Bloodburster did come with a scabbard. And Severine didn’t even joke about charging her extra for it. She undid the stiff leather straps that held the scabbard to the packroll where she’d kept it since she first became a priestess of the blades, and held it wordlessly out to Runa.

  There was nothing magic or magnificent about it. The scabbard was an old husk of a thing, worn and scratched. It didn’t look evil. It didn’t look anything. It was just a tool for holding the sword, the same way the sword wanted to just be a tool for mass death.

  Wouldn’t it be easier to just kill them all. Runa snorted. Honestly. If that was the best it could come up with, no wonder it hadn’t had a wielder since the Blood Lord.

  She slid Bloodburster into the unprepossessing scabbard and, because strapping it to her belt might suggest she wanted to use it, tucked it under one armpit.

  “Runa!” someone called from the top of the rolling hill they’d been hiding behind. She shaded her eyes with one hand.

  “Corvin?”

  “I see my potion didn’t achieve the desired results.” Corvin’s voice was dry, but the way he quickly looked Runa and Severine both over gave away his concern.

  “It’s not the potion’s fault. Needs an appetizer that improves the thrower’s aim,” Runa said.

  “Hah.”

  “Hey!” Severine protested. “I aimed it perfectly, given you were still yourself.”

  “Did you come to check on us, or your potion?” Runa asked lazily.

  “Impossible to do one without the other,” he responded promptly. “I also come with a message from Junilla.”

  “What is it?”

  “Get as much rest as you can today. Tomorrow, harvest begins.”

  ***

  “How come Junilla decides when harvest starts?” Severine asked Corvin the next morning, as they and half the village emptied onto the road that led down into Dawdledale and the fields around it.

  “She doesn’t.”

  “Is this another of the she’s-not-in-charge-really-we-just-all-do-as-she-says things? She can control the stars now?”

  Corvin allowed himself a thin smile. “The harvest stars will rise in a few days. Junilla’s impatience is a late-autumn-and-the-rains-are-coming thing.”

  “Coming from where?” Runa scanned the horizon. There was a lot of it, from the top of the mountain.

  Corvin pointed to a vague grey smear on the very far edge of the distant plains. “There.”

  “What? That’s hundreds of miles away.”

  “And if we all sit around saying that long enough, it’ll sweep through and take all the grain with it before we have a chance to bring it in. Same thing happens every year.”

  “That sounds very… regular.”

  He eyed her. “It isn’t like that where you come from?”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “The Cauldron does what it likes. There’s a cursed rainstorm that’ll follow you around sometimes, but nothing you’d call reliable.”

  “I mostly pay attention to the weather as and when I arrive in it,” Severine commented. “And then I go indoors.”

  Corvin gave a long-suffering sigh. “Welcome to normal life,” he told them. “The seasons come at the same time each year—”

  “Unless a magical blizzard buries you neck-deep in snow in the middle of spring,” Runa commented.

  “—and in the same order,” he completed, grumbling.

  “And if you miss any of them while they’re gone, there might be a cursed land stuck in eternal whatever-season next door in a bit anyway, so don’t worry too much. Hello, girls, Corvin. Ready to help bring in the harvest?” Junilla greeted them with the confident grin of someone about to do exactly no manual labour, while watching everyone else get sweaty.

  “What does that involve, exactly?” Severine asked cautiously.

  The answer was, it involved a lot of big sticks with sharp knives on the end.

  “I’m surprised you’re not up the front with a scythe,” Tam called to Severine when he caught sight of them. “Or you, Runa.”

  “Do you want to watch me wave a scythe around, or do you want the job to actually get done?” Runa asked him at the same time as Severine groaned, “Don’t give them ideas!”

  What felt like the entire populations of Pothollow and Dawdledale gathered in the fields. Farmers armed with scythes and sickles took point, cutting swathes of golden wheat as the sun beat down from above. Behind them, those less skilled with the scythe—perhaps those as likely to cut off their neighbours’ ear as an ear of wheat—followed behind, gathering the cut wheat to tie into sheaves, and piling the sheaves into stacks to be carried to… Runa wasn’t entirely sure, but someone was carrying them away, so they must be going somewhere. Eventually the stuff became the grains that Tam ground up in his mill, didn’t they?

  The work was slow, and repetitive, but it wasn’t the meditative rhythm she’d built up in the bakery. This was hot and prickly, with cut stems of wheat sticking to sweaty skin and poking in where it wasn’t wanted, and the sun making her horns too hot.

  Other people were wearing wide-brimmed hats. Runa wished she had one that fit over her horns.

  Her body wasn’t used to the movements, and soon began to feel the constant bending and scooping up wheat to bundle into sheaves in her shoulders and lower back. But despite the heat and the discomfort and the occasional piece of wheat that aimed itself unerringly for her nostrils, it wasn’t unpleasant.

  The whole village was out. All the people who’d been strangers less than half a year ago, and were now vital parts of her life, plus Morrie and Fennewic and her brood and other half-remembered faces from Dawdledale. And the atmosphere was as busy and friendly as an evening at Junilla’s. There were jokes, laughter. Even songs.

  She’d been wrong. Junilla wasn’t lording it over everyone, taking charge of the day and thereby giving herself the job of sitting back doing nothing; she and the landlady of the Dawdledale inn had wheeled out huge barrels of cider, and were walking the lanes between the fields, handing out mugs of cool drink.

  Even if she had a bed, she wouldn’t have managed to fall into it that night. She barely managed to shove Severine up the ladder and prop herself against a wall and think We really should have talked about what we’ll do with the sword before exhaustion overtook her.

  And the next day was more of the same. No wonder people talked about there being a harvest festival at the end of all of this—they would need one, to celebrate the end of the backbreaking work. The fields were full; in Dawdledale’s market square, the harvested wheat was beaten and sifted, separating the grains from the crackling stalks.

  Runa baked bread in the mornings and spent her days as one thread of the huge effort to bring in the wheat to grind so she could make more bread the following year.

  And that was how life continued for the next several days, dawn until dusk. It was hard, hot, dusty work, and Corvin roamed the fields behind Junilla and the other innkeeper, slapping protective poultices on cuts and grazes.

  But it felt good. Runa suspected that a few years ago, maybe a few months ago, the feeling of being part of a great grinding circle of work that was required to make more work would have felt like a stone around her neck. But it was a cycle she understood now. And appreciated. The people of Pothollow working together with the people of the town their little village had been dragged away from, and all of them intent on bringing in the food that would see them through the winter until spring brought the earth beneath them back to life.

  And they were all in a race against those distant rain clouds, and the hint of cold that seeped up from the south as autumn lumbered on.

  “And Bloodburster isn’t bothering you?” Severine asked in a low voice as they sat together at the tavern. In one corner, someone was playing a pipe, and the half of the gathering that weren’t dozing in their seats was singing along, something warm and meandering.