Thirteenth Child (23 page)

“Thank you kindly,” I said. “But I could do with an explanation along with it.”

“Near as I can see, you’ve been storing up magic like a squirrel storing nuts for winter,” Wash told me. “But you’ve also been most carefully not using any of it, so it’s been building up awhile. The more you store up, the harder it is to keep from overflowing, and when it starts overflowing without any control, well, it can get in the way of most other types of magic nearby. That—” he nodded at the polished wood piece “—will help drain off some of that extra power you’ve been hoarding, the way a lightning rod earths lightning to make no harm.”

I closed my fingers tight around the wood. “Thank you,” I said with a lot more warmth than I had put into the first one.

Wash’s eyes narrowed. “It’s a temporary measure,” he warned. “You’ll be needing to do some work on your own if you want to straighten things out permanent-like.”

I nodded, only half hearing him. As long as it kept me from causing problems with the spells Papa and Lan cast, temporary help was good enough for me. I made a loop with the cord and slipped it over my head, so that the wooden charm hung lightly against my chest.

And for the first time in a long time, I had a faint, shaky feeling of hope.

CHAPTER 25

O
UR SECOND DAY OF TRAVEL WASN’T MUCH DIFFERENT FROM THE
first, for me. I sat with Papa and Mr. Harrison mostly in silence while we drove the wagon across the bare dirt that ought to have been meadows and hay fields and woods. Every so often, Papa or Mr. Harrison would remark on something, but they never got much of a talk going even when I did my best to keep up my part. Everyone else was on horseback, and from what little I overheard, they were having plenty of interesting conversation. I decided right then that no matter what Mama said about being a lady, I wasn’t ever getting stuck sitting in a wagon again if all the interesting people were going to be riding.

What with the lack of talking, I spent most of the ride fingering the wooden charm Wash had given me. I was glad that someone else had seen my problem, and gladder still to have something to fix it, but on the whole, if I’d had my druthers, I’d rather that William had been right about it being all in my head.

The little wooden pendant was warm and comforting under my fingers. Wash had said something about it draining off the excess magic. I decided that if I could figure out how the spell worked, maybe I could drain off more than just extra magic. Maybe I could get rid of all of it. I thought about asking Wash to show me the spell he’d used, but I had a pretty good idea that he’d ask questions, and he wouldn’t like my answers.

That gave me pause. If I was that sure that Wash would think my idea was a bad one, I figured I should think about it a lot more before I actually did anything. Maybe I should just join the Rationalists, since they didn’t use magic at all. I put the pendant away, but all the rest of the ride I kept touching it, just to make sure it was still there.

We stopped that night at another wagonrest, a few hours short of the Oak River settlement. Lan and William were full of all the interesting stories Wash had been telling, which only made me crosser than ever. After dinner, Mr. Harrison started talking about what steps we should take when we got to the settlement the next day. He wanted to dive right in poking around for the old settlement spells, and he didn’t take it kindly when Professor Jeffries told him that the Rationalists would likely throw us straight out again if we did any such thing.

Finally even Papa got exasperated, and said that if Mr. Harrison went on like that, we might just as well have brought Professor Graham along after all, begging William’s pardon, for Mr. Harrison was like as not going to upset the Rationalists every bit as much as Professor Graham would have done, just for different reasons. William sort of choked, trying not to laugh. Lan did laugh, though he apologized very nicely. Mr. Harrison scowled, but before he could start up again, Wash spoke up.

“There’s times when too much hurrying makes for more delay,” he said. “I’m thinking this is one of them. It’s true we need to know how the Oak River settlement is keeping clear of those beetles, and we need to know soon—they’ll be coming out any day now, if they follow the same timing as last year. But I’ve stopped by Oak River a time or two on my way back to Mill City, just for curiosity’s sake, and Professor Jeffries isn’t far off in his guesses.”

“Surely the importance of this expedition has been made clear to them,” Mr. Harrison said, looking at Papa as if he was sure it was Papa’s fault if it hadn’t.

Wash shook his head. “Those folks aren’t just standoffish when it comes to magicians. They purely dislike them. I’m frankly surprised they agreed to this study at all, let alone as fast as they did. I doubt it’d take much for them to change their minds.”

“And we can’t afford to take that chance,” Papa said firmly. “If you won’t recognize that, Mr. Harrison, we’ll leave you here tomorrow morning and pick you up on our way back in a few days.”

“You can’t do that!” Mr. Harrison spluttered.

“I can and I will,” Papa said. “You don’t seem to realize that this trip was not organized with the backing of the Settlement Office, nor is it sponsored by the Northern Plains Riverbank College. Officially, this is simply a family visit. You can complain to whomever you like when we get back to Mill City, and much good may it do you, but there’s nothing anywhere that says I’m obligated to let you ride along on my wagon when I’m going to visit my daughter.”

“There’s always walking,” Wash added in a thoughtful tone. “The Rationalists do it all the time, though usually not alone. It’s easier to hold off an angry bear or a pack of Columbian sphinxes if you’ve got more than one rifle in use.”

Mr. Harrison paled. He sputtered some more, but in the end he had no choice but to agree with what Papa said. Lan frowned, and later on I heard him tell William that if Mr. Harrison tried to change his mind after we got to Oak River, Lan was going to put a laryngitis spell on him. I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea, but I was glad that somebody else had thought to wonder whether Mr. Harrison would keep his promises.

Next morning, we started off again. We passed several more tinytowns surrounded by bare land. One of them sent a man out to find out who we were; when he heard that Papa and Professor Jeffries were magicians, he pretty near got down on his knees and begged them for help. Professor Jeffries told him they weren’t miracle workers, and Papa said that as soon as they had an answer, they’d let everyone know, but until then, there wasn’t anything they could do. Mr. Harrison didn’t say anything, but he kept looking at Lan. Nobody said much for a good while after that.

Around mid-morning, I started seeing little clumps of dead grass and weeds every so often, instead of just bare dirt. Shortly after, the clumps came closer together, and then some of them started being green. The wagon ride got bumpy, and then transformed again as the plants got bigger and smoothed out into a meadow. “We must be getting close,” Mr. Harrison said.

Papa nodded. A minute later, Lan shouted from up ahead that he could see the Rationalist settlement, and Papa pulled the wagon to a halt.

“What is it?” Mr. Harrison asked.

“Mr. Morris!” Papa called to Wash. “Would you say this is a reasonable distance?”

“It’ll make them happier than it makes me,” Wash said. “But you’re right to say we shouldn’t go much farther.”

“What are you talking about?” Mr. Harrison demanded.

Papa ignored him. “Jeffries! The settlement’s in sight. Time to shut down.”

Professor Jeffries nodded and took out the gold disc that he’d used to do the protective spells for us that morning. He breathed on it, muttering, and I felt the spells around us collapse and fade away. I shivered, knowing that if there was any wildlife nearby, it could come straight for us now, and we wouldn’t even know until it was close enough to see.

“What are you
doing
?” Mr. Harrison said.

“Canceling the protective spells,” Papa said. “It’s part of their settlement contract—anyone visiting has to forgo magic while they’re on settlement land.” Which Mr. Harrison ought to have known, him being head of the Settlement Office, but from the look on his face, he hadn’t bothered to check before he came on the trip. I frowned. What else didn’t he know about?

Mr. Harrison opened his mouth, looked at Papa, and closed it again. Papa nodded to Professor Jeffries and set the horses moving. Half an hour later, we reached the settlement.

The Oak River settlement was on top of a hill with a palisade of logs around it, like most of the other settlements we’d seen, but the resemblance ended there. At the other settlements, the palisade was more of a tall fence made of branches woven together. It wasn’t meant for serious protection; it was just an anchor for the settlement magician’s spells.

This palisade was a double wall of logs sharpened to a point on top and then sunk half their length into the ground. The inner wall rose a good fifteen feet higher than the outer one, and there was a gap between them large enough that nothing could climb to the top of the first wall and jump from there to the second. Two log watchtowers stood at opposite ends of the compound, with the national and territory flags flying over each one. Around the outside of the outer wall, about thirty feet from the base of the logs, the hill had been carved away to make the slope steeper.

Professor Jeffries nodded in approval. “Good work. I think those walls would even stop a mammoth stampede.”

“They wouldn’t stop a steam dragon,” Lan pointed out.

“Very few steam dragons come this far east,” Professor Jeffries replied.

“It’d only take one.”

William was studying the settlement with a thoughtful expression. “They probably have some other way to handle steam dragons,” he said. “They’d have plenty of warning, with those towers.”

They had plenty of warning of other things, too. By the time we got to the settlement, the gate was open and two men were waiting for us. One of them was Brant Wilson. The other man was older, but he still looked familiar. It took me a minute before I remembered—Toller Lewis, the president of the Long Lake City Rationalists, who’d come with Brant to see Papa the first time, all those years ago. I was more than a little surprised that such an important person had chosen to be a settler.

Papa pulled the wagon to a halt next to them. Mr. Lewis stepped forward. “Welcome to Oak River, Professor Rothmer,” he said.

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Lewis,” Papa replied just as formally.

Brant looked at Papa and hesitated a second before he said, “Yes, welcome.”

Papa nodded at him, and the awkward moment passed over. First I was a little surprised that that was all there was to it, and then I was surprised that I’d expected anything else. After all, it’d been five years, and Papa wasn’t one to carry a grudge, especially when he’d recorded Rennie’s marriage and childings in the family Bible. Brant would probably never be his favorite son-in-law, but done was done. Papa went right on and introduced the rest of us. When the introductions got to Wash, he and Mr. Lewis gave each other a little nod, and I remembered Wash saying he’d stopped at the settlement a time or two on his way back to Mill City.

When everyone had finished their rather stiff greetings, Mr. Lewis offered to show us around before we went along to Brant and Rennie’s house. We started off as soon as we’d stabled the horses. Unlike most settlements, Oak River didn’t have an open paddock for visitors’ livestock. Everything was covered, and after a minute I figured out why—it was because in a normal settlement, the protective spells kept the flying wildlife off, but here, folks would be taking a big chance if they left everything open. I remembered Lan’s comment about steam dragons and shivered. It was all I could do not to keep looking up at the sky every other minute.

Inside, the Oak River settlement was as different from the other settlements as it had been from the outside. For one thing, it looked scruffier, almost makeshift. The buildings were smaller, shorter, and farther apart, and all of them had dirt heaped up around the walls nearly to the roofline. William asked if they’d started as dugouts, but Brant shook his head.

“No—they’re deeper and more purposeful than that. Uncle Lewis studied the reports on the western wildlife, then decided we should store most of our critical goods underground. The burrowing beasts are fewer and easier to keep out, for the most part.”

“Rather like the storm cellars they build down in the Middle Plains Territories,” Professor Jeffries said.

“Like them, but larger,” Brant said, nodding. “Every home and store has at least one full room underneath it; most have more.” He grinned. “Digging them out was no picnic, let me tell you!”

“They’re well worth it,” Mr. Lewis added. “We’ve been glad of them a time or two already. And if we had a major disaster—if a woolly rhinoceros came through the palisade or a tornado smashed the part of the settlement that’s above ground—we’d have a lean year or two, but we wouldn’t lose all our tools and supplies, and we’d have safe places to live while we rebuilt.”

It kept on like that the whole time they were showing us around, with Brant answering most of the questions and his uncle chiming in every now and then. Everyone except me and Wash and Mr. Harrison asked lots of questions, and Brant seemed to get more and more cheerful the more of them he answered. You could see that he was proud enough of the settlement to bust his buttons off, and didn’t get near as much chance to brag on it as he’d have liked.

I thought it was all very interesting, but I didn’t need to ask questions because Papa and Professor Jeffries and the boys were asking plenty enough without me. Wash didn’t say much, but he was studying everything in a way that made me wonder if he was
looking
at things. It bothered me at first, that he’d use Aphrikan magic, even just world-sensing, when the Rationalists made such a point of no one doing any magic on their allotment. Then I remembered the little nod he and Mr. Lewis had given each other, and I wondered if maybe Wash didn’t have some arrangement of his own. After all, he’d been here before.

Just about the time I thought that, a woman in a plain stuff dress and deep bonnet came out of one of the buildings and stopped short, staring at us. First she looked surprised. Then her eye lit on Wash and her expression turned dark. She gave him a good glare, then glared at everyone else for good measure, ending with Mr. Lewis. “So you did it after all,” she said to him. “For shame!”

“Morning, Mrs. Stewart,” Mr. Lewis said, though I noticed he didn’t wish her a
good
morning.

Mrs. Stewart ignored the greeting. “Magicians!” She said it the way some of Mama’s church lady friends said “saloons” or “actors,” like she was cross that the word even existed for her to have to say. “Magicians, in Oak River! It’s a scandal, that’s what it is, and it’s all your fault. I told you how it would be when you first gave in to that nephew of yours.” She looked at Brant and sniffed.

Brant’s lips tightened. Mr. Lewis gave him a sharp look, then turned his attention back to the woman. “The settlement council agreed to this visit, Mrs. Stewart,” he said.

“You’ve always been lax, Toller, and I make no bones about saying so,” the woman went on. “I’ve half a mind to report you to the national headquarters. We’ll see what
they
have to say about all this.”