Jane’s eyes fogged with tears. She immediately wiped them away, taking in her aunt for the first time in almost a year.

  Aunt Cecelia was everything Jane remembered: a tall, fearless woman of sixty or so, absolutely throbbing with magical force at all times, and incredibly annoyed with anyone or anything that upset her view of how things should be.

  And she’s absolutely filthy. Just covered in dust.

  “Stop staring, Jane. I came straight here when you asked, and I had to go all-out to get here this fast. There wasn’t a carriage in the world that could have kept up. I didn’t stop to bathe. You tend to get messy that way.”

  “I don’t care.” Jane ran across the room and dove into her aunt’s grimy arms. “I’m just so glad you’re here.”

  “Of course. Now what’s this I hear about you yelling a dragon to death?”

  Whatever garbled bits of the story Cecelia had picked up on her journey were soon corrected, as was the misperception that the council had been outright abusing Jane. Cecelia already understood why Jane would be upset by the council’s necessary, reasonable requests, better than perhaps anyone in the world besides Bella. That part took very few words indeed to get across.

  “I don’t understand where everyone fits in, though.” Cecelia pointed at Bella. “You are her friend, that’s clear, and she’s told me enough about you that I like you. Every town council is the same, so I know them.” Her gaze swept around the table and settled on Ashley. “But you, ma’am, are something different.”

  “I’m her advocate,” Ashley replied. “Or was, before you got here.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “My son likes her. I like my son.”

  The two women regarded each other for a moment before breaking into perfectly matched smiles.

  “Good friends, then,” Cecelia said. “I believe you cook?”

  “I do.”

  “Then please feed us.” Cecelia stood and headed for the door. “I’ll jump in that lake to get clean and take a look at the water, and then we’ll clear this up. There’s nothing here that can’t be fixed, Jane, but I’m certainly not going to fix it on an empty stomach.”

  —

  Jane watched her aunt stride toward the lake, resigned to what was about to happen. She was used to her aunt acting in ways that seemed erratic to other people. Nobody else present was. The council members averted their horrified eyes as politely as they could while the most powerful mage in the kingdom stripped down to her underclothes and waded into the cold mountain water without a flinch.

  "She's something else," Bella whispered. "I had imagined her more like you. Is she always like this?"

  "Sort of.” Jane shrugged. “We’ve never been alike. I don't think I get much of anything from her, really. She's my aunt by marriage. My mother's sister-in-law."

  Cecelia submerged herself completely, her hair fanning out in the water. She surfaced a few seconds later and scrubbed at her face and arms while the water turned to near-mud around her. Jane could feel faint pulses of magic as her aunt took some readings. By the time Cecelia emerged from the water, she still looked tired, but at least she was reasonably clean.

  "The water feels wrong," Cecelia announced, wringing out her hair as she walked back toward the group. "But not dangerous, exactly. More like confused. Have you been in it, Jane?”

  “Not since the dragon. I guess it might have changed since then.”

  “Possibly, but there’s no urgent reason to deal with it right now. We'll sort it out after we eat. Now, where is this restaurant?"

  Xand agreed to go with them to represent the council. Ivan, Milne, and Hershe were needed elsewhere. With farewells for the group, and an especially deep bow to Cecelia, the trio rushed off in different directions to oversee various aspects of the town’s ongoing recovery.

  Ashley led the remaining group through the winding streets. As they walked, Jane studied her aunt. No amount of washing could soak off the bags under her eyes or the way she stared at every food cart they passed. She was exhausted and hungry, more so than Jane had seen anyone be before.

  Two days. She said two days at the shortest, and only if she thought I was in life-or-death danger.

  It had been less than two days. Far less, and every marginal second had come at great cost.

  Jane did the guilty math in her head. It wasn’t pretty. Her aunt must have left within moments of receiving her message, pushed herself to the absolute limit of what even an archmage could sustain, and probably hadn't stopped to eat anything better than travel rations along the way.

  Cecelia actually sighed in delight when they arrived at their destination. The restaurant looked exactly as Jane remembered it. The converted warehouse with its hand-painted ‘Food and Ale’ sign welcomed them, spilling food-smells out into the open air. The reception was a little different, though. The moment Ashley pushed through the door, every head in the place turned, and Jane braced herself for the attention she had been dreading.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Instead, all eyes went to Cecelia.

  The whispers rippled through the room like wind through wheat. Jane watched her aunt absorb the attention and somehow ignore it at the same time. It was a skill Jane needed to learn. Cecelia barely budged for the normal courtesies required by the situation, offering a general wave to the room before following Ashley toward the back.

  "We'll take the big table," Ashley called to a young man behind the bar. "The one we use for guild meetings. And Thomas, start bringing food. All of it. Whatever's ready."

  "All of it?" Thomas looked uncertain. "That's a lot of food for five people."

  Ashley's eyes flicked to Cecelia, who had already claimed a seat and was gazing at a basket of bread on a nearby table with barely concealed longing. “Trust me. We're going to need it.”

  The big table was tucked into a corner of the restaurant, a massive thing that could have seated twelve comfortably. The five of them had plenty of room to spread out. Bella and Cecelia claimed the seats next to Jane, while Ashley took the head of the table. Xand settled across from them, looking more relaxed now that they were out of the official council chambers.

  Cecelia’s eyes tracked Thomas's movements as he disappeared to fetch their food.

  "You pushed too hard getting here," Jane said quietly, leaning toward her aunt. "You didn't have to do that."

  "Of course I did." Cecelia's voice was matter-of-fact. "You said you needed me."

  "I didn't mean for you to hurt yourself. I wouldn’t forgive myself if…"

  "Jane." Her aunt's hand covered hers on the table. "When you call, I come. That's how it works. That's how it's always going to work. Now, if you can, please stop feeling guilty about it and let me eat before I die."

  Thomas was already marching up with the first wave of food: platters of sliced meat, bowls of roasted vegetables, a tureen of thick stew, and an amount of bread that would have filled an entire table back at Jane’s shop. He set everything down and pulled out of the way just as Jane started to worry her starving aunt might bite his arm.

  Cecelia didn't wait for anyone else. She immediately reached for a thick slice of bread, tore it in half, and used it to scoop up stew like a makeshift edible spoon. There was no delicacy to it, which seemed to inspire the rest of the table. Arms reached from all sides as everyone dug in.

  Jane served herself a smaller portion, not particularly hungry but knowing she should eat anyway. She didn’t want her aunt to worry any more than she already had.

  It was one thing to know intellectually that her aunt loved her. It was another to see the proof of it in Cecelia’s desperate eating pace.

  When the last plate was finally cleared, Cecelia leaned back in her chair with a smile. She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, she looked like a different person. Focused. Much more like Jane remembered.

  "Right then." Cecelia straightened in her chair. “Let's talk about what happened, and what happens next."

  Xand nodded. "I won’t pretend things are fine, Archmage. The town is frightened. We've had problems before, but nothing like this. Though dragons have always been around, they’ve kept their distance, mostly. People are scared.”

  "That's understandable. Your people have every right to be concerned."

  "Concerned is putting it mildly," Ashley said. "I work in hospitality, so I hear everything. Half the fishing fleet is still grounded for inspections. Everyone keeps looking at the lake like it might betray them any minute.”

  "Also understandable. These fears will hopefully fade with time, assuming nothing else happens to reinforce them." Cecelia turned to Jane. “Which brings me to the matter of my niece."

  Jane felt herself tense. In a normal life, this was the part where her aunt would explain that she needed to step up. That her responsibilities as an archmage candidate outweighed her desire for a simple life. That the town needed her, whether she liked it or not.

  Luckily, Jane’s life was far from normal. And her aunt certainly wasn’t a normal aunt.

  "I sent Jane here to rest,” Cecelia said, addressing the table at large. "To recover from years of pressure, true, but mostly to learn more about the parts of the world that don’t revolve around magic. She was doing that quite successfully, until a dragon decided to have a crisis in her backyard."

  "With respect, Lady Cecelia," Xand began carefully, "the situation isn’t something average people can handle. We are grateful that she stepped up as she did, but it’s not over yet.”

  "The situation required her to act, and she acted admirably. I'm not dismissing that.” Cecelia's hand found Jane's under the table and squeezed. “But she can't very well rest and recover if she's busy being the sole magical authority for an entire town. That was never the plan. It shouldn't become the plan now just because circumstances forced her hand."

  Xand leaned forward. "Then what do you suggest? We still need someone. The dragon may have left, but we don't know why it was disturbed in the first place. We don't know if it will come back. We don't know if there are other threats we haven't yet discovered. Jane herself admitted that she doesn't fully understand what's happening with the water, and you don’t seem much different."

  "All valid concerns."

  "And we have no other magical resources of her caliber. The town's practitioners are skilled in their own ways, but mostly just with minor crafts. And —”

  Cecelia held up a hand to stop him. Jane was glad for it. She sensed that Xand was the kind of high-strung person who could talk endlessly, disgorging stress through words.

  "You're right,” Cecelia said. “You need someone with the power to handle threats of this magnitude, the knowledge to investigate what's causing them, and the authority to act decisively if action becomes necessary."

  She paused. Jane watched the realization dawn on Xand's face a half-second before her aunt continued.

  "Which is why I intend to stay."

  The silence that followed was absolute. Even the background noise of the restaurant seemed to fade, as if the building itself was holding its breath.

  "Stay?" Xand's voice came out as a muddle of joy and strangled desperation. He apparently could see both the upsides and the downsides. "Here? In Glenfall? For how long?"

  "For as long as necessary. I have responsibilities elsewhere, but nothing that can't be managed through correspondence and the occasional short trip. This isn’t a small matter, anyway. I’d be justified coming here even if Jane intended to stay on the job full-time. Besides that, I’m tired. I've been meaning to take a bit of a rest myself. This seems as good an excuse as any."

  Jane stared at her aunt, trying to process what she was hearing. Cecelia, the Grand Archmage, the woman who had spent decades rushing from crisis to crisis across the entire kingdom, was going to make her headquarters here, in a small little mountain city where nothing was supposed to happen.

  "You can't just…" Jane started, then stopped. "Can you? Don't you have obligations? Important ones?"

  "I have many obligations, and they're all very important to someone." Cecelia shrugged. "But I also have a niece who needed me badly enough to call. That’s what’s important to me."

  .