Runa began experimenting with the chocolate so quickly that Severine was instantly suspicious.

  “It’s the first loaf thing, isn’t it?” she said.

  Runa grunted.

  “You’re thinking, what if it goes wrong? What if everyone here is trusting you to be a key part of this important tradition—proof, in case you needed any more of it, that they like you and want to keep you around—and if you mess it up, they’ll see that you’re a fraud? So you’d better have something else up your sleeve to impress them. Except you don’t have sleeves.”

  Runa grunted again. Severine grinned and nudged her.

  “Too late, Runa. Everyone here sees through your gruff silent act, and that includes me. Not that it ever worked on me.”

  Runa glared at her as she opened the old baker’s recipe book, and Severine laughed out loud.

  “Fine,” Runa admitted. “But I am worried.”

  “You shouldn’t be. I know you haven’t been doing this long, but you’re a great baker.”

  “You never tried the bread I made when I first moved here. Or the stuff I made when you left.”

  “You fell into a pit of misery and bad baking? Now I really feel bad about running off in the middle of the night.”

  Severine saw through her, and she saw through Severine. Including the real guilt behind her shameless teasing.

  “Don’t,” she said gruffly. “We already talked about that. Anyway—”

  Severine’s eyes danced away from hers. “You’re right, this isn’t about me. It’s about you and your pointless anxieties. Runa, you know you’re as good at baking as you are at saving my life.”

  “Hmph.” Runa turned a page. “I am good at saving your life.”

  “And, as discussed, I’m going to give you every opportunity to save my life that the foreseeable future offers up. The unforeseeable future, too, don’t forget about that.”

  Runa didn’t doubt it.

  She was good at looking after people. She could swashbuckle with the best of them, anytime you needed. As Severine had identified with murderous accuracy, she would throw herself in front of any number of curses or monsters so that other people wouldn’t get hurt.

  She’d built a life around putting herself into situations where she had to always be looking after people, in case she looked around one day and found something else to do.

  Because despite what Severine and anyone else thought, she wasn’t a baker. Not really.

  She was a fraud.

  But maybe if she was a fraud with chocolate, that would be okay.

  She picked up one of the little finger-length sticks of chocolate. It crumbled a bit, and started to melt against her fingertips.

  “It’s such a rich flavour,” she mused out loud.

  “So you’re thinking, pair it with something less rich?” Severine suggested.

  “Not exactly. Runa glanced across to where the volcano sprite was lurking in the oven, gnawing on its rightfully stolen crusts.

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said slowly. “But it’s going to be a challenge for both of us.”

  ***

  Summer lurched over its sweltering peak, and slid elegantly into the cooler months of autumn. Severine repaired the clothes torn apart by her rooftop misadventure, embroidering them with fanciful curlicues and swords.

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  “I haven’t done anything like this in years,” she admitted to Runa one evening as they sat together by firelight. “I never had the time.”

  “What about all those quiet nights in misty ponds?”

  Severine sniffed and threw a stick of kindling at her. Runa caught it, laughing, and fed it to the fire.

  “You got me. My mistake, I never made the time. In between doling out fates and running away from anyone who got the wrong idea about me biffing a sword at them.” She stretched and sighed contentedly. “And now look at me. Dry. Warm. Full of scones and tea, sitting by the fire doing my embroidery like the good little gentlewoman my aunt despaired of me ever—no, I can’t use any of you to embroider with. You’re not needles.”

  Runa looked up from the recipe book and raised her eyebrows. “Swords giving you trouble?”

  “They’re jealous of my embroidery needle. Jealous! Of a needle. An entirely non-magical, tiny metal twig. Listen—no, no, because first of all I doubt there’s any cloth in the world woven big enough to use any of you as a needle without doing more damage than you’d be fixing. And secondly because who knows what your magic might do to clothing! Any of you!”

  “Worse that what you managed to do to it yourself?” Runa asked innocently.

  “Ha ha.”

  “You’re right. Clothes falling right off you. Doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “Don’t give them, or me, ideas.” Severine tossed her head back and shot Runa one of her smouldering looks. She spoiled it with a grin—but it wasn’t spoiling, not really. It was relish. Salt. Chocolate. It made everything better.

  There was a faint sound of metal on metal. More a ringing than a scraping, with a hum of complaint. Severine winced—but it was a wince of exasperation, not pain or worry.

  “Why not let them cut the thread or something for you? That wouldn’t do any harm, would it?”

  Severine wrinkled her nose. “Hmm.” She looked up from her stitches to the swords, and back, her gaze calculating.

  “I don’t think so,” she muttered at last.

  There was a faint, expectant jangling.

  “Okay,” she relented. “Who’s first?”

  There was a sound like the distant clang and clatter of battle. Severine pulled out a sword that sang like moonlight on a cold night, and used it to slice the thread.

  “Any luck?” she asked Runa after a few more minutes of silent working together.

  “Not yet.”

  “If he doesn’t have any recipes for coffee, I’m not surprised he doesn’t have any for chocolate.” Severine bent over her work, picking out the shape of a crescent moon to disguise a particularly torn section of sleeve.

  “I thought coffee was a drink?”

  “Coffee is everything.”

  “Not according to either of the bakers who wrote this.”

  “Maybe it’s time you started writing your own.”

  Runa already had her thumb at the back of the book, where the elegant recipes and their tersely worded corrections ran out and there were a few blank pages, but Severine saying it out loud made her want to take her thumb out and pretend she’d never even considered it.

  “Even adding my notes to the recipes that are already there feels like overstepping,” she admitted.

  Severine stared at her. “Why?”

  There was a blup of displeasure from the oven.

  Runa shook her head. “If any of my experiments work, I’ll… consider it. I just wish there was anything in here to work from. If chocolate is as hard to get hold of out here as coffee is, I’d better make it count.”

  “Or you could just eat it?” Severine suggested innocently. “The precious gift I risked life and limb to retrieve for you?”

  “You’re the one who brought me cooking chocolate,” Runa retorted. “And told me it was cooking chocolate. I wouldn’t have known if you hadn’t. If you didn’t want me to fuss with it, you should have brought me one of those other things you told me about. Mushrooms?”

  “Truffles,” Severine breathed.

  “Or the drink. But you didn’t. You brought me the stuff they use in baking.”

  “Guilty. I do like the fuss you make over things.”

  “Then I’d better get fussing.” She turned back to the first page of the recipe book and ran her finger down it.

  Severine gaped at her. “What are you doing?”

  “Checking.”

  “Again? Do you think a secret chocolate recipe turned up while you were reading the rest of the book?”

  “I’d be suspicious if it did. No. But now I know there aren’t any chocolate recipes, I’m going through again to see if there’s anything I can adapt.”

  “You don’t trust yourself to come up with something on your own?” Severine put her embroidery aside and leaned forwards. “You don’t want to… experiment?”

  “I don’t want to bush bash my way through a forest of waspthorn if there’s a perfectly good track another hundred paces down the road.”

  They worked together in companionable silence until Runa’s eyes were swimming and Severine’s embroidery started to snarl. She put it away, and tidied away the last of the swords who’d ‘helped’ her.

  “They happy?” Runa asked.

  “Yes,” Severina replied, surprised despite herself. “I suppose they get bored, waiting for fate to launch itself at another poor wretch. Snipping thread is something to do, at least.”

  “Bloodburster wasn’t interested?”

  Severine’s eyes flicked to the greatsword. “Do I need to answer that? But it’s fine,” she added quickly. “It isn’t… wanting anything, right now.”

  “It’s waiting.”

  Severine swallowed. “Yes.”

  “It won’t last forever.”

  “Also yes.”

  “Then let’s try what you suggested. Tomorrow.”

  The dough was rising. The starter bubbled in the corner. Severine’s breath slowed, and evened out, and acquired a faint snore.

  Runa lay awake, watching the ceiling without seeing it. Determination boiled through her.

  Tomorrow, she would wield the Blood Lord’s blade.

  On her own terms.