Chapter 22. The Queen Said the Creek Was Empty

Josie's POV

I took over the town oven because I couldn't stand to sit still, and because nobody in that valley had told me I couldn't.

It was a big beehive oven of river stone behind the schoolhouse, shared by twenty families, with a schedule chalked on a board by the door. I'd walked past it the evening we came in and smelled it: wood ash, rye, too much soda in somebody's biscuits, and a crack in the back wall that was letting the heat out on the left side. I couldn't sleep for thinking about that crack.

So at five in the morning I was there with a bucket of clay from the creek bank, patching it, and at six I had the fire going, and at seven a woman came around the corner of the schoolhouse with a tray of loaves and stopped dead.

"That's my—" She stopped. "That's my slot."