The Far West (25 page)

“Why not?” I said cheerfully. “I think I saw him over by the storage cellar. Let’s go.”

We had no trouble finding Adept Alikaket. Explaining what we wanted was a little harder, because it was really Lan who wanted something, and he’d gone all tongue-tied and reluctant to talk. William and I had a silent agreement not to let him out of it, though, and after a few false starts we finally got through an explanation of the whole sorry mess.

Adept Alikaket’s face didn’t twitch a muscle the whole time we were talking, yet somehow he looked more and more stern as we went on. Oddly enough, the adept’s disapproval made Lan more willing to talk, and he took over the story in the middle. Once he started talking, he didn’t hold back or leave anything out.

“And you expect this story to persuade me to teach you?” Adept Alikaket said when Lan finished.

Lan flushed. “Not … exactly. I just … if there was something that would have made a difference …”

“Many things could have been done differently. Knowing them won’t make your guilt less.” The adept studied Lan, his face impassive. “If you continue to reach past your ability, you’ll only create new disasters.”

I could see Lan starting to get a mad on again, so I asked, “Excuse me, but what does that mean?”

“Cathayan magic is beyond you,” Adept Alikaket said bluntly, holding Lan’s gaze. “You cannot learn it, and if you keep trying, the best you can hope for is that only you yourself will be killed or injured.”

“
What
? Why? You’re teaching William —”

“You don’t have the ability.” The adept held up a hand to keep Lan from interrupting. “I see I should have explained more completely before. You are the seventh son of a seventh son.”

Lan nodded warily.

“Your personal magic is very strong,” Adept Alikaket went on. “Too strong. To learn Cathayan magic, one must be at one with the magic that is oneself. This, you cannot do without being buried under the mountain that is your power.”

“There have to have been double-sevens born in the Cathayan Confederacy,” William said. “You teach them, don’t you?”

“No.” We all stared, incredulous, and the adept sighed. “The double-sevens can learn the exterior part of the way of boundless balance, the movements, but they can’t master the interior part. Their magic is too much.”

“I’d still like to try,” Lan said stubbornly. “Maybe it’s different for Avrupans.”

“I won’t help you to destroy yourself,” Adept Alikaket said flatly.

“Even just the theory —”

“No. For your Avrupan magic, there is distance between the theory and the practice; for Cathayan magic, there is not.
You’ve shown yourself headstrong and ambitious. I won’t tempt you to further foolishness. Be content with the power you have. It’s more than enough to bring you fame and honor if you use it well.”

With that, Adept Alikaket nodded to us and strode off. We stood looking at each other for a minute. Then Lan kicked at the ground and muttered, “It’s not fame and honor I’m after!”

“No?” I said, raising my eyebrows.

“No!” Lan glared when I still looked skeptical. “All right, maybe that’s part of it, but what I
want
is to do something big. Just to have done it. Something nobody else can do.” He kicked at the ground again. “Nobody else thinks that way. They have all these things that they want me to do because I’m a double-seven, but it’s all just more powerful calming spells, wider-ranging protection spells — the same things everybody does, just a bit stronger and better. There has to be
something
that only a double-seven can do!”

“Like the Great Barrier Spell,” I said without thinking.

“Exactly! Only I don’t have another double-seven to work with, like Benjamin Franklin did.”

“Benjamin Franklin was seventy-two when he did the working for the Great Barrier Spell,” I pointed out. “And Thomas Jefferson was thirty-five. You’re only twenty-two.”

Lan made a face at me. “If I just wait around, nothing will happen. There’ve been five double-sevens in the United States since Thomas Jefferson, and none of them has done anything special. I have to get started.”

“You’re just impatient,” I said. “Right, William?”

“Hmm?” William had been staring after Adept Alikaket with a frown of concentration on his face. “I’m sorry — what were you saying?”

“What has you off woolgathering?”

William’s frown deepened. “I was thinking about something Adept Alikaket said. About theory and practice and Hijero-Cathayan magic.” He hesitated. “I don’t think he’s right. At least, not all the way.”

Lan looked up, his face suddenly alight with hope. “William! You can tell me what he’s been teaching you!”

“What do you mean, he isn’t right?” I asked at almost the same moment.

“It’s that thing about there being a distance between theory and practice in Avrupan magic, but not in Cathayan magic,” William told me, ignoring Lan. “It’s the way he sees things, but —”

“— there’s always another way to look at it,” I chimed in, and grinned.

“What is going on with you two?” Lan demanded, looking from William to me and back.

“It’s part of how you need to look at things when you’re doing Aphrikan magic,” I said. “Miss Ochiba taught us some of it in our very first magic class in day school, back before she was Professor Ochiba.”

“I remember that speech,” Lan said after frowning for a second. “But what does that have to do with Adept Alikaket and Cathayan magic?”

“I’m not sure,” William said. “But I don’t think he tries
very hard to see things more than one way. Maybe that’s what you have to do in order to be a Cathayan magician, but …”

I nodded. “The one time we talked about it, he was very sure that Cathayan magic is completely different from Avrupan or Aphrikan magic. But they all feel the same to me, underneath. It’s just different ways of making the magic do things, really.”

The other two stared at me. “Underneath?” Lan asked finally.

“When I do Aphrikan world-sensing.” I looked at William. “You know, the way magic feels, down under all the spells and the little differences because of where it came from.”

“No,” William said slowly, “I don’t know. I don’t sense anything like that when I do the world-sensing.”

We all stared at each other again. “I think we should go somewhere and talk about this,” Lan said after a minute. So we did.

By the time we finished, Lan and William had gotten everything out of me and then some — the dreams, the way I’d used Aphrikan magic to tweak my Avrupan spells for so long, the way I’d been able to tweak Lan’s spells when we were taking the mammoth up to the study center, even some of the spells and techniques I’d learned from the pendant. There was a lot more of it than I’d thought, when you piled it all up in one spot like that, and both of them were annoyed that I hadn’t told them any of it before.

“It didn’t seem important,” I said. They gave me identical exasperated looks. “It didn’t! Especially since it didn’t happen all at once.”

“Can you show us?” Lan asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “Not the dreams, of course. I’m not sure about the pendant — I’ll have to ask Wash. But I can show you the tweaking, at least.”

Right about then, Mrs. Wilson rang the dinner bell, so there wasn’t time for any demonstrations. Next day, we got together again, and I showed them what I’d done to tweak my Avrupan spells. Or at least, I tried to show them. Neither one of them could tell what I was doing at first, not even William with all his world-sensing going. All they could see was that I’d cast a spell that had almost gone wrong, but then had steadied and settled and gone right after all.

It took William nearly two weeks just to see what I was doing. It was even harder for Lan, because he’d never learned any Aphrikan magic except for a little theory. All of us got frustrated, but we kept at it. I couldn’t help wondering if it had something to do with the pendant, and I resolved to ask Wash about that, too, once we were all finished getting ready for winter and had more time to spend investigating things.

Winter sort of eased its way in that year. About a week after that first snowstorm, it warmed up and everything melted. It didn’t keep the Southerners from complaining, though. We had a few days of gray, dry weather to fill in cracks in the longhouse, and then we got more snow. The first real blizzard didn’t hit until mid-December, trapping everyone indoors for a day and a half straight. We got a foot of snow, and two of the tents that people still had set up collapsed.

That storm moved most of the holdouts into the longhouse, though Wash and Mr. Zarbeliev stayed in tents until
January, when it got cold enough that Mr. Corvales’s thermometer froze. With nearly everyone inside, the longhouse was dark and crowded; sometimes it seemed that you could hardly move without poking someone or having to step over someone’s feet. Wash and Mr. Zarbeliev were circuit magicians, used to being out in wild territory all on their own. Neither one of them cared much for towns or cities, even, and I didn’t think it was odd that they didn’t want to be cheek-by-jowl with all of us in the longhouse. For myself — well, I didn’t much care for the crowding, but being warm made up for it.

I finally got the chance to talk to Wash right before Christmas. I told him everything Lan and William and I had been doing. I asked about showing them the pendant, too, as I didn’t feel I could actually let Lan and William study it directly without getting his permission. Wash got real thoughtful, but all he said was “Does Miss Maryann know what you all are up to?”

“I was going to talk to her next,” I told him. “If you say it’s all right.”

“Some things you can’t tell about, going in,” Wash said. “You just have to take your chances. But I won’t be raising any objections, if that’s your worry.”

I thanked him and went off to find Professor Ochiba. She didn’t seem surprised when I told her about the pendant, but she frowned when I told her about tweaking my spells, and she made me go over everything else very carefully. Then she looked even more thoughtful than Wash had. Finally, she said, “It appears that the three of you have stumbled into something, though whether it’s something big or a dead end remains to be
seen. I think you’d best go on as you’ve begun, but do keep me informed.”

“You and Wash and Professor Torgeson,” I said, nodding.

“Not Adept Alikaket?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “He is, after all, the head of the magical section of this expedition, and this project most definitely falls into that category.”

“It’s not really for the expedition, though,” I said. “It’s personal. And anyway, I don’t think Adept Alikaket much wants to look at things different ways. Or maybe it’s that Cathayan magic is so big and complicated that he hasn’t got room to see it from different angles. I don’t know enough about it to say for sure.”

Professor Ochiba gave me a small smile. “Possibly,” she said, and let me go.

So Lan and William and I kept getting together whenever we could. We didn’t have a lot of time, to begin with. For the first few weeks of winter, all the scientists and magicians and survey people worked on organizing and tidying up all the notes we’d made since September, and all three of us were very busy. It was a slow process, because we didn’t want to waste paper — we had a long way yet to go, and we couldn’t get more if we ran out. The soldiers mended their personal gear and checked over the harnesses and saddles and wagon wheels to see if anything needed fixing or replacing.

After the first month, most of the urgent work was finished, and Mr. Corvales set up a sort of school for anyone who was interested in trading knowledge. It started off with Dr. Visser showing off his plant samples and then teaching everyone the basic spells he used to figure out whether or not people and
animals could eat them. It was a lot more complicated than I’d thought. Some of the plants were fine for bison and mammoths, but they’d poison a person or a horse or a saber cat; others were only safe to eat once they’d been boiled. Then other people offered to teach whatever they were good at, from whittling to specialized cooking spells, and Lan and William and I finally had time to meet up more than once a week.

The other thing that happened once the work slowed was that a lot of the soldiers and survey men started hanging around the end of the longhouse where all of us women slept. The first time one of them tried to flirt with me, I was so surprised that I dropped the cup of coffee I was holding. Luckily, Sergeant Amy was standing right there; she laughed at him and sent him about his business. Then she took me aside and taught me a few things to say if I wanted them to leave, and a couple more things to do in case somebody wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was a lot more useful than Rennie’s nonsense about “taking care.”

I didn’t need any extreme measures, because all of the men on the expedition were pretty cheerful about leaving when we asked them to. Cheerful, but persistent; they left, but they kept coming back. Elizabet and Bronwyn took to going everywhere together, and Mrs. Wilson threatened to smack some of the men with the cooking ladle, as if they were two-year-olds.

The only one who wasn’t bothered at all was Professor Torgeson, and that was because the first time somebody tried to flirt with her, she ripped strips off him, up one side and down the other, right in front of the whole camp. Everybody looked a bit stunned, even Dr. Lefevre, who usually wasn’t
impressed by much of anything, and after that all the men were very careful not to even look like they were thinking about taking any liberties.

Round about the last week in December, Lan came around and asked me a little awkwardly if the men were giving me any trouble. It took me a few minutes to figure out what he was on about, and then I could only shake my head.

“It took you this long to notice that the boys have been getting restless?” I asked him. Sergeant Amy called the soldiers “the boys,” and I’d picked up the habit from her.

“What? You mean they really have been … been making improper advances?” Lan sounded horrified, as much by having to say something like that to his sister as by the idea itself.

“It’s only a bit of flirting,” I told him. “And it started months ago, really. It’s just been getting more noticeable since there’s less to do.”