The main problem with going to bed early, Jane decided, was that there was only so much a person could sleep. At the academy, her rigorous schedule meant she had never been at a loss of what to do with her time and energy. The idea that she could run out of capacity for sleep had never occurred to her.

  Now it was an inescapable reality.

  She was up and dressed before the sun, long before she could even hope that Allen would arrive. So, after cleaning up a bit around the shop, she decided to do some light cooking.

  Not baking, but cooking.

  Jane considered this a whole different category. Baking was the primary focus of her life right now, and it called for constant improvement. Cooking was much less important to her.

  That’s what makes it fun, though.

  Her time spent messing around with oven fuels and various cooking implements hadn’t made her an expert chef, but it had given her enough experience that at least some of Bella’s general grilling tips had stuck. And they were starting to produce results.

  Jane kept plenty of eggs around these days. Bella had also sold her on the wisdom of keeping various meats in stock. This morning, Jane scrambled some eggs with milk, then added a crumbly spiced sausage that left a pleasant burning sensation in the mouth. Next came a few vegetables, followed by some herbs and a bit of salt.

  Finally, she pulled out two pieces of the keln she hadn’t sent with Bella the day before. In bags, it stayed moist for a surprisingly long time. Jane set the bread on plates, then moved her pan far enough from the source of her heat that the fillings would stay warm without over-cooking.

  She had just finished this when a knock sounded on her door. It was so soft that, at first, she thought it might be a loud knock on someone else’s door, somewhere. She waited a moment until the knock sounded again, as gently as if someone was stroking a bird’s feathers while trying very hard not to hurt it.

  This time, she actually went to the door, opening it to find a sheepish Allen on her doorstep. The sight of him was accompanied by a freezing cold wind.

  “Get inside!” Jane grabbed the tinker’s arm and pulled him through the door. “Is there a blizzard coming or something?”

  “That? No, that’s just the wind. It comes down like that in the mornings this time of year. Not every day, although I couldn’t tell you why. By midmorning, it won’t be cold out there anymore.” He breathed into his hands and rubbed them together. “Though it sure is cold right now.”

  “How are you not frozen? I guess you have on a pretty heavy coat.”

  “Yes. And I brought one for you, too.” Allen patted the large, overstuffed shoulder bag at his waist. “In case we get out of here early.”

  “I’m not sure how we wouldn’t, now. It’s barely dawn and both of us are ready,” Jane pointed out. “I couldn’t sleep any longer.”

  “Me neither. Just excited, I guess.”

  Jane turned away before he could see the flush on her cheeks. Taking the pan from the stove, she used her spatula to separate the cooked food into two piles. She then scooped each pile onto a waiting piece of keln, handed Allen a plate, and sat down with her own.

  “I thought I’d make breakfast. You don’t mind spicy food, do you?”

  “Me? Not at all.” Allen folded his keln into a neat pocket and raised it from his plate. “Thank you for this. None of the breakfast places I like to go to were open in this cold.”

  They ate a few bites in uncomfortable silence before Allen broke it. Jane wondered if she was inadvertently taking Bella’s advice to make any silences seem like they were his fault, and tried to brace herself for making sure she took her fair share of the conversational turns in the future.

  “This is very good keln,” he said. “You made this?”

  “I did. It took me about a week to get it mostly right. I still have some ways to go.”

  “Could have fooled me.” Allen took a big bite, chewed, and swallowed. “I don’t think I’d have any complaints buying this from somewhere.”

  “Well, soon, I hope.” Jane polished off the last of her food and stood from the table. Taking her and Allen’s plate over to the sink, she rinsed them and set them aside. “I’m going to go upstairs and get my gloves, and I suppose a hat. I do have a coat of my own, though.”

  “Not like this one. Trust me.” Allen took a large, puffy jacket from his bag and tossed it to her. “Put that on, grab your gloves, and I’ll be waiting for you.”

  A few minutes later, she was ready to go, or at least ready enough that she couldn’t stall any longer. With gloves on, her own shoulder bag in place, and Allen’s spare coat wrapping everything from her ankles to her neck, she followed the tinker outside and locked the door behind her.

  She appreciated his insistence about the coat as soon as they started walking. Even with the cruel wind biting at her ears, she was much warmer than she had expected to be.

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  “This is some coat,” she marveled. “It’s like none of the cold is getting through.”

  “It’s all bird down! I only made a few of them because they take forever. So many little pockets filled with bird down, and more than one layer of them. It doesn’t weigh much for how much coat it is, and it’s very warm.”

  “Too bad about you not making more of them. It really is nice.” Jane resisted the urge to break into a dogtrot to keep up with Allen’s long strides. “I would be ice right now in my old jacket, and it’s supposed to be high-quality.”

  They hustled through the city at a pace meant to keep their blood moving as much as it was meant to transport them. Very few others were out on the streets, and those Jane did see were moving just as fast as she and Allen were. They made good time over the bridge, passing the stairs Jane usually took to the Underbridge Market.

  Finally, Allen turned. “What we want is just ahead.”

  He slipped his hand into the crook of Jane’s elbow as he led her down a series of stairs. Each terminated in a small landing before a new set led off in a slightly different direction, hugging the steep descent of the rock on either side of the waterfall. Once they reached the bottom, Allen pointed.

  “And here it is. People call it the cart, or sometimes the tram.”

  Jane found herself looking at a small iron platform with a chest-high cage built around it, large enough to hold five or ten people. A single stone and iron lever was attached near the door.

  “It’s a neat piece of machinery,” Allen gushed. “It has a clutch, like a sort of mechanical disconnect. The clutch keeps the gears that make it go up and down from turning unless you engage the lever. Then it uses a sort of turbine in the flow of the waterfall to power it.”

  “No offense, but that looks… rickety,” Jane said slowly. “Does it ever malfunction?”

  “It has,” he admitted. “I mean, it can. But if it fails, it’s designed to stick in place. The gears don’t turn without power, you see. We’d be stuck in it until someone came to save us, but that wouldn’t be longer than a few hours. And it’s unlikely, anyway.”

  Jane studied the precarious setup silently for a moment.

  If it really does get stuck in place, I will summon a sovereign spirit of the skies to lift us clear out of the cart and back to my house. No way am I spending a whole day in a deathtrap iron box hundreds of feet in the air.

  But there was no reason to bring that up unless it happened, of course. Allen seemed good and ready to be emotionally crushed if she didn’t like any part of this trip.

  She mustered up a bright smile. “Good! I’m glad it’s safe. We might as well get going.” Checking her magic supply to make sure she had enough spare power to lift them out of the box in an emergency, she stepped forward. “I do want to see that waterfall from the bottom, after all.”

  Allen lit up with relief at her willingness to ride the tram. He babbled on happily about the workings of the contraption as he threw the lever. The cart jostled them both with an alarming amount of power when it lurched into motion, but then more or less behaved itself. A huge pair of gears began turning on two massive iron posts secured to the mountainside, lowering them towards the rock and water below.

  The descent took a while. Jane was tense and terrified the entire time, but the rickety machine wasn’t the only source of her unease. There was something in the air here, a kind of unsettled magic she was unfamiliar with and, for once, couldn’t identify.

  And that wasn’t normal. Any kind of magic that existed in a book should have been within her experience. That was what her training was all about.

  Whatever it was, the magic had more of an effect on her than just making her feel odd.

  Jane was drawing in environmental magic at all times, in small quantities. It was part of the job. A normal mage made do with the magic in themselves, while an advanced mage could talk to the magic in the air and bend it to the same ends. An archmage did both those things at once, and with greater efficiency than lesser mages could do either. Here, that meant Jane had automatically ingested some of the strange power.

  And it is not agreeing with me. It is not agreeing with me at all.

  Her discomfort kept increasing. By the time the box landed and they stepped off the platform onto cool, wet rock, she felt a little queasy. Allen had been talkative and excited, but actually exiting the tram seemed to shake him out of it enough to notice that she was distressed.

  “Oh. Oh no.”

  He gripped her elbow and guided her to a nearby bench against a stone wall. Jane was more than a little dizzy now, and also more than a little embarrassed.

  Here I am, a woman who can catch moonlight in her hands and form it into enchantments of great power, and I can’t ride a little platform past a bit of odd magic on my way to a tourist destination. Some archmage I seem to be.

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize you were afraid of things like that. I should have asked. I’m so, so sorry.” Allen looked a little panicked. He had gathered both of Jane’s hands in his and was rubbing them gently through the gloves, as if trying to warm them. “Is there anything I can do to make this better? I’m such a jerk, Jane.”

  “No, it’s fine. I didn’t know it would do that to me. I’m alright now,” she assured him. He still looked so upset and guilt-ridden that she heard herself saying, “I’m a little bit magical, Allen. There was something in the magic in the air that upset me. It’s not your fault.”

  Now why would I tell him that?

  Jane wondered if she could blame it on her sudden temporary illness, but she couldn’t. It seemed that she had just wanted him to know, somehow. He had learned so many things about her that weren’t quite complete. She wasn’t ready to share the whole story, but she wanted him to have that little bit of truth, at least.

  “Really? That’s neat.” Allen looked thoughtfully at his own hands, still wrapped around hers. People without magic affinity tended to think of magic as living in a wizard’s hands, since that was what a wizard moved when they did their work. “I never had any myself. I wanted to when I was a boy, but now I just try to make my magic out of metal and wood. Can you do anything with your magic?”

  “Some small things. I hardly use it these days.”

  That much was true, at least.

  Jane was starting to feel better now. She could feel the magic inside her moving to accommodate this new, more unique lump of magic that had infiltrated her system. It wouldn’t grant her any more power than she usually had, of course, but at least the same kind of magic probably wouldn’t affect her as much in the future.

  “At any rate, I don’t see a waterfall.” She stood and peered around. “Shouldn’t it be here?”

  “We are behind a wall right now. They cut it to protect the iron platform from the mist,” Allen explained. “You’ll be able to see the waterfall as soon as we walk a bit forward. Close your eyes, OK? I want you to get the full effect all at once.”

  “I’ll trip!”

  “No, you won’t.”

  Allen looped his arm through hers, supporting her with his weight from much closer than he had ever gotten before. Much closer than anyone had ever been before, really, outside of hugs. Jane’s whole body lit up with embarrassed fire as she settled her weight onto him, accepting the support.

  “I’ll guide you,” he promised her. “Now, close your eyes.”