Frank shrugged. “And so could I. But I can walk back from here just as well. The ship has to sit somewhere, after all.”
“Wait here just one moment, then. I have something for you.”
Jane ran into her house and headed straight for the cold box. Pulling out the few cookies and one loaf of bread that remained from the day’s baking, she wrapped them up in paper. Then she ran back outside and handed the bundle to a very surprised Frank.
“For you. I didn’t sell these today, so I’d be glad if Mrs. Frank…”
“Deborah.”
“If she could make any use of them, I’d be very glad.” Jane smiled. “Thank you for the nice day, Frank! I’ll see you soon.”
“See you soon, Jane,” Frank replied, returning her smile. “And if you learn anything more about the trouble with the waters, you let me know first, all right?”
“I will.”
—
It felt like a rare night. Neither Bella nor Allen was likely to be around, and Jane was home early enough to relax truly for the first time in days.
First, she checked her new cabinet. She was pleased to see that not only had all her dinner holds gone out, but her ingredients for the next day had come in. Jane put away her groceries and headed upstairs.
Next, she looked through her pack until she found a small, palm-sized crystal. Like most of the truly expensive things she owned, it had been a gift from her aunt, the work of probably a month’s worth of Cecelia’s spare magical power to create. It was an entire library’s worth of books, copied down and magically indexed. To bring up several viable options on any topic, all Jane had to do was to think of the topic, offer up a bit of token magical power, and read.
Dragons
The codex summary of dragons is as follows: they are elemental spirits, always of one element and never a combination of two or more. They are generally peaceful. They are powerful beyond any other elemental spirits, and observers are well advised to stay out of their way.
Unsettled Spirits
Sometimes, certain natural phenomena will unsettle or destabilize natural spirits. This usually resolves in the dissolution of the spirit. The more powerful the spirit, the faster the dissolution generally progresses. In some specific historical cases, the instability resolved in some other, more violent manner, but such occurrences are rare.
Violent Dissolutions of Spirits
In the third year of the reign of King Uriah, it was said that the scholar Joseon saw the emergence of a great earth spirit, one beset by a demon of the heart which caused it great pain. It thrashed and agonized, until with great power it did explode, creating the canyon now known as the Gorge of the Scream…
Jane had been to the Gorge of the Scream. It was a natural wonder of sorts. She remembered plaques about dragons being there, but she had been too young and bored to read them. She regretted that now.
Calling up further histories gave her a vaguer and vaguer collection of stories about spirits gone awry. Each was in increasingly archaic language, until she could hardly understand what was being said.
All of the histories agreed on one point, however: when dragons dissolved in a violent way, great disasters followed immediately afterwards.
Jane drew herself a bath, sat down in the tub, and read for hours, reheating the water again and again until she was quite pruned from the soak. She thought hard the entire time.
It was true that the chances of this being an unstable dragon, the kind that eventually went boom, were low. That wasn’t the kind of thing that went unnoticed, and the recorded instances came only once every several centuries.
Normally, those kinds of odds would have made her feel better. It was entirely likely that this dragon wasn’t a problem at all.
The risk, however, was high enough to offset that comfort. The worst-case scenario here was not just the kind of disaster that hurt or killed people. This could be the kind of problem that future governments would be routing roads around for centuries to come. That made it serious, and worthy of serious consideration, no matter the odds.
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Climbing out of the bath, she dried herself off before slipping into a sleeping gown and wrapping herself in a blanket. Then she placed her hand on the semi-permanent communication circle and reopened the connection with her aunt.
This time, Cecelia answered much faster. Jane wondered if she was sitting around waiting for the call. It would have been like her to do so.
“Hello, Aunt. I have a question for you.”
“Shoot,” Aunt Cecelia replied. “And here I was hoping for a story.”
“I’ll trade you a story for the answer, if that’s what it takes. Deal?”
“Deal. What do you need?”
“How fast could you get here if you needed to? I don’t need you just yet, but some of my investigations have me feeling a bit of the same worry you said you felt after being here. It’s probably nothing.”
There was a rustling on the other side of the circle that sounded suspiciously like the unfolding of a map.
“Never say something is probably nothing. It’s something until the nothing is proved. As for how long it would take me, probably three or four days. Two at the shortest, but I’d have to think you were in life-or-death danger to push things that hard.”
“Well, don’t do it yet. Here’s what I’ve uncovered.”
Jane laid out her day, which should have been reassuring. The lake was normal. The river feeding into it was normal. So far, nothing had stuck out to her as unusual except the dragon itself, which she hadn’t seen since that one time. Everything was fine.
Except the feeling that something wasn’t.
“Well, dear,” Aunt Cecelia said when she’d finished, “I agree that the chances of a once-every-few-centuries disaster are low. But your instincts are good. Continue investigating. Remember that you can call on the local government for resources, should you need them. You are entitled to a certain amount of human resources, if nothing else. Labor. Assistants. That sort of thing.”
“I really don’t want to do that. I only just told Allen that I can do magic at all. If he had an idea of the scope of it, I’m not sure what would happen. His mother is so normal that…”
“Wait. His mother? He introduced you to his mother already?”
“Yes, and…”
Jane never finished. Once her aunt had spent a full minute laughing, she had somewhat lost the will.
“Jane, this boy introduced you to his mother on what sounds like the second time he took you anywhere. He could find out you were The Great Mage of Yore herself, and I’m betting he wouldn’t blink. You’ve kissed?”
“Aunt!”
“I asked you a question.”
“Maybe. Just once. For a bit.”
“For a bit, she says. Jane, you could split the sky in two now, and he wouldn’t notice or care. Do you remember how beautiful I used to say you were?”
She did. She could hardly forget it. Aunt Cecelia could not have been more over-the-top with her praise if she had tried.
“I want you to consider, Jane, that it just might have been true. If it was true, and it was, think of how discombobulated that boy makes you, and multiply it by five or ten times. That’s how he’s feeling. Believe me, you’ll be fine. Now, if you’ll excuse me, your aunt has a guest coming over. A gentleman guest I don’t want to keep waiting. Keep your eyes open, and keep me apprised of what you find. I will come if you need me.”
The circle went dead.
Jane sighed and climbed into bed, then spent another thirty minutes digging through her codex for whatever bits and pieces of magical lore might have a chance of being relevant to her here. There wasn’t much. She was chasing legends in search of scientific specifics, finding only vague hints about things the authors didn’t seem to understand fully. She closed the codex, lay down, and tried to put magical things out of her mind.
It wasn’t the simplest thing to do. These days, it felt like there really were two Janes, and that was at minimum.
There was Archmage Jane, who had important unignorable duties, but whom she didn’t very much enjoy being. She had tried to run away from this version of herself, but had recently been forced to realize that this Jane’s responsibilities weren’t so easy to escape from entirely.
There was Baker Jane, who got to be not-so-expert at things while still being good. Jane had been an important part of the future of magic for so long, any accomplishment she made in that field had long since ceased to matter to her. Baking was different. Every little success in baking felt huge and unexpected, like spinning a wheel-of-fortune and landing on a jackpot every time.
She wasn’t sure if Having-Friends Jane was enough to think of as a whole persona, or if Having-a-Boyfriend Jane was, but the two of them together certainly were. That left a Magic Jane, a Baking Jane, and a Social Jane, all competing for her time. That wouldn’t have been so bad if they didn’t all want to be the real Jane, the part of her that ruled over all the others.
And, through it all, one question kept popping up to the surface:
Do I hate Magic Jane that much? I ran away from her.
She had been exhausted when she ran away. Every gray day at the academy had melded into all the others. The result had been a dull hum of a life, a backdrop that did not have a feel or a smell or a taste. A life that just wasn’t anything in that distinct way that she had hoped everything here would be.
And everything here was. Every minute was its own set of moments, a little jewel of a memory she could now take out of storage to touch, feel, and hold. She wanted color and aroma, and her life had it now.
Which would simplify things if that only applied to the friends and the baking. But it applies to everything.
She was now rested, happy, and fulfilled. She had been almost terrified to do anything related to her old life for fear of ruining her new one.
Instead, something incredible had happened. She had been comfortable checking out the river and doing research on the lake. She had been more than happy to shield herself and Allen, and to use magic to light the fires of her ovens, and to renew a friend’s boat.
None of those actions had drawn her back into her old doldrums. If anything, they had made the days better. This made the whole matter of figuring out ‘who is Jane?’ just a bit more complicated than she had thought it would be when she first set out on the road to Glenfall, blistered feet and all.
She had assumed she was running away from magic, but what if magic had never been the problem? What if she had just been running away from a life that had no room for anything else?
Jane’s eyes started to droop. She pulled her blanket a little closer as she waved a hand to snuff out all the lights around the room. Not everything could be figured out in one evening, she sensed. A little bit of progress was fine, and just at that moment, the blankets were feeling even better than fine.
If I fall asleep right now, I’ll get extra rest… imagine that.
.