“No luck finding a way through?”

  Junilla stood behind the counter at her tavern, surveying the room the way a general might survey a war map. She’d spotted Runa the moment she ducked through the door, and waved her over.

  Runa grunted. “It’s solid ice as far as I could see out west.”

  Junilla tsked. “We’ve been lucky, I guess. Ten years since a glacier last moved this close. Which is it, do you think? Something off the Moonshroud?”

  “It’s not a glacier.” Runa sat heavily on one of the bar stools, accepting the mug of ale Junilla slid towards her with a weary nod. “It’s an ocean.”

  Junilla tensed, but her tone stayed light. “Bit crisp for an ocean.”

  “I don’t know what caused it. Never seen anything like it before. All I know is there’s a leviathan frozen solid about five miles along the rim.”

  The innkeeper let out a slow hiss of breath. “That’s new.”

  It was. And Runa didn’t know what to make of it, which worried her. “Could be the Dead Waters. Or the Gar-ghost Bog has some weird things in it.”

  “Well, it isn’t the Starfire Seas, unless something’s gone very wrong.” Junilla snorted at her own joke. Then she raised her eyebrows. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “You’ll need somewhere to stay tonight.” Before Runa could speak, she continued, “and I can’t offer you a room here. Sorry. The village wasn’t prepared for midwinter to crash down on us like that, and I’d be a poor neighbour to let them freeze in their own houses, so we’re all full up.”

  “I don’t need a room. Happy to camp out in here.” Runa indicated the dining room, and Junilla shook her head sadly.

  “Already spoken for, I’m afraid.” She shook her head again, and then her expression brightened, so artificially Runa braced herself. “Say! The old bakery’s still empty.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And the old baker always kept the woodpile well stocked. Nobody’s touched the place since he left—” Junilla’s gaze flickered, as though that wasn’t entirely true. “—so everything you need should still be there.”

  Except the door, Runa thought to herself, but the tavernkeeper had thought of that, too.

  “Fennewic had her boys around this afternoon, to put the door back on its hinges. Once you have the oven lit, the place will be cozy as anything.” Junilla wiped her hands together, as though the matter was settled.

  “Fennewic?”

  Junilla nodded towards a far corner of the tavern, where a stocky human woman with brassy hair pulled back in a single plait held court over a table of men aged from snotty-nosed boy upwards. Her family, Runa guessed, and the dwarf man at her shoulder must be her husband.

  “Our blacksmith,” Junilla explained. “Well. Dawdledale’s blacksmith. But she brought the ducklings up here to mend anything needs mending after that storm. Two of her boys are apprenticed out to Wyd, for all the good it will do them.”

  Dawdledale? That must be the larger settlement down at the base of the Cauldron. A proper town, not this straggle of a village.

  Runa chased the last of the vegetable stew around her plate with her spoon, keenly aware of Junilla’s gaze on her.

  Fine.

  “Who’s Wyd?” she asked.

  “Woodskeeper for the town and village,” Junilla said promptly. “They spend most of their time in the woods, so apprenticing to them is mostly a case of figuring out where the hells they got to. The boys are doing well enough, though. If there’s a hole in your roof that shouldn’t be there, or you need a new table, they’re the ones to go to for the parts to fix it.”

  That was a lot of information, for someone who’d already told Junilla she was leaving as soon as possible. Runa nodded. “I’ll thank Fennewic for the door on my way out.”

  She stood up, and waited as Junilla turned away to fuss with something behind the counter.

  One, two…

  Junilla checked herself, and turned back, raising one finger as she looked up at Runa.

  “Actually, there is one other thing…”

  And there it was. Runa’s heart sank, though she made sure the feeling didn’t make it to her face. What did Junilla want? Move this, break this, frighten these people… those were the things people usually thought she’d be useful for.

  In the Cauldron, she was an expert. An expert a lot of people still expected to use as a pack-mule and defend them against anything with big teeth and claws, sure, but she knew how to survive the place, and they respected that.

  Anywhere else she’d been, all people saw was big and tough. Unless she was with her mother or father’s people, in which case the options narrowed down in other ways she didn’t like.

  “If you’re holed up in the old bakery anyway, why not try your hand at putting some loaves on for us? Warm bread makes up for a lot.” Junilla’s gaze flicked to the shuttered windows and took on an ironic shine. “Maybe not a wall of ice that stretches to the godsdamned sky, but it can’t hurt.”

  Runa stared. “You want me to… bake.”

  A short figure appeared at the lower corner of her vision. Tam Miller leaned against the bar, an excited light in his eyes.

  Without looking, Junilla reached over and swatted him away. “If it isn’t too much trouble.”

  Runa looked at her a moment longer, then shrugged, and pushed through the crowd to thank the blacksmith for fixing the bakery door. Then she headed outside.

  Stolen story; please report.

  She hadn’t said yes. She’d shrugged. And sure, the smarter thing to do might have been to stick around longer, soak in a bit more of the warmth, and argue her way out of being volunteered for work she didn’t want. But…

  The sun was long gone behind the mountains now, and despite the fact it was summer outside of the Cauldron, the air had a bite that made her glad she hadn’t toughed it out in the wild overnight without her camping gear. The frozen ocean loomed up into the velvet sky. Runa’s breath puffed out in white clouds.

  She pulled out the string around her neck and checked the charms by the light of the lantern outside the tavern door.

  Still bright and yellow as the noonday sun.

  She shoved them back under her shirt and hurried along the snow-lined streets. It was cold, and dark. A good opportunity for some self-pity, if she’d been given to that sort of thing.

  Her lightstick smudged the shadows away, and she lifted it to look at the bakery with new eyes.

  The door hung tidily in its frame. The hinges looked new, and where the wood had splintered around them, Fennewic had fixed it and reinforced the whole side of the door with strips of metal.

  The roof was clear of snow, as was the ground for a few feet all around, and her arms still remembered every shovel-load of work that had taken, for this building and every other one. The windows were shuttered.

  Inside, only the faintest hint of woodsmoke and baked bread remained from her stay.

  The last baker had vanished. Runa would have to be fresh out of the sea not to be suspicious of that. But one of the benefits of being the biggest person in any given room was that people thought two or three times about involving you in any ‘attack the stranger and steal their stuff’ schemes.

  And she couldn’t see how Junilla inviting her to make herself at home in the bakery would fit into a scheme like that, anyhow. What was she going to do? Steal those boots back?

  This whole thing was just… weird.

  People didn’t hire her for her housekeeping skills, which was good, because she didn’t have any. They hired her for her size, and her knowledge of the Cauldron, and her ability to throw them over her shoulder and sprint away from danger.

  Bake bread for the village? Bake bread that people were meant to eat? Willingly? When there was any other option? Even her camp breads turned out to just be a way to make the stew look more appetizing by comparison, most times.

  But…

  The lightstick sputtered and she dropped it before it got any ideas. With the light out, she stared at nothing, and the charms around her neck seemed to burn her skin.

  Her clients were out there somewhere. Alive and unharmed—the beads weren’t smart enough to lie or be lied to—but trapped in the Cauldron. Had the camp been spun away by the avalanche the same way she had, or were they still in the shadow of the black fortress?

  Ninnius had mentioned the Blood Lord. She shook her head. Ridiculous. The Blood Lord was one of the Seven Deathless, the lich lords who’d almost destroyed the world in their quest to become gods. He was the first other troll Runa had ever heard of, other than her absent father.

  And he was dead. Proper dead, not undead-dead. His fellow Deathless had made sure of that, well before the rest of them turned on each other, and that was hundreds of years ago.

  But the fortress wasn’t a fortress. It was a tomb. And tombs were—famously—where dead people hung out, but ever since the Skeleton Wars, dead didn’t necessarily mean not troublesome.

  No power in the world could bring any of the Deathless back from their second and final deaths. But the same wasn’t true of their followers.

  Ninnius and Anklopher and the dark-eyed woman needed her. Specifically, they needed her well-rested and strong. Ready to face whatever the cursed lands had to throw at them all.

  Well rested.

  And… well fed?

  Her stomach was too full of stew to do anything except sit there happy and warm. But the morning would be a different story. She’d been in this job long enough to know the importance of planning ahead. Don’t just think about today’s meal; think about where tomorrow’s is coming from, too.

  That was just good sense.

  Besides, she couldn’t sit still and do nothing.

  And her camp bread hadn’t been that bad.

  She was moving before the thought even finished forming. Not getting ready, just… seeing how things were. She brushed out the oven and lit a new fire, then wedged the lightstick into her belt where she could tap light from it easily. With the light from the oven and the light from the stick, she could explore the space a bit better.

  She looked inside the huge jars lined up against the wall behind the counter. Flour. Different sorts of flour, maybe, because they were different colours and fineness, but that was a problem for someone else, because it wasn’t like she was going to be around long enough to know how or why flour came in different types. Junilla wanted her to bake something? She didn’t have time to experiment. She was just going to throw something together.

  The bench top was dusty, but a quick swipe with a cloth solved that. Not that it needed to be clean for anything. There were shelves underneath, with various cups and pots. Why hadn’t the last baker taken them with him?

  She built up the fire and set a tin pot to the side, full of snow to melt. She’d want to fill her waterskin before she headed out, anyway.

  Which made hunting in the cupboards under the wooden bench good sense, too, and using the big cup scoops she found there to measure out a random selection of flours. There was a mixing trough at one end of the workbench. She dumped the flour in, then moved back to the fire. The snow was starting to melt. The water was cold, but at least it was liquid. She made a well in the middle of the flour and—

  Cursed out loud.

  “Hells above. What am I thinking?”

  She thrust her hands onto the bench, disgusted with herself. How could she have forgotten the most basic part of bread making? Even her camp breads started with baker’s cheat, the dry powdery stuff kitchen witches sold to travelers who wouldn’t be carrying their whole mother-of-bread with them.

  None of the jars she’d looked in had anything that looked or tasted like cheat in them. Which left the real thing.

  And of course the last baker would have taken his with him. Leaving the huge jars of flour, she could understand that. Carrying them with him would have made as much sense as carrying the furniture with him, or the whole building. She’d had several extremely memorable clients who had spells that let them carry a portion of their towers with them, but that sort of magic was far out of reach of most people. But the one thing all breads needed to rise instead of stay as skimming-stone cakes?

  “Course the old baker took his mother-of-bread with him,” she muttered. She stomped away from the bench.

  Behind her, something went clonk.

  Runa spun around, her hand going to where her axe wasn’t. She grunted in frustration and peered into the darkness above the bench.

  Which suddenly wasn’t so dark.

  Light puddled from the back of the deep shelf above the bench. The firelight from the oven flickered so busily, it was hard to distinguish the softer, steadier glow. But glow it was. What was causing it, that was another question.

  Runa crept closer, remembering the skitters and shadows of movement the night before, and the strange creature she’d surprised that morning.

  Something had shared the warmth of the bakery with her.

  “Hello?”

  She pitched her voice as though she were speaking to one of those clients who’d only just twigged that venturing into the most cursed lands in all the world meant they would be spending time around a bunch of scary cursed stuff.

  There was no response. There usually wasn’t with the clients, either. Other than some quiet sobbing.

  “You might as well come out and be closer to the fire,” she added. “If you’re no danger to me, I’ll be no danger to you.”

  She waited.

  There was no response, but the steady glow pulsed, and there was that clonk again. Frowning, Runa stepped forward. With gentle fingers, she pushed clay and wooden vessels aside. Something smelled like smoke. She cast a glance over her shoulder, in case the fire had caught something it shouldn’t.

  Light skittered at the edge of her vision.

  She looked back, but it was gone.

  And right in front of her outstretched hand was a ceramic jar with a tell-tale pale crust around its rim.

  Runa’s eyebrows lifted almost up to her horns.

  She gave the jar a sniff, expecting the acrid tang of foodstuffs abandoned too long. “Not bad,” she said in surprise. If her eyebrows had further to go, they would have gone there.

  She looked at the jar. She looked at the pile of flour on the counter. She looked at the jar again.

  She did not look at the sound of tiny feet nervously pattering back and forth behind her.

  “All right, then,” she said, and got to work.