Soon enough, Jane’s feet had taken her to a familiar stairway. She felt a little bad climbing down towards the covered banks of the river. It wasn’t a rational feeling. She was reasonably sure that Allen would be glad to see her, just as she would be glad to see him. Even so, he had work to do, and she would be distracting him from that.

  She pushed through anyway, hoping that she wouldn’t be imposing on him too much.

  The Underbridge Market was much quieter than she remembered. She’d already guessed that many of the market folks lived down here, or at least kept some of their social lives at their shops. At midday, they were mostly cleared out, probably eating lunch or running errands.

  Allen’s shop was right where she had left it. She spotted him before he spotted her. He was bent over a workbench with his back to the aisle, turning a small piece of wood over in his hands. After examining it from different angles, he went back to working on it with a hammer and chisel.

  She watched him for a moment, feeling slightly foolish at how flustered she was. They had kissed. They had slept in the same bed, even if nothing had happened. By any reasonable measure, she should be past the stage of getting nervous just from seeing him work.

  And yet there he is. Just look at him.

  "Are you going to stand there all day, or are you going to come say hello?"

  Jane startled. Allen hadn't turned around, but somehow, he’d known she was there.

  She felt her face heat up as she walked the last few steps to his stall. "How did you know it was me?"

  "I felt nervous all of a sudden, and you are the only person who makes me nervous." Finally turning, he pointed towards the blacksmith shop just a few stalls over. "Also, Brit’s right there, and he keeps pointing and waggling his eyebrows. How come it took you so long to work up the courage?”

  "I wasn't working up courage. I was admiring your craftsmanship."

  "From thirty feet away?"

  "I have good eyes."

  Allen laughed and set down whatever he'd been working on, wiping his hands on a cloth before stepping around the workbench to join her. Jane appreciated that he didn't reach for her right away. They were in public, after all. She wasn't entirely sure what the local customs were for that sort of thing, or even if it was the idea of local customs that was stopping them.

  Hopefully, there would be plenty of time to figure all of that out later.

  "How are you feeling?" His voice dropped, serious now. "Really feeling, I mean. I want to know."

  “Better,” Jane assured him. “Really better. I tested my magic this morning. It's mostly recovered. Another day or two, and I should be back to normal."

  “Good. That's good. I was worried, you know. When you collapsed. When they carried you inside and you wouldn't wake up."

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare anyone."

  "Don't apologize for saving the town, Jane. That's silly." He shook his head. "I'm just glad you're all right. When your aunt showed up yesterday, I thought maybe something had gone wrong. That you’d had some sort of relapse after I saw you."

  “Not at all. How did you know my aunt showed up? Did your mother tell you?”

  “No, but everyone knows. Your aunt is going from shop to shop, buying things she needs and bragging about her niece.”

  Jane winced. “Oof. She does need the things, now that she’s staying in Glenfall for a while.”

  "Staying?" Allen's eyebrows rose. "The Grand Archmage is staying in Glenfall?"

  "She says she needs a rest. And she wants to help figure out what's wrong with the water."

  Jane shrugged, trying to make it seem less momentous. Having an archmage take up even temporary residence in a town was a big deal. It was the kind of thing that made a place show up in official reports. She didn’t have a lot of hope that she would be able to downplay that, but she was going to try.

  They stood in comfortable silence for a moment, surrounded by the gentle sounds of the nearly empty market. Jane found herself looking at Allen's hands, studying the calluses and small scars that marked him as someone who worked with his body as much as his mind. It was so different from the smooth, unmarked hands of the mages she'd grown up around.

  "What are you working on?" she asked, nodding toward the workbench.

  "Oh, that?" Allen turned and picked up the piece of wood he'd been examining when she arrived. It was small, maybe the length of her palm, and carved into what looked like a tiny house. "It's a puzzle box. Or it will be. Someone asked me to make one for their daughter's birthday."

  “I thought you made tools?”

  “I do.” Allen leaned against his workbench. “But I’m a tinker. I make things like tools between more complex tasks, to keep my hands busy. My real work is fixing watches or figuring out how to make things other people don’t. Tinkers fill in the gaps.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Putting down the future puzzle box, he grabbed Jane’s hand, which set off another long period of wordlessness.

  Allen recovered from it first. “What about you? I thought Bella told you to rest.”

  “She did, but that’s just from running the bakery. I couldn’t stay cooped up in there all day. I’d go crazy. I wanted to see things.”

  “Then let’s see things.” Straightening up, Allen walked towards the exit, pulling her with him. “I actually had something I wanted to show you.”

  Up the staircase they went. Jane decided not to ask where they were going. A little surprise wouldn’t hurt her.

  Allen crossed over to Jane’s side of the bridge and led her down streets that ran in the same direction as the flow of the river. Then he doubled back through an alley, ending up on a long, sandy bank that ran almost to the edge of the waterfall. It was cut off by an observation platform of sorts, just a small masonry pad with a metal railing to keep folks from falling off.

  “You said you needed to check out the water around town, and I thought of here.” Allen pointed to the lip of the waterfall, which almost could have been walked across if not for the sheer speed of the water. “Everything narrows at this spot. I don’t really know how magic works, but I figure if the magic flows with the water, it might condense here. This is the closest I could get you, but you should just about be able to touch the water if you stretch.”

  “That’s… wow. Yes, that might work. Although I think you are judging how far I can reach by how far you can reach.” Jane stuck out her short-person arms for inspection.

  “What if you got down on your stomach?” Allen suggested. “I could hold your feet.”

  “You won’t drop me?”

  “I won’t. Promise.”

  Jane knelt and lowered herself onto her chest before scooting carefully forward. Once her head passed the railing, she felt Allen’s strong hands lock around her ankles, stabilizing her as she started to dip down towards the waterfall. The edge of the platform was a good half-foot past the center of her hips when her hand finally made contact with the roaring, foaming water.

  Like a truly unpleasant miracle, Allen was right. Something was wrong with the water here. She could feel something different under all the normal magic found in moving water and all the pieces of mystic force that signified the memories of fish and plants moving in the flow. Just a bit of unnatural marring the natural, so quiet and faint that she couldn’t even have sensed it if she wasn’t specifically looking for it.

  “Well?”

  “It’s something,” Jane yelled. “Give me another four inches of reach. I need to get lower.”

  Allen carefully inched her forward, low enough that the spray soaked her hair and the neck of her dress. Her arm went deeper and deeper into the fast-moving water. When she spread her palm to catch the flow, she could feel it pulling her diagonally towards the drop.

  A bit more water on her hand brought the issue into closer focus. There was something in this water that wasn’t supposed to be there, something like the magic that came off chemicals people used for certain kinds of specialty work. If she had to put a name to it, it felt like a sort of anti-soap, an evil kind of magic residue from a bad detergent somewhere. Even that was foggy and nonsensical, though.

  The water and her general positioning also brought something else into focus. She was very used to the odd magics of the dragon now, but she was not used to sensing them and being upside down at the same time. She felt her stomach start to complain about the experience as nausea leapt straight up to her throat.

  “Pull me up,” she called. “I’m going to be sick.”

  Allen dutifully towed her in, going slow enough to ensure he did not scrape her stomach in the process.

  She took a deep breath as she sat up, and immediately felt better. “Thanks.”

  “You seem to be having that trouble a lot lately,” he pointed out. “Is… do you throw up often?”

  “No. It’s like the way your stomach turns while you muck out an outhouse. It stops right away once I get free of the odd magic. And right side up, I suppose.”

  Jane lifted her hand into the air and circulated some magic in a certain pattern. Like sound, magic came in many different frequencies. This one didn’t require lot of power, but it was very loud, like a scream on a cold, clear night. She made sure to put a little dot on the end that indicated she wasn’t in danger, since there were probably more than a few people in town with enough magical sensitivity to hear the basics of what she was doing.

  But only one person would be able to hear all of it.

  “What was that about? It made my ears pop.”

  “Really? You might have some kind of weak magical sensitivity, then. We should check that out.” Jane wiped her wet hand off on her shirt. She had needed a bit of water on her palm to tint the magical call with information for her aunt, but not anymore. “I was just sending out a little signal. You found enough here that I need to show it to someone else.”

  “I helped? Great!” Allen smiled, radiating excitement about the success of his plan. “I wasn’t sure if I was wasting your time or not.”

  “It wouldn’t be wasted anyway. I like spending time with you.”

  “Good.” Allen smoothed down her wet hair with his hands, then tensed in a sudden panic. “Wait. Who did you signal?”

  “Me!” Cecelia called as she mounted the stairs, waving an umbrella. She really was very fast. Jane just hoped she had been fast in a discreet way that didn’t scare the locals. “I am the Lady Cecelia, Servant of His Majesty the King, Strong Right Arm of the Academy, Grand Archmage, Counter-Disaster of Salvation.”

  Allen nodded weakly. “Very nice to meet you. I’m Allen.”

  “Ha!” Cecelia roared. “He didn’t bow. Most people do when I pull that trick. Well done seeing through it, Allen.”

  Jane knew better than to interpret Allen’s reaction that way. He hadn’t bowed simply because he was frozen in place.

  “Aunt, could you please leave my boyfriend alone? I kind of like him, and I don’t want him scared off.”

  Cecelia raised an eyebrow, but the bigger reaction came from Allen, who looked like he had just been told he was secretly the crown prince.

  “Boyfriend?” he repeated. “I’m your boyfriend? You think of me that way?”

  “Of course.” Cecelia’s eyebrow rose higher. “You don’t think of her that way? As your girlfriend?”

  “I mean, I do, especially since I slept in…” Allen’s mouth slammed shut. He went pale. “Since I slept on… I mean…”

  Cecelia stepped forward and wrapped Allen in a big hug. “I like you. You’ll get no trouble from me unless you do things I suspect you’d never do. Don’t go there, and we’ll have no problems.”

  Releasing him, Cecelia flourished her umbrella and dipped it in the water, loading it up with quite a bit of unaligned mystic power. Then she tilted her head and listened to how the umbrella interacted with the water below.

  Jane vowed to learn this trick as soon as possible, if for no other reason than keeping her hair dry.

  “I see what you meant about this water,” Cecelia mused. “It’s a little icky. Do you have any idea why?”

  “I don’t. We need to investigate further, don’t we?”

  Cecelia looked at Allen, who was glancing between the two of them in helpless terror. She smiled and put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Yes, but not just now. At the moment, I desire lunch. With ale. Perhaps a game. Do you know of a place we find these things?”

  Allen snapped back to partial functioning. “Oh. Yes. My mother’s restaurant, for one.”

  “No, not there. I want to get to know you. She’s already met Jane twice. I need to catch up a little.” Cecelia tapped her umbrella on the railing, sending little droplets of water flying back down to the river. “Actually, I saw a place on my way in that I think will do just fine. Follow me.”

  .