been edible, if…” Junilla trailed off. She picked up the bundle with a forced brightness in her eyes. “And I’m sure these will be, too.”

  “Try soaking them in some stew first?”

  “You read my mind.” Junilla gave a wry smile.

  Runa didn’t blame her. There wasn’t a lot you could say for the batch of loaves she’d pulled out of the oven. What you could say, should probably be left unsaid.

  Runa was generally in favour of leaving things unsaid, but her skin prickled with something like embarrassment.

  “I wish I could offer you better payment for your hospitality,” she admitted.

  “What? Rubbish.” Junilla snorted. “Nobody else was using the bakery, so why shouldn’t you set up there? Not that you’re planning anything long-term,” she added before Runa could say it.

  “I’m heading off again this morning.”

  “Heading east along the rim this time?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “You’d better take one of these.” Junilla tried to offer her one of her own loaves, but Runa waved it away.

  “I already have one.” She hesitated, and stopped herself from adding, I can use it as a sled as a last resort.

  Or a sledgehammer.

  In fact, the batch she’d handed over was missing two loaves. Her own, and one other. She’d turned away while the bread had been cooling and come back to find one of them had disappeared.

  She blamed nobody in particular.

  Runa nodded farewell to Junilla and left her quietly preparing for the day. What would the morning bring for Pothollow? More houses to be dug out of the snow, more pathways to be shoveled clear and banks of snow to be broken up so that the melt didn’t swamp people’s homes?

  Horrible bread?

  None of your business, she reminded herself. She’d paid for her night’s sleep. Now she was done here.

  ***

  She was back at the tavern before sundown.

  “No luck?”

  An old woman gave her a sympathetic look. Runa vaguely recognized her, but couldn’t put a name to the face.

  When the woman pushed a drink across the bar to her, though, she accepted it.

  “No luck,” she confirmed.

  The rim to the east was as impassable as the rim to the west. The unseasonable snow had blanketed the caldera as far as she could see from as far as she could walk.

  Weariness gathered around her shoulders, a heavy cloak she couldn’t see any way of lightening.

  And her clients’ beads were still gods-damned yellow, and she couldn’t figure out why that was bothering her so much.

  “Don’t fret,” the sympathetic human told her. “The Cauldron always stirs again before too long.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that,” Runa retorted, stung.

  “Sure. But it looks different from the outside than when you’re in the midst of it, I expect.” The human leaned back, chewing on what Runa realized with belated embarrassment was a crust of her horrible bread.

  “Maybe.”

  She wasn’t feeling talkative.

  Unluckily for her, the human was.

  “Expect you’re looking forward to it stirring again as much as we are, though,” they added. “Can’t say I enjoy waking up and it’s dark, sun rises and feel like I’m in a frozen pond, and then it disappears behind the mountains again when I’ve barely had a chance to complain.” She chewed contemplatively. “Not much to complain about here, though. Haven’t had good stone bread like this since I was in pigtails.”

  “Stone bread?” Runa frowned. “You like it?”

  “My da took up with a dwarf woman, after my mother died. None of us ever had the knack for bread that she did.” The old woman gnawed another lump off the edge of the crust, smacking her lips in apparent total enjoyment. “My step-siblings and half-sisters all liked their bread soft. And their children are no better! Now young Tam—you’ve met him, haven’t you, and he’s my nephew of some sorts by way of being my step-mother’s sister’s grandson or something of that nature, and grew up in Billswater but came to us after all that water didn’t suit him, well I had hopes for him, after he took up with the Miller boy, but all he’s interested in is…”

  She took another bite of crust, her grumbles lost in chews that managed to be gritty and sticky at the same time. Meanwhile, Runa had remembered the old woman’s name, and was belatedly putting the pieces together.

  So Tam Miller was Audella Tremblewood’s nephew or great-nephew, and had married into the job and the name. Runa absently accepted the offer of another hunk of bread from her drinking partner and almost cracked a tusk on it. She dunked it into her mug of beer and held it there with a sigh. Maybe by the end of the evening, it would soften enough that eating it wouldn’t mean she had to find a dentist first thing after she tracked the wizards down.

  She doubted Pothollow had a dentist. Probably the grumpy apothecary would brew her something, glowering the whole time and pretending he wasn’t terrified she was going to sing him into the nearest cave system.

  Anyway, bread and beer were practically the same thing, weren’t they? She’d heard that somewhere. The same bubbly stuff that went into making bread happened when you made beer, too…

  Would that make her bread better? If she used some brewer’s stuff, instead of the old mother-of-bread from the bakery?

  “…but now that you’re here—oh, don’t give me that look. Yes, yes, we all know you’re only sticking around until that damned ice wall melts or shuffles off or whatever it’s planning to do.” The old woman sighed. “But you’ve spent two nights in that haunted bakery, and that’s good enough for me. I’ll take as much stone bread as you can bake before you do leave. Don’t need to worry about it going stale. Keeps well, this stuff.”

  Runa wasn’t planning on staying. Her mouth was already open to say so. But…

  Her fingers twitched. What if she did try using brewer’s stuff for another batch of loaves? She could use the bakery mother-of-bread too, for Widow Tremblewood’s bread, and maybe produce something literally anybody else in the village would want to eat, as well.

  Before she left.

  She shook herself. Of course before she left. Tonight, she would make up some dough, and tomorrow, she’d bake another batch of loaves to pay the village back for their hospitality—two batches—and then she’d… she’d…

  Wait. Haunted bakery?

  “I suppose you’ll head down the mountain tomorrow? Seeing as you’ve already tried the other directions.” Widow Tremblewood fixed her with a curious look.

  “Hm? Yeah. That’s right.” She shook herself again. Not that it seemed to be helping. Her mind kept going back to where it didn’t belong.

  Haunted by what? Not that flickery lizard thing that kept judging her cooking?

  The old woman patted her on the arm again. “Heading further away from the rim might feel like you’re going in the wrong direction, but you’re far better off taking the King’s Road than scrambling over the bare mountainside and getting yourself mired in snow. Which you’ve no doubt already realized, having spent the last two days doing just that.”

  Runa was nodding along, taken in by the old woman’s reasonable tone. She narrowed her eyes at the last bit, and Tremblewood cackled.

  “What’s that face for? I said you’re being sensible! Not like you’ve decided to climb over the bloody thing? No, down-mountain’s the safest route. It’s six weeks on cart or horseback to Sollus’ Gate, or less if you want to climb up the volcano again to try your luck at one of the other Rim towns in between.”

  Six weeks. Runa’s mouth tasted bitter.

  Maybe she should try climbing.