Most people meet Crumb at the front of the counter — finished loaves, warm light, and the strange way he seems to know what someone needs before they can name it. But he didn’t appear fully formed. There were years when dough collapsed, when guests were difficult, and when the only way to pass on what he knew was to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with someone younger and let them fail where he could see it. 

This story lives in one of those years: about five years before the events of the first Crossroads book, when the oven is the same but the viewpoint turns inward — into the heat of the kitchen and the quiet pressure of learning the Way Crumb bakes. Instead of following travelers through the door, we stay with three apprentices as they work through a single baking year and discover that “learning to bake” is never only about bread.

Over harvest rush, Lantern Week preparations, hungry winter, and the first hints of spring, the lessons sharpen: what you do when an entire rack is ruined, how you answer someone who walks in already angry, which recipes are merely profitable and which are sacred, and what it costs to send people you love out to light ovens on other roads.

You can start here without knowing the wider world — it’s a good door to come through. And if you already know Crumb from the main books, this is the quieter look behind the counter: the year that shows how a warm room becomes a way of living.