Thirteenth Child

CHAPTER 8

ONCE SCHOOL STARTED, EVERYTHING SEEMED TO CALM DOWN, FROM the weather to the settlers to the Settlement Office itself. Our daily visitors went back to being students coming for classes or to ask Papa special questions. Hugh packed his trunk and left for the same university back East that Charlie and Peter had studied at, after explaining carefully to Dean Farley that he didn’t mean it as any reflection on the Northern Plains Riverbank College, but he thought he’d prefer a school where he didn’t have to take half his classes from his own father.

Rennie was still at home, though she’d graduated upper school and should have started work or been studying for college. But Rennie didn’t want more schooling, and she couldn’t seem to find a job that suited her in Mill City, however hard she looked. I thought it was probably because nobody would let her start right in bossing people, without taking a turn being bossed first, but I kept my opinion to myself.

It wasn’t long before I was glad I hadn’t said anything, because a month after school started, Corrie Bergston came to class with a hacking cough, and nearly everyone caught it, including me and Lan. Rennie split the nursing with Mama, and I didn’t like to think how miserable a time I’d have had if I’d given her reason to be cross with me. I was miserable enough as it was.

Lan wheezed for a week, like everyone else, and then the coughing slacked off and he went back to school. I wasn’t so lucky. The cough turned to a putrid sore throat, and then to something else that made me hot and achy all over for weeks. Mama had the doctor in, and then another doctor, and then pretty nearly every professor at the college who might have some practical use to them, and the minister on top of them all. Most of the time, I was too tired and achy to care about anything except making them go away, but after a while it sank in through the fog in my head that I must be really sick for all those people to keep coming with nasty-tasting potions and spells.

One of the times I felt clear enough to think, I finally asked Mama what was wrong with me.

“You have rheumatic fever, Eff,” she said. “It’s a very dangerous disease, but you’re past the worst of it now, if we’re careful.”

“If we’re careful?”

“Rheumatic fever lingers in the body, even after you start feeling better,” Mama explained. “You’ll have to lie here quietly for a long time if you don’t want to have a recurrence.”

“You mean I could be sick all over again?” I asked.

Mama nodded. “All over again, and worse than ever,” she told me. Her voice wobbled, so I knew it was serious. “You might die, or the fever could weaken your heart, despite all our spells and potions. So you see how important it is for you to stay quiet.”

I nodded. Mama looked like she wanted to say something more, but I lay back and pretended that I wanted to go to sleep. She tucked up the coverlet and kissed me before she left. I lay awake for a long while when she was gone, thinking as best I could.

My head was still fairly muddled, but I’d got the part about dying, all right. It seemed wrong to me that all the doctors and magicians should put so much work into trying to keep me alive, when if they’d known I was a thirteenth child and bound to turn evil in a few years, they wouldn’t have lifted a finger. Only then I thought maybe they wouldn’t mind about me being thirteenth, after all. Mill City was different from Helvan Shores. In the five years we’d been here, nobody’d made any fuss about me being a thirteenth child. If anybody had noticed, it seemed they didn’t much care. Nobody had made any fuss about Lan being a double-seven, either, except for the Settlement Office. If I stayed away from the Settlement Office, maybe it would be all right.

Not that I had any call to go anywhere near the Settlement Office, or anywhere else, that year. Mama meant it when she said I had to stay quiet. I spent most of that year in bed, and missed all of school. For a while, Lan brought lessons home and I tried to catch up, but Mama wouldn’t let me put in a full day working, for fear the fever would go to my brain, so I finally had to quit. I was really sorry. Once you get over the novelty of the thing, it’s almighty boring, lying in bed all day for months. Even lessons would have been better.

My older brothers and sisters tried to cheer me up, but except for Rennie they were all in school most of the day, and had chores and homework to do after. They didn’t have much time to spend entertaining an invalid. A few of my classmates came a time or two, but I didn’t know most of the girls very well and the boys were embarrassed to be visiting a girl, especially after they saw I didn’t have any interesting scars.

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 selecting 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.