Thirteenth Child

CHAPTER 1

EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT A SEVENTH SON IS LUCKY. THINGS COME A little easier to him, all his life long: love and money and fine weather and the unexpected turn that brings good fortune from bad circumstances. A lot of seventh sons go for magicians, because if there’s one sort of work where luck is more useful than any other, it’s making magic.

And everybody knows that the seventh son of a seventh son is a natural-born magician. A double-seven doesn’t even need schooling to start working spells, though the magic comes on faster and safer if he gets some. When he’s grown and come into his power for true and all, he can even do the Major Spells on his own, the ones that can call up a storm or quiet one, move the earth or still it, anger the ocean or calm it to glassy smoothness. People are real nice to a double-seventh son.

Nobody seems to think much about all the other sons, or the daughters. There’s nearly always daughters, because hardly anybody has seven sons right in a row, boom, like that. Sometimes there are so many daughters that people give up trying for seven sons. After all, there’s plenty enough work in raising eleven or twelve childings, and a thirteenth child—son or daughter—is unlucky. So everybody says.

Papa and Mama didn’t pay much attention to what everybody says, I guess, because there are fourteen of us. Lan is the youngest, a double-seven, and he’s half the reason we moved away from Helvan Shores when I was five. The other half of the reason was me.

I’m Eff—the seventh daughter. Lan’s twin…

…and a thirteenth child.

From the day I was old enough to understand, I heard people talking to Mama and Papa about what to do with me. Aunt Tilly was the kindest. She only sighed and said it was a lucky thing I’d come first, or Lan would have been a thirteenth child with all the power of a double-seventh son. I wouldn’t be near so much a danger when I went bad, Aunt Tilly said. Uncle Earn and Aunt Janna disagreed. They said Mama and Papa ought to have drowned me as soon as Lan was safely born, and it wasn’t too late yet if they just had the resolution.

There were plenty of others, too, all anxious to tell Mama and Papa how I was sure to go bad, and to report every little thing I did as evidence they were right. If I spilled my soup, it was done apurpose and with evil in mind; if a ball I kicked went astray and tore up the new plantings in the kitchen garden, it was done deliberately in malice and spite. And of course their children heard the talk, just like I did, and if they didn’t understand it all, they understood enough to make my life a misery.

My cousins were the worst, mainly because there were so many of them. Papa had six older brothers and three older sisters, and four of my uncles and two of my aunts had married and stayed in Helvan Shores. Sometimes I thought the whole town was related to me. But even the children who weren’t relatives took their cue from my cousins.

I tried to stay out of trouble, but when I hid away from my cousins, they said I was sly and sneaking. Mama and Papa started giving me gray, worried looks when they thought I wasn’t noticing. My older brothers and sisters, the ones nearest me in age, tried to protect me sometimes, but sometimes they joined in teasing me. Lan was the only one who always stuck up for me, no matter what.

When Lan and I were almost five, and because Lan was the seventh son of a seventh son, our grandfather had decided he should have a private tutor. “He’s still too young to learn spells, of course, but he can learn the theory,” my grandfather said, with a sidelong look at me. “Private lessons will make sure he learns goodness as well as strength and skill.” Even then, I didn’t need him to say anything more. I knew that what he really wanted was to make sure Lan got his magic lessons without me anywhere near, in case I might drag him down when I eventually went bad.

Mama and Papa looked troubled, but they couldn’t turn down such a generous offer. I was heartbroken the day Lan started lessons. He was the only person in the world who didn’t think there was something wrong with me, and now he was going to be shut away from me for hours every day. He whispered a promise to come every night and teach me what he’d learned, but that still didn’t ease the hurt.

Mama found me curled up in a sniveling ball, just down the hall from the closed door of the lesson room. “Why, Eff! What are you doing?” she began, and then she saw my face and she got right down on the floor beside me and gathered me in her arms. “Honey, what’s the matter?”

I just shook my head. I didn’t want her to think I grudged Lan his lessons. He was special, everybody said, the same way I was wicked. He deserved those lessons—but, oh, I wanted him to be with me! Or at least close enough to call or run to when the others started in.

Even though I didn’t say anything, I think Mama understood. She sat and stroked my hair for a while, and then she brought me to the kitchen and we made sugar cookies together. She didn’t scold me when I spilled the milk because I was in such a hurry to show I could help. She just studied me with a thoughtful expression.

I got a lot more of those looks over the next month or so. I didn’t know what to make of them. Then, about a month after Lan started his lessons, the two of us were doing his exercises in the attic one evening when Allie came puffing up the stairs. She was three years older than we were, and her blue eyes were snapping with excitement. “There you are,” she said to me. “They want you in the sitting room.”

“What do they want me for?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but you’d better go right now. Uncle Earn is there with a policeman, and Papa is madder than blazes!”

I felt myself cringing. “I haven’t done anything!”

“Then you don’t have anything to worry about,” Allie said, imitating the smug tones of our older brother, Hugh.

As I rose slowly to my feet, Lan’s eyes narrowed. “I’m coming with you,” he announced suddenly. “So it will be all right.”

Allie cocked her head to one side and eyed him doubtfully. “I don’t know if they want you.”

“I’m still coming,” Lan said.

We walked into the sitting room together, me holding on to Lan’s hand tight as tight. Mama was sitting in the straight-backed chair with the carved arms; Papa was standing by the windows with his hands in his pockets. Uncle Earn was standing just inside the door next to a very uncomfortable-looking man in a blue-and-gold policeman’s uniform. “There!” Uncle Earn said as we came in, stabbing his finger straight at me. “That’s the child. Officer, do what you came here for!”

“And just what is that?” Papa said in the mild tone he used when he was getting ready to lay into one of the older boys about something, but he wasn’t quite certain-sure he had all of the facts in the case just yet. “I’ve yet to hear a clear explanation from you, and until I do, this goes no further.”

“You!” Uncle Earn turned a glare on Papa that would have melted fire irons. Papa just smiled gently, without a particle of yielding. “You,” Uncle Earn said again, “you’ve kept this menace and let her live and grow with no regard to your family or the disgrace and doom she’s sure to bring on us all. Maybe the luck of the seventh son will protect you, but what about the rest of us? And now—”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” the policeman said, “but am I to understand that this is the young lady against whom you lodged your complaint?” He nodded at me, almost friendly, and I felt a tiny bit better.

“Yes!” Uncle Earn roared. “She’s a thirteenth child and a witch, and she’s put a curse on my house!”

“I take leave to doubt that, sir,” the policeman said politely. “She can’t be more than four or five, and that’s too young even for natural magic.”

“It is your duty to enforce the law,” Uncle Earn said. “Doubts or no. And the law—”

“—applies in this regard to persons aged ten and older, that being the age the courts have set as the youngest possible to a deliberate working,” the policeman said. He looked at me and winked. My mouth fell right open, and I could only stare at him as he went on. “If you wish to lodge a complaint against her guardians for lack of restraint, you’ll need a writ from the courthouse first.”

“That is an outrage!” Uncle Earn roared.

The policeman appeared unimpressed. “It is the law, sir, and if you’d been plainer about your business when you called me out here, you’d have saved us both some time and trouble. My duty is clear, and if you’ve no more to say, I’ll be about it. Evening, ma’am, sir.” He tipped his hat to Mama and Papa. “Young sir, young mistress.” He nodded at Lan and me. “My apologies for the interruption.” He turned and left without saying anything more to Uncle Earn, who stood sputtering.

“That appears to dispose of the law,” Papa observed. “Shall we settle this as a family now, Earn? What’s this about a curse?”

“She’s put a curse on my house,” Uncle Earn repeated. “My Marna saw her out back this morning, doing a working with string and feathers. She ran off, but Marna found this.” He held up a pink ribbon triumphantly.

I felt a wave of despair. Lan had given me that ribbon on our birthday, and I’d worn it constantly since then. Everyone knew it was mine, and knew how much I loved it. With that ribbon for evidence, no one would believe I hadn’t done a thing, no matter what I said.

“That’s a lie!” Lan burst out. His hand was clenched around mine so hard that it hurt. “Eff was playing skip-jacks on the back step, all by herself, and Marna came up behind her and yanked that ribbon right out of her hair and ran off. I saw it out of the window.”

Papa looked at me. “Is that what happened, Eff?”

I nodded, feeling the beginning of hope. Then Uncle Earn stepped toward me and bellowed, “Liar! She’s a born witch and a liar, and she’s corrupting your precious seven-and-seven. She—”

All of a sudden, I couldn’t see anything but navy blue pleats. It took me a second to realize that Mama had moved right in front of me and Lan. It must have surprised Uncle Earn, too, because he broke off in mid-bellow. “That is quite enough, Mr. Rothmer,” Mama said in an icy calm voice I’d never heard her use before, not even the time she’d seen a man whipping an overloaded horse in the street and given him what for. “No one calls my children liars in my home.”

“I—I—”

“You’ve had your say, Mr. Rothmer,” Mama told him in the same cold, calm voice. “Now I’ll have mine. I’ve watched you and your wife come near to ruining your own children between spoiling them one minute and whipping them the next. You know my views on that, and I’ll say no more of it now. But when it comes to you and Janna ruining my children as well as your own, I have more to say than you’ll like hearing. And first, last, and foremost is this: It ends now.”

“Sara, you’re overset,” Uncle Earn said. “I allow for a mother’s partiality, but surely even you can see—”

“I can see plain enough that an angel straight from heaven itself would grow up crooked if she was watched and chivvied and told every morning and every night that she was sure to turn evil,” Mama said. “And I can see equally plain that fussing and fawning over a child that hasn’t even learned his numbers yet, as if he were a prince of power and wisdom, will only grow him into a swell-headed, stuck-up scarecrow of a man, who like as not will never know good advice when he hears it, nor think to ask for it when he needs it.”

“You’re mad,” Uncle Earn said dismissively. “Daniel, I did not come here to be lectured by your wife.”

“The door is right behind you,” Papa said pleasantly

I peeked around Mama’s skirt in time to see Uncle Earn’s jaw drop. “What? You don’t mean ...”

“I mean that Sara hasn’t said a thing that the two of us haven’t discussed and come to an agreement on already. If I hear one more word about Eff or Lan from you, or Janna, or any one of your precious children, I’ll put a curse on your house myself, brother or no.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

“Try me,” Papa said grimly. “And if you ever attempt to set the law on my family again for nothing but a poisonous whim, you had better be prepared to defend your actions in court, for I’ll have you hauled in front of a judge faster than a cat can hiss. I think that’s put clearly enough even for you, Earn.”

Uncle Earn just stood there, staring, for a long, long moment. Then he stiffened, glared all around, and stalked out, letting the sitting room door slam behind him.

Lan and I looked at each other, and then up at Mama. Mama looked over at Papa, and Papa said, “You stay here, Sara, while I see that things have been shut up properly after him.”

Mama took me and Lan by the hand and walked us over to the straight-backed chair with the carved arms, and then took both of us in her lap at once. My head was still swimming with the surprise of it all. Not that Cousin Marna would make up tales about stealing my ribbon, nor that Uncle Earn would call a policeman to arrest me—those weren’t exactly surprising. But the way the policeman winked at me! And the way Mama and Papa tore into Uncle Earn! I’d never thought such things possible. I still wasn’t sure they’d happened.

Papa came back after a bit and said Uncle Earn was gone, and then he and Mama talked all serious to Lan and me about what had just happened. Mama said she and Papa couldn’t do much to keep people from talking, and they could do even less about what people chose to think, but there were some things they could do, and we’d see for ourselves in a few more days. Papa wanted to ask me more about Cousin Marna and the other children, but Mama said firmly that it was getting late and that Lan and I should be in bed. I still had a million questions, but I couldn’t get them out my tongue.

The very next day, Lan came running out into the yard, wide-eyed. “You’re supposed to be with your tutor,” I told him. “You better go back in before they miss you.”

“I’m not having magic lessons today,” he said. “Mama told me to come outside and stick with you.”

Lan’s tutor never came back. Years later, I learned that Papa had spoken to him about teaching both of us and had dismissed him outright when he refused. There must have been some discussion with Grandfather, too, but neither he nor Papa ever spoke of it after. At the time, Papa only told Lan and me that there would be no more private tutoring. We would have a lesson with Mama in the morning, and another with Papa in the evening, and in between Lan and I were to stick together. I think Papa must have said something to our older brothers as well, because for the next week, one or two of them always seemed to be around when the cousins came by ready to tease and make trouble. It was the best week I ever remember spending in Helvan Shores.

Then, on Monday evening, Papa held a Family Council, and everything changed.