Allen had somehow found his way under the covers. He was now fast asleep, facing away from her like a perfect fully-clothed gentleman.
My aunt would laugh until she died if she could see this.
All of Jane’s mortification aside, though, it was nice. He was just over there, breathing away.
Jane knew that most of the time, Allen provided her about as much protection as a guard-mouse would provide a bear. Granted, in her current weakened magical state, that was less true. Yet even if she were truly invincible, she could tell that she would still feel good about him being there.
Allen was stability in human form. He was dependable. In cold, mathematical terms, she understood that he wasn’t really doing much. But in a warm way that could be felt more than explained, she had never been safer.
Jane slipped out of bed, unable to sleep any longer for a dozen reasons. The clock on the wall told her it was about time to be up, anyway. She was pleased to find she could stand just fine now. A preliminary inspection of her body revealed that she was almost back to good physical health, at least.
The sealed envelope from the council’s courier was still sitting on her bedside table. Pocketing it, she headed downstairs to prep her breads. She was immediately assaulted by a single message delivered across multiple notes, all affixed to her ovens and cold box in a way that couldn’t be missed.
No baking. You do not have a bakery until I say so. Probably after the next rest day. Understood? Good. Now make yourself breakfast. I left some food in the cold box. If you really want to bake, it’s just for you. And maybe Allen, if you were really, really brave.
Bella
“Was I brave? I think I was just scared,” Jane whispered to herself as she pulled some eggs, meat, and leftover keln dough out of the cold box. “Either way, I’m glad I’m cooking for two.”
It took her half an hour to get everything ready. Like magic, the smells filled the house and summoned Allen out of bed. He came downstairs looking both sheepish and hungry.
“Oh, wow. Thanks.” Rubbing his eyes, he sat by the counter. “How did you make that bread so fast? I thought it took… you know. Longer.”
“Keln is pretty thin, so it bakes fast.” Jane shoveled some eggs and meat into one of the hot keln pieces and slid the plate to him. “And I felt a bit lazy, so I cooked them with more heat than I really should have.”
“I think you have an excuse. It’s been a big couple of days.” Allen took a bite out of his breakfast and looked at Jane thoughtfully as he chewed. “You are worried, and I don’t know why.”
“You can see that?”
“Oh, sure. It’s not hard to notice. I just want to be able to help.”
Jane removed the kettle from the heat and poured boiling water into two cups. Then she opened a package of chocolate-y, stimulant-filled powder that Frank had told her was popular for waking up fishermen. She hadn’t tried it, but the smell of it was certainly bracing as she began spooning it into the cups.
“Careful. That stuff is strong. Just a spoonful is plenty.” Allen took his cup gratefully. “Thanks, though. It just feels especially early to be awake, today. Somehow.”
“Agreed.” Jane sat down and let her hands wrap around the warmth of her own cup. “As for me being worried, I don’t know why, either. That’s the problem. If I knew how people were going to react to all this, I’d know if I should be worried, and then I wouldn’t have to be worried. It’s not easy to anticipate what other people might do, you know.”
“I know. But as far as I’ve heard, everyone is pretty thankful. Nobody is going to hate you for saving the town.”
“It’s not that.” She shook her head. “It’s like… I’m Jane. I got to be just Jane for a little while, you know? Now I’m all those things I had to say I was to make that command to get away from the shore a legal order. People know all of that now, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever get to be just Jane again. Does that make sense?”
“It does. But I think if you give people a chance, you’ll find they aren’t quite as bad as all that. I have a weird way to prove it, actually. But it’s weird.”
“I can do weird.”
“OK. Just remember you said that.” Allen put one of his hands on the table. “This is Archmage Jane, and she’s big and powerful and important. Her aunt is probably the most powerful person in the entire world. Right?”
“Sure.”
“And this other hand is Jane the Person, who is nice and pretty and doesn’t get mad at me for being bad at… this. All this.”
“You aren’t bad at it.” Jane patted his hand. “Or we are bad together. I like this.”
“Thanks. But you know what I mean. You are worried people are going to pick Magic Jane and not Real Jane, right?”
“Right.”
Allen beamed. “See, that’s the thing. Last night, you asked me to stay, right? And I could have said no, because you are this big powerful archmage and your aunt might kill me.” Suddenly, he gulped. “Will she kill me? For staying?”
“She’ll do what your mom will do to me for asking you to stay. Probably buy you a gift or something.”
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“Oh, good. But you see what I’m saying. There was all that, but I chose Jane-the-Person, because she’s just worth it. And that’s how everyone is going to be, because Jane-the-Person is so good to know.” He smiled like it was the simplest truth in the world to realize. “See? No problem.”
Allen was a good, simple man with good, simple ideas. He wasn’t dumb, but he had spent his life thus far focused on his specialties and not much else. That left him completely unprepared for the armful of sobbing baker he found himself loaded up with for the next five minutes.
Once Jane had calmed down and bestowed a kiss on what remained a very confused young man, she was at a genuine loss of what to do with the rest of her day. Allen hadn’t said so, but she was sure he had tinker duties waiting for him. She was bad at things like helping someone leave gracefully, but she needed to find a way to do it soon, or she would never let him go.
The problem was solved by a knock at her door.
“Hey there.” The man standing there waved and smiled. “I came to learn from you. To do what you can do.”
Jane furrowed her brow. “I’m not sure I’m qualified to teach.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. I’m pretty good already, and I’ve got all morning.”
“Morning?” Jane was truly confused now. “In what world is one morning long enough to learn anything meaningful?”
“Bye, Jane.” Allen bent down and kissed her cheek, then pitched his voice to a whisper. “I think this person wants Baker-Jane. You said you’d teach people about keln, remember?”
Jane froze as Allen let himself out. He was right. Nobody in this town wanted to learn magic. And even if they did, they’d be looking for a referral to the academy, not direct lessons.
This man wants to learn to cook flatbread properly, and I’m making it unnecessarily weird for him.
She tried to make up for this by ushering the man inside with a smile. “Sorry. I was confused about something. You are here for keln?”
“Yes! I was really excited when I heard you had figured things out. I heard you were holed up here and not baking, so I figured I’d take a day off myself and see if you had a few minutes to spare. Of course, if you don’t, maybe you could just write it down for me? I don’t want to ruin your recovery.
“Not at all,” Jane assured him. “Only…”
“Yes?”
“Could you get more bakers? if I’m going to be doing this, I’d like to do it all day. They don’t all have to be here at once, but…”
“No problem. I’ll go find a courier and have him tell folks that class is in session. I’ll be right back.’
The man returned just as Jane finished her breakfast cleanup. While they waited for other bakers, the pair went over the more conventional parts of their methods, from what flours they used to cooking times and temperatures. There were more similarities between them than there were differences. Still, the man was years ahead of Jane in terms of experience. Though he didn’t lord it over her at all, it was clear by the end of their first half-hour together that she was getting much more out of the exchange than he was.
More bakers showed up as they talked. Once a sizeable group had gathered around the counter, the conversation turned towards keln.
“What I don’t understand is how you figured this out,” one middle-aged woman said. “No offense meant. You are clearly a very talented young lady. I’m no slouch either, though, and I’ve been working on the problem for years.”
There’s no use hiding things now. Cat’s out of the bag, and all that.
Jane looked around at the assembled bakers. “I’m cheating.”
A mild look of what she read as relief rolled across every face. Jane could understand that. By now, they all would have compared notes on her and knew she was an amateur at best.
“There’s a magic spell that let me draw out some of the memories of this place,” she went on. “I was able to get some notes on how Shelby made bread. Almost like watching her do it.”
The man who had shown up first nodded. “Well, the product speaks for itself. Some of you haven’t tried it, but it’s Shelby’s keln. Not quite as good yet, though. No offense.”
“You’re right. It isn’t as good as Shelby’s.” Jane pulled her yeast jar down from its shelf. “And it can’t be until this guy gets older.”
Some of the bakers were familiar with natural yeast, but a quick check showed that very few of them were actually using it. Furthermore, Shelby had shown Jane several ways to help the yeast along, from the amount of flour to feed the yeast to the recommended temperature range for keeping it healthy. The shade had represented these methods as perfectly normal, but they seemed to be revelations for this group of bakers.
“I never would have realized that step on my own. Not in a hundred years,” said a huge man, so big he’d been forced to duck to get through the door. He looked more like a construction worker than a baker. “It must have been pretty detailed, this magical information.”
Jane shared every detail Shelby had given her. Then she set the group loose on her ovens, letting each baker test out the process using her jar of leavening. Finally, she settled down to watch them work, hoping to pick up a few tips.
It was enlightening. The sheer mastery with which some of them held a whisk or angled a bowl was visibly superior to her own. They took every routine task and made it into a work of productive art. Each of them had their own set of tricks, and those tricks had melded over the years into one big mass of technique that Jane couldn’t hope to match.
Defying her expectations, the huge man was the most efficient of the lot. He moved like a very large pixie through her kitchen, completing tasks in a fraction of the time Jane would have spent on them. She simply had to know how he did it, but she also knew it probably wasn’t the kind of thing he could easily explain.
That left few options she was comfortable with. She chose what seemed like the best one.
“Can I make a record of you working?” Jane asked the room. “For my own use. For training. You wouldn’t know it was happening, and it wouldn’t reveal any information I can’t get just by looking, but it’s good manners to ask.”
The bakers all stopped and glanced at each other before assenting in a collective ‘whatever-happens-happens’ sort of way.
Jane smiled. “Thanks.”
“No problem, girl,” one of the older women replied. “It would make us pretty poor students if we didn’t find some way to pay you for this.”
Setting aside a handful of flour in a small bag, Jane tried to steady herself. This was a very minimal spell of everyday convenience. Even so, it would be a big test of her healing magical abilities.
Jane said the incantation as quietly as she could, but found that she couldn’t avoid being the center of attention for a moment. Every eye in the room pivoted to watch her talk.
“Experience saved in the scent of remembering. Frozen Recall.”
To her relief, she felt the magic stir obediently, then lock into place.
It was a spell for taking notes in class, and it was only possible because normal human memories worked so well in the first place. The small bag of flour she used to absorb the incantation’s magic would now carry the magical flow of the next hour within itself, a faint echo of this period of time. Jane would be able to use it to jog her memories with crystal-clear mystical reinforcement.
The flour wasn't imperishable, of course. But Jane would be reviewing these memories over weeks, not years. It would last well enough for that.
Jane then sat back and kept watching, helping the other bakers where she could but mostly endeavoring to keep out of their way. These were masters. They bounced ideas off each other, refined each step of the process, and generally came to surpass Jane in every keln-related way in a distressingly small amount of time.
Finally, and with many expressions of gratitude, they all began to filter out. The big man was the last one to leave, having stayed to help Jane clean up with the same astonishing speed he used in his baking.
“Well, thank you,” he said. “Most folks would have kept that kind of secret to themselves, you know. It’s something you could have used to compete against us for years.”
“Maybe!” Jane held the door open for Bella as she swept into the bakery, then gave one last friendly smile to the bigger, older professional. “It just seemed like it belongs to Glenfall more than it could ever belong to me. It would have been wrong to keep it.”
.