Jane felt the available magic in their locality drain away as every bit of nearby mystic force dedicated itself to Cecelia’s cause. The spell had always amazed Jane, in that it was so general and simple that it should have done nothing at all. In Cecelia’s hands, though, it possessed an almost world-shaping power.

  She had once told Jane it took her a few decades to get the hang of it, but Jane couldn’t imagine herself mastering it in a thousand years. It was too little like her and too much like Cecelia. It was also much too direct to become like Jane, even if she modified it or herself to drastic degrees.

  Cecelia charged the space in front of her hand. The air trembled for just a moment, then bent with shockwaves as a massive amount of pure kinetic power burst straight forward like a cannonball. Jane had read accounts of her aunt stopping avalanches with this spell, or cutting channels suitable to divert floods. It should have been enough to remove all the water in the dragon outright.

  Instead, the dragon turned in the direction of the spell, snarled, and blasted magic back with a force that felt like polluted water and brooked no argument at all. Jane watched in horror as her aunt was jerked off her feet and sent flying backwards, arm broken from the backlash.

  Not helping her felt like being stabbed in the soul, but Jane had no time for anything but the emergency. Force had failed. That was clear enough. Something else was needed.

  Jane doubted she would be able to convince the dragon to leave this time. Before, it had seemed angry about what the water had become, but now that same corruption had seeped into the dragon itself. It was in agony.

  How do I know that?

  She did know it. Anyone else, even another mage, would have told her she was insane for thinking she did. But the knowledge was in her mind, firm and undeniable.

  She had learned it from some impression in the magic in the air, some moment in her aunt’s attack and the dragon’s response to it. She had sensed it in her first encounter with the dragon over the lake. And she had understood it, somehow, as if the dragon’s pain was communicating in a language she knew.

  Then, suddenly, she knew the exact source of that agony.

  This dragon does not know what it is. It knows what it was, and what it’s becoming. But it doesn’t know what it is, right now. And that hurts.

  As calmly as she could in the face of a dragon that might crush her at any moment, Jane stepped back into one of the ovals of the spell circle. There was no magic left in the air for her to leverage, so she would need the amplification of the circle, along with a few elements of the spell itself. She began circulating her energy in a limited pattern, just the part of the circle meant to send her influence to the water.

  She couldn’t speak to the dragon, but she hoped she could communicate with it.

  Closing her eyes, she tried to remember everything. Her experiences at the academy came first. She felt them at the dragon: the days blurring into one another, the sameness, the set-course feelings of something she had not chosen but that was still somewhat comfortable.

  As best she could, she told the dragon of when that had soured for her. Of when it had started to become apparent that this wasn’t where she was meant to be or how she was meant to live. Of how it had felt to leave all that, like she was ripping off one of her arms to escape a trap. Of the loss, and the sudden freedom, and the overwhelming feeling of having no control in an entirely different way.

  Those two ideas took mere moments to relay, despite the fact that they comprised most of her life. What took longer was telling the dragon about where that change had taken her. That despite being out of control, she had been found, exactly where she was. She had been given friends, a way to belong, and a new way to be. She felt the warmth of Bella, the strength and protection-without-actually-protecting of Allen, and the sense of her parent-like aunt becoming her friend.

  And then she told the dragon that whatever it chose to be, it would be all right.

  When Jane finished, she fell. Not just from a standing position, but down out of the air. She hadn’t known that linking one’s intent with a dragon to that extent made one float. She guessed that nobody knew, or had even tried it before.

  The dragon seemed unaffected at first. If anything, its roars of rage and pain intensified. Jane crawled over to her aunt and prepared to shield the other woman with her body, for all the good that would do when the dragon came crashing down.

  And crashing down it came, but not towards them. Instead, it fell into the lake, losing all distinction as it melded back into the water.

  “Jane.” Her aunt gritted her teeth and cradled her shattered arm as she struggled into a seated position. “Did you just tell a dragon a story?”

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  “Something like that.”

  “I thought so. Did it work?”

  “I have no idea,” Jane said. “I told it to decide what it wanted. What do animal-shaped masses of water magic want, typically?”

  Cecelia laughed a short, painful bark as she looked towards the water. “I’m thinking something like that.”

  In the center of the lake, the water was spinning. First slowly, then faster and faster as a vortex of sorts began to form. Jane thought she might have been imagining it, but it felt as if the evil magic in the air was being pulled away from them, towards the center of the lake.

  Then tendrils of water whipped out of the lake. Jane watched as they pulled every speck of leaked impurity anywhere near the shore into themselves, gathering up all the contents from the recovered barrels before withdrawing back down into the water.

  It took a while. By the end of the process, Jane could see a streak of impurity in the lake, condensing again and again until it formed a sphere of pure adulteration in the otherwise clear water. For a few seconds, she wondered what the dragon wanted with it.

  Then the dragon showed her.

  When the form of the spirit burst from the lake once again, the ball of chemicals was inside it, tucked deep beneath the surface of its midsection. The ball was only visible because of the extreme purity of the water that encased it. The dragon flew close to them once more and hovered in the air above them, nearly still.

  “I think it wants to show you,” Cecelia said. “Maybe stand and look.”

  Jane got back to her feet and staggered towards the oval she had used for communication. She never got there. The dragon didn’t need her to. It could communicate just fine, to the extent it could communicate at all.

  Mine, it seemed to say. It didn’t have words, but Jane felt like the meaning was forming itself in her mind. Mine to protect, but not me.

  That seemed to be the solution the dragon had come up with. It was the water, and the water had become ill. The dragon had isolated that illness, and would guard it from now on.

  Probably. Jane was not at all sure she was fluent in dragon feelings, but that seemed close enough to what it meant.

  “Oh. Yes,” she stammered. If there were any possible objections to this plan, she did not want to know them at the moment. “That will be fine. Thank you.”

  If the dragon understood, it gave no sign. It simply flew away towards the headwaters of the river that fed the lake, off to do whatever dragons did.

  After a minute or so, Aunt Cecelia finally found words again.

  “So. If you weren’t an archmage before, I’d say you likely are now.”

  “I guess.”

  Jane smiled. She had come to a realization of her own over the last few minutes. Conversations with dragons tended to do that, she decided.

  “I’m not leaving this town,” she said. “You don’t have to tell them for me. I’ll tell them myself. I’m who I am here. This is the Jane I want to be.”

  Cecelia returned her smile. “Good. I approve.”

  —

  EPILOGUE

  “This bread isn’t stale,” Jane said. “It’s a special bread, for dunking in soup. It’s supposed to be like that.”

  “Which is stale.” The older woman in front of her knocked on the bread, frowning at the noise. “I don’t want stale bread.”

  Jane sighed internally for the twelfth time that day. She then led the old woman towards the conventional loaves, which the customer happily bought.

  Some of the more advanced recipes in Jane’s books had been hits with the town, but overall, they had been misses. The stale soup-bread had always felt like a longshot. Today, she had received ample confirmation that it just wouldn’t fly with her clientele.

  It was almost refreshing, having people tell her she was wrong. It felt very normal.

  The old woman turned out to be Jane’s last customer of the day, which suited her just fine. She had already loaded all her dinner holds into her Allen-built cabinet, where they would sit happily until their owners picked them up. Shedding her apron, she slipped into more walking-appropriate shoes and made her way to Allen’s mother’s restaurant, where she was certain Allen would be.

  She got more than just Allen, it turned out. Bella was there, as was Cecelia. Emily and Sadie were happily chatting while they sipped ale. Jane noticed Brit last, which was forgivable, considering he was slumped facedown on the table.

  “Why is Brit asleep?” Jane asked. “Is he all right?”

  Cecelia turned away, looking decidedly guilty for a moment.

  “‘M fine,” Brit slurred. “Winning.”

  “He challenged Cecelia to a drinking contest,” Allen said, standing up from the table and giving Jane a quick kiss. “He doesn’t know he lost.”

  “Ah.” Jane sat next to Allen on the long bench and waved the waiter over to order food and an ale. “Why is everyone here?”

  “Cecelia found everyone and brought them. She hasn’t said why.” Allen leaned close and spoke in a loud whisper. “I figured you could pry it out of her.”

  “No need,” Cecelia said. “Having vanquished a young blacksmith, I can speak for myself. Jane, word came from the king today. Apparently, the academy gave up and sent the matter to the throne. This is, once and for all, the final decision.”

  Jane went a little pale, despite herself. The academy had wanted a lot of things once they’d learned of her achievement with the dragon. Most of them weren’t things she wanted to do. She had told the academy no. They had told her she had no choice. She had told them she did have a choice, and her answer was no.

  Things had gone back and forth like that for six months, annoying her but not actually affecting her life.

  This, however, could. The king could command her to do almost anything, and she would have to do it.

  As Cecelia tried to hand the scroll to Jane, the younger archmage shook her head.

  “You read it. I’m too nervous.”

  Cecelia shrugged. Then she broke the wax seal on the small scroll, unrolled it, and read. The corners of her mouth quirked mysteriously about halfway through, but that was the only sign Jane got until Cecelia spoke.

  “It says, ‘The girl is the only one who can communicate with a powerful dragon, and she asks to live somewhere near that dragon, and I have to get involved? It’s my decree she can do whatever she wants, so long as she’s willing to travel a bit here and there if that ever becomes necessary.’” Cecelia set the paper down. “That’s a paraphrase, of course, but I know the man, and that’s roughly what he meant.”

  Jane felt Allen and Bella hugging her before her mind had cleared enough to register everything.

  “I can really stay?” she stammered. “I can stay here?”

  “Of course. Jane. So long as that’s what you want.”

  Jane would live the rest of her life not knowing what her friends looked like in that moment. Her eyes were so full of happy tears, the best she would ever be able to remember was a joyful blur.

  “Yes,” Jane said. “That’s exactly what I want.”

  .

  !