Lissa’s words echoed and reechoed in Jane’s mind throughout her long walk home. Understanding what the woman had said was one thing. Accepting it was another.

  Yet Bella, Allen, Brit, Sadie, and Emily had all been very clear when they said Jane’s food was excellent. Now a professional had said it wasn’t quite as good as Jane’s friends thought it was, but still more than good enough to sell.

  It would be arrogant of Jane to buck every single opinion besides her own, especially when she had a good idea of where her bias was coming from.

  You’re not an archmage-level expert on all topics, she reminded herself firmly as she drifted off to sleep.

  She resolved to keep that in mind.

  —

  The next morning, she woke up early and tried to do some planning. There were four days to go before her date with the tinker. Jane couldn’t imagine trying to figure out a shop opening until that particular life experience was behind her. That meant she had four days of practice time left, at minimum.

  If Lissa thought Jane was ready to focus on her own personal baking, then Jane needed to figure out what she actually wanted to bake. Thankfully, this didn’t take long. All roads led to keln: the local flatbread Bella had wrapped Jane’s breakfast in for her first morning in Glenfall.

  Jane had now tasted it twice, and considered it to be possibly her favorite baked good ever. It was soft, flexible, and thick, absolutely perfect for packing almost anything in. She hadn’t seen it used for desserts, but she could easily imagine packing one with cold, fresh berries and whipped cream.

  But nobody knows how to make it, at least among the people I can ask.

  Keln was a local specialty the old owner of Jane’s bakery had brought from parts unknown, which had then been duplicated by all the other local bakers. Every non-baker agreed that there were little tricks and secrets nobody else had entirely ferreted out, and that the substitute keln was not quite as good as the real thing.

  Local politeness rules seemed to dictate that one should not go straight to one’s competitors and ask them the secrets of their trade. Even without those unspoken rules, Jane did not want second-rate keln. If there was a better version to be had, she was determined to have it.

  Neither of her books were any help on the matter, which left her with just one last avenue to pursue.

  Magic. Particularly complex, tricky magic, too. I’d better lock the doors.

  She’d only have one shot at what she had in mind. Caution had driven her to buy many more ingredients than she probably needed, ranging from conventional flour and eggs to powders and additives she had no idea how to use. On top of that, she had bought the one thing a powerful magician really couldn’t do without.

  “Ok, chalk.” She hoisted the pure, white cylinder of rock up to eye level. “We are all sealed in here. Time to do your stuff.”

  For the next few hours, she did mental math of a sort that would have left a lesser mind cross-eyed. Every aspect of the shape of the house had to be compensated for, and every bit of its construction had to be included in her calculations. The resulting pattern she drew with the chalk was a crazy thing, a rune of squiggly, often zigzagging lines that bore as much relation to an orderly spell circle as a child’s scribbles on paper did to fine poetry. Still, the pattern was right, as near as she could tell.

  With everything double-checked, she knelt near the core of the formation and put her hands down flat on the floor.

  “That which soaked this place with their presence, come forth again. Shade.”

  There were stories of people who had died attempting this spell, drawn down and emptied by the sheer magical demand of it. Jane was leaps and bounds past that being a real danger, but the act still took a lot out of her. She felt a little woozy when the spell was over, which made her glad for the supporting hand under her arm that helped her back to her feet.

  “Oh, goodie.” A woman almost exactly Jane’s height but three times her age was grinning at her like a loon, clearly delighted to see her. “I wondered if anyone would ever bring me back. It was on my list of things to do, and now you’ve done it for me. I’m Shelby, child, and I thank you.”

  Shades were not ghosts, and they were not the people they appeared to be. Rather, they were an echo in the magic of a place, an impression left by some particularly strong personalities on the space they had inhabited. With powerful reinforcements, those echoes could be made physical for a short time, even if the echo itself was used up in the process.

  Jane returned the shade’s smile. “I’m Jane.”

  “Good to meet you, Jane. If we can call this ‘meeting.’”

  “I think we can. It’s just us, anyway,” Jane pointed out. “Who could tell us no?”

  “Oh, I like you.” Shelby looked around, taking in the space. “I see you are starting to make it your own. Good. I always hoped this would be a bakery again. Are you just starting out?”

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  “I might open the doors as soon as next week. I’m getting pretty good at loaves of bread and cookies, which feels like the minimum. I can learn cakes, I think, at least simple ones. But you had something I can’t get anywhere else.”

  The shade grinned, setting off a cobweb of wonderful, happy wrinkles all across her face.

  “I really do like you,” she said. “You want keln.”

  “I do. It’s just so…” Jane looked for the word and couldn’t find it, but something about this woman told her she didn’t need to be exact with her verbiage to be understood. “Everything.”

  “Oh, I agree, dear. Let’s not waste any time, then. How much of that do we have? Time, I mean.”

  “Three or four hours.”

  “My.” Shelby nodded briskly. “Then get me a pencil. I’ll write everything down first, just in case we run out. Though we should have just enough.”

  The next few hours were a whirlwind.

  It turned out that keln was not particularly complex to make. There were some odd seasoning choices regarding particularly pungent spices that Shelby explained were optional, but otherwise, it was a lot like everything else: just a bit of flour, sugar, yeast, and salt, followed by some oil to brush the dough with.

  Shelby was a master of her own kitchen. She effortlessly controlled the temperature of the ovens, making some changes to the heat midway through the process that Jane never could have figured out on her own. When the bread was baked, Shelby pulled it out and handed a small portion to Jane while eating a bit herself. She hummed in satisfaction as she chewed the soft bread, clearly enjoying this aspect of her false return to life above all others.

  Jane was glad. It was always a gamble bringing people back. Often, they were not the nicest, no matter how well-remembered they seemed to be.

  This time, Jane had won the wager. Shelby was simply wonderful.

  “You look disappointed, Jane.” Shelby smiled. “And I bet you the rest of this bread I can tell you why.”

  “It’s a bet. Why?”

  “Because this is normal keln. Any number of people around town can do it just as well. It’s not mine, so it’s not special, and you can tell.”

  “You won your bread.” Jane poured the shade a small cup of tea and moved it towards her. Shades could eat, though nobody could really say what food did for them or where it went when they disappeared. “So what’s the secret?”

  “The yeast. This yeast is the packaged kind. They make it in big vats a few towns away and send it here dried. It works just fine for most things, but for keln, you want yeast from here. From Glenfall. Something alive that carries its own flavor. It gives the bread a bit of tang.”

  “So… what? I use some of the other town’s yeast on flour, and keep it alive?”

  “No, no. We’ll start from scratch. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”

  Shelby took a bit of flour from a bag and put it in a jar. She mixed in some good clean water to form a paste, then covered the jar with a clean white cloth.

  Jane watched, fascinated. “That’s it?”

  “In a way, yes. The yeast live in the air, and they eat flour. They’ll find it, and soon that whole jar will be alive. That’s your start. But the yeast get better the longer you keep the same supply alive. After twenty years, that little jar will be special. Of course, you’ll want to give it a bigger home, eventually.”

  Jane lifted the jar doubtfully. It was, after all, just flour-water.

  “Trust me, dear,” Shelby assured her. “Just a pinch will do. Now, I want to thank you again for bringing me here. As I said, it was always a bit of a dream of mine, and you made it perfect.”

  The woman brought a wrinkled hand to Jane’s face and rested it there, warm and comforting.

  “I’m glad it’s you that took this place over for me. No matter what happens, know that I said you are welcome here.”

  The warmth on Jane’s cheek started to fade, along with the shade’s form.

  “One last thing, dear. Is there a boy?” The shade had seconds left. It was spending them on this question. “A nice one, I hope?”

  Jane felt herself blushing. “Yes. I think so.”

  “Good.” Shelby smiled at her one last time. “I approve.”

  —

  After the shade was gone, Jane had to lie down. She used just enough energy to crawl into the light of the window like a cat, then fell asleep right on the wood floor, waking up only once the sun had moved enough to leave her in the cold again.

  When she did finally get up, food was on her mind. She took what was left of the keln and stuffed it with a sausage, some fresh tomato and lettuce slices, and a simple salty condiment Bella had recommended. Once it was loaded up, she ate it without delay.

  Magic took a lot out of a person. There was really no way to get it back outside of eating, sleeping, and not doing any more magical things until the tanks refilled.

  The nourishment from the keln, meat, and veggies flowed through Jane in an almost tangible way. Just a few minutes later, she was functionally and physically whole, if not magically so.

  She looked down at her jar of future yeast affectionately, wondering where to put it.

  To discourage little crawlies from growing on things, we keep them very hot or very cold. I guess I want this jar sort of warmish, most of the time. How do I do that?

  Her eyes were drawn to a high shelf on the same wall as the ovens. It had always been a bit odd to her, as shelf-placements went. It was a bit higher than was convenient to reach if she was going to store oven-related tools there, and a bit lower than she would have made true-out-of-the-way storage.

  Now that she had the jar in her hand and memories of Shelby firmly in mind, she could easily guess the shelf’s purpose. It was for keeping the yeast warm by means of the nearby heat of the ovens, encouraging its growth and preventing it from freezing to death on cold nights.

  A slight frown creased Jane’s brow as she looked again at the jar. There were just enough spells in her repertoire that discouraged the growth of tiny life to give her a working idea of how long it would take her flour-and-water to get started the old-fashioned way. And she knew she didn’t have that kind of time.

  She did know one spell that encouraged such growth, a sort of parlor-trick spell that got passed around in books of forbidden spells every year. The spells were not really forbidden, of course. Broadly speaking, they were just stupid.

  Now, though, one of them just might come in handy.

  Jane whipped up another batch of keln, pleased at how short the baking time was on a product she planned to make a lot of eventually. By the time it was done, she had recovered enough magic to juice the jar with a little bit of power.

  Jane liked spells with chants, and this wasn’t one. It was an intention spell, the kind of magical working where you put your wants into the air, just by feeling them. Then you hoped the magic in the world would respond to your desires.

  In this case, it almost certainly would. Magic loved life. Jane wasn’t a healer-type mage, and never would be, but it wasn’t hard to give a gentle push to magic’s already strong desire to promote life.

  For a few minutes, she focused invisible forces on a task beyond even her understanding, swirling magic and a desire for yeasty goodness around the bottle. Then she set the jar on the high shelf and glanced at the light coming through the window.

  “I’ve done all I can do with that for the moment,” she said aloud to the empty room. “Feels like time for a break.”