Runa had never been particularly poetic.
Among her mother’s people, bread appeared at intervals as if by magic, unless you got up early and saw the local villagers leaving their offerings at the edge of the volcano. The bread there was dense, sweet potato-based loaves steamed or baked in the heat from below ground.
The villagers were never exactly keen on meeting the nymphs they left offerings for. They hadn’t been excited about making Runa’s acquaintance, either. Volcano nymphs who kept their village safe from flying lava bombs and couldn’t stray too far from the volcano’s superheated embrace were one thing. Half-trolls who could wander down the mountain at will and poke their nose where they weren’t wanted? Not so much.
But that was back when she was a kid. She had decades of being bad at cooking to lean on that had nothing to do with either side of her heritage.
Runa took the jar back to the mixing trough and peered inside it. The stuff was high and fluffy. More alive than any of the mother-of-bread she’d ever managed to carry through the Cauldron, before she gave up and stuck with baker’s cheat. She mixed the flour around a bit, slopped in some water, and stopped as a small hiss of what sounded like pain seeped out from the shelves behind her.
Huh.
A scoop of mother-of-bread followed the flour and water. It landed with a glop on a mound of flour.
There was another pained hiss.
Runa waited.
Tap, tap, tap, went tiny feet. Scrabble, scrabble. And then something fell to the floor with a thunk.
Runa turned around slowly, giving the little creature enough time to hide again.
There was a book on the floor.
She brought it over to the oven, peering at the pages as the firelight flickered over them. It was the sort of book the guildmaster back in Sollus Gate used to record contracts: thick, heavy, with a leather cover and pages filled with dense black scrawl. But where the guildmaster’s records were famously precise, whoever owned this book hadn’t hesitated to scribble and blot out their work.
The writing was so messy, it took Runa several pages to figure out what she was looking at.
A recipe book.
“I was doing that badly, huh?” she said to nobody in particular.
‘Nobody in particular’ went tap-tap-tap in the shelves.
She paged through the book. More scribbled-out writing. The occasional diagram, carefully labelled, and then slashed out. Quantities, directions, notes on how to shape and how long to let the dough rest—dough needed to rest?—and most of it all but unreadable.
What a waste of paper, she couldn’t help thinking. Who had this book belonged to? Why go to the effort of writing and drawing everything out if you were only going to cross it out again?
At last, more than a third of the way through the book, she found a page that hadn’t been completely scrawled over.
Maslin Loaf
Mix one part the barley flour to four parts the rye, adding with oats and softened berries of rye. Salt, one spoon each loaf being made. Make alive the yeast by four parts warm water in one ladle honey each loaf, and mix all well together. Let rest the night. Shape loafs a double-fist round and leave to rise one bell. Bake in hot oven, one bell.
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Make alive the yeast? That sounded like a spell, not a recipe. Bake in a hot oven? She could follow that, at least. Not like a cold oven cooked anything.
She hadn’t noticed any belltowers while she was digging out the village.
She peered at the flour she’d thrown into the mixing trough, then checked the storage jars again.
“Would be handy if any of this was labeled,” she wondered out loud. “What makes a barley flour different from a rye flour?”
No response. Not even a pained moan. Maybe the little creature had given up hope. Smart of it. She wasn’t sure what rye was, let alone rye flour.
She checked the recipe again. One part to four parts… how much had she put in of that one flour already? And water? The two had already made a sludgy mess together.
“If the water’s meant to be warm…” she muttered to herself as she moved around the kitchen. “And… honey. Is this one honey? It’s sticky enough. Why’d the last guy leave everything here like this, anyway?” she muttered.
She still wasn’t sure what the instructions meant by make the yeast alive, and although she put in a bit of another flour, the likelihood it was the right one was low.
But that didn’t matter, she told herself. If life had taught her anything, it was that so long as a meal existed, and was hot, it didn’t really matter if it was good.
And she wasn’t a baker. If they wanted good bread, they should have asked someone else.
The instructions said to let the dough mixture rest for the night. Runa stretched. She should probably rest, too. The bakery was warm from the fire in the oven, and she needed her strength for tomorrow.
After she washed up, she explored the rest of the bakery a little. Not because she was planning on setting up camp here, no matter how subtly Junilla thought she was suggesting Runa make Pothollow her new home. Just to get the lay of the land.
There was a small all-purpose room behind the kitchen, with a few more pieces of furniture stacked to one side and a trapdoor leading down to a cellar. Runa climbed down the narrow stone staircase, and the lightstick showed her more barrels and earthenware jars, magically warded against rot and insects. She cracked a few open and found more flour and other ingredients. Her unease over the missing baker grew. Why stockpile this much stuff and then run off?
On the way back up something caught her eye.
Tiny, webbed footprints in the thin layer of dust on the steps.
She snorted and made her way back up.
The only other door led out the back of the bakery. There was a pump—frozen—and a half-enclosed area which she guessed was the washhouse. A small building at the end of the snow-covered garden turned out to be a long drop, which she used.
She shut the door and paused in front of the fire, thinking. The kitchen was the heart of the small building. The heat from the ovens kept the kitchen toasty, and seeped through to the other room to keep them not quite freezing, which was probably why the stores were kept down in the cellar where the oven’s heat wouldn’t mess with those preservation seals. But the warmth upstairs was good. If she’d built the fire during the day, maybe the whole building would be warmer now. If she built them up tomorrow morning, before she left…
…then she would be admitting to herself that she thought she’d be back, and would want a warm room when she returned.
She clenched her fists at her sides.
Worrying over whether the ice wall would be as steep and impenetrable in the other direction wasn’t going to help her. She needed rest. Like the dough. And although she was used to bedding down in the dirt, she’d prefer something other than solid stone pavers beneath her tonight. None of the rooms she’d found was a bedroom. Where had the old baker slept?
Somewhere the heat from the ovens would find him…
She looked up. Aha!
The trapdoor in the floor led to the cellar. The trapdoor in the ceiling led to the baker’s personal quarters. There was a neat trick to getting the ladder down, probably, but she couldn’t find it, and a lifetime of cautiously prodding traps in the Cauldron had taught her not to yank on things that didn’t move the way they ought to.
No matter. Ladders were for short people.
She reached up, grabbed the edge of the square hole in the ceiling, and boosted herself up.
Please don’t let there be a skeleton up here.
She felt a touch of guilt for thinking it. Everyone here in Pothollow had been so… nice. So welcoming. Even the apothecary, who looked as though he would rather be anywhere else than conversing with anyone, let alone a troll.
Maybe that was why she was looking for the catch. Because there had to be one, right?
And maybe there still was, but whatever the catch would turn out to be, it wasn’t the former baker’s corpse lying in his attic bedroom.
At least, not out in the open.
Runa got her head and one shoulder through the trapdoor, far enough to see the narrow bed wedged into one corner, a set of drawers, and a small writing desk, and then she got stuck.
She swore. But all the cursing in the world wouldn’t change the fact that this entire building had been designed for someone a hell of a lot narrower than she was. The stairs down to the cellar, the bed she’d glimpsed in the bedroom.
The godsdamned trapdoor.
Growling, she unwedged herself and lowered herself awkwardly back down to the kitchen.
Fine. Stone paver bed it was.
As though she needed any more reasons not to stick around.