The shoe shop was tucked into a corner of the market district Jane had somehow never noticed before, despite passing it dozens of times. The woman who ran it was perhaps fifty, with strong hands and an eye for feet that seemed almost supernatural.

  "You've been walking a lot lately," she observed as Jane sat down on a fitting stool. "I can tell from the wear on those boots. Good work, don’t get me wrong, but they weren't built for the kind of distances you've been putting them through. It happens sometimes when a person used to carriages moves to a city where we walk everywhere."

  "Is it that obvious?"

  "To me it is. Don't worry. We'll get you sorted."

  The woman disappeared into the back of her shop and returned with an armload of options. There were proper walking boots, sturdy with thick soles and good ankle support. There were lighter shoes for days when Jane wouldn't be venturing far from paved roads. There were even a pair of wonderfully soft house shoes, lined with wool and designed for shopkeepers who spent their days on their feet but never left their own floors.

  "These," the woman said, pressing the house shoes into Jane's hands, "are what you need most. Trust me. Your feet will thank you by the end of the first day."

  Jane tried everything on and walked in little circles around the shop. The woman watched with professional attention, talking about what kind of care each shoe needed to stay in tip-top condition. By the time Jane left, her aunt's coins had been spent on three pairs of shoes and the promise of happy feet for months to come. The shopkeeper wrapped everything in brown paper and sent her off with a wave, keeping her old boots for disposal.

  The ingredient suppliers were similarly pleasant. Jane placed her orders for flour, eggs, and butter, arranged delivery times, and chatted briefly with the young man who ran the counter about the weather and the state of the fishing industry. He didn't treat her any differently than he had before, which was either a good sign or simply evidence that he hadn't heard the news about her identity yet. She decided not to worry about which.

  By the time she made it home, the afternoon was sliding toward evening. She set her packages on the counter and stood for a moment in the quiet of her shop, looking at the empty display tables and the cold ovens.

  Tomorrow she would open again. For the first time since the dragon.

  Everyone will know now. Everyone will know what I am.

  It shouldn't matter. She knew it shouldn't matter. The people of Glenfall had been nothing but kind since her arrival, and kinder still since she'd saved the town from being washed away. But there was a difference between being liked and being treated like a person, and Jane wasn't entirely sure which one she was going to get when those doors opened in the morning.

  Stop it. You're catastrophizing.

  She knew she was. But the worry was there all the same, curled up in the pit of her stomach like a small, persistent creature that refused to be reasoned with.

  Fine. I can't think my way out of this. I'll bake to get my mind off it.

  She slipped off her walking boots and pulled on the new house shoes. The wool lining was every bit as wonderful as the shopkeeper had promised, soft and warm against Jane’s tired feet. She wiggled her toes experimentally and felt some of the tension in her shoulders ease.

  Better. Much better.

  Felicity Cast’s cookbook sat on the counter where Jane had left it. She flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for. The recipe was near the back of the book, in a section the author had titled ‘Challenges and Curiosities.’ It was for a particular kind of cake, one with a delicate structure that had to be built up in layers and could collapse if the temperature in the oven fluctuated even slightly.

  This is probably a bad idea, Jane thought, reading through the instructions. I've never made anything this complicated before.

  But that was rather the point. If she was going to spend the evening worrying about tomorrow, she might as well do it while learning something new. And even if she failed spectacularly, she'd have a distraction in a different sort of way.

  She gathered her ingredients and got to work.

  The first attempt was a disaster. She followed the instructions carefully, measured everything precisely, and watched through the oven window as her cake rose beautifully for the first ten minutes before sagging in the middle like a deflated balloon. When she pulled it out, she found the center was dense and gummy, while the edges had gone slightly too brown.

  "Well, that was educational."

  She scraped the whole thing into the waste bin and started again.

  This time, instead of just watching through the window, she placed her magical awareness inside the oven. These were the same little markers of perception she'd experimented with the night before. The temperature readings flowed back to her in a steady stream, and she could feel exactly when and where the heat was fluctuating.

  The problem became obvious almost immediately. Her ovens ran slightly hot near the back left corner, a quirk she'd noticed before but never really accounted for. With a normal loaf of bread, it hardly mattered. With something this delicate, it was the difference between success and a gummy disaster.

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  She kept making tiny adjustments, magically drawing heat away from the hot spot and redistributing it more evenly through the space. It was fussy work, but it wasn't difficult. It was just the kind of precise control that her training had always been about, applied to something far more pleasant than combat magic. It was like balancing a book on her head to train her posture: annoying, but doable, and almost forgettable over hours of practice.

  The cake rose. The cake kept rising. The cake did not collapse.

  Jane watched it through the oven window, hardly daring to breathe. The structure held. The top browned evenly. When she finally pulled it out, the whole thing was perfect, light and delicate and exactly what the cookbook had described.

  "Ha!" She set it on the cooling rack and stepped back, admiring her work. "Take that, challenging recipe."

  A knock at her door made her jump.

  "Jane? It's Emily. I brought wine!"

  Jane opened the door to find the small librarian standing on her step, bottle in hand.

  "I was thinking today that I haven’t gotten very close to you yet, because I’m so far away. Then it occurred to me that I could actually fix that myself. So I’m here." Emily’s eyes moved past Jane to the kitchen, where the perfect cake sat cooling on its rack. "Oh, that looks amazing. What is it?"

  "Something I just learned how to make. Come in, come in. You're just in time to help me eat it."

  They dragged two comfortable chairs into the backyard and set up lakeside, near the water but on good solid ground, with a short table between them to house their cake, wine, and utensils.

  “You really have come a long way. You say it’s because of that book? I wouldn’t think just one book would have done this much.”

  “Well, it’s quite the book.” Jane smiled. “Thanks for giving it to me. I think for most people it wouldn’t have been helpful at all, but whoever wrote it had an incredible mind. Most of how she thinks is a lot like wizard-work, so I was able to leverage my mage training.”

  Emily poured out two glasses of wine and handed one to Jane. “Do you think she was a mage? Like you? Just someone trying a different life?”

  “No. At least there’s no hint of it. Magic is useful enough for certain parts of cooking that I think she would have mentioned it as a tool if she had any idea of it, but she doesn’t seem to. In the introduction, she said she was a metallurgist.”

  “Well, good on you either way. Let’s dig into that cake and see just how much she helped you.”

  They spent a minute or so cutting the cake, taking first bites, and generally cooing over how good it tasted. They were both on their second helping when Emily launched the conversation again in earnest.

  “I talked to Allen about you. You really did a number on him. He stopped by for a book on lock mechanisms and hardly talked about what he was working on at all. It was just Jane this, and Jane that. You’ve bamboozled him.”

  Jane’s smile became a laugh. “He’s done about the same to me. I like him a lot.”

  “Good. I’m glad. He said you were worried about… you know.” Emily put her hand out toward the lake and slithered her arm back and forth in an undulating, dragon-like motion. “Something about not wanting to be a mage.”

  “Hmm. It’s not that I don’t want to be a mage,” Jane said. “I’ve been thinking about that. Being a mage is a big part of who I am. It was almost my entire childhood. You can’t be as good at it as I am without liking it a bit. A person couldn’t get through all that practice and training if they hated it. I don’t want to dump it entirely.”

  “Then what?”

  Jane looked out over the lake. On the far side, she could see people walking down the streets in the dimming light, heading home to dinners, families, friends, and fun.

  “It’s more like I wish everyone was magic. That it was normal. That every single person could do something like what I could do, so they wouldn’t look at me as different for being able to do it. And then I’d be just a magic baker, like all the other magic bakers. I think that’s why I tried to hide it at first, you know. I wanted to just be normal, and there’s no such thing as a normal person who can do what I do.”

  “I don’t know.” Emily shrugged. “What you do definitely isn’t normal, but I find you normal enough. As a person, I mean. Maybe you won’t be able to get everyone to see you as Jane the baker instead of Jane the archmage, but what if you could get everyone who knows you as well as I’m starting to?”

  “It’s still a lot of work, isn’t it? People see you one way, and you have to work and hope they end up seeing how you are, every time you want a new friend. Isn’t that tough?”

  Emily looked at Jane expressionlessly for a moment before laughing hard for a few seconds. She waved when Jane asked what was so funny, getting the giggle fully out of her system before she was willing to move on.

  “Don’t be mad at me, Jane. It’s just that you described how making friends is for everyone. I’m a crazy librarian to most people, or even nobody at all to some people. When you first met me, I was just a girl your age. Then I was a girl your age who sorted books, then who sorted books well, then who was willing to come to your parties. Then I was fun, and now I’m finally starting to be your interesting friend Emily who comes by with wine sometimes. We’ll be years before we really understand each other.”

  “Doesn’t that make every friendship really dangerous, though? What if we get in ten years and find out something we don’t like? What if that happens…” Jane gulped. “What if that happens with Bella and Allen?”

  Emily set down her wine and thought for a few moments.

  “Tell me how you make a spell that goes on for a long time. I know there are some. If you were purifying water for a town, how would that work?”

  “Hmmm.” For what felt like the fiftieth time in the last few days, Jane thought about how hard it was to explain this kind of thing. “It’s a multi-stage process. There are a lot of calculations involved. Are you sure…”

  “I’m more educated than you think. Try me.”

  Jane started explaining it as best she could. It was a system of buckets, basically, different parts of a chain where water moved from a mass cleansing to more and more exact stages meant to get rid of smaller and smaller risks.

  Emily nodded. “So, say you get to the last stage, and you find out after days and days that it hasn’t been running right. Whatever little thing that last stage does is broken. Does it ruin all the water?”

  “No. It would just be a little worse than it could be.”

  “That’s sort of what friendships are usually like. It’s even better than that, because some little thing you might not have liked abstractly is now part of this entire person you love. You might even like it on them.”

  “Huh.” Jane tapped her fork against her empty plate. “So friends never find out dealbreaker information about each other? That doesn’t seem right.”

  “Oh, they do,” Emily said. “I’ve even lost friends that way, when I thought someone was dependable and they turned out not to be. But you were worried any little bump in the road would upset the whole wagon, and it’s not like that. Just keep being who you are, and I think you’ll find Bella and Allen stay on the Jane-road. Me too, for that matter.”

  “Thanks for this. I know it must be frustrating to reassure me.”

  “Oh, no. Kind of the opposite, actually.” Emily picked up her wine and took a healthy gulp. “It’s not every day you meet a perfectly nice person who never got to have real friends before. Usually when people have that kind of trouble, they are difficult to deal with. With you, it’s just, ‘Oh, no, Jane. The part where everyone likes you is because they really do.’ And then we drink more wine.”

  “Yes we do.” Jane refilled her glass. “And thank you for that.”