She opened her eyes and flung out a hand to brace herself. In her dream she had been standing on a grassy plain but in fact she was lying on her side, back turned to the light of the morning, which was cutting in under the clouds and coming in straight through a window. That had been real, at least. The Pinnacle and the storm had been dream figments but that deep grinding sound was certainly there, pervading the cottage and coming up into her bones through the floor.

She got up. The sound had a directionless quality that made finding its source no easy task. But soon enough she found her way into the kitchen. At the other end, by the door to a pantry that looked bigger than the rest of the house put together, a stone rested atop another stone. Both were round and flat, like thick coins, or slices of a sausage. Their diameter was about the length of a person’s arm. The one on top had a hole in its center, which was full of golden grain. Edda was standing next to it, one hand resting on the upper stone, and she was pushing it round and round. Flour trickled from a hole in the lower stone and collected in a bowl on the floor. This was, in other words, a mill like any other, save it lacked the waterwheel or the team of beasts that would normally be required to budge anything so heavy. Edda moved it as easily as if it were a spinning wheel.

“Is there . . . some way I could help?” Prim asked.

“It is about time to empty the bowl,” Edda pointed out, and nodded at a large table in the middle of the kitchen, on which a considerable heap of flour already stood. Prim stepped in, picked up the bowl, and carried it to the table, where she dumped it out atop what was already there. Then she paused for a few moments, for the shape of the heap was strikingly like that of the mountain in her dream, and the cloud of loose airborne flour still swirling above it was like the thunderhead that obscured the heights.

But she knew that the flour was spilling out onto the floor by the mill, so she hurried over and reinstated the bowl. While she was there kneeling at Edda’s feet, she scooped up loose flour in her hands and transferred it into the bowl. The scent of flour was everywhere, of course, but so was the scent of Edda, which was faint but bottomless.

“Baking more bread?” Prim asked. For it seemed that Edda had baked more than enough of it yesterday.

“Hardtack,” Edda corrected her. “To sustain us on the road.”

Chapter 49

Chapter 49