"I do." With her life, in fact, every night she sleeps and leaves Belmarniss on guard. "She is a trusted ally and her help has been invaluable." Tanya hopes this guard's faith in human strangers is well-placed, because the alternative is worse. Well, it's not news that ethnic tensions are ugly.

"Bakery's down that lane on the left."

"Thank you," Belmarniss tells him, and she gives him plenty of room on the way past.

Tanya walks into the bakery before Belmarniss, just in case.

There's bread in there, and some kind of local thing that's like a pretzel shaped like a figure eight. Belmarniss pulls out some copper and hands it to Tanya.

Seriously? ...Tanya will pretend to be Belmarniss's commander here to buy food for both of them, how about that.

"Hello. How much for -" she names an amount of bread they can reasonably eat before it goes stale. Does this place sell pastries or anything or is it just plain bread?

You can get a figure eight with a quail egg cooked into each hollow and there's a kind of roll with honey and raisins in it.

Belmarniss hangs back by the front door. The baker stares hard at her before returning his attention to Tanya and naming a figure for a loaf and an egg-eight and a roll all together.

Tanya has absolutely no idea what prices are reasonable, so if Belmarniss gave her more than he asked for she'll pay the asking price. (If she didn't want her to pay that much, she shouldn't have given her that much money!)

Tanya has absolutely no idea how to haggle, let alone with cultural aliens, and she's making a small one-time purchase and has no alternative supplier, so.

The copper covers the asking price! Belmarniss looks pretty excited about bread, when Tanya comes out.

She is welcome to the fresh bread! Tanya also appreciates it after the endless mushroom monotony.

...wait, is this - "if this is your first time trying bread, this isn't bad but it can get a lot better! Should we buy something else, maybe smoked meat or cheese or something? I didn't buy any more bread because it goes stale after a day - edible for a few days, but doesn't taste nearly as good - but I don't know what else might be cheap."

"We have meat downstairs - I guess they have different kinds - I would love to try cheese and I also hear good things about fruit."

Of course! Fresh fruit and vegetables! Tanya is too used to the front where canned preserves is all you can get. Does this place have a market - probably not, going by the village's size, or just not today - are any other stores marked with a sign or something?

Looks like not today. There is an apple tree in that yard there, and a little general store.

They can't just take the apples from someone's tree! Or the village's communal tree, as the case may be. (Are apples even in season?) 

What does the general store offer? The fact it exists implies there's enough traffic through this village to both supply it and keep it in business, so hopefully they offer wares useful to travelers and food is definitely on that list.

The apples are not ripe, and she might wanna warn Belmarniss of that, since she is looking speculatively at them.

The general store has things like rope and nails and candles and cloth, and some animal feed. There is, if they look hard enough, some jerky and nuts and dried fruit and travel biscuit.

It can be hard to tell if an apple is ripe! They come in all sizes and some kinds just stay green and Tanya doesn't know this one! Also, apples can keep ripening once picked, so it's really best to find a seller you can trust - ahem. She'll warn Belmarniss.

The travel food is more exciting. Dried fruit and nuts are nutritious and have vitamins (if not as much as fresh fruit), and meat is essential to a growing girl's diet. The biscuits are the kinds of rations you save for last, but it's still important to have.

How much is Belmarniss ready to spend here and how much does that buy them? They can also stop to buy supplies at other towns en route, one or even two per day, so they can be somewhat picky about prices and also don't have to carry that much.

"...seems overpriced compared to the bakery," she remarks. "Is that because it's dry and it'll keep? How long does bread keep? We aren't going for a six week wilderness hike."

Tanya is glad she can be the human food expert!

"Bread starts getting hard and not as tasty within a few hours of being made. It's edible and nutritious for - three to five days, depending, I don't know what the local bread is like, but you don't normally buy bread if you expect to eat it days later. These biscuits probably use the same flour and last for weeks, but they start out hard and not that tasty. Biscuits do require more preparation than bread" (that's why they're called twice-baked, right?) "but I have no idea how much it really costs to make either one in this particular village. Maybe travelers coming through are rich enough that the sellers just price traveling food higher. Meat will always be more expensive than bread and other wheat products like beer; the fruit and nuts are probably expensive just because the locals grow wheat as their staple, and grain keeps but most of the fruit is eaten fresh and not preserved."

"Travelers are probably usually rich," Belmarniss agrees. "If grain keeps why doesn't bread, isn't bread made from grain?"

"Bread is made from grain. I don't know why exactly bread doesn't keep - I assume Earth scientists do - if I had to guess I'd say part of preparing it is to make it easy to digest, and then if you don't eat it it's quickly digested by - um. Tiny omnipresent lifeforms, like I mentioned with the disease, except the bread isn't alive and can't defend itself. But it might be some other purely chemical process. Bread goes hard long before mold grows on it, so it's probably something I don't know about."

"Huh." Munch munch bread. "What're those?" The nuts.

"Nuts. They're - like fruit, in a botanic sense. They're crunchy and may or may not be to your taste, they usually keep for months and are very calorie dense."

"Sounds exciting."

Belmarniss will shell out for some travel food but not the hardtack. They're not going to be that long between towns.

"I expect there will be more variety and quality in a city. And lower prices, hopefully, since there's more competition and bigger markets. If we're sure where we are on the map then I can't think of anything to ask that's not better asked in a bigger town closer to the coast."

"I think we're sure to within the accuracy of the map, which isn't perfect, but there's roads and that helps."

"We're going to the second biggest city in the country on the estuary of its biggest river. As long as we're even approximately correct we'll be fine."