Thirteenth Child

CHAPTER 16

MISS OCHIBA’S CONFIDENCE IN ME, AND THE HIJERO—CATHAYAN concentration technique she taught me, were about all that made that year bearable for me. I did a lot better in most of my classes once I stopped fretting over maybe blowing someone up if I got mad. I still had trouble with magic, though. I was afraid of it—or, rather, I was afraid of what I might do with it. The book-work was fine, but at least half the time, when I started to cast a spell, the fear got in the way and it fizzled. The looks my classmates gave me went from curious to doubtful to sneering.

Oddly enough, I didn’t have any difficulty in Miss Ochiba’s Aphrikan magic class. Most of the Aphrikan magic we were doing didn’t feel like spells, and that helped. We still practiced foundation work at least twice a week, but those of us who’d been in the class for two years already were up to what Miss Ochiba called “advanced world-sensing.” It started with being aware of the world, the way we’d learned in foundation work, and then went on to feeling the links between what we were sensing and ourselves. The first time, she had us each give her the slates we used in our regular classes. She mixed them up, then made each of us tell her which slate belonged to which person, without looking at them. She said that when we got really good at it, we’d know if a floorboard was rotten before we stepped on it, or whether an apple had a worm in the middle before we bit into it.

Round about Christmas, or a little after, Papa and Professor Graham got in another row with the North Plains Territory Homestead Claim and Settlement Office over their allotment policy. I didn’t know the long and short of it, and neither did anyone else in my class, but that didn’t stop some of those whose parents favored the Settlement Office from deciding to choose up sides, with William and me on the wrong one.

At first it was mostly just name-calling. William got into a couple of fights during recess over that. I ignored it as best I could. I had to. I was afraid of what might happen if I got mad. Then someone put damp sand in our lunch pails during the morning, so that our sandwiches were soggy and full of grit. William went straight home and talked his father into teaching him a locking spell, and after that nobody could get into his lunch pail. He tried to teach me the spell, too, but it fizzled, so I just kept a sharp eye out from then on.

Then, on a bitter cold day in late January when we all had to wear our coats in class because the stove in the corner couldn’t keep up, someone iced the path behind the general store that William and I always took to get home. If we hadn’t just come from Miss Ochiba’s Aphrikan magic class and been working on sensing the world, we might not have noticed it before one of us had a nasty tumble. As it was, we spent ten frozen minutes kicking snow and little stones onto the icy part to rough it up so that nobody else would fall.

Things came to a head two weeks later. Four of the boys and two girls who’d been the worst of the name-callers laid for us after school. They’d done it before, and we’d given them the slip, but this time they were ready for us. They caught us on the path behind the store, out of sight of anyone on the street. Before you could shake a stick, they had a ring around us.

“Well, well, lookee here,” said Tad Holiger. He was one of the new boys, the oldest and biggest of the group. By his age, he ought to have been starting in the upper school, but he’d started schooling late and never paid much heed to it except in Miss Ochiba’s class. “It’s the snobs from over on College Way. What do you suppose they’re doing here? Come to tell the Settlement Office how to run?”

“Heading home,” William muttered.

“What’d you say?” Tad shoved William’s shoulder, and the other boys laughed. I got a sick feeling in my stomach.

“I said we’re heading home,” William repeated loudly. “So if you’ll just move out of the way, you can be rid of us.”

“Oh, that’s cold,” Tad said, with an exaggerated look of hurt. He looked around the circle. “Isn’t that cold?”

“Cold as the snow,” one of the other boys said.

“Let’s see,” said a third, and scooped up a handful of snow. The other two boys followed his example, while Tad and the girls watched William and me.

“Just leave us alone,” I said, and the sick feeling in my stomach got sicker. I’d said the same thing to Uncle Earn. I took a deep breath, trying to start the concentration exercise, but I was too scared—scared as much over what I might do as over what Tad and his friends were planning.

“Oh, the little mouse has a squeak after all,” Tad said. “Let’s find out which of these two is colder.” He nodded and all three of the boys let fly.

The snowballs didn’t get within two feet of William. All three of them whizzed sideways in mid-course and plowed into the snowbank. William gave Tad a nasty grin. “There are advantages to having a father who teaches magic at the college,” he said. “He likes it when I take an interest in more advanced magic than what they teach at the day school. Or didn’t you figure that out when your lunch pail trick didn’t work?”

“You can’t block it if you’re not looking at it,” said a girl on William’s left. He turned to give her a disdainful look, and the boy behind him pitched another snowball hard at the back of his head.

I yelled, too late, but the snowball veered sideways a foot before it got to William. The girl who’d set him up had to dodge in a hurry, and the snowball hit the side of the store with a solid thunk. William frowned. “There was a rock in that snowball,” he said.

“Maybe there was, and maybe there wasn’t,” Tad said. “But we still haven’t found out which of you is colder, and everybody knows your girlfriend is no good at magic. We’ll just start with her.”

“His fancy spell may stop snowballs, but I bet we can still stuff it down the back of his coat,” one of the girls said. She kicked a chunk of ice loose from the bank alongside the path and picked it up.

“That’s a really bad idea,” Lan’s voice said, and a second later he walked around the corner of the store. He was seriously angry, I could tell, though he might not have looked it to anyone who didn’t know him well.

Tad looked him over and sniffed. “Says who?”

“Me,” Lan replied evenly. “Lan Rothmer.”

“The double-seventh son!” the second girl gasped.

“That’s right,” Lan said. “And Eff is my twin sister, in case you didn’t know. That’s why picking on her is such a bad idea.”

A couple of the boys looked uneasy, but Tad just sneered. He made a show of scooping up another handful of snow, and this time he didn’t hide the rock he stuffed in the middle. “So you’re the hot-shot magician everybody talks about. How hot are you?”

“Oh, about this much,” Lan said, and gestured.

A tongue of flame three feet high shot up from the middle of Tad’s snowball. Tad yelled and dropped it.

“Now,” Lan said. “All of you. Leave my sister alone.” He got a faraway look for a second, and Tad and all five of his friends, boys and girls both, started yelling and hopping up and down. One of the girls plopped down right in the snowbank and yanked off her boots, then buried both feet in the snow.

“Don’t just stand there, you dummies,” Lan said to William and me. “Let’s get out of here.”

So the three of us ran. When we finally stopped for breath, I said, “How did you come to be so handy?”

“I had a feeling something was wrong,” Lan said. He looked at me, and I could see he was still pretty mad. “How long has that been going on?”

“This was the first time,” I said quickly. “Lan, what did you do to them?”

Lan grinned and held up a half-burned matchstick. “Hotfoot spell. Don’t look like that—it won’t really burn them. It just feels like it. For about five minutes, I think, until it wears off.” He sounded very pleased with himself.

“Five minutes, you think?” William asked in a wary tone.

Lan shrugged. “You’re supposed to use it on one person at a time. I had to do six at once, so I put a little extra power in it. I’m not sure what that’ll do to how long it lasts.”

“You’re not sure?” I said. I’d burned my hand on the smoothing iron once when Mama was teaching me to iron shirts, and I remembered how much it hurt. Feeling like that for five minutes would be awful, even if you didn’t get blisters and soreness after. “If you don’t even know how long it’ll last, how can you be sure that the extra power won’t really burn them after all?”

“You goose,” Lan said. “It’s an illusion spell; it can’t burn anything. More power just makes it last longer.” He looked thoughtful. “I wonder how long I could make an illusion last, if I really tried. Days, I bet.”

“Lan! You could have hurt someone,” I said. “And what about that fire you shot out of Tad’s snowball?”

“That?” Lan laughed. “That was just an illusion, to scare him.”

“You’ll still be in trouble if he reports it,” William said.

“He deserved it,” Lan said, unconcerned. “Anyway, he won’t say anything. If he told, he’d be the one in trouble, for putting rocks in snowballs. Besides, all I did was scare him off.”

“You brought up being a double-seven, and then you used magic on them. Even if it was just illusions, that’ll bother a lot of people.”

“I didn’t bring up being a double-seven,” Lan objected. “That girl did. I can’t help it if people know who I am, can I?”

“I suppose,” William said doubtfully. He looked like he wanted to say more, but thought better of it. “Where did you learn that spell, anyway?”

“From Jack. He got it from one of Papa’s students, I think.” Lan gave William a sidelong look. “I’ll teach you, if you want,” he offered. “It’s easy.”

William hesitated, then nodded. I wanted to object, but I didn’t. After all, Lan hadn’t said anything to Tad about leaving William alone, just about me.

It wasn’t until later that night, thinking things over in bed before I fell asleep, that a niggling little worry started in the back of my head. Lan had said that the flame that shot out of Tad’s snowball was illusion, but I distinctly remembered hearing the hiss and spit of water hitting a hot surface. I tried telling myself that it was part of the illusion, that Lan had remembered to include sound as well as sight in his spell. I convinced myself well enough to get to sleep, but not enough to make the worry go away for good.

That was just about the end of the nasty tricks from Tad and his friends. The very end came a couple of days later. I was walking back to my seat in class, and I saw Tad shift his feet under his desk. I knew that he was going to try to trip me as I went past him. Only then he looked down and turned white as a bleached shirtfront, and went completely still. His head twitched as I came up next to him, like he’d started to look at me and stopped himself, but that was all.

I looked down at his desk as I passed, and saw his slate with all the math problems we’d been doing. Right in the middle was a blank spot, like somebody had swiped a sponge across it, and in the middle of the blank were three words and two numbers: Don’t even try. 77

After that, Tad didn’t just leave me alone; he avoided me every chance he got. That was fine by me. At the end of that week, Lan asked casually whether I’d had any more trouble. I told him no, and I didn’t think I would. I didn’t tell him I’d seen his message to Tad, and I didn’t ask how he’d done it, though I thought on it more than a little.

Then, just when I figured the worst of the year might be over, Mama slipped on the back steps while she was carrying the wash water and twisted her knee and broke her leg in two places. The doctor strapped her in a heavy cast and she was weeks mending.

Nan had just found a job in the shipping office at the railroad, so Allie and I had to take over running the house. You’d have thought that with Hugh at university in the East and Rennie off in the settlement, there’d be enough less work to notice, but it didn’t seem like it. It was harder on Allie than it was on me, because I’d been having as much trouble learning normal housekeeping spells as I did with my other magic lessons, so Allie had to do most of the chores that needed magic. Neither of us complained much, though, except to each other. We didn’t want Mama to take the notion she should get up and manage things herself, not until the doctors said she could, anyway.

In the middle of everything, a letter finally came from Rennie. Papa didn’t pass it around to us all, the way he usually did with family letters, but he said she was sorry she’d caused a fuss. She was happy at the Rationalist settlement, she said. And she’d had a baby boy, named Albert Daniel Wilson after his two grandfathers, who she hoped to bring to Mill City to meet us all when he was older and better able to stand the journey. She didn’t mention a birth date, which annoyed Nan, but Papa added Albert Daniel Wilson and the year to the family Bible and said we’d put the rest in later.

The news from Rennie cheered Mama up some. By the time school let out, she was up and around again, but she tired easily, so Allie and I kept on with the householding. It didn’t leave me time to worry over Lan, or Tad, or Rennie, or anything else, all that summer.