The next day, Bella’s breakfast shop was having a slow morning. That meant Jane was able to laze around with her friend over a cup of cold juice a bit longer than usual. She pondered the idea of telling Bella about her date right away, but decided there would be plenty of time for that conversation later.

  For now, she had a different problem.

  “So, everyone liked my baked goods.”

  “That’s one way you could say it.” Bella sipped her juice. “The other way to say it is that everyone raved about your baked goods from the moment they arrived to the moment they left. Here’s another: I am hereby demanding, as a customer, that you bring me a loaf every morning so I can sell it with breakfast. I will pay you for this. It will help me make more money. So many ways to say the same thing: your baking skills are incredible.”

  Jane waved her hands to stop the flow of compliments. “I believe you. But you aren’t a professional baker, and neither am I. I’m talking about opening up a professional shop. Shouldn’t I have brought my wares to a real established baker, just once? Asked for advice even a single time?”

  Bella tapped the tines of her fork on her plate, shaking her head. “It’s not like you aren’t right. I just don’t like seeing you fight so hard against the idea that you might be good at something. We already know there are things you are good at. Why not this?”

  “Believe me, I want this to be one of them. I have no problem at all with the idea of succeeding. I just want to be sure.”

  Jane knew that Bella always spoke her mind. She was like that. There wasn’t a single iota of ‘Bella’ that would hold back on the truth. If she’d contained even a dust speck’s worth of meanness, she would have been impossible to be friends with.

  As things stood, it was a valuable trait. Bella would say nothing to hurt Jane unless it was absolutely necessary, and Jane could trust that Bella would always try to steer her in the right direction. If Bella told her to give up on the idea of a consultation, Jane would do it without a thought.

  Instead, Bella relented with a nod.

  “Fine.” Scooping up the last major bits of her breakfast onto a fragment of not-Jane’s-bread, she washed it down with the last of her juice. “But I have some ideas about this.”

  Bella’s ideas turned out to be sensible. For things like bakeries and restaurants, she said the clientele was mostly determined by proximity. If someone lived close to your bakery, and your product wasn’t out-and-out bad, they would use you before other bakeries.

  The problem was overlap. Some people lived between two bakeries and had to make a choice, which could produce real competition between shops.

  The woman who had lived in the bakery before Jane had, apparently, been a real powerhouse of baking. She hadn’t had to worry about competition. The bakers near her did, so asking them for help was potentially asking them to work against their own interests.

  To avoid that, Bella directed Jane to the very farthest bakery she knew of that was still considered part of the city. Jane returned to her house to get her morning’s baking, inspected it to make sure it was acceptable, and then set out on the lengthiest walk she had ever taken through Glenfall.

  The town had a lot of interesting variety, but certain rules seemed to hold it to a specific range of design choices. Every building by a river had a mill of some sort, and buildings near the lake were spaced in such a way to allow for the large docks fishermen needed for work. Away from the water, the buildings were more varied, but they still followed a particular pattern. A bit more wood here or a bit more stone there didn’t mar the cohesiveness of the town. The repeating patterns made it a real place, with a real spirit.

  There was a pattern to the commercial offerings, also with intentional spacing. There was never a tailor set up too near another tailor. But after passing any given shop, Jane knew she would probably see an almost identical one after another ten minutes of walking.

  Everything was designed for a life lived on foot. It was on this walk that Jane noticed how few wagons there were in the city. Allen had one on the smaller side, or at least he’d been driving one on the day he delivered her goods. Jane had seen nothing bigger than that besides Patty’s wagon, which had come from out of town with large deliveries of what looked like produce.

  Everything else moved by large backpack, pushcart, or wheelbarrow. Just little deliveries here and there, unobtrusively supplying various shops with the various goods they needed for the day. It was the kind of system in which nobody could track all the moving parts, but everyone handled their piece so well that it all came out just fine.

  The cool morning air kept Jane comfortable as she made good time across the city. Her travels had done her legs a lot of good. A trek across the city would have worn her out back in the capital, but now that she was fully rested, it was fairly manageable. She felt light and happy doing it, even, which she never would have dreamed possible before.

  The buildings were tightly packed together on every street until she reached the city’s outskirts, when they suddenly weren’t. The shelf the city sat on was only so large, but on both sides, it sloped back towards land. This side sported a few roads, providing a traversable route down towards even more distant bastions of civilization.

  The shop Jane was looking for sat beside the road. It was a single building with plenty of space around it, serving both the last dregs of the waning city and the more rural customers who lived outside the city limits. Bella knew of it because she had traveled out of the city in this direction before. Closer shops would have done just as well, probably, but this one had a last-stop-before-the-wilderness tradition with a good reputation for quality goods.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Jane found herself warmly greeted the moment the door cracked open, both by the warm smells of a full bakery and the friendly shout of the owner.

  “Howdy! Welcome to Lissa’s! I’m Lissa.”

  The woman was taller than Jane, but most people were. If she seemed abnormally large, it was because of her blazing red hair, followed closely by her presence. She moved around her counters and tables without so much as a look, her feet clearly having memorized every grain of the wooden floors.

  Lissa breezed swiftly up to Jane, glancing down at her covered basket and then up at her eyes with a different kind of interest.

  “Well, now. Most people don’t bring me things. Can I take a look?”

  “Of course.” Jane hefted the basket up onto a table. “I’m Jane, and I’m taking over a bakery on the other side of the lake. I’m new at baking, though. I’ve been thinking about reopening the shop, but it’s hard to know if I’m ready.”

  “So you want my advice? That’s a compliment, you know. You ought to be careful, or I might get used to that. How long did you say you’ve been baking?”

  “Just a week or so. Though I had some prior experience in a field that has turned out to be related.”

  Lissa smiled sympathetically. “Just as fair warning, baking isn’t an easy thing. It takes an awful lot of experience to get good at it, to learn to manage all the little things you have to keep track of. It’s almost like juggling. Once you have one thing down, you have to worry about the next. They all keep nudging each other like a pile of kittens trying to take a nap.”

  “I understand.”

  Finally, someone was talking sense. Jane would almost be relieved if this woman told her what her soul already knew: that she wasn’t ready. That she had to take a few more months, or even years, to figure things out.

  “I won’t be sensitive about it, I promise,” she assured Lissa. “I don’t expect to be declared a baker today.”

  “Good girl. Now, let’s take a look.”

  Lissa opened the basket. Jane had decided to pack it pretty lightly, including only her burnt-top loaf, a plain loaf, and a few varieties of cookies.

  “Most things I can make right now are variations of these,” she explained. “It didn’t make sense to bring another ten kinds of cookies or different kinds of bread, just to show I could change up seasoning or what chunks of things I mixed into the dough.”

  She got an odd, indecipherable look for that. Then Lissa reached into the basket and grabbed the least exciting thing there: the plain loaf.

  Jane had honestly hoped she would pick anything else. The burnt-top bread was exciting, and the cookies were a lot easier to get right, in some ways. The plain bread had nothing to hide behind. It just was what it was.

  A bread knife appeared from a sheath on Lissa’s work belt. She set it on the table as she tapped the top of the bread here and there, then pushed on it hard enough to move the crust. Nodding, she cut the heel off and manipulated it in her hand a bit. She cut a larger slice off before regarding the crust and softer flesh of the bread with interest.

  After what felt like forever, Lissa finally took a bite. She leaned on her own heavy, sturdy display table as she chewed it, staring at nothing in particular.

  “I have some ideas,” she said after swallowing, “but I’m going to try your other things first. Just hang tight. Help yourself to some tea, if you want it, or a glass of water.”

  Jane took her up on the tea. Pouring a glass, she returned to watch Lissa nibble at her cookies and assess the burnt-top bread.

  “How did you learn? If you don’t mind me asking.” Lissa gazed thoughtfully at the basket. “You must have had some kind of teacher.”

  “I found a book,” Jane replied. “Two, really. One of them I couldn’t understand because it was too… personal, I guess? The next one was a book the library loaned me. It was more exact. More like math, if that makes sense.”

  “Do you have it?”

  “I do.” It was the one heavy thing Jane had brought along, and she was now glad she had done so. She dug it out from its place in the bottom of the basket and held it out to Lissa.

  The woman thumbed though the pages, squinting for a few moments until she seemed to grasp what she was looking at.

  “Okay. That makes sense.” Lissa shook her head. “No, I wouldn’t say it makes sense, but at least I see how it’s possible. You are a scientist of some kind?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Then I think I understand. Come sit with me. We’ll talk.”

  Lissa went to the front and hung a little sign in the door’s glass window, then led Jane to a few chairs near another window on the sunnier side of the shop.

  “When I look at bread, I’m looking at a few things before I eat it,” she began. “I don’t want to see burned crust, for instance, but I also don’t want a crust with no bite. There’s a range. Cookies can be too sweet, or burnt, or fall apart. Bread can be too dry. Everything you bake has a list of basic principles.”

  “I figured that out,” Jane said. “Whatever else you do, you can’t ruin those basic things. The bread still has to be moist and chewy. The cookies still have to be all the things cookies should be, no matter what you mix in.”

  “Right. I call them the fundamentals. Once you have the fundamentals for a certain section of baking, you can play around with what I call variations. Usually, it takes people a very, very long time to get the fundamentals perfect.”

  Jane leaned forward eagerly. “That’s part of what I wanted to ask about. How long do you think it will take for me? I’m fine waiting until I get to that point, but I just don’t know how to estimate it.”

  “Oof. You are hurting my pride.” Lissa gave her a wry smile. “No, Jane. I won’t do that, because I can’t. You have all the fundamentals down. This Felicity Cast woman somehow managed to transmit all the fundamentals to you in a way that guaranteed you wouldn’t make mistakes with them. You have breads and cookies down. Done. No notes.”

  Jane almost scowled at the poor baker before she controlled herself. It wouldn’t do to tell someone she had sought out as an expert that they were wrong.

  “But how is that possible? You said it takes years.”

  “It really should, but I suspect you and the woman who wrote your cookbook would have been very, very good friends if you had known each other out here in the real world. She broke down baking to exact formulas, then found probably the only other potential baker in the world who could understand them. Quite the pair, you two.”

  “So it really is good?” Jane looked at her bread. It was fine. It was edible. She sure liked it a lot, but it was very hard to believe this was actually true. “I can’t improve it?”

  “I didn’t say that. For instance, your scorched bread there is a neat idea, but I think you know that the burn isn’t very exact. The shortbread cookies are perfect, but any of the more complex ones have little flaws. The average person may not notice. As an expert baker, though, I can see them.”

  Lissa took another nibble off a particular cookie, which had never found its way out of her hand, and sighed appreciatively.

  “That said, you don’t have to be the best baker in the world to be a baker, and everything you gave me was tasty and mostly correct. Overall, I’d give that basket a seven out of ten, in a world where anything above a five could probably survive.”

  “Huh. And what do I have to do to get to ten?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? Because it’s not a simple thing. I once heard a painter say that up to a certain point, it was just piling up skills. That would make someone a good painter. But after that, she said, it was about what you choose to paint, and becoming an expert in that.”

  Standing, Lissa held out a hand for Jane to shake.

  “To me, the burnt-crust bread feels like your first step in figuring out what you want to paint. Keep following that urge, and you’ll turn out just fine.”