“It brought me lots of friends, which isn’t a bad thing for a magician, given that the first person people look sideways at when a cow dies is the local magician,” Steen chuckled. “But I’m taking up your time, and you’re taking up my sitting room. Time for you to go back and talk to Rufous about the old bridge, among other things, and me to get back to my garden.”

The woman collected the glasses as they filed out obediently, though poor Beyrn was still clearly disturbed at the fact that magic existed at all. Abi wasn’t—but then she’d heard her brother’s and father’s stories. It wasn’t that magic didn’t exist in Valdemar; it was that there was a protective power in Valdemar that drove Mages out or drove them insane, and at the same time made it hard even to think about “real” magic for very long.

There were dozens of questions she would have loved to have had the time to ask Steen, but as he had pointed out, they were here to do things, not stand around and talk. She followed the others out, and Steen closed his door behind them.

Rufous, as it turned out, was the name of the village mayor who had greeted them with a speech they hadn’t understood, and he was delighted to have them come back and tell them about the bridge. In fact, he was delighted to show them.

On the outskirts of the village to the west was a road that led to a swiftly flowing river and continued on the other side. But where a bridge should have been was nothing but a few pilings driven into the bank.

“It washed out this spring, you know,” Rufous the mayor said sadly. “It washes out every spring, but there’s usually enough left to rebuild it. Not this time.”

Abi studied the situation from every angle. “How deep is it?” she asked.

“Deeper than it looks. Well over my head in the middle,” said Rufous, unconsciously standing up as tall as he could. “It’s a good source of tolls for the village. When it’s there, that is.”

The river ran along the bottom of a flat valley, without the sort of bank that would make it possible to build a stone bridge like the one Abi was so proud of back in Valdemar. But they probably don’t have the skilled labor, or the lifting machines that would allow them to do that either. What they need is a bridge they don’t have to keep replacing, or something that you could haul out of the way in flood-time . . . or both. Hmm. We could give them the plans for a different sort of stone bridge that they can build out of smaller stones, and while they’re building that. . .