Jane's legs were aching by the time she made it back to her house. The sight of lamplight spilling from her windows stopped her short at the corner of her street. She hadn't left any lamps burning. She was certain of that.

  Burglars? No, that's ridiculous. It’s not that kind of town. I might as well guess the lamps turned themselves on.

  She approached cautiously anyway, one hand already gathering a small reserve of magical force just in case. The door was unlocked, which she was also certain she hadn't done. She pushed it open and found herself looking at Bella, Emily, and Sadie, all sitting around her counter with steaming mugs and expressions that could only be described as guilty.

  Jane set down her pack and looked at each of them. "Is this an ambush? Because if it is, I'd like to know what I did wrong."

  "It's not an ambush." Bella stood and crossed to her, pressing a bowl of noodles into her hands before she could protest. "Sit and eat. You look like you've been trying to tunnel through the ground."

  "That’s pretty close."

  Jane looked down at herself. Her coat was streaked with mud, and her boots were caked with it. She was glad for the new coat of leather oil on the boots, protecting them from harm. They’d have been ruined otherwise.

  "You haven't answered my question,” she pointed out. “Why are you all in my house?"

  "We made a mistake,” Emily said. "A terrible one. We weren't being good friends."

  "We forgot to tell you something important,” Sadie added. "Something really important."

  Jane sat on the stool they had clearly left empty for her and took a bite of the noodles. They were good in a way that made her realize just how hungry she was. She chewed and swallowed before responding.

  "All right. What did you forget?"

  The three of them exchanged looks. Bella was the first to speak.

  "There's a festival tomorrow. The Lake Festival. It happens every year around this time, and it's a big deal."

  Emily nodded. "A very big deal. People get dressed up. There are tables of food and drink set up all around town, and everyone wanders about, visiting each other and having fun. Then at sunset, everyone gathers at the shore for fireworks over the water."

  "It's a bring-a-date sort of thing,” Sadie said. "For young people, anyway. The older folks just go with whomever, but for people our age, it's tradition to have someone to walk around with."

  Jane took another bite of noodles, processing this. A festival. Tomorrow. With dates and fancy clothes and what sounded like the entire town participating.

  "I see."

  "We didn’t tell you because we're terrible friends who assumed someone else had mentioned it." Bella looked genuinely distressed. "We just realized tonight that you’d have no way of knowing about it."

  "We came straight here,” Emily told her. "Well, we stopped to get you noodles first. But then we came straight here."

  Jane looked down again at her muddy, filthy clothes. Her hair was a disaster. She had been climbing through brambles and wading into rivers all day, and she looked exactly like it.

  "I don't have anything to wear. I mean, I have dresses, but nothing that would be right for something like this. And I don't have a date, either. Allen and I haven't talked about it at all."

  Bella, of course, had already thought of these problems. "Which is why we're here. Brit is handling the second thing as we speak. He's tracking down Allen right now to make sure the boy knows he needs to ask you properly."

  "And I'm handling the first thing." Sadie held up a garment she must have brought with her, deep blue and clearly well-made. "This is one of my sister's dresses. She's closer to your size than I am. I'm going to alter it tonight so it fits you perfectly."

  "You can do that? In one night?"

  Sadie shrugged. "I'm good with a needle. It's not that hard, really. Just some adjustments here and there."

  "And while she's doing that," Emily said, "the rest of us are going to help you with your hair. And your nails. And whatever else needs helping with. We're going to have a fun night of it."

  Jane felt her eyes prickling. These women had realized they’d made a mistake, and instead of just apologizing and leaving her to figure things out on her own, they had brought noodles, a dress, and a small army’s worth of effort. They were going to spend their evening making sure she could participate in something she hadn't even known was happening.

  "You really didn't have to do all this." Her voice came out a little rough. "I would have been fine."

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  "Of course you would have been fine." Bella sat down next to her. "But fine isn't the same as good, and we want you to have a good time. You've earned it, Jane. After everything that's happened, you deserve a nice day with your friends and your boy."

  "Besides," Emily said, "we wanted an excuse to play with your hair. It's so curly. I've been dying to try some things."

  Jane laughed, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand.

  "Fine. All right. But I need to bathe first. I can't let you work on my hair when it's full of forest."

  "Obviously." Bella waved toward the stairs. "You can get clean after you eat. We'll set up down here. Sadie, start taking measurements while Jane finishes her noodles."

  What followed was perhaps the strangest evening of Jane's life. She ate her noodles while Sadie measured her with a practiced hand, calling out numbers to Emily, who wrote them down in a little notebook. Then she went upstairs and bathed properly, scrubbing the day from her skin and hair with her new soaps until she felt fully human again.

  When she came back down, wrapped in a robe over her underclothes, the trio had transformed her kitchen. The counter had been cleared and covered with an array of brushes, combs, ribbons, and little pots of things Jane didn't recognize. Sadie was already at work on the dress, her needle moving with surprising speed.

  "Sit here." Emily patted a stool they had positioned by the counter, where the lamplight was strongest. "Let me see what we're working with."

  Jane sat. Emily's fingers worked through her damp hair, and Jane found herself relaxing into the gentle attention. She couldn't remember the last time anyone had done this for her.

  "Your hair is wonderful,” Emily gushed. “The curls have so much life in them. We just need to bring them out properly."

  "I've always thought it was too much. Too messy."

  "It's not messy. It's got personality." Bella handed Emily a jar from the counter. "Here, try this. It's supposed to make hair look shiny."

  They worked in companionable chaos, talking and laughing as Sadie's needle flew and Emily experimented with different arrangements. Bella supervised everything with the air of a general overseeing a campaign, occasionally offering opinions or fetching things from Jane's cupboards.

  "So tell us about your day,” Emily said, working some kind of sweet-smelling oil through Jane's curls. "You were gone a long time. Bella said you'd left early."

  Jane hesitated. She had promised her aunt she would focus on her bakery and her friends, not on the investigation. But these were her friends, and they were asking.

  "I was checking the river upstream. Looking for the source of the contamination that's been upsetting the water."

  "Any luck?" Bella asked.

  "In a way. The river up there is completely clean. Cleaner than anything I've felt in the lake. Which means whatever is causing the problem isn't coming from upstream."

  "That seems worse, somehow."

  "It might be. I don't know yet. We'll have to consider possibilities in the lake itself. Which is harder."

  "But not tomorrow." Bella's voice was firm. "Tomorrow is the festival. You are going to have fun and not think about dragons or contamination or any of that. Understood?"

  Jane smiled. "Understood. I promise."

  Time slipped pleasantly by. Jane's hair slowly transformed under Emily's hands, the curls taking on a shape and definition she had never managed to achieve on her own. Sadie finished the major alterations to the dress and had Jane try it on, marking a few more spots for adjustment before sending Jane back to her seat.

  "It's going to be beautiful." Sadie sighed happily as Jane settled into her robe. "The color suits you."

  "I never would have thought so. At the academy, we mostly wore grays and browns. It was more practical.”

  "Practical is boring," Bella declared. "You're not at the academy anymore. You're in Glenfall.”

  By the time they were finished, Jane was exhausted in a new, more pleasant way. Her hair was pinned up loosely for the night, ready to be arranged properly in the morning. The dress was hanging upstairs on her wardrobe door, completely transformed from the simple garment Sadie had brought into something that looked almost magical.

  "Thank you," Jane said as they began gathering their things to leave. "All of you. This was really kind."

  Emily hugged her. "This is what friends do. We help each other have good days."

  There was a knock on the door. Jane was so happy that she ran to open it without a second thought.

  Allen was standing there. He looked momentarily abashed, then slightly terrified for reasons Jane couldn’t place.

  “Hi.” He gulped, appearing to search for the next words in his sentence with the same energy a disarmed man uses to find his sword. “Um. The festival.”

  “Yes. I just learned about it.”

  “Would you like to go? With me?”

  “Of course!”

  Allen nodded. Gulping again, he shoved a wrapped package into her hands, a small one about the size of her palm. “Good. See you then. Bye.”

  Before Jane could say anything else, Allen pushed the door shut with such force that he almost slammed it in her face.

  She raised her eyebrows in astonishment. “That was very, very odd. Is that how this sort of thing normally goes?”

  Jane turned to find all her friends red-faced, holding in laughter just long enough for her to see them making the effort before absolutely losing control.

  “What?” she demanded. “What is it?”

  “Your…” Bella heaved an enormous breath, then lost most of it laughing. She managed to keep just enough of it to squeak out a few words, pushing them into being with great effort. “Your clothes.”

  Jane looked down, puzzled, then felt her whole world stop for a moment. She had forgotten that she was wearing only a loosely wrapped robe over her underthings.

  And she had answered the door that way. To Allen.

  She felt her whole body start to burn as she blushed toe-to-head. “I’m going to die.”

  It took a full five minutes for her friends to calm down, at which point they comforted her as best they could, feeding her wine and telling her it really wasn’t that bad.

  "Allen will probably come by in the morning," Bella added. "Don’t worry about a thing. Remember that he’s just as nervous as you. Honestly, he’ll probably do anything not to mess up his chances."

  When Jane had finally regained most of her composure, her friends left in a flurry of goodbyes and final instructions about hair care and dress preservation. Jane stood in the doorway and watched them go down the street, their laughter carrying back to her on the night air one last time.

  She closed the door and leaned against it. Embarrassment lingered, threatening to mar the warmth of the moment, but she pushed it down with a monumental effort and focused on anticipation.

  A festival. With Allen. In a beautiful dress, with my hair done properly for the first time in my life.

  It was such a normal thing. Such an ordinary, small-town, completely mundane thing that she tried hard to feel like she deserved. Just a girl going to a festival with the boy she liked, surrounded by friends who cared enough to help her get ready.

  She climbed the stairs to her room, checked on the dress one more time, and fell into bed with a smile on her face.

  Tomorrow was going to be a good day.

  .

  !