Before I saw to the errand of the firewood I stopped to visit the seamstress.

  “Ah, the little spy.” She grinned at me. “Need a new cosplay?”

  “A couple of them.” I admitted. “A street brat garb smaller than me by at least one knot. And I want you to recreate this in my size.”

  I pulled of my own court dresses from my palace days from my messenger bag.

  “Oh.”

  “The fabric is this bolt. The under skirts this one.” I didn’t make those, Aunt Glory packed them.

  She nodded slowly, greed clearly showing on her face. The fabric was imperial quality.

  I put a pile of five gold on the counter. She smiled and nodded faster.

  “I need it by tomorrow.” I added another five gold.

  “I’m not sure…”

  “I will try to stop by later to help with straight seams. Oh. And there’s this.” I smoothed the lace pieces I’d made to match the style while I was in the convent.

  Every time we had inclement weather and couldn’t use the main yard we had to stay inside, all together, and do girly things. This was normal bobbin lace mesh with embroidery along the surface.

  She bowed her head to me. “My lady.” She went and grabbed a small copy of the street kids clothes.

  I didn’t hide that I stored them in a magic storage.

  It wasn’t difficult to find the cabinet maker. There were four in town and they all lived and worked on the same street. A quick glance into each workshop was all it took to find him.

  “I don’t do handouts from here.” The same man I had chatted with snapped. “I donate at the temple.”

  I smirked happily. “I just stopped by to thank you.” Actually it was a shame I didn’t have a reason to be secreted into the mansion in a new piece of furniture. That would be amusing.

  This guy would make a good spy delivery man.

  “Look. I found something at the market and it felt like good karma to bring it to you. I swear it was in this condition when I found it.”

  My hand was out of his sight and I was in his courtyard. I manifested a bedsheet and then the boards on top of the bedsheet. I lifted the bundle around the corner and let it clatter like it was a load I could actually carry a long distance. I flung the sheet open.

  “That is my order, isn’t it?” He looked faint.

  “Pretty sure. I bought it as firewood from pirates, but…” I shrugged. “I got a good price. Free with a purchase of something less expensive than this should have been. Can you use what’s available for your commission?”

  “I think…” he moved the boards around, turning them to see both sides. “With a little creative thinking, yes. Most definitely. What do I owe you?”

  I hesitated. Was there anything I wanted that he could provide? An apprenticeship would be fun if I planned to stay in town. But I already had a strange suspicion that I would be kidnapping an emperor.

  My best interest was to get the man holding my mother into power so she’d be free. Theoretically. I mean, if he was indebted to me…

  “You didn’t think that far ahead.” The man crossed his arms and smirked at me. “That is even more interesting than you going out of your way to fix my problem.”

  “You’re right. I didn’t. It felt… like the fates had conspired to create the entire set of circumstances.”

  “We make our own fates.” He said dryly.

  “So I have heard.” I agreed, looking around the yard. “Actually… were those runes there when you move in?”

  I pointed to the inside of the outer wall to his courtyard. Fortuitous Encounter win.

  “Yes. I mean the city had a mage inspect them some time ago and they seem to be decorative.”

  “They’re not. Do you mind…” I gestured to the wall.

  “Go ahead. Study away. You are rather an odd child.”

  “Hmm… yeah. I know.”

  I used my messenger bag as a fake bag of holding, withdrawing first my index of notebooks and then a specific notebook. This was one where I had written what I could remember of one of Bob’s library books.

  “Another freaking fortuitous encounter.” I grumbled as I matched symbol after symbol.

  I was right. It was a teleportation gateway. An incomplete one. I could clearly see where key portions of the whole had been removed. Not removed recently either. The spaces were rain worn and anyone could see it. The question in my mind was where was the power source?

  It could be an entirely useless relic, or it could be a nearly working magical machine. Of course, I had no idea where it went, but if the far end was not powered it wouldn’t go anywhere.

  The runes that should have led to a mana crystal or other power mechanism seemed for a moment to disappear into the corner of the wall, behind a carefully arranged pile of canvas and wood.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Hey. Careful. That’s the old wishing well.”

  I took a step back and eyed him quizzically.

  “I don’t think it’s really a wishing well. There’s no water at the bottom. It’s just… when this block was a city square it was a superstition. People would make a wish, usually write it on paper and then throw it in the well with an offering. Like I said, superstition.”

  “And it’s now just sitting open in your courtyard?”

  “Well… I said a mage inspected it? They bricked off the opening when they closed up the square. I just noticed one day that the closer I was to that corner the easier it was to carve my enchantments. So I removed the bricks and put that false door on it. The cloth doesn’t block the essence.”

  “Huh. Well. Might as well give it a try.”

  I pulled out the ink Vortex had given me and the widest drawing brush I had. I filled in the broken parts of the formation, carefully referencing my notebook.

  Then I pressed the activation switch.

  On some level I knew this was a ridiculous thing to do. I could end up on another continent with no way to get back.

  However what was I risking? Nobody was technically counting on me. Half the people I ever met probably thought I was dead already This could be quite the adventure.

  When the light show of teleportation finished I found myself in a dimly lit cavern which brightened perceptibly the moment I gasped in surprise.

  “I don’t believe that worked.” I hissed into the echoing room. It had some resemblance to the waterfall cavern with the tree. A nearly symbolic resemblance. There was an entrance in the wall at least three men’s height above the ground.

  The brightening light was coming from lights ringed with rune formations.

  Not only was there an active power core somewhere, it had power directly after a transport.

  I began looking around the room for details. The walls were overgrown with lightly glowing mushrooms and purple moss. Despite the foliage I could see the room had a roughly circular shape with seven alcoves spaced evenly around the center.

  I will admit that I had hoped to come across the mound of wishes and the coins and other offerings people had dropped toward the mana core. But I was most likely half a world away.

  One of the alcoves had a line or channel carved from its center to a corner of the circular central space where I had appeared.

  Once I saw it I saw it wasn’t alone. All seven of the alcoves had a groove and all seven of them ended in a sort of constellation around the room.

  Something about the shape reminded me…

  I pulled out my notebook index and quickly found the reference.

  The winter palace in xxx had a room called the map ballroom. It had seven doors and all seven had the name of other cities in the empire on them, including one that was a ruin now.

  The map was on a mosaic inlaid into the floor. It was where the princes and princesses had their debut parties at two, twelve and twenty two years old.

  Xxx was where mother and Aunt Glory were being held.

  I got on my hands and knees, clearing dirt and debris off the carvings. I compared the map on the floor to the one I had painstakingly copied from the book on the xxx palace.

  The shape of the continent was the same.

  I had labeled the cities and noted the disparity between the names on the doors and the places on the map. Two of the places nearly overlapped, and they overlapped at Melanor. Upper and Lower Melanor. One of them had been replaced on a door with a newer city of the empire.

  “Fortuitous Encounters my ass.” I muttered. I got to work inspecting runes and repairing some of them. All of the formations had been altered in the same way. The same pieces of the whole were chiseled out of the rock.

  I fixed ‘Upper Melanor’ first. While I was working I couldn’t help but notice the power line leading up. All the power lines led up.

  It took me a while to locate the maintenance door. It was hidden as well and with similar mechanisms as the hidden stairs in the house on the cliff. The stairs also had friendly glowing light formations.

  I had finally found promised pile of hundreds of years of wishing well bundles, many of which were tied with red holy string and contained one or more coins.

  Coins were not the only offerings. There were weapons, armor, tools, votive statuettes, even several fuzzy ‘teddy bears’ which looked more like anthropomorphic dragons than bears.

  A paleoanthropologist would have had a field day.

  I took it all. It filled a small corner of my very large storage space. I tried to justify my pilfering by saying I was making the stairs more accessible. The pile had long, long ago filled the lower ten stairs.

  More plausible, I was working as an adventurer and I owned what I found. Minus any guild fees and taxes- most of which I was exempt from as an hereditary Lady.

  I got to and tidied the control room. The mana crystal the size of an egg that could fit my whole current body was set in a rune formation that functioned both as a recharging chamber and as a power distribution system.

  There were dials, a lot of dark red lights and a few that I suspected shone in infrared, since they were warm to the touch. Only one shone bright orange. I wondered if that was because I had fixed both ends of the Upper Melanor formation or if it was the only warning light.

  The nice thing about the control room was that it was on the same level as the entrance. There was a window and a door. It seemed like a bank teller in a dangerous place or a subway station ticket booth.

  In fact, that’s what it pretty much had to be. A ticket booth.

  I unlocked the door, It had a simple keyless deadbolt, and put a block of actual firewood in the gap to keep it open. I stepped out onto what I expected would be a cliff. It was not a cliff. It was a terrace, a rooftop terrace with boards put across it to warn of a steep drop inside.

  The roof was half crumbled. I walked along the cliff face where it seemed most intact.

  I’m not sure what I actually expected, but I was in Melanor. I recognized the layout from looking over the cliff.

  I wanted, wanted so bad, to just go inside and straight to xxx where I could be reunited with my mother.

  “Why do I feel a sense of duty to the brat?” I muttered. “I don’t even know any of auntie’s siblings.”

  I went inside. I locked the door and checked the latch on the pull down window. I went down the stairs and activated the teleport to Upper Melanor.

  “You!”

  I felt guilty at the tone of the cabinet maker’s voice.

  “I thought for sure you fell down the well.”

  “Not exactly, no. You only owe me one thing for the damaged ebony.” I said seriously. “Access to that wall any time of the day or night, but only for the next few days.”

  “I… sure.”

  He disappeared and returned with a key on a rope loop.

  “Gate key. Doesn’t open the house or the shop, just the yard.”

  “Perfect. I will leave it on the bench if you’re out when I leave for good. In fact… I’ll tell you before you need an alibi. Do you mind covering the rune repairs with cloth? To avoid questions?”

  He looked momentarily rebellious.

  Then he took my shoulder and steered me into the shop. He closed two doors as we made our way to an inner room.

  “Who are you? What are you planning?”

  “Miranda d’Isle.” I left off dad’s name since he was dead and I wasn’t his heir anyway. “Currently known as Mira Lacer. I was palace born, my mother is lady in waiting to a daughter of the late emperor and former empress.”

  “They had three.”

  I nodded. “The youngest.”

  “Who is in the custody of the First Prince.”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m going to take the sky trolley down to a friend’s workshop. His apprentice can help me condition the least splintered pieces. You have four days before I come back. Be finished with whatever you are doing by then.”

  “I will.”

  “Fine. I will go pack a bag of holding. I will be elsewhere by dusk.”

  “Did you ever drop anything down the well?”

  He hesitated a long moment. “I don’t believe in wishes or wishing wells.”

  I went straight back to the seamstress shop where she put me to work and occasionally pinned the fabric straight to my body like a little dress form.

  We worked into the wee hours of the morning, then I took the finished dress, leaving the scraps and pieces of remaining fabric for her.

  I slept in the wood shop that night. I was carefully covering the runes in a layer of stucco. Then I tried the teleport. Worked like a charm.