Cakes had been surprisingly difficult, but at the end of her week of training, she had managed to master a simple recipe for vanilla and a slightly more complicated chocolate variation. One of each now sat fully frosted and ready for buyers. They were nestled between tables covered by cookies, loaf after loaf of bread, and an amount of keln so large that Jane couldn’t help but be alarmed by it.
Yet despite this encouraging display, she found herself feeling anxious once everything was out and ready. There were a dozen kinds of bread, but the only differences lay in shape and how much of which herbs she had chosen to use. There were treats in various forms, but not so overwhelming a variety that she could see anyone being impressed by the spread.
Jane knew this was all she could do. It was just hard to see it as enough.
A knock at the door broke her out of her worried reverie. She was unsurprised to see Bella there, smiling and oddly peppy for so early in the morning.
“Bella, you should be at your shop!” Jane protested. “Or I suppose you are on your way, and just picking up some keln?”
“No, girl.” Bella bopped her playfully on the top of her head. “I took the day off. I’m here to help.”
“There’s honestly not a lot to help with, Bella. I’ve done all my baking. It’s all set out. I just need to open the door.”
“Right. So why haven’t you?”
Jane scowled at her friend. “I will.”
“When? It’s past dawn. People are on the streets. When?”
“When it’s ready. When the work is done.”
“‘There’s honestly not a lot left to do, Bella. I’ve done all my baking. It’s all set out.’” Bella’s ‘Jane’ voice was not at all accurate, but its general messaging was undeniable. “You are ready, Jane. It’s going to be the same opening your door now as ten hours from now, except there won’t be any customers by then. You can’t fix worrying about whether or not you’ll get customers by barring them from the store.”
For the first time in her life, Jane found herself audibly gulping. She had always thought this only happened in books, to show fear in the face of inescapable danger, but she gulped all the same.
Finally, she gave a mostly-false brave nod to Bella and unbolted the door before throwing it open to the chilly morning air.
The frigid wind from the day before wasn’t blowing today. After yesterday’s adventures, Jane was beginning to suspect the reason for these inexplicable weather shifts, but she didn’t care to think about magic water spirits this morning. She simply pulled the door almost closed again, leaving it open a drafty crack instead of fully swung out in welcome.
“You might want to look outside,” Bella told her. “I made you something. Rather, I had someone make it last night.”
Jane obeyed. Indeed, there was a new object just a few feet outside her door. It was an A-frame of two boards, covered in slate and joyfully decorated in colorful chalk a passerby could hardly miss.
Jane’s Bakery
Now open for business!
“And exactly who did you get to make this?” Jane demanded, though she had a good guess already. “Who would make this so quickly just because you asked?”
“More people than you’d think, but in this case, exactly the one you’d expect. He was so excited to do it for you, too. What did you do to that boy, Jane? He was smiling so hard, he looked broken.”
Jane flushed red. “We just went on a walk.”
“Jane.”
“I… might have kissed his cheek. And told him I wanted to see him again.”
“Well, that explains it.” Bella laughed long and hard. “I knew there must be something.”
Once the door was open, there was nothing to do but wait.
Jane had spent her last few waking minutes last night going through both her books, looking for anything that might tell her what to expect today. The more scientific book had been no help at all, which she grudgingly admitted was reasonable. Felicity Cast had been a hobbyist baker, someone who simply wanted to make her own treats and supply her friends with baked goods. She had probably taken years to get to the skill level she had allowed Jane to achieve in weeks, just moving slowly and making sure she got things right.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
To Jane’s surprise, Gramma Isaks did have thoughts on the subject, even if they weren’t exactly aimed at Jane’s particular project.
Remember that baking brings them in like nothing else. When folks get a whiff of dough cooking, they’ll come right over, looking for a talk about this and that but with eyes that never leave your oven.
That’s one of the magics of baking, you see. If you want company, you just have to fire up that oven, and they’ll come running. Nobody ever had so many friends as they do when they are taking a tray of cookies off the fire, I say.
Gramma Isaks turned out to be right. The sign probably helped, and Bella had probably done her best to get the word out. But when someone finally came in, it was a woman whose nose was working like a bloodhound’s. She was wearing an apron and looked like she was running another errand between household tasks. She hardly managed a quick wave at Jane and Bella before she was between the tables, poking loaves of bread and considering cookies.
“If I can help you find something, let me know!” Jane said cheerily. The woman nodded, but didn’t take her up on the offer. She just continued poking until she pointed at one of the burnt-top loaves and some of the simpler cookies in the shop.
“I’ll take this and a dozen of those, for dinner hold. I’ll see you around sundown. Good to have you here, you know. I’ve been walking an extra five minutes every day to get my evening bread.”
Jane’s mind raced over all her Glenfall knowledge, but ‘dinner hold’ was a new one. She didn’t want to admit that, though. Instead, she nodded knowingly. The woman smiled before sweeping out of the shop without paying or taking anything.
Bella was grinning. “You have no idea what she meant, do you?”
“Absolutely none. I could guess if you want.”
“No, don’t.” Bella grabbed a sack from behind the counter, put the loaf of bread in it, and then bundled a dozen cookies in paper and a tied ribbon before gently putting those in, too. “It’s funny. Most of the time, when this causes an issue, it’s people from Glenfall going anywhere else and finding out no other town does dinner holds.”
“Oh, good. It’s an only-here thing, not a Jane-doesn’t-know-things thing.”
“Right. Just a here-thing. What it means is, she’s might not be carrying enough money on her, or doesn’t want to take the goods now and have them getting in her way all day. She wants these things for supper, and not until then. So she puts them on a dinner hold. You put the bag behind the counter, and she knows it's there when she needs it without having to worry you’ll run out.”
Jane’s eyebrows lowered as she thought of all the things that could go wrong with this system. “What if she doesn’t come back? What if I turn out to be charging a price she doesn’t want to pay? I bet someone dishonest could cheat people that way.”
“You’d think that, but in practice, it doesn’t happen,” Bella assured her. “When people don’t come back to honor dinner holds, it’s usually for reasons you’d be a monster not to forgive them for. And if someone tried to use a dinner hold to pressure someone into overpaying, folks would run them out of town on a rail. I’m serious. We take meals seriously around here.”
“So this is as good as sold?”
“Close. Sometimes, you might end up with bread behind your counter nobody comes to get. If you’re a nice person, you’ll bring it to the customer anyway, free of charge. But I know that woman. Nothing less pressing than a broken bone would keep her from coming back to make good on her promise.”
In that case, it’s a transaction, right? Which means…
“That’s right.” Bella looked straight through Jane to the truth, more or less reading her mind. “This is your first sale, Jane. You don’t know her. She doesn’t know you. And she bought that bread without a second thought. It’s real.”
Jane sat down on a stool, suddenly shaky. “Wow. I always wondered why there was so much empty room behind the counter, but… wow.”
“Drink some water. Eat this.” Bella handed her a bulky, paper-wrapped package of breakfast held in her own good keln. “Get some food in you, girl. You should know better than to try to take care of other folks without taking care of yourself first.”
Jane found it hard to disagree with Bella, especially around a mouthful of eggs, sausage, and bread. She managed to eat about half of her breakfast before the next customer came in.
“Keln?” The burly man picked up one of the discs in a rough, strong-looking hand, then looked to Bella instead of Jane for confirmation. “Is it any good?”
Before Bella could respond, Jane hopped off her stool, already feeling much stronger and steadier.
“Here,” she said. Taking one of the spare keln that hadn’t made it to the shop tables, she placed it on the counter and cut it into several triangular sections. She then handed a section to the man, who popped it into his mouth.
His eyes instantly widened. “How?”
Jane chose her words carefully. “I found some stuff around the house that helped me figure it out.” That seemed true enough, even if the details wouldn’t have been believable to anyone present but her. “Spread the word for me, if you could. I’m the only one who has this right now, but I’ll teach any other baker who wants to know.”
“Decent of you,” the man observed.
“It’s not my secret to keep.”
As much as she liked to think she would be in Glenfall forever, doing just what she was doing now, Jane couldn’t really guarantee that. For better or worse, she now knew there were things afoot in the background of the town that she would have to start looking into. She couldn’t ignore dragons and other such magical problems forever.
And if circumstances changed on her fast, she didn’t want to steal this secret from the town that wanted it most. It belonged to Glenfall, not her. She was going to make sure Glenfall got it back.
The man shrugged. “Still, nice to do. I’ll absolutely make sure people know you are open, and that you have good keln. Dinner hold a half dozen of them for me, if you can, and give me a half dozen now. If I know the boys down at the worksite, they’ll have some eggs and meat cooked up pretty soon. Something like this bread will make me real popular, at least for today.”
He paid, took his keln, and left. Jane had real coin in her hand now. She opened the register to deposit it with a sense of ritual and grandeur, then sat down to wait for the next customer.
“That’s two dinner holds. Not bad.” Bella nudged the rest of Jane’s breakfast at her. “He paid for both sets, by the way. That’s pretty standard pricing.”
“I figured. I’ll sit down with a pencil and paper later, but that should have been a comfortable profit. Why should I be glad about dinner holds especially, by the way? It seems like getting paid up-front should be a bigger deal.”
Bella glanced out the front window and whistled. “I’ll tell you later. There’s no time right now. Look outside, Jane. Things are about to get real busy.”