Junilla’s promise of hot dinner and a drink came with a place to sleep, although she might not have intended it. Runa fell asleep where she was sitting, again, and woke ready to face the Cauldron. Her bruises had faded, and her joints felt like they’d spent the last few days being gently massaged and allowed to rest in an enchanted hot pool, not bashing around mountains. Corvin might act like he begrudged every drop of the potions he’d freely given her, but his brews worked.

  The problems started when she tried to leave.

  Runa rose before dawn and packed out. Not that there was much to pack. Her lightstick, her clothes, and herself. Her axe was still out there on the glacier somewhere. She had a knife, but it was the sort of thing you used for peeling fruit or digging stones out of your shoe, not defending yourself.

  But none of that was her biggest problem.

  There was no way through the wall of ice.

  It stretched as far as she could see in each direction, a gleaming green-blue wall like a wave caught and frozen as it broke over the rim of the Cauldron.

  “Trying to pick a direction?”

  Tam Miller came up behind her, blowing on his hands to keep them warm. He nodded at the icy wall. “Unless you’re thinking of climbing. Hell of a drop if you lost your grip, though.”

  The top of the ice wall curved outwards. She’d already discarded the idea of climbing it.

  “I might melt my way through.” She hefted the lightstick, letting the tip glow hot before letting it go again. She had been thinking about it, though most of what she’d thought was it sounded like a good way to get either drowned or crushed by a half-melted wave crashing down on her the moment she got in deep enough.

  “Prefer you didn’t. Not looking forward to any of that melting, to be honest. Best thing about living at the top of a hill, no flooding.” He sucked his teeth. “If I wanted that much wet around I would have stayed in Billswater.”

  The name was vaguely familiar. A port city in the west.

  Still, Tam didn’t need to worry about the ice walls melting and spilling down into Pothollow. “The ice walls won’t melt over you. The magic that keeps the Cauldron contained—”

  “Keeps everything safely tucked away inside, yes, thank you, I have lived here quite a few years now. Long enough to know how many exceptions there are to that rule.”

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  She frowned. “Your town wall is hardly a good defence against the things the Cauldron might spit out.”

  “Even less, now someone busted the gate down. Hah! Don’t look like that. We haven’t had a monster come climbing out of the stew pot since even old Audella Tremblewood can remember. The Cauldron’s quiet around here.”

  They both looked up at the towering, frozen wave.

  “Most of the time,” Tam amended. “You’ll be off, then?”

  “Yep.”

  “Shame. Been a while since we had any visitors. We’re a bit off the beaten track for most people.”

  Runa didn’t point out that as their most recent visitor, she’d smashed their town gate, broken into a building, and terrified their local dragon.

  She wondered if the others knew their apothecary was a dragon.

  Not my business, she decided.

  Because she was leaving. By tonight, Pothollow would be far behind her. The small village would be a checkmark in her memory—a place she might come back to, one day, if she found herself this side of the Cauldron with a party that needed some time in a place where the local foliage didn’t try to strange them in their sleep, but that was all.

  She waved farewell to Tam, and headed west, towards a higher ridge that might give her a better view of any passes through the ice.

  The snow was thick, but she cut through it faster than she had the day before, not worrying about making a path others could follow. It got shallower the farther she got from the village, too. By the time the sun was rising, somewhere on the other side of the ice wall, she was only waist-deep.

  Fast didn’t mean easy. By the time the snow was only hitting her thighs, she was wishing she’d never heard of the stuff.

  The frozen wave unsettled her. The moving mountains had been one thing. Even the black fortress rising up from where it had been entombed belowground—the Cauldron was full of weird shit like that. She’d never seen something so big emerge from solid rock, but she’d spent a lazy afternoon once watching a single cursed tree try to grub its way out through the dunes of the Whistling Desert, and be slapped back down each time.

  The wave was different. And behind the wave, the mountains that had swooped in to try and force the fortress back belowground, all pushed out to the absolute limits of the Cauldron.

  And still no way through.

  The sun was still high in the sky, though it would soon duck behind the mountains and the ice wall. But at that moment, it struck the glacier, turning something she’d dismissed as a shadow into something from a nightmare.

  She stared at it glumly.

  It took weeks to traverse the outer rim of the Cauldron. Not that you’d want to. That was why the fortified Rim town of Sollus Gate existed: so you could get in and out quickly, and have a warm meal waiting when you got out, and plenty of shopkeepers ready to relieve you of all that heavy treasure.

  And that was how long it took when the whole place wasn’t blanketed in snow.

  It took until mid-afternoon, with the sun only a memory of warmth onchilled cheeks, for her to admit that stomping through the snow in search of a pass through an impenetrable wall of ice might be a stupid idea.

  She could keep going, with no guarantee she would find shelter for the night regardless of whether she found a way through the ice or not.

  Or she could turn back.