Thirteenth Child

by Patricia C. Wrede

  The only things that made those months bearable were Rennie and Lan, and the visits I had from William and Papa’s students. Rennie sat and read to me for hours every morning, and never complained a bit—at least, not where I could hear.

  William was the surprising one. He’d started going to the day school in the fall; I guess Professor Graham decided that if day school was good enough training for the seventh son of a seventh son, it was good enough for William. He’d been nervous at first, until he found that the boys in his class had heard all about the set-to he’d had with Lan back in the spring, and thought he’d been brave to stand up against a double-seventh son, even if he hadn’t known that he was doing it at the time.

  After school started, William stopped by every single day on his way home and told me what happened in class and what his father would think of it. It got a little wearing, sometimes, but I could see he was really trying, and it was nice to see a face that wasn’t one I’d seen every day of my whole life. Also, once he’d gotten through telling me about school, he’d talk about other things, or play checkers. I didn’t find out until years later just how worried he’d been that I was going to end up a permanent invalid like his mother.

  Lan came by himself, evenings, and did his studying in my room. I was glad for the company, and I liked seeing him practice the spells he was learning. It took me two weeks to figure out that glow spells and fire-burst illusions weren’t the usual things a first-year magician learns, even if he was a double-seventh son.

  Papa found out what Lan had been doing a few days later, and read him a tremendous scold over working new spells without proper supervision, never mind the reason. Then he taught Lan a couple of really good ones, and started sending some of his own students up to do advanced illusions. It got to be kind of a contest among them. Even Brant Wilson came, though he had no magic and couldn’t do illusions. Instead, he told me about the Society of Progressive Rationalists and the settlement they were planning.

  “Why do you wear that feather in your hat?” I asked him one time.

  “Eff,” Rennie said reprovingly. She’d been reading to me, and had gone off to get some hot cider for us when Brant arrived.

  “It’s a reasonable question,” Brant said to her. “We’re taught that no reasonable question should be considered impolite.”

  “I imagine that gets hard to keep up when you’re talking to other folks, though,” Rennie said. “Especially if you’re the one doing the asking.”

  Brant sighed. “Sometimes we do cause offense, but it’s always unintended.”

  “Were you offended?” I asked. “Just now, when I asked about the feather?”

  He laughed. “Not at all. We wear feathers for a lot of reasons. They show that we belong to the Society of Progressive Rationalists. We use them as badges of office, too. And they remind us of how much we might do, of how high we can fly under our own power, without magic.”

  “You can’t either fly,” I said. “Not without magic. You’re just making that up.”

  Rennie frowned at me. “Eff! Mind your manners! Being sick is no excuse for rudeness.”

  Brant laughed again. “It’s all right, Miss Rothmer. It’s a turn of phrase, Eff, that’s all. A metaphor. I’m not used to taking spells into consideration all the time. I can see this year is going to be an education in more ways than one.”

  I stuck my tongue out at Rennie when he looked at her, real fast so he wouldn’t see it. Her face was a study, trying to be polite and interested to Brant and scoldy to me, both at the same time. Brant even noticed, and darted a quick look back at me, but by then I was just looking doubtful again.

  “I didn’t mean to say that we can actually fly like birds without magic,” Brant told me. “But our ideas and imaginations can soar, if we don’t cripple them by looking to spells to do everything for us. The man who designed the new engine for the railroads is a Rationalist. While everyone else was trying to use magic to improve it, he used his mind and his knowledge, and the result is an engine that works better and is more reliable. And you don’t need to have magic to use it. That’s the sort of thing we need more of, if—”

  A knock at the door interrupted him. Rennie rose and opened it. “William!” she said. “Is it so late already?”

  “Hello, Miss Rothmer,” William said. “Excuse me; I didn’t know Eff had another visitor.”

  “This is Brant Wilson,” I said. “William Graham. He’s Professor Graham’s son. Brant’s from the Society of Progressive Rationalists,” I added to William.

  William frowned for a second; then his face cleared. “Oh! That’s the people who don’t believe in magic.” Then he looked at Brant and went purple as a cooked beet.

  “Not exactly,” Brant said. “We believe magic exists; we just don’t believe in doing magic, or using things made by magic.”

  “That’s all right, then,” William said, nodding. “It’d be pretty stupid to think magic doesn’t exist, when people do spells all the time. Why are you poking me?” he added, looking at Rennie.

  Rennie turned red and looked cross, but before she could snap at him I said, “She doesn’t think you were polite, but since you’re not part of our family, she can’t say so straight out without being impolite herself.”

  “Eff!” Rennie sounded like she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or read me the biggest scold I’d had in months. “Honestly, I don’t know what to do with you.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” I said. “I’m Mama’s problem, for that. And I don’t see that it’s so important. Brant doesn’t mind, and William’s practically family now.”

  William looked surprised and gratified. Rennie rolled her eyes and looked at Brant. Brant laughed. I could see that William was getting ready to ask some more questions, and I didn’t want Rennie mad at him. “Brant and the Rationalists want to start a settlement,” I said, to give him something else to think on.

  “But I thought you said you didn’t do magic,” William said.

  “We don’t,” Brant told him. “We plan to start a settlement without using any magic.”

  William’s eyes widened. “You can’t put a settlement on the west side of the river without using magic! How would you keep off the mammoths and the sphinxes and—and everything else?”

  “We have some ideas,” Brant said. “A double trench and a palisade would stop the larger creatures—Samiel thinks the right defenses could halt even a mammoth stampede, if they’re properly designed. The smaller animals aren’t much of a danger to a village, only to lone travelers. The real difficulty will be protecting the crops. Barricading enough acreage for ten families to farm, or even five, just isn’t practical.”

  “Five?” William’s eyebrows scrunched together, the way they always did when he was puzzled by something. “But ten families is the minimum for a settlement.”

  “Yes, but they don’t all have to be farming,” Brant said. “We’d actually planned to start with fifteen families, because we want to be as self-sufficient as possible. It’s sometimes difficult to find goods that haven’t been—” he hesitated “—touched by magic, so we already make most things ourselves. We don’t want our settlers having to buy things that they could make themselves, if they had time.”

  “What sorts of things?” Rennie asked, leaning forward with interest.

  “All sorts,” Brant said. He waved an arm expansively. “Nails and horseshoes and cloth and furniture—we have a blacksmith who’s going, and his wife’s a weaver. Leather for saddles and harnesses and boots. Candles and soap, plows and kitchen pots, combs and clothespins.” His eyes were glowing and he seemed to have forgotten we were even in the room. “We can do it,” he finished fiercely, though nobody had said he couldn’t.

  “Sounds to me like you’d need a whole city for all that,” I said.

  “We’ll have to haul in a few things, at first,” Brant admitted. “But the planning committee has prepared very carefully, and they’re being even more careful about selectin
g the people who are to go. The settlement will work.”

  “Are you going with them?” Rennie asked.

  “I hope to,” Brant replied. “It’s why I’m studying here. The planning committee has plenty of people to pick from who can farm and weave and smith, but they’ll need someone who knows something about the territory and the animals, and what things have been tried and whether they’ve worked or not. Even your magicians can’t manage everything; a lot of the settlements have unmagical protections, too.”

  William gave Brant a long, skeptical look. “It doesn’t sound like much fun to me,” he said finally.

  “Not fun, exactly,” Brant said with a smile. “But just think of it—building a whole new community, the first one ever without magic! It will prove to everyone that we don’t need magicians to settle the plains, and the government will have to open the territories for settlement. It will make history!”

  “It won’t be the first one ever,” William said in a grumpy tone. “Lots of places on the Old Continent got along without magicians after the Roman Empire fell apart. Anyway, you can’t do it unless the Settlement Office lets you, and I bet they won’t.”

  Rennie glared at William, but Brant just looked determined. “It may take time, but we will convince them,” he said firmly. “This is too important to let some shortsighted officials get in the way.”

  “I don’t want to talk about the Settlement Office,” I said. “They’re just—boring. Tell me about something else.” Tears stung my eyes. Just saying the name of the place was hard; I didn’t want to hear anything more about it. William and Brant gave me surprised looks. Rennie clucked and stood up.

  “She’s overtired and getting cross,” Rennie told them. She turned to me. “Time for a nap. It’s not so long since you were feverish, and Mama will slay me outright if you take sick again.”

  I objected a little, for form’s sake, but I didn’t really mean it. Rennie was right; I was tired. And if napping cut the visit short, it at least put a stop to the talk of the Settlement Office and what it would or wouldn’t do.

  By spring they were letting me out of bed for a little, and I only had to take the fever-prevention potions once a day. I was as weak and clumsy as a new puppy, and Mama fussed and fretted over me, and ordered me back to bed twice, until Papa asked her what she expected when I hadn’t used my legs all those long months. After that, Mama didn’t fuss so much, and after a few weeks Papa started me doing training exercises. Gradually, my legs got stronger, though Mama still wouldn’t let me run or do too much hard work. I was glad enough to be let off hoeing the garden and pumping water for the kitchen, but I wasn’t sure that getting landed with all the sewing and piecework was a good trade.

  Shortly after the snow melted, when the Settlement Office announced who’d be going off to start new homesteads, we found out that Papa and William had been right: The Society of Progressive Rationalists wasn’t on the approved list. They didn’t give up, though. The folks who’d come to Mill City in hopes of moving west stayed on, hoping they could persuade the Settlement Office to change its mind. Brant wasn’t even that discouraged. He said they’d expected setbacks, and it was just an opportunity to show people in Mill City how to get along without magic.

  The other big thing that happened that spring was the start of the McNeil Expedition. The report that Papa had written all those months ago had said in no uncertain terms that somebody needed to do a proper study of the animals and magical creatures that were causing so much trouble for the settlements. Somebody back East had paid attention, because Dr. Allen McNeil came out on the first train after the last snow melted to do just that. He wasn’t a medical doctor, just educated all the way up as far as you can get.

  Papa said Dr. McNeil was a famous naturalist and magician, and he was going to spend a whole year out on the wild plains beyond the river, examining animals and watching the way they lived. He was taking a small group along to help. Five of them were students from the college, and one of the students was Brant.

  CHAPTER 9

  NOBODY WAS QUITE SURE HOW BRANT WILSON HAD TALKED DR. McNeil into letting him go west to study the wildlife, but he’d done it, and he was elated by the chance. Our whole family went down to see them off at the Settler’s Pier, where all the people who were heading west to the settlements went to be ferried across the Mammoth River in big, flat-bottom boats. I didn’t know ‘til I got there that it was going to be a big send-off, with Mr. Harrison, the new head of the North Plains Territory Homestead Claim and Settlement Office, making a speech. If I’d known that, I’d have played sick and stayed home. As it was, I hid behind Papa in the crowd and didn’t hear a word the man said. I did take a real good look at Mr. Harrison himself, though, so I’d know him and could dodge away if I saw him on the street.

  The doctors said I was still delicate and had to stay quiet, so the summer was nearly as boring as the winter had been. I didn’t even have visits from Papa’s students, once the college finished up for the summer. Luckily, everyone decided that I was well enough to go back to the day school in the fall, or I think I’d have just about gone crazy.

  The year I’d spent being sick put another big wedge between me and Lan. I’d always known that when he started coming into his power, he’d blaze ahead of me in his magic lessons, but I’d thought we’d at least be together in our regular classes. Instead, he was a year ahead in everything, and I was back with the tagalongs a year younger than either of us. The few girls I’d begun to know were not that interested in talking with someone a year behind them, and when they did try, we didn’t have much to talk about. I didn’t know what had been happening in their classes, and they weren’t interested in what was going on in mine.

  Most of the teachers made things worse, trying to make them better. They stood me up in front of the room on the first day and talked about the rheumatic fever and me missing a whole year of school, and how everyone should be extra kind and welcoming now that I was back. By the time they finished, there wasn’t one single one of my new classmates who dared say hello, either because they feared to catch whatever I’d had or because they feared a teacher would see and decide they hadn’t been kind or welcoming enough.

  If it hadn’t been for Miss Ochiba and William, I’d have gone staring mad in the first month. When I got to Miss Ochiba’s magic class, she read my name in order, along with everyone else’s, just as if I’d always been there. I’d almost have believed she hadn’t noticed I’d missed a whole year, if she hadn’t stopped me at the door after class and said, “It is good to see you back, Miss Rothmer. I expect that you will catch up very rapidly in your magic lessons, if you choose to do so.”

  “Uh, thank you, Miss Ochiba,” I stammered.

  She gave me a penetrating look, then raised her voice just a little and looked over my shoulder. “Do remember that I wish to be informed of any extra lessons your families may decide to add to your training.”

  “Yes, Miss Ochiba,” I murmured, and I heard another voice in back of me muttering the same thing. I slipped out the door and blew a sigh of relief, and William ran into me from behind.

  “Sorry, Eff,” William said. At ten, he was short and he’d put on just enough weight to be called wiry instead of skinny. He glanced back, but the classroom door was closed. He heaved an even bigger sigh than I had. “She meant that last for me, you know.”

  “I think she meant it for both of us,” I said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have said it so we both heard. Miss Ochiba always knows exactly what she’s doing, that way.”

  “I suppose.” William looked back at the door again, then down at his feet. “You want me to tell her that your father isn’t like mine? Giving extra magic lessons and things, I mean. Well, except with Lan, but he’s—” He broke off and glanced at me and then back down.

  “He’s special,” I finished for him as we walked toward our regular classroom. “He’s the seventh son of a seventh son, and I’m—” I caught myself just in time to keep from saying I wa
s an unlucky thirteenth, and changed it to “—just his twin sister.”

  “You’re special, too,” William said fiercely. “You’re just quiet about it.”

  I looked at him in surprise, but he didn’t add anything more and I couldn’t ask what he meant because we’d arrived at our next class and Miss Jensen was waiting impatiently for us to take our seats so she could start on the math lesson for the day.

  I thought about what William had said, and what Miss Ochiba had said, off and on for the rest of the day, and then some more that evening. William was right, but not the way he thought he was. Being a thirteenth child was just as important as being a double-seventh son, only in the opposite direction. And nobody had told Miss Ochiba what I was.

  It took me two full days more to work up the courage to talk to Miss Ochiba, though I could plainly see that if I didn’t do it, nobody else would. Lan wouldn’t give me away, and Robbie and Allie wouldn’t think of it. Nan and Jack were in the upper school, with no reason to come back and talk to the day-school teachers, and Papa and Mama were still too mad at Uncle Earn, even after all that time, to stop and think that he might have been right. But it was a hard, hard thing to pause after Miss Ochiba’s class and ask her if I could stop in to talk for a minute at the end of the day, privately.

  What got me to actually do it, instead of dithering for another week, was the thought that not warning Miss Ochiba would be just the sort of thing I’d do if I were starting to go bad. That scared me, almost as much as the Settlement Office. Uncle Earn had never said when I was supposed to go bad, and I’d always kind of assumed that it wouldn’t happen until I finished school and got to be grown up enough to make some real trouble. But I didn’t know for sure and certain, and if it went and happened earlier…I could see that I’d have to be extra careful, so it didn’t sneak up on me before I could warn people.