Cold washed over her. There were only two ways the charm ended like that. Either the clients had connected their beads to the ones back at the Hall, to mark a job complete, or—

  She’d left it too long. She’d coddled one measly injured arm while her clients had been out here. Trapped. Not injured, because the charm would have told them if they were injured, which meant death had come out nowhere, sudden and final.

  Bitterness rose in her throat. She should be glad that it had been quick, but she wasn’t. The guilt was too strong.

  The Cauldron was hers. They trusted her to guide them through the nearest thing she had to a home, and she failed them.

  She closed a fist around the charm beads. There was no answering warmth, no vague sizzle of power.

  Nothing in the guild’s rules said anything about retrieving bodies. But if she didn’t, she knew she would spend the rest of her life wondering what happened to them. Anklopher, Ninnius… and the woman whose name she didn’t know, who she’d only exchanged a few shouted words with.

  Who she’d thrown into her camp, thinking that would keep her safe.

  Even if the wizards were dead, the woman could be alive. There was a chance.

  A tiny chance. One she’d be stupid to bank on.

  Anger and grief twisted through her. She snapped the cord around her neck, barely restraining the urge to throw the charms away. As though that would help. As though abandoning her last connection to the people she’d failed would be anything but an insult to their memory.

  Her shoulders sagged. Exhaustion rolled over her, deeper and greyer than after the blizzard, worse than the nagging pain in her arm.

  Laughter rang out behind her. Cheerful voices, calling to one another. Runa’s spine stiffened. The ice wall was gone, the mountains had retreated to the horizon, and the people of Pothollow were descending on the Sweetmeadow as though a picnic had come to town.

  “Runa!”

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Runa dragged breath into her lungs. She couldn’t pretend she hadn’t heard Tam calling out to her. She could stalk off without looking back, but could she really, knowing the dangers that awaited the villagers in the Sweetmeadow?

  What were they doing?

  She turned around. Dread dripped down from her chest, weighing down her feet. Half the village was gamboling down the slopes of the Sweetmeadow towards her. More than half. Laughing and smiling like it was a festival day.

  And somewhere out there, Ninnius and Anklopher were dead.

  If she’d been faster.

  If she’d… if she’d…

  “Runa!” Tam had caught up with her. His husband was a few yards behind, not looking at all surprised that Tam had outpaced him. Plenty of dwarves looked like they should move slow, but get them started and they were like a boulder rolling downhill. Unstoppable and on top of you before you knew it. She’d had a few clients who—who…

  “I was hoping we’d catch you!” Tam’s voice seemed to be coming from a long way away. “Not that I don’t know you’re away on very important business, but—”

  “Hush, Tam. She looks like she’s seen a ghost. Runa? Is everything all right?”

  Everything was not all right.

  She’d seen death before. She’d lost clients before. Colleagues. Friends. But those had been deaths she was there for. She’d seen them fight, seen how and why things ended the way they did.

  She hadn’t abandoned any of them.

  “I-—”

  She couldn’t say it. Okay. She was never good at talking, but this was new.

  She could show him, though. Maybe showing him the beads would do all the explaining for her, and she wouldn’t have to say anything.

  Her fingers had cramped over the small beads. She forced them open, like clawing open the door to a tomb nobody was ever meant to see inside.

  Blue.

  Runa blinked.

  Blue?

  They should be black. Black meant clients dead, contract terminated. If she thought they looked blue, it must be because her hands were reflecting the light funny, because blue meant her clients were not only alive, but had made it back to the guildhall in Sollus Gate and marked their contract complete and satisfactory.

  “Is it news about your friends?”

  She’d fussed with the beads often enough nursing a drink at Junilla’s that people had figured out they had something to do with her job.

  “They’re fine,” she said, not able to hide her confusion. “The blue means—they’re fine. They made it out of the Cauldron.”

  “But that’s wonderful news!” Errant clapped her on the shoulder. “What a relief. And no need for you to go hunting after them!”

  “No need,” she echoed.

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  “So you’re not heading away after all?”

  “Tam!”

  “I’m just saying, if the friends she’s been biting her own tail to go find are home safe after all, then maybe she’ll be sticking around, and maybe if she’s sticking around—”

  “Tam!”

  Runa blinked. She came back to herself, in a slow, lurching way, like when a ghoul woke up and was figuring out how many limbs it still had.

  Why the hell didn’t she feel better? She felt so far from better. She felt bad. It wasn’t the same sort of bad as when she thought they were dead. But it was still…

  The Cauldron was hers. She guided people safely through the most dangerous place in the world. If she couldn’t do that, what was the point? If they didn’t need her to do that, then what…?

  What else could she do?

  It was still bad.

  She ran one hand over her face. “What’re you all doing out here, anyway?”

  Errant groaned, covering his eyes. “Don’t ask.”

  Tam grinned up at her. “Harvest.”

  ***

  Nobody likes the Cauldron. Corvin had said that with the sort of warning glint in his eye that said, watch it, don’t act too in love with the terrifying patchwork landscape where everything wants to eat you. People might think you’re getting ideas. Like, ooh, there sure are a lot of uninhabited evil castles in here, it’d be a shame if someone took one over.

  Hypocrite, Runa thought, watching the apothecary pick his way carefully through a stand of carnivorous gladioli. He’d gathered an armful of the globular moss that grew in the safety of the flowers’ shadows, and had an unmistakably smug look on his face.

  He wasn’t the only one pleased with the day’s takings. To the people of Pothollow, the arrival of a new cursed region on their doorstep wasn’t a cause for wariness or concern. It was a chance to forage for wild-grown fruits, fill the apothecary’s stores… and to garden.

  The oddly straight lines of shrubbery weren’t some new trick on the Cauldron’s part.

  They were Tam’s.

  “No one’s ever sickened from eating food from the Cauldron,” he was arguing with Junilla when Runa got close enough to hear what he was saying to make the innkeeper have that expression on her face.

  “I disagree,” Junilla said, arms folded.

  “You know what I mean! You eat the jam Zinnie makes from the solberries she gathers here, same as everyone else.”

  “The solberries aren’t cursed. Any that are, don’t go in the jam.”

  “I’m not talking about cursed food.” His eyes darted this way and that.

  Junilla sighed. “We all know you are.”

  “Well, I’m not talking about only cursed food.” He pointed across at Corvin. “Look at Corvin! We all know what he puts in his brews, and no one says boo to him about it!”

  “There’s a different between what people expect of an apothecary and what they expect of the man who mills their grain for flour, Tam Miller.”

  He waved a hand airily. “You know I keep a clean shop, Junilla. I’d scour any trace of Cauldron flour off the millstone before I started on anyone else’s.”

  “I know you’d have every intention of doing so. Right up until you started wondering what might happen if a bit of that cursed grain made it into my barrels…” Junilla saw Runa walking up, and nodded at her. “Or the bread.”

  “Is that what you’ve been hinting at since I arrived?” Runa frowned.

  “I wasn’t hinting! I was trying to ask you outright, but someone thought it would scare you off.” He glared up at Junilla.

  Cursed bread. The thought rolled around in Runa’s mind, and came up against the memory of skittering footsteps and jars falling conveniently off shelves. “It’s not like it could make my bread any worse.”

  Junilla made a frustrated noise. “Don’t encourage him!”

  “I don’t need encouraging!”

  “Yes, we can all see that.”

  Runa stared at Tam’s garden.

  She’d watched Rinnie and her friends gather berries with a mixture of bafflement and wariness. Junilla was right; any berries that oozed suspiciously hadn’t made it into the women’s baskets. And she supposed it was true that not everything that grew in the Cauldron was technically cursed. The Sweetmeadow and the Thornwaste and all the rest of them had been dragged in because most of what they were was curses. Not all.

  She still never ate what grew in the Cauldron, though.

  And she didn’t like the look of what Tam was growing.

  “What are these?”

  “Corn,” he said, defiantly. “Same as they grow down on the plains.”

  “Even those ones?”

  He followed her pointing finger to the end of the rows of corn. Most of the plants were tall, grass-like things, green and rustly.

  The ones down the end of the row were distinctly… red.

  Not the sort of red you found in other things you should eat, like strawberries and cherries. Not even the sort of red you found in things you shouldn’t eat, like some other berries, and many varieties of frog.

  This was a red that clung to the eye. Even when you looked away, it was still there, glowing strangely for a few minutes that mad Runa’s horns prickle before it faded.

  “Not those ones, perhaps,” he admitted. “Do you think they look ready yet?”

  Runa stared at the grass. “Ready for what?”

  “She’s a Cauldron guide, not a gardener.” Errant was still looking at the searing red corn. “They’re not ready. Still a month or two off.”

  “A month? Two? The Sweetmeadow might not be around that long! If they go away they might not be back! What if I miss the harvest?”

  “Then the grain will fall, and seed and sprout itself, and grow something that will no doubt terrify us the next time the Sweetmeadow swings around.” Errant picked Tam’s hand up and kissed it.

  Tam perked up. “You think so?”

  “I do. Which is why I hope to all the absent gods that the Sweetmeadow sticks around long enough this time for us to harvest this growth.”

  “Even the red ones?”

  Errant looked like a man crushed by regrets. “Even the red ones. We’ll use a hand mill for it, Junilla. There won’t be enough here to make it worth the water mill, you don’t need to worry about contamination.”

  “Con-what?” Tam asked.

  “How long have you been working as a miller?” Runa asked.

  “Two years this Mullsday.” Errant grinned at her. “And to think I thought he liked me for my good looks. He was just after the mill all along.”

  “I saw saplings growing in the Greensward,” Runa wondered out loud. “Looked like they’d been planted, not wild grown.”

  “Apples,” Errant said fondly. “If he can’t win Junilla over, she’ll ban him from the tavern, so he’s going to try his hand at cider.”

  “Aren’t there any farms out here? Don’t you have…” Runa cast around her limited knowledge of how life worked outside the Cauldron and Sollus Gate. “Markets?”

  “Markets, sure. A day’s walk down the side of the mountain, in Dawdledale. And plenty of farms down there. We’ve a good trade with them, for grains and such like, and most people in Pothollow keep a garden, but…” Errant sighed, and winced, as though repeating words he’d heard too many times. “It’s worth cultivating a backup.”

  “The Cauldron is your backup pantry,” Runa said flatly.

  “Well, what do you eat when you’re out here?”

  Dehydrated stew. Pottage. Dried meats. Anything that can be carried in from outside the Cauldron, put in some cleansed water, and made marginally less terrible.

  She didn’t say any of it out loud. Instead, she glared at the corn. “You’re not worried about picking up a curse?”

  “And rolling slowly Rimward in our sleep?” Errant raised his voice. “Should we be worried about that, Corvin?”

  Corvin stalked towards them, arms full of moss. “About the wheat? Yes, I’d advise it.”

  “You just want it for yourself!” Tam protested.

  “Of course. Its magical properties would be much better utilised in my workshop than putting the rest of the village at risk.”

  “See?” Junilla sighed deeply. “Runa, don’t let these idiots delay you. You need to go find your friends.”

  Runa’s gut twinged. She explained briefly that her ‘friends’ were home safe, and managed not to sound resentful about it.

  Why was her default to sound resentful?

  “Oh!” Junilla’s eyebrows rose, and her eyes were suddenly sparkling with interest.

  “Uh-oh,” Tam muttered. “Run while you can, Runa.”