Why had she offered her food? What food?

  Runa built the fire up. It was still full night, and the firelight sent dancing shadows across the walls. Severine jumped a little at first, then pinched the bridge of her nose and muttered something to herself. She hadn’t touched the larger pack she’d pulled the greatsword out of earlier; it was leaning against the chair beside her, though, still in reach. Runa had balanced the greatsword in one corner, near the bread shovels.

  “Something to drink?” Runa asked. “I’ve got, uh…”

  She’d done it again!

  “…water?” she said weakly.

  They stared at each other for long enough that Runa strongly considered running back to the Cauldron, right that instant, just to be somewhere else and not staring wordlessly at the most beautiful woman she’d ever met.

  Who remembered her. Who was breathtakingly gorgeous, and whose voice shook as she told Runa she remembered her saving her life, and who was—was staring at her with the same slightly panicked paralysis that Runa was staring at her.

  That helped, actually.

  Severine blinked rapidly. “I have tea leaves!” she announced, with the semi-panicked excitement that sounded a lot like the way Runa sounded when she was hunting desperately for something to say. Except where Runa’s voice dragged through gravel, Severine squeaked.

  Severine dug around in her satchel. Her silky hair fell over her face and she shoved it back. When she did find the small pouch she was looking for, she grimaced. “Well, they were leaves. Tea crumbles. Tea dust?”

  And cheese and dried fruits from Runa’s traveling rations. That would have to do. She arranged the meagre fare on a plate while she waited for the water to heat over the fire.

  There was no sign of her mysterious housemate. Runa dragged a chair to the fire while Severine plucked off her snow-sodden outer layers. Outside, there were only the normal sounds of the village at night. The rustle of wind over rooftops. The occasional hoot from an owl warning other owls that they were close to the rim of the Cauldron, and to watch out because things got weird in there, even for owls.

  Their fight with the undead skeleton in her cellar had gone entirely unnoticed.

  Runa caught a glimpse of what Severine was wearing under her sodden cloak. It was thin, and clinging, and there wasn’t a lot of it, and Runa immediately turned back to the fire. “Blanket?” she offered, and was amazed she managed to say the two syllables in order.

  “Yes, please.”

  She unfolded the blanket from the window seat she’d been using as a bed and held it out half behind her back, not looking. Cold thoughts.

  Having stray, lonely thoughts about the woman you threw over your shoulder and saved from a collapsing glacier was one thing. That same woman showing up all wet and shivering in your cellar?

  Hoo, boy.

  She poked at the fire until the rustle of cloth subsided, and then sat down. Severine was tucked into the armchair, under the blanket, and Runa got her first good look at her.

  Severine was human. A few years younger than her, at a guess, though despite spending so much time around humans she still had trouble guessing their age without horns to go by. She had a long, oval face with high cheekbones that made it too clear how hollow the cheeks beneath them were. And there was something magical about her hair. It kept slipping out from where she tucked it under the blanket, sliding to fall in luxuriant waves over her shoulders. And it was so glossy. Which wouldn’t have been noticeable if the rest of her was clean, but she was back-country scruffy. Her golden skin was roughened by the sun, and there were tiny tracks of dirt and sweat trapped in the shallow lines at the corners of her eyes.

  She looked like a rich woman who’d been rolled in the dirt. But she didn’t hold herself with the stiff anxiety of someone not used to carrying road dust on the back of their neck. If she’d been wealthy enough to afford a permanent charm on her hair once, it was a long time ago.

  She was a mystery.

  A mystery with a magic knife capable of cutting portals through the world.

  And she was in Runa’s bakery.

  Not that it was her bakery. She was only staying here until—well, it had been until she headed back into the Cauldron to rescue the wizards and Severine, except the wizards didn’t need saving and Severine was here. And she’d been going to leave anyway, even after the charms told her the wizards had returned to Sollus Gate safely. She hadn’t planned on staying here.

  Here. Where Severine was.

  A very small and far-off part of her mind pointed out that if she had managed to get back into the Cauldron and rescue Severine from certain doom, then she would have also been where Severine was, and presumably had to manage holding a conversation then, as well. Exactly as she was failing to do now. Except possibly with more convenient undead to bash out of the way and give a point to the conversation.

  She let out a breath that was far steadier than her thoughts.

  Severine looked up at her, eyes watchful and waiting.

  “Uh.” The single syllable made it past Runa’s lips, then echoed in her ears, sounding as stupid as she felt. The thing was—and she was trying pretty hard not to think about this—there were convenient undead, ready and waiting, just a short sprint over the rim of the Cauldron and then however long it took her to find one of the battleground curselands.

  On the one hand, sprinting out into the darkness after just saving Severine’s life seemed like an over-reaction.

  On the other, she’d been staring silently at the woman for way too long already.

  She cleared her throat awkwardly. “So. Uh. The camp survived the Cauldron stirring?”

  “It might have been the only thing that did. After the fortress emerged…” Severine shivered.

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  “I did mean to come and find you. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

  Her voice had the same gravel in it that it always did when she made herself say something out loud that wanted to stay secret. But Severine didn’t shy away at the sight of the hulking half-troll growling at her.

  Her mouth crooked into an understanding half-smile. And her opposite eyebrow twitched up, too. Ungraceful, awkward… and perfect. “No need to apologise. I thought you’d been crushed under several mountains. I’m glad you’re not.”

  “I could have—”

  Severine shook her head. “We made it out. I’m not going to say it was fun for all the family, but no one lost anything vital. And if you’d come back to shepherd us out of the Cauldron, you wouldn’t have been here to save me now, would you?”

  Runa frowned. “You wouldn’t have needed to come here—”

  “Oh no. I absolutely would. I’m not saying the series of decisions that brought me here were the best decisions anyone has made, but in any other circumstances, I would have made exactly the same choices.” Severine’s smile turned into a grimace, just for a moment.

  Still, I might have been there with you.

  Even thinking it made Runa feel flustered. More flustered than she already was. She checked the water, almost spilling the whole pot into the fire. Deep in the back of the oven, something hissed disapprovingly.

  On the upside, not looking at Severine made it easier to talk.

  “How’d you make it out?”

  Severine’s hair slithered over her shoulders as she shrugged. “The wards on your camp held up to the mountains exploding, and we all decided that probably ran us out of good luck for the decade. Once things calmed down—well, you might have noticed I have a magical knife that can cut portals through the world? That came in very handy.”

  Runa stared at the flames, counting. “It took almost two weeks for the mountains to calm down out there?”

  The Cauldron had been so still, here—frozen still—that she’d assumed the storm was over. That all the mountains had blasted themselves Rimward, along with the frozen ocean, and that was the end of it.

  “Eh… not exactly.”

  Runa risked a glance at Severine, and caught the full blast of a rueful grin that almost took the back of her head off.

  “It took the boys a few days to stop arguing. They wanted to look for you. Well, Ninnius wanted to look for you. Anklopher said you’d told them to stay put if you got separated.”

  Runa blinked. He’d actually listened to her?

  Her jaw tightened. “But then I didn’t show up.”

  She’d tried. But in the end, she’d left them.

  While she was still glowering at herself over that, Severine made a face. “Then they argued about their research. They’d lost something that was going to help them study—er, what they were there to study. So they took turns arguing it was too important to leave behind, and that it was more important that they leave it and stay alive. I mean, they argued with each other about that, and then swapped which side they were arguing. And this went on for days.”

  “The Blood Lord,” Runa murmured under her breath.

  Severine stilled. “You know that’s what they were after?”

  “Sure. It took a mountain about to smack into us for them to admit it, but yeah, I knew.” Runa snorted and jabbed at the fire. “As though there aren’t enough undead walking around the Cauldron, without trying to dig up one who’s properly dead.”

  “Ah,” Severine began. “Yes. More than enough undead. About that…”

  Runa sat back and met Severine’s gaze long enough to catch the worry in it. She looked away quickly.

  “Don’t worry about that one we threw back through your portal,” she said.

  “You don’t think it survived the fall?” Severine joked weakly.

  Runa shrugged. “Best way to put down a skeleton is to break its bones until there isn’t enough left to get up again. A fall from that high, onto solid rock or ice? Even troll bones crack eventually.”

  “That’s good! I mean, it’s awful, but it’s good. And that’ll leave it… properly dead?”

  Runa risked another glance. Severine was leaning forwards, perched nervously in her blanket.

  “You haven’t seen many undead before?” she guessed.

  “My life was remarkably free of them until, oh, a few weeks ago? When it became suddenly clear to me that one of the curses the Dread Mistress swept into her stew-pot must be whatever keeps a person’s soul stuck to what’s left of their body.” Severine shivered and pulled the blanket closer around herself.

  “Well, a lot of the Cauldron is old battlefields. Don’t know whether the skeletons got swept along for the ride, or she put ‘em there on purpose.” Runa shrugged, then realised she’d gotten through a whole sentence—several sentences—without tripping over her own tongue. Maybe it wasn’t just the adrenaline of near-death she needed to keep the conversation flowing. Talking about all the ways you could die in the Cauldron worked, too. “Anyway, it was only a skeleton. It’s ghouls you need to watch out for. Skeletons are just…” She grimaced.

  “Terrifying and murderous?” Severine suggested. “And they’re the better option? How bad are ghouls, then?”

  “Ghouls have more person left in them. More people, with the older ones, what with how they… you know, they don’t eat ‘em, exactly, but they get bits of other corpses…”

  Severine blanched, and Runa winced. She was meant to be reassuring her, not scaring her. “I mean—they’re no worse than any other person that might want to kill you. Er, or no better? A ghoul will decide to attack you. They’ll track you, play dead, lay traps. Same as any other bastard. But a skeleton walking around can’t do anything except what it was already doing before it died. They don’t have any soul left in ‘em, just body-memory. Most of the ones you find in the Cauldron were soldiers, so they’ll, you know. Act like soldiers.”

  “Attack on sight and try to cut my head off?”

  “Uh, yeah. Sorry.”

  Or freeze, Runa wanted to say, but she bit her lips closed, because this conversation had already swung hard from surprisingly easy to hard and weird. Because sure, some skeleton soldiers attacked.

  And some froze, as scared of you as you were of them. Some waited in formation for an order that would never come. Some made a show of rattling their swords and then got back to the dice game they’d been playing for the last two hundred years.

  They’d all attack eventually. Most things did. But they didn’t wander the blighted fragments of their long-lost world, waiting for someone to dismember to upgrade their shins. They just kept doing whatever they’d been doing when the last of the Deathless fell, two centuries ago. It was scary, sure, and unsettling, and unnatural, and… sad.

  Ghouls were worse, with the thinking, but some days she’d prefer to face a patchwork corpse than a skeleton that would slowly lower its sword when it lost sight of her and shamble back to what it had been doing before whatever job she was on made her interrupt it. Something that, whatever it had been, that was all it ever would be.

  “What about liches?” Severine asked suddenly.

  “Huh?” Runa blinked.

  “Skeletons, ghouls, and liches. Those are the three types of undead the Deathless created, right?”

  “The only liches they created were themselves, and they’re all gone. Just need to worry about what they left behind.” And thank all gods and liches for that, she added silently. What they’d left behind was bad enough.

  “G-good,” Severine said hesitantly. “Nothing to worry about then. Just ghouls sizing me up for a new ribcage, and skeletons going for my neck.”

  “And your weapon,” Runa added absently.

  Severine went still. “…Yes?”

  “It was after your sword, wasn’t it? That big ugly one in the corner.” Severine still looked slightly grey, so she added, “I guess there’s as many soldiers who’d kill for an upgrade as they would for anything else. Nothing strange about that.”

  Or who’d kill when you tried to take their weapon away from them. Especially a fancy blade like that, with jewels in the hilt and enough chips in the blade to show it had been well-used.

  Severine blinked. “No,” she said at last. “No, you’re right. It was a shock, though. I wasn’t expecting it to go… after the sword.”

  She nodded slightly, as though trying to convince herself. Then she looked up, saw Runa watching her, and grimaced. “It did look dead,” she said with a wince.

  “I don’t doubt it.” Runa’s voice was the steadiest and gentlest it had been all night. Right up until you tried to steal its sword and anything else of value from around it, she added silently.

  Because behind Severine’s shivering and questions and the brave face she was putting on over everything, was something it usually took Runa a bit longer to figure out. She hadn’t seen it coming with Ninnius and Anklopher until it was too late. But maybe that experience made her a bit sharper this time around.

  Runa straightened. She hadn’t even known she was tense, but her shoulders came down and her head lifted as though she’d had a whole party of hapless clients on her back and had finally shrugged them off.

  Severine was breath-taking, and gorgeous, and mysterious, and she was hiding something.

  And, somehow, that last one made her far less intimidating to talk to.