Thirteenth Child

CHAPTER 15

MAKING MAGIC IS NOT AN EASY THING. IT TAKES FOCUS AND CONcentration, on top of years of study to know the exact right combination of words and objects that will do just what the magician wants it to. If you get one tiny thing wrong, the spell can fizzle like a wet firecracker, or worse yet, turn back on the magician in some unexpected way. Or tear into the people standing around nearby.

That’s what they taught us in school, anyway, and I believed it. I’d seen enough times what happened when Miss Ochiba’s older students got careless—looking like they’d been dipped in green paint was the least of it. Papa’s students were more careful, but they were also doing harder spells, so when things did go wrong it could be pretty spectacular. Once when a spell went wrong, it punched a hole the shape of a duck in every pane of glass in every west-facing window in every building for three blocks around the magic lab, in spite of all the shields and mufflers they had up.

But when all that muddle of magic and fury burst out of me at Uncle Earn, I knew that even though I hadn’t been focused or concentrated or even practiced it as a spell, it was going to do exactly what I wanted. Not what I’d told it to do or meant for it to do, because I hadn’t thought about either of those things. It was going to do what I wanted. And what I wanted right that minute was for Uncle Earn to pay for all his meanness, and pay handsomely.

For one tiny snip of a second, just as that magic left me, I knew all that and I was happy to know it. Then, in the next instant, I was terrified. I grabbed for that mess of magic, trying to pull it back before anything dreadful happened, the way sometimes you can catch a sentence right at the edge of your teeth before you actually say it and get yourself in trouble.

I didn’t quite catch this, but I did something. The angry tangle of magic fell apart right before it got to Uncle Earn. The air filled with a cloud of sparkles, bright enough to see clearly even in the daylight. Uncle Earn flinched and batted at them with his hands, like he was trying to shoo off a cloud of gnats. The crowd of people who’d gathered around us all gasped. Papa and Lan stared at me with identical expressions of surprise and alarm.

The sparkles floated higher, hovering over the crowd like fireflies, except they twinkled like the sun on lake water instead of blinking slowly. They hung there for near a full minute before they winked out, while I stood there panting and hoping they wouldn’t do anything but sparkle. Uncle Earn kept batting at them until they rose too high for him to reach. Then he started sputtering at me instead. I didn’t understand most of it, until he turned to the people behind him and said, “You saw her attack me! You all saw!”

People stirred at one end of the crowd and started moving off. Uncle Gregory came through them toward us and gave the rest of the onlookers a glare that got them moving, too. He put one big hand on Uncle Earn’s shoulder—Uncle Gregory was the biggest of my uncles by a fair margin—and said cheerfully, “Earn, you’re drunk as a skunk. You’d better come along before Janna finds you, or you’ll hear about it for the next month.”

Uncle Earn sputtered some more, but he didn’t have much choice. When Uncle Gregory decided to move someone along, he moved. I found out later that as soon as Aunt Tilly heard there was a ruckus going on, she’d hunted up Uncle Gregory and told him that poor Diane had been through enough already, and it was his house and his responsibility to see that nothing more happened to spoil the party. So he had come straight over to put a stop to whatever was going on.

Papa watched for a minute, then said, “Eff, you’re overwrought. Lan, take your sister into the house and find somewhere quiet. I’ll be along in a minute.” He sounded very stern. He didn’t wait to see that we did as we were told, but started purposefully after Uncle Gregory and Uncle Earn.

Lan nodded even though Papa didn’t see, and grabbed my arm. As he hustled me away, he asked, “How did you do that?”

“I don’t know!” I said. I pulled my arm free. “I didn’t do it apurpose. It just happened.”

“Well, you’re in for it now,” he said. “Uncle Earn isn’t a good enough magician to spot anything but those sparks you did, but Uncle Stephen is, and so is Aunt Irma, and they were both watching. It’ll be all over the family in no time.”

I just nodded miserably. Uncle Earn would have me arrested for real this time, and I didn’t even care. All the things everyone had been saying about me for all those years were true. I’d almost hurt Uncle Earn badly, and I’d been happy about it. That wasn’t right, no matter if he deserved it. And Papa and Lan knew it, too, or they wouldn’t have looked at me the way they had.

By the time Papa came to find us, I’d sunk into a black despair. Papa took one look at me and sent Lan away, then held me for a while, as if I was a childing of three instead of near grown. Then he asked me to tell him what happened, from the beginning. When I finished, he told me he was going to put a dampening spell on me until we got back to Mill City. It’d work on my magic like a soggy blanket smothering a fire, so there wouldn’t be any more accidents. Once we got home, he said, I’d have to take a whole long list of tests to see how and why I’d been able to let loose a spell like that and then stop it cold.

I nodded, though I didn’t see that it mattered whether I agreed or not. Papa told me I was overexcited and overtired, and made me lie down until it was time to leave, so I missed the rest of Diane’s party. If I thought about it at all, I was glad. It wasn’t even a punishment; it’d have been worse to go back out and see everyone looking at me sideways and whispering and backing away as I was sure they would. I didn’t want to spoil Diane’s party the way Rennie had spoiled her wedding, not any more than I’d already done.

On the way back to Aunt Tilly’s after the party, Lan told me that everything had gone fine for the rest of the evening. John Brearsly even laughed when Diane fussed about Uncle Earn and me, and told her that there was no harm done that he could see, and that it’d make a good story to tell at their fiftieth anniversary. That made me feel a little better. At least there was someone who didn’t mind what had happened.

The next morning, Papa took me into Aunt Tilly’s music room and did the magic-dampening spell. I didn’t understand most of it. All I had to do was stand in the middle of a clean sheet while he ground some herbs and sprinkled them in a circle around me, then burned some other plants and sprinkled me with water and I forget what else. He didn’t explain it, and I was still too miserable to ask questions, before or after.

The dampening spell made me sleepy, and even when I was awake, I felt as if I was walking around in a thick fog. I didn’t like it at all, but at least I didn’t have the energy to fret over the dark looks and the scared whispers that swirled around me for the rest of our stay in Helvan Shores. Truth to tell, the memory of it is still foggy, even after all this time.

As soon as we got back to Mill City, Papa cleared the spell off me. Right away I was almost as miserable as I’d been back in Helvan Shores. When I said as much to Papa, he told me not to worry, that as long as I was away from Uncle Earn’s “irritating influence” it wasn’t likely that anything else would happen for a long time. By then, I’d have the training to control my magic.

I nodded and smiled, but for the first time in my life, I didn’t really believe what Papa said. I didn’t think I could control the kind of anger I’d felt toward Uncle Earn. More than that, I was sure that I’d never be able to control the magic. I knew that the power I’d felt was just a beginning. What would I do when it grew stronger? I wouldn’t have a hope of controlling it then. But I could see that Papa wouldn’t understand.

Papa left me to myself for three days, to let any lingering effects of the magic-dampening spell wear off all the way. It was like I was sick all over again, only this time I was in quarantine. Finally, he started the tests he’d promised. First he cast a magic-detecting spell and made me work all the minor spells I’d learned at the day school, over and over. Then he did it again, with a spell for detecting a different sort of magic. That went on for about a week, and then he went over to the engineering department and borrowed a bunch of their instruments for measuring the level of magic in a spell and did it all again, and again.

I spent nearly the whole summer in Papa’s study, I think. Every time I cast a spell, I felt that lump of magic power inside me grow a little. It worried me more every time, until I found a way to sort of move sideways in my head so that practicing spells didn’t make the power grow.

In the end, the tests didn’t show anything unusual about me at all. Papa sat down and explained it all to me very clearly. The magic that had gone off at Uncle Earn had been a fluke; such accidents happened to young people sometimes, he said, especially when they were turning from childing to full-grown. People didn’t grow evenly; sometimes their legs got long and clumsy before the rest of them caught up, and sometimes they went wide, or skinny, from growing one direction faster than another. In me, the magic part had grown too fast and burst out without any control, but the rest of me was already catching up. Once everything was back in balance again, there was no chance of anything similar happening again.

The only trouble was that what Papa described didn’t sound anything like what I’d felt. Or like what I was still feeling. I tried to tell Papa that, but he only smiled and said I was worrying over nothing. How someone felt didn’t have anything to do with spell casting, he said.

Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with normal spell casting, but the way I felt about Uncle Earn had plenty to do with that spell burst I’d sent at him. And it was me switching from angry to scared that made it fall apart just in time; I’d worked out that much. But Papa just shook his head and reassured me, a little sharply, that according to all his tests, everything was completely normal.

School started up again, and if anything could have made things worse, that was it. The Settlement Office had been busy that summer, and a lot of families had gotten their allotments and moved West. They still couldn’t keep up with the people who wanted land, though, so Mill City was growing fast. There were a lot of new faces at the day school, even though a couple more parent associations had formed and started new schools in our part of town. I was the tallest girl in my class, and at thirteen I was also the oldest, and I felt awkward and clumsy and conspicuous. All of the new students knew about Lan being a double-seventh son, and they heard pretty quick that I was his twin. They all gave me curious looks when they thought my back was turned, which made me feel even more conspicuous.

For the first time ever, I had trouble with my schoolwork. I couldn’t remember the Columbian Presidents past the first five—George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Eduard Baier, and Herman Augustus Morton. All my sentence diagrams went crooked, with the phrases coming off in the wrong places. I got the signs backward in my algebra. Worst of all, I started having trouble with my magic lessons. The spells I’d worked without any problems all summer began fizzling out, and I couldn’t get the new ones to work at all.

Two months after classes started, Miss Ochiba asked me to come back and see her after school. I thought I knew what was coming—a lecture and extra homework, and maybe even the threat of moving back another year, to study with the sixth-grade magic classes.

So I wasn’t prepared when Miss Ochiba closed the classroom door, waved me to a seat at the practice table, and said gently, “I am sure you know as well as anyone that your classwork has not been satisfactory this year. It is plain that the cause is neither lack of interest nor lack of effort. You are an intelligent girl, Miss Rothmer, and I should like to know what you think the reason is for your sudden difficulty.”

I burst into tears. Miss Ochiba handed me her handkerchief and waited. I gulped and wiped my eyes and the whole summer tumbled out of my mouth in a jumble: Diane’s wedding and the new students watching me all the time and Rennie running off with Brant and Papa’s tests and the spell I’d thrown at Uncle Earn.

Miss Ochiba listened without saying anything, and I couldn’t read the expression on her dark face. When I finished, she nodded and said, “I am not surprised that you are finding your studies difficult.”

“Papa says that how a magician feels doesn’t have anything to do with spell casting.” I felt torn. I wanted to believe what Papa had told me, but…

“Your father is an excellent magician,” Miss Ochiba said, “but his background is entirely in the Avrupan school of magic. Furthermore, he is accustomed to students who are older and less…volatile than persons of your age. I am a little surprised that he did not recall the incident with your brother.”

“The incident with—you mean when Lan got mad and floated William treetop-high?” I said. “How do you know about that?”

“Miss Rothmer.” Miss Ochiba gave me a look that was half amused, half reproving. “I teach magic to all of the students at this school, including your brother, all of your other siblings, and their friends as well. It would be more than surprising if I had not known about it.”

“But what does that have to do with me?”

“Three years ago, Lan lost his temper and cast a spell on William that should not have been possible for a child with little training and no practical experience. You are his twin sister. You lost your temper and cast a spell with more power behind it than you should have been capable of handling at your level of training and experience. I think the parallel is obvious.”

“I’m—like Lan?” I stared at her. “But he’s a double-seventh son.”

Miss Ochiba closed her eyes briefly. “And what else is he?” she asked in her teacher voice.

“He’s my brother,” I said, reacting automatically to the question she’d asked so often in class. “He’s my twin. He’s a boy. He’s thirteen, and the youngest of us. He’s—” I stopped. Saying that Lan was Papa’s favorite, and the one everyone always looked to and talked about and expected great things of, would sound petty and jealous. Only it was the plain truth. I’d just never seen it that way before, because I felt that way about him my own self.

“Exactly so,” Miss Ochiba said when I didn’t continue. “And he’s a few other things besides, and no doubt he’ll pick up more as he goes along in this life. In some ways, you are alike; in others, you are not. I leave it to you to sort them out. For the moment, that is not my main concern.”

I nodded uncertainly. Miss Ochiba tapped her fingers on the tabletop, one-two-three, one-two-three. Then she said, “Thank you for explaining. Now that I am aware of the situation, you need have no fear of any similar accidents occurring in my classroom, Miss Rothmer. Do you understand?”

I nodded again. Then I swallowed hard and said, “But what about everywhere else?”

“There is a Hijero—Cathayan technique that I believe you will find helpful,” Miss Ochiba replied. “It will take some time for you to master it, but I do not think that will be a problem. You do not lose your temper often.”

I hadn’t believed in Papa’s tests, and I hadn’t believed him when he told me everything was fine, but when she said that, I believed Miss Ochiba. I almost cried in relief.

Miss Ochiba gave a brisk nod, as if I’d said something, and stood up. “We will begin tomorrow, then. That is all, Miss Rothmer.” The next thing I knew, I was walking home in a daze, feeling hope for the first time since the start of summer.