Most people meet Crumb at the front of the counter.

They see the finished loaves, the warm light, the way he seems to know what someone needs before they finish their sentence. In the main Crossroads story, that’s where you first meet him too: as a steady presence in a busy world, a keeper of bread and stories at the edge of a much larger road.

But the bakehouse at the Crossroads (later known as Pathfinder’s Crumb) didn’t appear fully formed with a perfect oven and endless patience. He had years where the dough collapsed, the guests were difficult, and the only way he could pass on what he knew was to stand next to someone younger and let them make mistakes right in front of him.

This book lives in one of those years.

Crumb’s Year of Apprentices takes place about five years before the events of the first Crossroads novel. The village is the same. The oven is the same. But instead of following travelers and Pathfinders through the front door, we stay in the heat of the kitchen with three apprentices who are trying to learn what it means to bake the Way Crumb bakes.

Over the course of a single baking year—harvest rush, Lantern Week preparations (a Crossroads tradition of tending window-lanterns and baking marked loaves for travelers), hungry winter, and the first hints of spring—you’ll see how he:

responds when someone ruins an entire rack of bread,

talks about guests who walk in already angry,

decides which recipes are just profitable and which ones are sacred,

and what it costs him to send people he loves out to light ovens on other roads.

You don’t need to know anything about the larger Pathling world to read this first. If this is your starting point, welcome: this is a good door to come through. If you already know Crumb from the bigger books, this is a quieter look behind the counter at how he became the man you meet there.

There’s also a small, real-world truth baked into these pages.

In the stories, Crumb never hoards what he knows. He trains people and then releases them, trusting that the world needs more than one warm room and more than one lit oven. As the bakehouse—later known as Pathfinder’s Crumb—grows off the page—in an actual bakery, in

more than one real location—I wanted you to see that this idea isn’t a marketing line. It’s part of the character’s heartbeat.

Every new shop, whether in fiction or in the real world, is meant to feel like one of those “lantern ovens” you’ll glimpse here: same kind of care, same kind of bread, just rooted in a different piece of ground.

So this book is, in its own way, a remembrance and a beginning.

A remembrance of a year when Crumb’s hands were a little younger, his apprentices a little greener, and the Crossroads still catching its breath between storms. And a beginning for the idea that the Way he teaches in this small kitchen might spread much farther than anyone standing there could imagine.

Thanks for stepping into the heat of the oven for a while.

~N.W. Pathling