“The smallest warrior. The biggest heart. The most beautiful shield in any dungeon.”

Her name was Millet, and she had been walking since the spring thaw — across the grain fields of the eastern provinces, through the mountain passes that smelled of pine and old snow, and now down toward the coast, where she had heard there was a baker who knew a recipe that had been lost for two centuries.

The cape had been her grandmother’s. It was embroidered by hand — every flower, every diamond, every border stitch placed with care across decades. Millet wore it not as ceremony, but as armor. The kind that reminded you who made you, and why you were still going.

The hat had been an accident. She had sat on it in a market stall three towns back and the flower-seller had laughed and said keep it, it suits you. Millet had not laughed, but she had kept it.

She was not soft, exactly. But the people who assumed that a small figure in a floral hat carrying bread was harmless had not tried to overcharge her for a room at an inn. Those people had reconsidered. The baguette was, it turned out, a surprisingly effective negotiating tool.

What she was, more than anything, was hungry. Not the ordinary kind — the kind that bread fixes. The kind that came from wanting to find the one thing in the world that was made just right, that tasted the way home was supposed to taste, even when you were far from it.

She adjusted the hat, gripped the baguette, and kept walking.
The coast was three days away.
She had walked farther for less.