Seven days was nothing, she told herself. She sent a message down the mountain, telling Morrie she was still after a berth on whatever transport was heading to Sollus’ Gate in a week’s time, and that she was available to hire on as a guard.

  She’d had weeks off before, she argued with herself, as she rearranged the bakehouse to make it more comfortable for someone of her height and her inability to squeeze into the attic room. Recuperating between jobs in the guildhouse. Quiet seasons when there weren’t enough groups wanting a guide to the Cauldron for everyone to be working. Seven days was nothing. It wasn’t like she was settling down to stay. She still had one foot out the door.

  Anyway, staying in Pothollow meant she had a direct view of the Cauldron and what it was doing. Far better than if she was down in the plains already. She’d be able to see if the Cauldron stirred again, and take advantage of the mountains and that gods-damned ice wall shifting the moment they got out of the way.

  Meanwhile, the snow around the village thawed. Cold poured off the ice wall like water over the edge of a too-full bath, but outside the Cauldron it was still summer, and it acted like it. With no more unseasonal snowstorms pushed over the rim, the weather was mild verging on hot. Runa shed her cloak and went around in her tunic or undershirt. She helped dig channels in the snow to ensure it melted into ditches and creekbeds, instead of flooding people’s houses.

  And despite firmly telling herself she had one foot out the door of whatever establishment she found herself in, she got to know the village and its people. She ate at the tavern each night, and found herself drawn into conversation with the families whose houses she’d helped dig out. She got to know Junilla better, delivering bread to her each morning and avoiding her when she got the look in her eye that meant she was starting to think of people as pieces on a game board ready for her to move around.

  She visited the mill and had lunch with Tam and Errant. She asked around and found someone who could fix her up with a shirt that wasn’t mostly holes, and found herself poked and prodded with pins for an excruciating half hour, and then bundled out the door with a new tunic and undershirt. In exchange for… she wasn’t sure, exactly. In Sollus Gate, you couldn’t breathe without someone charging you for it, but here people waved her away when she asked how she could pay for anything.

  Every morning and every night, she checked the beads. Every time, they were the same sunny yellow.

  They had to be broken. It was the only explanation.

  The evenings found her back in the bakery. Not just to sleep, though she was almost comfortable, sleeping in the deep stone bench by one window she’d repurposed as a bed.

  Baking.

  It was how she could pay her way, she told herself. She was being put up in the bakehouse, so, she had to bake. And it wasn’t like anyone was letting her pay for things any other way. Not that she would have been able to if they did want coin.

  These were the thoughts that jostled against each other in her mind each evening as she measured flour and water and the mother-of-bread that magically seemed to never run out, and they were the thoughts that flattened out to wrap around her as the mixture transformed each night from a sticky mess to a smooth ball of dough.

  The bread that resulted still only came in two varieties. Stone, and flat. But Widow Tremblewood seemed happy with the stone ones, and Junilla wasn’t complaining about the flat ones, so…

  I’m leaving soon, anyway, Runa told herself morning after morning.

  If they want good bread, they should have strong-armed an actual baker into moving to town, she grumbled as she checked her own arm each evening, to see if it stopped looking like it wanted to be a new constellation in the sky.

  And then she flicked through the old baker’s recipe book, searching its pages by candlelight or the ice-tinged sunlight of early morning. There were so many recipes in it. How did one village need that many varieties of bread? Seedy breads. Nutty breads. Breads made with double-milled or triple-milled flour, fine and soft and fluffy. Honey-baked rolls and the lam-in-ate things.

  And at the back of the book, tiny cakes.

  She puzzled over those.

  The recipe book had two clear authors. The original writer, and the baker who’d scribbled over and updated the original recipes with his own preferences. But the tiny cakes were all added by the second baker, on new pages sewn into the book. There were pictures, painstakingly picked out in the same black ink he’d used to scrawl over the older recipes, and cramped, questioning notes on flavours and textures—but no actual recipe. As though he’d seen the cakes, but not known how they were made.

  Weird.

  But—she closed the book each day, repeating the same thought as though this time it might stick—not her problem.

  The village would have enough stone bread to feed them for years. And something about the process helped calm her mind. The rhythm of making dough and shaping it, baking it and walking the cart down to the tavern, made her feel as though her stay in Pothollow wasn’t a complete waste of time. She felt, if not settled, then… rested.

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  And each night, she lay on the stone bench by the window, eyes shut, while the bakery’s other strange inhabitant rolled jars around and left long-toed pawprints in piles of flour that had not been left like that after Runa cleaned up for the day.

  She didn’t try to sneak a look at it. It didn’t want to be seen, and she wasn’t sticking around long enough to need to delve into anyone else’s secrets. One secret dragon neighbor was enough. Whatever No One In Particular’s deal was, and whatever it had to do with the village rumour that the bakery was haunted, she didn’t care to find out.

  But whatever it was, it had strong opinions. She was beginning to see why the old baker might have disappeared without packing all his things.

  And every morning, after she delivered the day’s bread to the tavern, she trudged back up the hill to the apothecary, and let Corvin smear a curse on her arm.

  Her arm didn’t fall off. That was good. The cracks-in-the-sky scarring reduced, day by day. The crackling throb in her elbow subsided and the strange echoes of the damage in other parts of her body disappeared one by one. Corvin’s offhand comment about her not having a strong magical core still stung, but the injury didn’t.

  It was working. The crackling on her arm was less every day, and the feeling like her bones were trying to peel apart was fading, too, thank all the gods and liches. Or thank one asshole dragon, anyway.

  “What do you reckon?” she asked Corvin on the sixth day. “Still think tomorrow will finish the job?”

  “Hm.” Corvin lifted her arm and inspected the wound from several angles. “Perhaps.”

  “I’m going to need a clearer answer than that.”

  “You’ll have a clear answer when your injury is healed.”

  “Helpful.”

  “I strive to be of service.” His voice dripped with sarcasm, and in the silence that followed, the jars on the shelves tinkled merrily. “Have you noticed…”

  “Hm?” Runa was re-rolling her bandage, ready to replace it on her arm as soon as Corvin was done slathering ointment on and scraping it off again. Her arm didn’t need bandaging, but also, she didn’t like to look at it, so she tried to keep it covered up.

  “You’ve spent a lot of time in the Cauldron. Does anything about its current state strike you as odd?”

  She stared at him. “Everything about the Cauldron is odd.”

  Corvin gave a good impression of a man deigning not to grind his teeth. “Is its behaviour unusual?”

  “Freezing up an entire ocean and leaving it hanging over the Rim? Sure. Never seen anything like it before.”

  “Could it be—” He stopped himself again, looking unwell. “There are many things hidden in the Cauldron.”

  “Sure.” She waited, and when he didn’t say anything else, added, “You could go in and find out for yourself.”

  “I don’t fly, remember?”

  “You could come with me to Sollus Gate.”

  The words hung in the air, too late to take back.

  What the hell made her say that? She didn’t want company. Clients were the price she paid for spending time in the Cauldron without people questioning why she kept going back there. And Corvin wasn’t a client.

  Did he remind her of Ninnius and Anklopher and their constant bickering? Was that it?

  What was wrong with her?

  It was almost a relief when Corvin looked as uncomfortable with the offer as she felt having made it. “I’ve no wish to visit the Cauldron.”

  Runa relaxed. “But you live right on the edge.” And you just as good as said you were worried about something crawling out of it.

  “Where I can keep an eye on it.”

  Corvin’s business was none of her business. He wasn’t a client, and she barely cared what her clients’ business was, anyway, unless it got in the way of her keeping them alive.

  She had no reason to find out what it was Corvin was keeping an eye on the Cauldron for.

  But.

  “There was one thing—”

  Corvin’s eyes snapped to hers.

  “In the Cauldron. Before the storm that chased me out. Something came up from underground.”

  Corvin went completely still.

  “A castle, or fortress, or something. The wizards called it a tomb. Black stone, evil-looking carvings, that sort of thing.”

  “Ah.” The tension eased out of Corvin’s posture. Whatever he’d been worried about, a great big creepy fortress wasn’t it. “Something leftover from the Lich War, no doubt. There. We’re done for today.” He scraped the last of the neutralized ointment into the bucket under the table.

  It was the same bucket he’d been using all week, but this time, something about it caught her eye.

  “Are those… leaves?”

  As she watched, more leaves unfurled from the sprouts in the ointment. A tiny bud appeared. Corvin sighed.

  “You might as well keep watching,” he said.

  The bud opened. A minute white star-shaped flower specked the green, then another, and another and another, until the bucket was overflowing with pearlescent stars.

  “Moonstars,” Corvin said, a trace of pride in his cool voice. “They have very particular requirements to sprout from seed. I had hoped this might work.”

  “Wait. You’ve been using my magic poisoning as fertilizer?”

  He scoffed. “It’s not as though you’re paying me.”

  He had a point. But Runa folded her arms anyway. “These moonstars. They’re rare?”

  “Incredibly.”

  “Sounds like I might be overpaying you, then.”

  “For preventing your arm from being torn apart from the inside out by magic? Yes, I’m positively exploiting you.” He twisted her arm around to check all angles, and tsk’d. “And that exploitation is all but over. I’m lucky the seeds sprouted when they did.”

  “What?” Runa yanked her arm out of his grasp and looked at it, straining to check the far side of her elbow and her triceps. There was no telltale crackling, no lingering points of light creepily far beneath her skin. “It’s done? It’s over?”

  “We’re done here.” He busied himself at his workbench, so seamlessly Runa almost missed the way he ducked his head before he added, “And that means so are you, I believe.”

  She was in the middle of thinking At least my damn arm won’t ache so much after kneading the next batch of probably-stone-bread. Corvin’s words knocked her thoughts sideways as effectively as the Cauldron tempest had knocked her off the side of the mountain.

  Her arm was fixed. She was healed. She could leave.

  And she was thinking about bread?

  “Good. About time,” she said out loud. She flexed her arm again, to be sure. No tingling. No strangeness.

  It was time to go home.

  No. Godsdammit. It was time to return to her work. To save two idiot wizards and the woman whose eyes still haunted her dreams.

  Via an irritatingly long and circuitous route that would involve going back to the guildhall and admitting in front of everyone that she’d lost track of her clients in the first place.

  It was only when Corvin told her that if she expected to make payment in powdered teeth then he expected her to clean them first, that she realized she was grinding her tusks.