The tinker’s shop wasn’t the kind of place Jane ever would have found by herself. Just as Bella had said, Glenfall’s streets didn’t follow any rules. They seemed to go whichever direction made sense to their own personal logic, and that logic appeared to change every few feet.

  She followed Bella’s directions to the letter, staying mostly on main roads until she made it to the big river that flowed away from the lake. The stone bridge that crossed the river was a massive thing, built to span a wide, deep, and fast-moving river. Jane took her time crossing the bridge, stopping halfway to admire the sheer, vast wetness of it all. She slightly regretted how little she could see of the waterfall from this angle.

  The city was in full bustle now. Jane weaved her way through other pedestrians until she made it to the far side of the bridge, where she had to search for a bit until she found the next step in Bella’s directions. This was a steep stone staircase she certainly would have missed, as it cut back in the same direction as the bridge she had just crossed. Gripping the iron railing tightly, she made her way down the damp steps to the banks of the river.

  Once she reached level ground, she saw there was a sign slapped onto the footings of the bridge. Carved into ancient, heavy boards and barely accented with worn, peeling paint were the words ‘Underbridge Market.’

  There were acres of ground down here. Jane was glad to see that only the first few steps were muddy. Past that point, the dirt had been covered with a kind of wide, flat boardwalk, on top of which was a surprisingly big market bazaar. Fishermen were already there, unloading their day’s catch. Workmen were repairing or buying tools. Various vendors were selling hot drinks and food to the crowds who circulated, bought, sold, and otherwise brought life to this hidden economy.

  Jane walked up to a stand that appeared to sell nothing but walking sticks. Trying to speak loudly enough to be audible over the crowd, she called, “Excuse me. A woman named Bella sent me here, looking for someone called the tinker. Do you happen to know where he is?”

  “The tinker?” The man nodded. “Sure. Everyone knows him. Head down that way until you see a man who sells carvings, then turn left, then right at the salvager’s. You’ll find him.”

  Jane thanked the man and dove deeper into the bazaar. There were all sorts of merchants here, and the wares she recognized were vastly outnumbered by those she had never seen before. This was, it seemed, mostly a place for the buying and selling of equipment. Professionals would come here to buy what they needed to ply their professions. She would have thought herself in the wrong place and left by now, if Bella hadn’t assured her that what she needed was down this way. Jane couldn’t imagine the large woman steering her wrong.

  After turning at the carver’s and taking her best guess at which shop was the ‘salvager’s’, she arrived at the tinker’s. His shop was almost a bazaar in and of itself, filled with tables displaying hand-built tools of every variety. Saws and knives co-existed with all sorts of cookware, arranged neatly above cleaning tools, buckets, and a vast array of other implements.

  It was overwhelming. Jane was, indeed, overwhelmed by the time the tinker found her.

  Then she became overwhelmed in an entirely different way.

  “Welcome!” Ducking under the door to his workshop and into the open air, the tinker pulled himself up to his full, considerable, straight-postured height. His smile as he set eyes on Jane almost blinded her. “Can I help you?

  Oh, she thought in sudden confusion. He’s much younger than I thought. And handsome. Quite handsome. How does he keep his teeth perfect like that without magic?

  Resisting the urge to slap some sense into herself, Jane stepped forward with a nod.

  “Yes, please. Bella sent me. I need some things.”

  “What sort of things?” The young man waved over his shop in a friendly, easy sort of way. “As you can see, I make a variety.”

  “A mop and broom, at least. I just moved into the old bakery on the other side of the river, and it’s dusty.”

  “I’ll say. Are you going to be staying there long? I hate to say it, but I bought most of the things in that house when the owner passed. There’s not much there besides some blankets and sheets, I think.”

  “Sounds about right.” Jane’s eyes darted away from the distracting brightness of the man’s face towards anything else at all. By some turn of fortune, her gaze landed on a broom. “Oh, this is very nice. You made this?”

  “Thank you! I did.” The tinker picked up the broom and spun it in his hands. “Brooms are fun. It’s tricky to bind the fibers, but if you do it just right, they last and last. This is good wood, too. It’s light, but it doesn’t bend at all. See?”

  The tinker put a not insubstantial amount of healthy muscle to the task of bending the broom, which steadfastly resisted him. Jane blushed slightly and hoped to the bottom of her soul that he attributed her reddened cheeks to the chilly air.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “It’s very nice,” she said. “I’ll take it. As to the other things, I do think I’ll be staying a while. But I’ve never equipped a house before, let alone a business. Patty said I’ll need to figure that part out as well. Starting a business, I mean.”

  “That’s tricky.” The tinker motioned to a small table which, despite being for sale, seemed to be used for longer business discussions. “What you’ll need depends on what you’ll do. Any ideas yet? What are you good at?”

  Jane was instantly aware that of all the people she didn’t want thinking of her as a generation’s top magical talent, the tinker was somehow already at the top of her list.

  “Nothing that applies here, I’m afraid,” she said as she sat down. “And everyone in this town seems good at what they do.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Nobody is going to kick you out just for taking some time to find your place. If you don’t mind me saying so, it seems that actually using the bakery for baking would be the easiest thing. Since you don’t have a preference.”

  “I suppose so. I do like the idea of baking, and the ovens are already there. But I don’t have the first clue what else I’d need. A whisk, at least. Do you…” Jane felt her face flushing again for reasons she couldn’t entirely understand. “Do you sell whisks?”

  The tinker smiled. Jane found herself hoping she’d build up a resistance to it, eventually, in the same way people could become immune to sicknesses they’d already recovered from.

  “I do sell whisks. I hate to ask, but do you have a budget? I can help you figure out what you need, but a lot depends on how much you actually want.”

  Jane thought about how very little of her aunt’s gold she had emptied from the big bag when she filled up her walking-around purse for the day.

  “I have plenty,” she assured the tinker. “One of my relatives is helping. That’s not a worry.”

  “Well, then. Excellent.”

  The tinker’s eyes darted to his goods, absolutely devoid of greed. Jane recognized that look. It was the complete focus of someone absorbed in solving a difficult problem.

  With no warning, he suddenly stood, grabbed a sack off a nearby table, and started packing it with things. “You’ll want some clothes, and soap, and oil to start. Here’s that broom, and a mop, and a bucket. You should be able to carry that, right? Just put the sack in the bucket and tuck the mop and broom under your arm.”

  “Yes, of course.” Jane took the offered items and found she could barely handle them all. She smiled ruefully. “I don’t think I can take anything else, though.”

  “Don’t worry about that. The bazaar is a morning market. Once I’m done and packed up, I’ll just bring over the rest of what you’ll need. Do you trust me to do the choosing? There are some things I don’t have, and I’ll have to get those from other folks.”

  “Sure.” Jane found there wasn’t any lie in that trust. Whatever else the tinker was, there didn’t seem to be any dishonesty in him at all. He was, if anything, distressingly earnest. “You know the way, of course.”

  “Of course. I’ll be there around dusk, if that’s all right.” The tinker held out his hand. “I’m Allen. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “I’m Jane.” Putting down the bucket, Jane took his hand and shook it. “Same.”

  She wandered out of the market in a daze, hardly remembering how she got safely up the stone stairs to the bridge. When she finally shook herself back into full awareness, she was distressed to find that she wasn’t yet halfway home. She had been walking slowly, and that absolutely wouldn’t do.

  She needed to get home and clean.

  There was a lot of work waiting for her in the dusty street-level part of the house. As a magically inclined person with little experience of household chores, she had no idea how long it would take her to clean the place, let alone to clean herself up afterwards.

  But she had to. Though she was reluctant to admit it, it was a simple fact that both she and the house needed to be spotless by dusk. It might not have been a life-and-death situation, but it certainly felt that way.

  However non-romantic the reasons, a boy was coming over to see where she lived. For the first time ever.

  Everything needed to be perfect.

  —

  When Jane got home, she found Bella leaning against the bakery’s recessed entryway.

  “Thought you’d be back sooner. I guess I didn’t count on you carrying a mop.” The woman took the bucket from Jane’s hand and nodded towards the door. “Come on. You need help cleaning.”

  Jane stared at her, mystified. “How did you know?”

  Bella shrugged. “I know because I know. You went down and talked to the tinker. After that, it’s just people math.”

  Jane knew a lot of things that other people didn’t. She had long ago learned not to talk about the wind of magic that blew all around everyone at all times, not unless the person she was talking to had seen or sensed that wind themselves. If she did talk about it anyway, she knew the most likely outcome would be a confused or even concerned look from a person who obviously couldn’t comprehend the wonders she had seen.

  Yet there was a great deal she didn’t know. She was currently holding a broom and a mop, both tools she had nothing but the very vaguest idea of how to use. She had never washed her own clothes. She had bought things in shops, but only at set prices negotiated by the academy for their students. The actual life that most people lived, the life that involved working, building, breaking, and cleaning, was almost unknown to her.

  She wasn’t sure if “people math” was part of that, but she was determined to find out.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “People math? It’s just an idea. I’m not good at normal math. Or anything to do with books, really. But I’m around a lot of people. All day, every day. Once you spend a lot of time watching people and talking to them, you get to understand what different people and situations add up to.”

  “And that helped you know when I’d be home and what I’d want?”

  “Of course. See, there was one pretty girl.” Bella pointed. “That’s you. Add one pretty boy. Then add that he loves the things he makes, and that you look at everything like you are amazed to see it, and you get a figure. Then I multiplied that figure by the fact that you need all sorts of things for your house…”

  “And you knew he’d be coming over,” Jane finished, with a valiant effort to ignore the flush spreading over her face. “But how did you know I’d be in a hurry to clean the house?”

  “Oh, that? Easiest part. You want people to like you, and he looks like he’d be nice to be liked by.”

  “What about knowing I’d need help?”

  “Well… that part isn’t math,” Bella admitted. “You just seemed like you would.”

  “Oh.” Jane blinked a few times, trying to figure out if all of that math actually checked out. As far as she could tell, it did, at least in an odd, informal sort of way. “Well, thank you. Can I show you in?”

  Bella grinned. “Of course. Please do.”