Across the Great Barrier

by Patricia C. Wrede

  I didn’t get much written. I’d been asleep longer than I’d thought, and before I’d written out more than three polite replies, Miriam and Frank were knocking at the door to take me back to the hospital to see Lan.

  The fresh air felt good, and without thinking too much about it, I relaxed and started world-sensing. Philadelphia was a busy, bustling city, much larger and with more variety than Mill City, and I wished I could have seen more of it under better circumstances. The walk to the hospital was much too short.

  When we reached Lan’s room, Frank opened the door for me. I hesitated at the threshold. Nothing had really changed since morning except maybe the angle of the shadows. Mama looked up, and I stepped into the room.

  Something heated and thumped hard against my chest, like a spark thrown from a fire when a chestnut pops. I yelped in surprise and fell forward.

  CHAPTER

  21

  FRANK CAUGHT MY ARM TO STEADY ME. “WATCH YOUR STEP!” HE said, and I could tell that he hadn’t noticed anything unusual except me tripping over the threshold. I shook my head, partly to clear it and partly because I didn’t see how anyone could not notice that something was wrong. The whole room felt sick and smoky green, like something nasty had gotten burned in the fireplace, and suddenly I knew why I’d felt so tired and dizzy when I left the hospital earlier.

  I moved closer to the bed, wondering how long I could stand to stay. Papa made room for me. Mama had the only chair, and she was still holding Lan’s good hand. I leaned over to stroke my brother’s hair. I could feel his magic, sputtering and popping like water dropped on a hot iron pan. It was as crooked as ever any of my Avrupan spells had been, and without thinking I shoved at it a little to get it back in place, the way I’d been shoving at my spell work for the past two years.

  Lan made a whimpering noise. Mama jerked and clutched his hand. “Lan?”

  He didn’t respond. His magic was still crooked and sputtering, though maybe not quite so much as it had been a minute before. I started to shove at it again, but I remembered the canning jar I’d melted back at Professor Torgeson’s office, and decided I’d best not try too much of that. I didn’t know what to try instead, though. All I knew was that Lan’s magic needed straightening out, and right away.

  Frank and Papa leaned forward, but neither of them so much as glanced at me. I realized that they hadn’t noticed what I’d done, any more than my teachers at the upper school had ever seen that I was using Aphrikan magic alongside my Avrupan spells. They only saw the results.

  I brushed my fingers through Lan’s hair again, wondering what I could do. It never occurred to me to say anything to Frank or the other doctors. They’d had a week, and Frank had told us they’d tried pretty much everything they could think of. All the Avrupan spells, anyway.

  I found myself wishing that Wash was there, even though I’d never once seen him do any healing. In fact, the only really major magic I’d seen him do was when he got Daybat Creek flowing past the landslide. I remembered him trying to explain to Professor Torgeson how he’d done it. Aphrikan magic works from the inside, I thought. But how do you get inside a person?

  The hot spark at the indent of my chest got hotter. I reached out with a tiny trickle of magic, the smallest I could manage, and poked at Lan with it like I was trying to get his attention. I felt a reaction in my magic, even though Lan didn’t stir a bit on the bed. I poked again and pointed, picturing in my head how everything was supposed to feel, especially where the crooked bits needed to come straight.

  Slowly, I felt Lan’s magic start to move. I made encouraging noises in my mind, though I didn’t think Lan could hear. It went faster and faster, like the water soaking into the dam at Daybat Creek. I held my breath.

  And then I felt everything click into place, like setting the very last piece into a puzzle. Lan’s magic stopped popping and sputtering, and the hot ember on my chest faded away to nothing. The sick, smoky feeling in the room began to fade, too, like someone had opened a window and let in a breeze.

  I looked around. Nobody else had noticed anything, not even Frank. I thought that was more than a little odd, since he was a magical doctor as well as a medical one. Then I thought about saying something about what I’d done, but I decided not to. It didn’t seem to have made much difference, and I was pretty sure that Mama and Papa would fuss at me for interfering if they knew.

  An hour later, Lan stirred. “Lan?” Mama said.

  “He’s — I have to get someone,” Frank said, and practically ran out of the room. He came back a few minutes later with another doctor, and right away they shooed all of us back to the waiting room. Mama was quite cross about it; if she hadn’t been so worried and tired, she’d have given them a piece of her mind.

  After a long while, Frank came out, looking hopeful for the first time in days. “Lan’s doing a lot better,” he said.

  “Is he awake?” Mama asked.

  “Not yet,” Frank said, and he didn’t sound like he was hedging or trying to be optimistic. “Probably not for a while. But he’s responding to the healing spells and — well, it’s too soon to say, still. But he’s improving.”

  “I want to see him!”

  “We can come back in the morning, Mama,” Frank said, and Papa agreed.

  We all went back to the hotel in a much more hopeful frame of mind. As I changed for bed, I thought about the hospital and Lan’s magic, wondering all over again whether I ought to tell someone that I’d poked it until it went back into place. I bent over the washbasin and caught sight of myself in the standing mirror.

  There was a round, red mark on my chest, about three inches below my collarbone. It looked like a burn. I straightened up, and the little wooden pendant I always wore, the one that Wash had given me almost two years before, dropped into place on top of it.

  I stared at it in the mirror for a minute, then slowly lifted the cord over my head. I dangled it in front of me, staring. I almost expected it to look charred, or maybe to suddenly start glowing, but it just hung there, a plain, polished whorl of wood the size of a robin’s egg, with a hole at one side for the cord.

  Staring at the pendant wasn’t going to tell me anything new. It certainly wasn’t going to tell me why it had heated up enough to leave a burn on my chest when I walked into Lan’s hospital room that second time. I hung it back around my head, knotting the cord shorter so the wood wouldn’t rub against the little burn. As soon as I’d finished washing, I turned down the lamp, climbed into bed, and started the Hijero-Cathayan concentration exercise.

  It had been a while since I’d practiced, so it took me a lot longer than I wanted to get into the floaty state of mind that told me I was doing the concentration exercise properly. By the time I did, I was half asleep, but I made myself focus on the wooden pendant, and once again, the spells came clear.

  The first thing I noticed was that the spells had changed from what I remembered. I was so surprised that I lost my focus and my concentration both, and had to start over, but at least being surprised woke me up a little.

  When I got back on track, I studied the change more carefully. It wasn’t as big a difference as I’d thought. The magic of the pendant was layered. The older magic curled into a knot in the indent, while the rest of the spells wrapped tightly around them. I still couldn’t tell exactly what any of the spells were, but it was plain as day that what had changed was the magic in the outermost layer.

  Very cautiously, I poked at the changed places. It was like poking a walnut; nothing happened, except that I got a better sense of the changes. They felt familiar — a little like Lan’s magic, a little like Mama’s … and then it hit me. All the changes felt like my magic.

  Without thinking, I sat up in bed, yanked the pendant off, and threw it across the room. I stared into the darkness, breathing like I’d been running and thinking about everything I’d ever thought I knew about that pendant. After a long time, I fished it out from behind the dresser where it had fallen. I still didn’t k
now what it did, but Wash had given it to me, and I trusted Wash. Trust or not, though, I was tired of not understanding, and so I was determined to study it some more. I didn’t put it on; I just held it in my hands while I did the concentration exercise again.

  This time, I tried to look at the other layers of magic, the ones that didn’t feel like mine. Sure enough, each and every one of them felt different. And the magic in the next layer down from mine felt like Wash’s.

  I studied the pendant for a good long time. None of the other magic felt like anyone I knew, which wasn’t too surprising. Wash said he’d had the pendant since he was three or four, and I wasn’t likely to have met anyone who’d worn it before he had. Most of the early spells seemed to be Aphrikan magic of one kind or another; there was hardly any Avrupan magic at all until the last couple of layers, and most of the Avrupan-type magic was in the layers that went with me and Wash. That made sense, too, if the magician who’d originally made the pendant was Aphrikan.

  The really interesting thing was all the don’t-notice-it spells. They weren’t the oldest magic on the pendant; in fact, the oldest layers weren’t hidden at all. Then, right before the layers started to have bits of Avrupan-style magic in them, there were suddenly a whole lot of spells for keeping things hidden and unnoticed. I spent a while studying them, trying to figure out how they’d been cast, but I’d never been too good at building spells in reverse, and these weren’t like any other kind of magic I’d ever seen or heard tell about.

  Finally, I gave up and just sat there with the pendant in my hands, thinking. I laid out in my mind everything I’d learned about it since Wash had given it to me: It was Aphrikan magic, it could draw off a little magic from whoever wore it (and it obviously had), it was passed from teacher to student, it went cold when I was near someone else who wore something like it — I stopped. Something was tickling the back of my brain.

  I tried to remember whether the pendant had ever done anything like that at other times. Well, besides heating up when I walked into Lan’s hospital room. Hot and cold, I thought. Has it ever heated up or gone cold before?

  And then I had it. Every time I’d woken up from one of those odd dreams, the ones that seemed so clear, I’d been cold. I had connected it with the dreams, not with the pendant, but what if it was more than just the one thing?

  It felt right, though I still didn’t have any idea why the pendant might be giving me dreams. Maybe I could get Wash to tell me, now that I’d figured out this much on my own. I snorted. He’d probably just smile and nod and look approving without actually saying anything more, and I’d have to study up some more on my own. I made a face. I was surely giving myself a lot of studying to do, for someone who wasn’t in school any longer.

  I set the pendant on the nightstand and lay back, trying to relax. Even so, it was a long time before I fell asleep. I didn’t remember any of my dreams, but I slept better than I ever had in as long as I could remember.

  Lan woke up late the next morning, in the middle of all of us visiting. He saw me first and squinted, like he didn’t quite believe his eyes. “Eff?”

  “Lan!” Mama’s lips trembled, like she didn’t know whether to smile or cry. I felt tears in my eyes. I’d wanted to believe that he would be all right, ever since I’d poked his magic back where it belonged, but I’d been afraid to believe it until right that minute.

  “Mama?” Lan licked his lips. “What are you doing here?” Suddenly, his eyes went wide. “The lake spell! What happened?”

  “Lake spell?” Papa said. “I thought you were working on construction scaffolding.”

  “Later, Daniel,” Mama said firmly. “Lan, something went wrong with a spell in one of your classes, and you were badly hurt. We’ve been very worried, but you’ll be fine now.”

  “What about —” Lan stopped. I could tell he wanted to know something, but was afraid to ask.

  “Some of your classmates were injured, but you were the worst of them,” Papa said. He smiled. “Dean Ziegler tells me it was your doing that none of the students were more seriously hurt. I am very proud of you.”

  Lan flinched. “Students,” he mumbled. He raised his head, looking scared to death. “And Professor —”

  “That’s enough talking for now, Lan,” Mama interrupted. “You need to rest and recover.”

  “But —”

  “Excuse me,” said a polite and utterly unapologetic voice from the doorway. We turned to find yet another doctor standing there. He scolded us for not having fetched someone the very minute Lan woke up, and sent us all back to the waiting room.

  We saw Lan again in the afternoon. He didn’t say much, and when we left, Mama commented that he seemed tired and it was no wonder after all he’d been through.

  I didn’t think Lan was tired. I thought he was downcast and worried. I wondered whether they’d told him yet that Professor Warren was dead. The doctors didn’t want to say right off, on account of not wanting to give Lan a bad shock when he was only just recovering, but sooner or later, he’d have to know.

  Frank went back to New Amsterdam the next morning; he’d been away from his patients longer than he liked already, and with Lan on the mend, he didn’t need to stay. Miriam stayed with us for another few days. Mostly, we divided our time between visiting at the hospital and writing letters to everyone telling them that Lan was going to be all right. Papa sent a telegram back to Nan and Allie and Robbie, and Frank said he’d let the family in Helvan Shores know when he passed through on his way to the city, but there was still a heap of other folks to let know.

  Since I seemed to do most of the writing, I started a letter to William right off. I wrote Roger Boden, too; it hadn’t seemed right to write before, when it would take so long for a letter to get to Albion that by the time he got to worrying everything would be over. I had to put both letters aside a couple of times when Mama thought of someone else who needed to know how Lan was, or to be thanked for inquiring after him. I wrote Roger a straightforward account of everything that had happened, with as much detail as I had about the spell that had gone wrong and the treatments the doctors had used, because I knew he’d be interested in that. William’s letter turned into a long ramble about everything that had happened and what I felt about it, including my worries about Lan and the business with the pendant that I didn’t feel I could tell anyone else. It was the only letter I didn’t mind writing, because it was the only one where I could tell the truth as I saw it.

  And the truth was, the more I saw of Lan, the less sure I was that he was “all right,” or likely to be so anytime soon. Oh, his burns were healing, and so was the damage inside him that they hadn’t told us about right off. The doctors said that with magic as strong as his, he’d be back to normal in no time. Nobody but me seemed to notice the shadows in his eyes, or the way he flinched when anyone talked of the accident (even before they told him about Professor Warren), or that he hardly spoke except when somebody asked him a question.

  I tried once to say something about it, but Papa and the doctors said it was a normal reaction to being hurt so badly, and that Lan would be fine once he got his strength back. I thought they were wrong, but it was plain nobody would listen to me, and I wasn’t sure what they could do, anyway. So I let it go, and only complained in my letter to William. It ended up being four pages long and needing an extra stamp, and I had to apologize at the end for taking so long to write it when he ought to have been told about Lan straight off, as soon as he woke up.

  The doctors let Lan out of the hospital two weeks later. His injuries had mostly healed up, but he was still shaky and weak. Mama and Papa had a long talk one night, and the next day Papa went out and hired a house for a while. Mama and Lan and I moved in, and Papa went back to Mill City and his students.

  Slowly, Lan got stronger, but he stayed quiet and gloomy. A week after he got out of the hospital, he came down to breakfast and said, “I’m not going back to Simon Magus, Mama.”

  “What?” Mama looked up
from her tea and eggs with a startled expression.

  “I’m not going back to school,” Lan repeated in a low voice. “I can’t — I just — I’m not.”

  “It’s all right, Lan,” Mama said after a minute. “The year is almost over, and after what you’ve been through, I’m not sure it would be a good idea, anyway. By the fall —”

  “I’m not going back ever,” Lan interrupted. His right hand was clenching and unclenching at his side; Mama couldn’t see it from where she sat, but I was on the same side of the table as Lan, and I could. “Not ever, Mama. I mean it.”

  Mama looked stricken. “Sit down and have breakfast, you,” I told Lan before Mama could come up with something to say.

  Lan gave me a look like one of the wild animals in the menagerie about to bolt. I rolled my eyes at him.

  “Sit,” I said to him. “You don’t have to settle everything right this very minute.”

  “I suppose not.” He glanced at Mama, and the wild look left him. He pulled out a chair and sat next to me, bowing his head. He wasn’t clenching his fist anymore, but I could see that his hands were shaking before he shoved them under the edge of the tablecloth to hide them.

  Mama’s eyes narrowed just a hair, and she looked from me to Lan and back. Then she nodded once. I reached for the teapot and poured for Lan, then dumped a big spoonful of eggs in the middle of his plate. He looked up, startled.

  “Eat now, talk later,” I told him sternly.

  “Eff,” he started uncertainly, “I —”

  “You aren’t all the way better yet,” I said. “And you’re going to need the energy once the knocker starts up.”

  Lan groaned, but he nodded and picked up his fork. Once word got out that Lan was well, or at least improving, we’d had a steady stream of visitors — first the students who were in the accident with Lan, to thank him for whatever he’d done to save them; then his friends from other classes and from the rooming house where he usually lived; then his professors and a bunch of important folks from all over the city who, as far as I could tell, just wanted to be able to say they’d met a double-seventh son.