Bella and Jane made their way to both deliveries pretty quickly, since the customers were close enough to have patronized the shop in the first place. Then Bella led Jane towards the incoming river side of town, where a winding path took them past mill after mill until the buildings finally thinned out.

  The flat platform that allowed Glenfall to exist was the result of some kind of large-scale, instant erosion that had swept away a mass of dirt and rock all at once. While the slopes on either side of the shelf were not quite set at right angles, they were more than steep enough to make construction impractical past those points.

  Bella pointed up the slope. “See how the staircase is cut in here? That’s to get you over the cut-off point, where the rock and dirt came away. It flattens out a bit after that, and it’s walkable again. But first we have to get up the stairs.”

  Jane was glad there was a railing. The fairly shallow steps were not suited for absolutely secure footing even when dry, and apparently, they were almost always damp from the river water seeping over. But it didn’t take her and Bella long to reach the top and set their feet on much more manageable ground.

  It was a good viewpoint of the town, too, and from a higher angle than Jane had seen before. The sight made her think of her first glimpse of Glenfall from Patty’s wagon. She appreciated it for just a moment before Bella tugged her onwards.

  The path wasn’t treacherous. At first, it wasn’t clear to Jane why Bella had felt she needed to come along and help. After a while, though, she started to understand. The path split off at several points, definitively heading to places unknown. In other parts, it seemed to do this, but Jane wasn’t always sure if what she was looking at was even a path.

  “Animals make trails too,” Bella explained when Jane pointed this out. “And sometimes trees just sit in a way that makes it seem like there’s a path between them. People follow those trails and wander off to look at a pretty rock, and sometimes they can’t find the real path again. It only takes a few steps to get lost.”

  Bella nodded towards the sound of the river, which was rushing past them only a short ways away. “Following the river is one way around that. I notice you don’t seem to mind.”

  “I don’t.”

  Jane peered through the trees in the direction of the river’s roar. She would rather have been soaking in a tub around now, or else talking to Allen about the cabinet he was making for her. Her aunt, however, had expected her to take a deeper look into things around Glenfall. She was obligated to do so, even if it took time away from the more pleasurable aspects of her life.

  The dragon from the day before had been huge and powerful, but that was to be expected from large nature spirits. They were a lot like spells that had been given life: churning masses of magic that had gained accidental form and continued growing into deeper and more visceral variations of the same basic shape.

  And, like spells, they could also go awry.

  Usually, when a mage failed a spell, the only result was a bit of fizzling. Less often, failure would produce an explosion. Rarest of all, a mage could fail a spell so completely that it turned into another spell, one with a dangerous purpose the caster had never intended.

  The water spirit Jane had encountered felt wrong in that third way. It felt like a spell that was slowly turning into something else.

  With a spell, that was dangerous enough. With a dragon like she had seen, it meant a mountain-sized lump of magic was spinning into instability. That was exactly the kind of thing her aunt had asked her to keep an eye on.

  But what could be powerful enough to upset a water spirit that large? Jane had no idea, and she needed to find out. Her thought was to start by examining the water in the area, searching for bizarre things that might have put an unstable spin on their surrounding environment.

  “Jane?” Bella prompted.

  Jane jumped, realizing she had been staring silently into the woods for several seconds. “Sorry. No, I don’t mind following the river. What I’m looking for is connected to the river, actually.”

  “Thought so.” Bella backtracked slightly to a path that led through the trees. “Come on, let’s make our way over to it. Whatever you are trying to feel, it’s probably easier up close.”

  The river rushed past at an incredible speed, narrow and deep in a way that encouraged velocity. Jane got the sense that if she touched it any deeper than a toe-dip, she’d be swept away wherever it wanted her to go, probably deep into the center of the lake. She stayed a safe distance back from that power, respecting it as a beautiful, dangerous part of nature.

  The magical environment around the river confirmed that viewpoint as correct. The mystic force in the air had a distinct flavor, both wild and targeted. It was the scent of power being called in a particular direction and rushing joyfully and stubbornly towards it.

  It was a frighteningly direct form of magic, but it was also not the least bit unusual for something like a river. Even the water coming out of a pump carried a hint of the same feeling. Whatever was amiss with the water spirit, Jane knew it wasn’t connected to this area.

  “This isn’t quite it,” she told Bella. “Are you fine to go a bit further?”

  “Of course. But not much further. We have about a half-hour before we have to worry about light. We don’t want to be traveling out here in the dark. Deal?”

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  “Deal.”

  —

  A while later, Jane found her feet on paved ground again, now alone. Bella had taken her to a few more easily accessed observation points, and they had all given her similar impressions. The mystery problem wasn’t starting or ending at any of them.

  Soon, she would have to check out the waterfall again, hopefully from different points on the tram’s travel path. And then maybe the lake itself. Somewhere, hopefully, she’d find a clue about how to proceed.

  It’s time to put all that kind of work out of mind, anyway. I’m off to see the tinker at work… tinkering? Tinking? Doing whatever he does.

  She made her way through the city slowly. For the first time, she felt like she was starting to understand Glenfall’s odd street layouts. It was more of a vibe than a logic. A person just pressed consistently but gently in the direction they wanted to go, and everything just worked out. It might have been a nightmare without the lake or rivers to guide a traveler home, but with them in sight, Jane was able to make it across the city not too long after it was truly dark.

  She inched down the damp, slippery stairs to the Underbridge Market, thankful for the lanterns set up along the wall to light the way. Safely at the bottom, she made her way to Allen’s stall. She passed the same groups of people who populated the market during the morning, except now they were drinking and having fun. Their happy chatter created a kind of festival atmosphere. It was quite different from the all-business mercantile feel of the market at an earlier time of day.

  Allen was not with those groups, though she guessed he might be usually. Instead, he was in his stall, bent over a huge wooden frame and pounding in a support between two long boards with a wooden mallet. Every few blows, he’d stop and feel its positioning with his hands, then resume working. She watched him pound in a couple boards that way before he finally noticed her standing there.

  “I didn’t see you!” He dropped his hammer and hurried over. “Sorry. I would have stopped right away if I did.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I enjoyed watching you. What do those pieces do, anyway?”

  “Those? A lot of things. They’re a support for these long pieces, for one, but they also serve as a separator between different compartments. I’m trying to make as many compartments as I can, most of them about the size of the bundle you gave me today. I figure…”

  As she listened, Jane found herself awash in a happy truth: other people were just as glad to be asked about their work and interests as she was. If anything, Allen was more boyishly excited than she ever could have expected herself to be. She let him go on for five minutes, somewhat understanding what he was doing with the project but mostly glad to see him so happy and relaxed as he talked about the thing he knew best.

  The cabinet was going to be a low-sitting thing that would fit under the windows of her shop, featuring a bunch of enclosed compartments to be loaded with goods. Allen showed her some little pieces of slate he was going to affix to the front of the compartments. In doing so, he proved that he had thought way, way ahead of her in terms of her needs.

  “You don’t need any of these compartments to lock, but you do need people to know which of the orders are theirs. The front of your shop is covered enough that we can use slate and chalk for that, unless it’s raining so hard that nobody would go out anyway. You’ll want to keep the bread inside those days, I guess.”

  “Sounds good. And water won’t leak into the compartments, regardless?”

  Allen looked aghast at the very idea. Instead of answering, he ran to get another piece of wood, returning to show her a built-out square on the back that fit very snuggly into its compartment.

  “See? It’s going to fit so tight, dust and water can’t get through. It’s neat, right?” His face suddenly fell. “Although it took so long to do that I don’t think I can get it done tonight. I’d wanted to have it done for you before tomorrow.”

  “That’s no problem,” Jane assured him. “I don’t think I’ll be going out before sundown tomorrow, anyway. If I need to, I can deliver the last sacks of bread by hand. It won’t hurt anything. But if you aren’t going to finish tonight anyway, I have an idea.”

  In truth, Jane was putting everything together as she went, so saying she had an idea like it was the result of forethought was the worst kind of lie. Now that she was committed to the lie, though, she had to do her best to produce a complete thought.

  “What’s that?” Allen asked.

  “I’ve been working so hard, I’ve hardly been around the city at night,” she heard herself saying. “I don’t know where to go to get dinner or how to have fun here once the sun goes down. I figured you probably did. If you don’t mind, I’d like you to show me?”

  “Absolutely.” Allen looked at his filthy hands and wiped his sweaty brow. “Just give me a minute to get cleaned up. The place I’m thinking of doesn’t mind a little mess, but this is too much, even for them.”

  Allen ducked a bit deeper into his shop. Grabbing a cloth off the top of his water pump, he stripped off his shirt before pumping water, wetting the rag, and wiping himself down with it.

  Jane was shocked for a couple reasons, the more banal of which being that the water must have been absolutely freezing.

  She shivered in sympathy, but the second reason soon commanded all her attention. Allen worked with his hands all day, which had given him broad shoulders and strong-looking arms. She had noticed this already. What she hadn’t thought much about was just how all-encompassing that kind of muscle-building activity was, or what he’d look like in this kind of situation.

  Of course, he wasn’t putting on a show, and she felt a little bad treating it that way.

  I’ll try not to look. But I won’t try very hard. My, am I starting to like a normal person’s lifestyle…

  Soon enough, the spell was dashed. Allen fished out a slightly less work-appropriate shirt, slipped it on, and motioned for her to follow him. If he had noticed her watching him, he gave no sign. From what she knew about his inability to lie, she figured she had gotten away with it.

  “The place I’m taking you serves… a lot of food,” he said. “Is that all right? I don’t know how hungry you are.”

  Her stomach answered for her, growling much louder than it ever had before. She had eaten breakfast and lunch, sure. But it had been a long, hectic day learning how to run a store, followed by a long walk in the wilderness and all the way across town. Now that all those distractions were gone, she realized she was starving.

  Something about the situation made her remember something, unbidden. It was from a book that had turned out to be much brassier and bawdier than her usual fare, read when she was just entering her teen years. Most of it had been forgotten over time, but she remembered one passage with crystal clarity, spoken by an old grandmother character to a young lady of marriageable age:

  “Just see you don’t marry him without passing gas in his presence, girl. His reaction to that will tell you who he is, truer than anything else. You’ll embarrass yourself, and you might just ruin things, but it’s better than spending the rest of your life holding in farts.”

  She hadn’t quite done that in front of Allen, but he had already seen her lose the contents of her stomach and weathered it just fine. Now, faced with a long cry of hunger from that same stomach, he just laughed and wrapped her hand in his.

  “Good, that answers that. Come on. You are going to love these people.”