Frank led her to his craft. It was as small as he had made it out to be, just large enough for a table, a few chairs, a mast, and a long rudder used for steering. It did look fast, though, and to Jane’s eye, it seemed Frank had cared for it with almost a fatherly love.

  The faintly painted label on the rear of the ship wrenched a sudden huff of laughter out of Jane: The Lee-day.

  “She’s a good ship.” Frank pulled a loop of rope from around a post on the pier and threw it onto the deck. “And now she’s launched. Come aboard, miss. Let me know if there’s anything I can do that will make you more comfortable.”

  “Will do.” Jane made her wobbly way to one of the chairs as soon as she could. Her sea legs were undeveloped, so the fact that she managed to get seated before she fell overboard was no small feat in her book. “Thank you, Captain. I look forward to the cruise."

  Frank pulled on a rope. After a few different pulls, knots, and adjustments, this somehow got the sail out and full of wind. The ship slid smoothly into motion, which was a relief to a poor city girl who had fully expected a lurch.

  “Let’s get out onto the water, and then I’ll help you learn to stand while the boat’s moving,” Frank said. “Unless you want to stay in that chair the whole time. It’s all the same to me.”

  There was a sense in which Jane did want to spend the entire cruise in the chair. It would be pleasant to breathe in the fresh air, soak in the sunshine, and not risk toppling over any railings into the water. Yet there was another sense in which she was absolutely obligated to take a close look at the water hundreds of times during this trip, something she couldn’t do while sitting in this chair.

  “Learning to stand would be good,” she told Frank. “Thank you.”

  The boat sliced through the water with surprising speed. The town got smaller and smaller until The Lee-day was making a wide, lazy circle in the center of the lake. Frank set the tiller in such a way that the circling would continue without him, then walked over to Jane and held out a hand.

  “People have a hard time balancing in small boats. Just stand there for a few minutes and let your muscles adjust, and then you’ll be fine. Talking while you stand there makes the adjustment happen a little faster, although I couldn’t tell you why.”

  Jane stood, almost fell, and then righted herself.

  “Talking?” she echoed, leaning her weight on the older man’s hand. “About what?”

  “Anything you want. For instance, why you wanted to come out into the middle of the lake with an old man who only knows about fishing. If you really just wanted to go on a cruise, you would have waited until Lee-day. This is something different.” Frank winked. “Not that an old man needs to know, either. But if you really want to talk, there’s that.”

  In that moment, Jane found herself seized by a strong current of whimsy. She actually wanted to give Frank the true reason behind this outing.

  The impulse surprised her. Hadn’t she been working hard to keep such matters a secret? She hadn’t even told Allen everything yet.

  But this was different. She didn’t care deeply about what Frank thought of her, outside of wanting to maintain friendly relations with a friendly person. And after visiting Xand, she knew she couldn’t be forced into archmage duties without a truly pressing need, no matter who knew about her abilities. The only thing holding her back from telling Frank her actual purpose was the fear of it morphing into a rumor that might spread throughout town.

  “Hmmm.” Studying Frank’s face, she dropped her voice to an exaggerated whisper. “How are you at keeping secrets?”

  Frank laughed. “In town? I wouldn’t tell me anything. But boatmen and fishermen have a certain code. You spend enough time out on the water, you get to where you want to tell people who you really are. The code says you can do that, and I can’t say a thing about it to anyone else. True fact.”

  “Well, then.” Jane cleared her throat and decided to let whimsy win. “I’m one of the most powerful magicians in this world, among the top small handful in the kingdom. I have staggering mystical powers I handle with the control of a fine artist. Only age and a few tests hold me back from the title of archmage.”

  “Ah.” Frank pursed his lips. This was not his average fish story, it seemed. “And the lake fits into that how? Are you going to freeze it, or something?”

  “No. I just saw an enormous, very upset water spirit the other day, and I’m trying to track down why it seemed off. I don’t think it’s dangerous, but I need to make sure.”

  “So you need to look very closely at the local water.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I see.”

  Jane realized right away that she had made a mistake.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The old man hadn’t really understood what he was asking, or even what she’d just said. This was a man who knew there was magic out there, somewhere, but had never really encountered it beyond a few enchantments in his home for keeping food cold or keeping certain things clean. And now she had forced him to contemplate the idea of immense mystical forces far beyond his understanding and experience.

  She had seen this reaction before. There was something new in his eyes as he looked at her, almost like he was trying to see through a wall. Like she was something wholly, impossibly other.

  “Let me show you something. Something simple and fun.” Jane reached her hand down to the deck of his ship. “Can I have permission to do some tidying up, Captain?”

  Frank had just enough confidence in her to shrug in half-assent. She ran with it. Flexing magic through the deck of the ship, she felt just a tiny bit of its history.

  For reasons no one fully understood, most built objects remembered what they’d been like when they were new. The Lee-day was no exception. And, even as exquisitely kept as it was, it showed signs of wear-and-tear. Planks had started to warp. The tar had grown thin in places. There were some spots where splinters had risen just high enough to be noticed.

  Focusing, Jane found the memories of the ship that didn’t include those imperfections. The echoes of the moments when the boards had been sanded flat, perfectly fitted, newly tarred, and entirely beautiful. Letting her magical power leak, she started encouraging the ship to remember those echoes better, to the point where they started to become real.

  It wasn’t adding material, of course. No amount of power Jane had access to could do that. But it did convince the little bits of matter all around the surface to rearrange themselves, going back to places they had once been or moving up to replace splinters and ship-fragments long lost to time and weather.

  Not for the whole ship, unfortunately. Jane didn’t have enough power in her at the moment to do that. She focused on the deck, the mast, and the little table and chairs nailed down to provide comfort for Frank and whatever guests he chose to take along.

  But it was enough. By the time she opened her eyes, the wooden planks at her feet were smooth and even more secure. The table and chairs gleamed as if they’d just been built and nailed down. There was no evidence that she was standing on anything but a brand-new deck.

  Frank stared at the planks beneath his feet, open-mouthed. “Well, I’ll be. It’s like the day after she was launched. How’d you do it?”

  “Just a little trick.”

  It was that, Jane supposed. What she had just done fell under the general category of sorcery. Sorcery was powerful, versatile, and woefully inefficient. It used a person’s impulses and instincts rather than anything resembling a method. True, it could do some things other forms of magic couldn’t, but the energy Jane had just spent would have blown a house-sized hole in solid granite if she had used it according to the rules of a more economical system.

  Keeping all these thoughts to herself, she smiled at Frank. “Just something good that magic can do.”

  “I don’t suppose you could do it more.” Frank sounded hopeful. “I know plenty of other captains who…”

  “Sorry. It’s not like that. What I just did wasn’t something I can repeat very often.” That was true, too. Despite her incredible power, Jane wasn’t the best at sorcery. The almost rash nature of it wore her out. “This was just a one-time thing, between friends.”

  “Well, thank you for it. The wife will get a real kick out of it when she sees it.” Frank was back to his normal self. Jane’s gambit had worked just fine. “That’s all magic is? It fixes things? Makes them better?”

  “When it works like it should, yes.” Again, Jane decided not to mention the massive-crater-in-granite aspects to Frank just yet. “Although I would appreciate it if you kept that boatman’s code for me. I like living in this town as just Jane, if you understand me.”

  Frank grew thoughtful for a moment, then comprehension slowly filled his eyes. “Yeah, I could see that. No worries on my end, Miss Jane. I’ll be glad to keep your secrets.”

  After that, things were a bit simpler. Getting to know the ship for the purposes of the spell had also done wonders for her sea legs. Jane welcomed this particular bit of inexplicable magical side effect. She was now able to lean over the railing and dip her hand into the lake, feeling the natural magic that coursed through the water.

  It was mostly normal. Slight bumps and dips here and there indicated places where something not-quite-water had seeped into the flow. Her aunt called them dead bugs, like you would find in a room that had been closed off for a long time. Just little irregularities to sweep up before you got back to magical work. They made very little difference to anything at all in the lake water’s overall flow of magic.

  Frank continued to set their course here, there, and everywhere around the lake. He started fishing as the hours wore on, securing his fishing pole to a hole in the deck. Jane watched him work, impressed by the multitasking. She even joined in the excitement whenever the rod actually hooked something for Frank to pull in.

  The first fish he caught was a fairly normal lake fish, to Jane’s eyes. The second one was different in a way that made both her and Frank grimace.

  “What is it?” Jane asked. “It looks…”

  “Lumpy. I know. It’s the same kind of fish as I caught before, just wrong.”

  “How could that be?” Jane’s eyebrows lowered. The creature hardly appeared healthy enough to swim. It was covered in oddly-shaped bumps, malformed sections of scales, and bent fins that looked like they’d catch as much water as they let slip by. “The poor thing. It doesn’t seem natural.”

  “It must be. I found it in nature, after all.” Frank put the poor fish out of its misery with a thunk against the side of the ship, then let it sink back into the water. “I never used to see these much. The last few years, I’ve seen a few more than I’d expect. No idea why, except maybe I got unlucky.”

  “Hmm.”

  Jane dipped her hand into the water and tried to find any signs of anything unusual. She did detect something slightly off, but it was probably just the trail of the poor malformed fish, leaving a faint, unnatural taint in its wake.

  Otherwise, the bulk of what she felt was just normal water. Good, healthy water.

  “Nothing too odd around here,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “You haven’t seen anything weird out on the lake, have you? As odd as that fish, or odder?”

  “Not in a few years, since the Lady Cecelia visited. You’d want to ask her about that, though. I’m not sure I understood very much of what was happening when she visited. I kept as much distance from it as I could. Magic, you know.”

  She did know. Frank might be a little more comfortable with her now, but she needed to watch herself around him in the future. Anything too flashy or huge might mess up the little bit of normalcy she had managed to preserve between them.

  .