Across the Great Barrier

CHAPTER 23

LAN STOOD SILHOUETTED AGAINST THE WINDOW FOR THE LONGEST time. When he finally began to speak, he kept his back toward me, as if he could pretend he was just talking to himself as long as he couldn’t actually see anyone else in the room.

“I wrote to you about Professor Warren last summer,” he said after a while. “When he had Michael and me working on spell classifications. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” I said very softly, once it was clear that he expected me to answer.

“I didn’t like him.” Lan was quiet again for a long time. “Now I wish I had, even though that would make everything worse, some ways.”

I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me.

“He taught the class in comparative magic,” Lan went on. “You know, Avrupan and Aphrikan and Hijero-Cathayan magic, and how different they are. He says — he said — that Avrupan magic is about analysis and control, Hijero-Cathayan magic is about passion and direction, and Aphrikan magic is about insight and assurance. I never understood what he meant.” He paused. “I don’t think I ever really tried to understand.”

It seemed to me that understanding such a fuzzy description would take a powerful lot of trying, but I stayed quiet.

“Last summer, he had a bunch of us working at classifying some of the new spells the Hijero-Cathayans have been developing. They’re really interesting, Eff — the Zhejiang Provincial School of Advanced Magic has done some amazing … never mind. The point is, Michael and I wanted to learn some of the spells, but Professor Warren said we didn’t have enough control.” His shoulders twitched irritably. “So we started working on them by ourselves.”

“Lan!” I burst out, horrified. “How could you? Hijero-Cathayan magic is horribly dangerous!”

“It’s not that bad,” Lan said. He half turned to look at me, and I could see his frown in the dim light from the street lanterns. “They’ve been doing it for nearly three thousand years, after all. And we didn’t have any trouble.” He turned back to the window. “Not then,” he added so softly that I almost missed it.

After another long pause, Lan went on. “There was one spell in particular, for dredging a lake, that I really wanted to learn. It uses the circulation of the lake water to support the spell, almost the way the Great Barrier Spell uses the flow of the river, and I thought if I could understand it properly …”

His voice trailed off, but I knew my brother well enough to know what he was going to say. The Great Barrier Spell was an amazing piece of magic, and nobody really knew how Mr. Franklin and Mr. Jefferson had gotten it to work. If Lan could explain even one little piece of it, his name would be made. If he could duplicate it, the settlements in the West wouldn’t need palisades or even settlement magicians anymore.

A carriage rattled by outside, the only one we’d seen since we’d been sitting there. I wondered how late it was.

Lan sighed. “Professor Warren caught us before we got everything set up to try the spell. He read us a lecture worse than Mama’s, and after that, Michael wouldn’t help. And you can’t cast Hijero-Cathayan spells alone; they all take more than one person.”

I nodded again. The way they explained it in day school, Hijero-Cathayan magic takes a team of magicians to work, but it’s not like the teams of magicians we use. When Avrupan magicians work together, each of them takes one tiny piece of the spell and does just that one thing. Avrupan team magic takes a lot of control and precision to work, because if everyone’s bits and pieces don’t fit together exactly right, the whole spell falls apart and nothing happens.

Hijero-Cathayan magicians do the whole spell together, all of them at once, with a master magician or adept guiding the group. That means they have a lot of power — Hijero-Cathayans have spells for damming up rivers and carving roads out of mountains that take just one spell and a few hours to do all that work — but if anyone slips, all that power can burn out the master magician and injure the whole group.

My thoughts stuttered, and all of a sudden I had a sick, awful feeling that I knew where all Lan’s rambling was going.

“— took his class, anyway, because I hoped he’d actually teach the spells,” Lan was saying. I’d missed some. “But he didn’t. He’d show us an Avrupan spell, and then he’d set up for a Hijero-Cathayan spell that did something similar, but he always stopped short of actually casting it. All year long.” He banged his fist against the window frame, not hard, just frustrated.

“So last month, when Professor Warren set up for the Hijero-Cathayan lake-dredging spell …” Lan paused, and swallowed hard. “… when he set up the spell, I went ahead and finished the casting. I thought it would be just for a minute, just to show him it would work, we could handle it. Only …”

There was a long silence. “Only it didn’t work,” I said at last.

Lan gave a harsh laugh. “Oh, it worked; that was the problem. Nobody but me was ready for it to work. I thought I would be the head magician, because I’d finished the casting, but I guess Hijero-Cathayan spells don’t work like that. Professor Warren set everything up — he was the teacher, he was the focus. And he couldn’t hold us all — he wasn’t strong enough. He couldn’t … he couldn’t hold me.”

My eyes widened as I realized what Lan was saying. He was the seventh son of a seventh son, with more magic than pretty near any other magician there was. Pouring all that magic into a Hijero-Cathayan spell that no one was expecting in the first place … well, I’d wager it’d be a problem for even a really experienced Cathayan adept. For Professor Warren …

“I could tell it was all going wrong, but I couldn’t do anything about it. Professor Warren was the head of the team. All our magic, from all eleven of us, went straight to him. All of my magic. I couldn’t stop it.

“I burned him out,” Lan whispered. “Me. My magic. I killed him.”

I stayed quiet.

“I almost killed everyone else, too.”

“You almost died yourself,” I said.

“I should have. I should —”

“No,” I said firmly. The word hung in the air almost as if it was a spell, louder and clearer than anything either of us had said.

For a minute, Lan stood like he’d been turned to one of those gray-white stone statues Professor Torgeson had been collecting. Then he turned and, for the first time since we’d started talking, peered into the dark where I was sitting. “But —”

“No,” I said again. “I won’t say it’s not partly your fault, and I won’t say you shouldn’t feel bad about what you did. But talking about dying makes it worse, not better. It’s bad enough that your professor died and people got hurt. More people dying doesn’t make up for what happened; it only makes things harder for everyone who’s left.”

“Everyone who’s left?”

“Mama and Papa,” I said. “All our brothers and sisters — Robbie and Allie and Nan and Frank and everybody. Your friends here — I don’t know their names, but you had more visitors than the hospital would let in, and a heaping pile of get-well notes and letters besides.” I frowned at him. “Me.”

Lan looked away. “I’ve let everybody down, haven’t I?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You messed up, right enough, but it isn’t like you meant for anyone to be hurt, let alone —” Lan flinched, so I stopped right there.

“Does it matter that I didn’t mean it? People did get hurt, and Professor Warren … I don’t think I can ever make up for it.”

“Lan!” I snapped. “I’ve been trying to be nice about this, but you’re being as thick in the head as the wall the menagerie built to keep the baby mammoth inside! Moping around isn’t going to make anyone feel better, not you and not anybody else. If you want to blame someone, you might as well blame me.”

Lan’s head jerked up. “It’s not your fault! How could it be? You weren’t even there.”

“Exactly,” I said. I knew what he was thinking. I’d spent years and years feeling bad about everything that went wrong anywhere around me, because I was sure that it all happened on account of me being a thirteenth child and unlucky, and he thought I was back at it again. But I’d learned a thing or two in the past three years, and one of them was when I ought to figure things were all my fault and when not.

But Lan was just as used to needing to talk me out of blaming myself as I was used to doing the blaming in the first place. I told him that, and then I added, “What you don’t see is that for all the times you helped me keep from trouble that hadn’t ought to have been mine in the first place, there were just as many times when I helped you duck trouble that really ought to have been yours.”

“There were not!”

“Oh?” I shook my head. “What about that time you floated William treetop high when we were ten? All right, you maybe would have let him down easy if I hadn’t been there to talk at you, but then again, maybe not. And you were all set to lay into Uncle Earn at least twice when we went out to Diane’s wedding, if I hadn’t gotten to him first. And —”

“All right!” Lan held up his hands and almost smiled.

“So if I’d come East to school the way you wanted me to, I’d maybe have seen enough to talk you out of making such a mess of things this time, too,” I finished.

“You can’t blame yourself for that!”

“No more than you should take more blame than you have coming,” I told him, ignoring the little voice in the back of my head that said I was, too, to blame. I’d gotten a lot better at ignoring it, but it was still there at times like this. “It’s harder for you, because there’s no denying that you did something you shouldn’t have, and it’s only right that you should try to make up for it. But you have to do more than dwell on everything that went wrong.”

“If I don’t think about it, I might do it again,” Lan said. “Not — not a Hijero-Cathayan casting, but something else that’ll end up with people hurt and — and —”

“I didn’t say not to think about it,” I said. “I said not to only think. Sitting around doing nothing because you’re scared of messing up again isn’t going to help anyone.”

“I know. I just —” Lan raised his hands, then let them fall helplessly.

Neither of us spoke for a while. Then I said, “I think you should tell Papa what happened.”

“I tried!”

“How hard?” Lan was quiet. I nodded. “I think you should try again. Sometime when he isn’t so distracted. Then you can figure out who else needs to know and how to tell them.”

“I don’t want anyone else to know,” Lan muttered.

“You told me.” I studied the dark shape against the window. “And what about Professor Warren? You’re the only one who knows everything that happened; according to Dean Ziegler, all the other students were confused and couldn’t explain anything after Professor Warren set up the spell. If you don’t say what happened, they’ll likely put the blame on him, and that’s not right.”

“No, it isn’t.” Lan sighed. “You fight dirty, Eff.”

“Think about it, anyway,” I said. “You made a bad choice, and some of it can’t ever be fixed. But you have a lot more choices coming up. The important thing is to try really hard not to make another one this bad, ever again.”

He nodded. We stayed a long time in companionable silence, watching the gaslights and the shadows they cast on the street outside. Finally, Lan pushed away from the window and walked over to where I was sitting. He didn’t speak; he just put a hand on my shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze, then went on out of the room.