That first time I’d crossed the Mammoth River, it had felt like the Barrier Spell itself was looking me over, checking to see if I was a danger that shouldn’t be let through. It hadn’t been a pleasant feeling, and I’d been careful not to do any Aphrikan magic on the return trip. Now I had a moment of misgiving; I wasn’t sure whether being very quiet would be enough to keep the spell from noticing me. But it was too late for second thoughts; the ferry bell was ringing to warn everyone that we were almost at mid-river. A moment later the ferry hit the spell with a little bump.
Little rainbows shivered across the deck toward me. The horses jigged and pulled against the hitching rail, and I could feel mine fighting the spell I’d put on him. I sank deeper into the magic to try to calm him. Without thinking, I fell into the breathing pattern of the Hijero-Cathayan concentration technique that Miss Ochiba had taught me when I was thirteen.
The Great Barrier Spell reached the part of the ferry where I stood with the horses. It didn’t seem to pay me any mind, though I didn’t have too much time to think on it right then. That horse of mine was fighting the calming spell worse than ever, and I could see it wasn’t going to hold.
I reached for the nearest natural magic source. I’d gotten in the habit of doing that whenever my Avrupan spells started to go wrong — twitching and tweaking them from outside to make them work, anyway. But there was no natural source of magic within reach except the power of the river, and the Great Barrier Spell was using all of that.
I bit my lip, clenched my hands around the hitching rail, and poured as much of my own power as I could reach into the spell. Distantly, I felt something warm against my chest. The weak spots in the calming spell tightened up. My horse gave a great sigh, shook his mane, and settled down. And a few seconds later, we were through.
I hung over the hitching rail, panting. As I did, I felt Wash’s wooden pendant swing and settle a few inches below my collarbone. It was cool again, but I knew it had been the source of the warmth I’d felt a minute earlier. Right that minute, though, I wasn’t thinking much about it. I was just hoping that Wash hadn’t noticed what I’d been up to, because I was pretty near certain that he’d guess I’d been tweaking my Avrupan spells and wouldn’t think much of me doing it.
“Nice job, Miss Rothmer,” said an accented voice above me. I jerked my head back to see Professor Torgeson pushing sweat-damp hair back from her forehead. “Fixing a spell on the fly like that is a useful talent,” she went on. “I’m glad you have it.”
I straightened, though I still felt shaky and exhausted. “Thank you,” I said uncertainly. “But I always thought it was better if your spells didn’t need fixing.”
The professor laughed. “True enough, as long as you’re working with a predictable situation. The wildlands aren’t predictable, though.”
“Wildlands?”
“The land that men haven’t tamed,” Professor Torgeson said. “From my home, that’s most of the mainland; from yours, it’s all of North Columbia that’s outside the Great Barrier Spell.”
“Oh,” I said. Over her shoulder, I saw Wash studying me and my horse. His face was a dark, expressionless mask, and when he saw me watching, he turned away. My heart sank. He’d noticed what I’d done, right enough, and he frowned on it just as much as I’d thought he would.
I wanted to head off somewhere and curl up in a ball, like I used to when I was five and my cousins back in Helvan Shores hectored me, but I couldn’t. There was no place on the ferry to go, and as soon as we docked, I had my hands full with my horse and the extra baggage and supplies. As our guide, Wash got to handle necessities like food and fire starters, but Professor Torgeson told me that as her assistant, the equipment and magical supplies for the survey were my responsibility, and we should begin as we meant to go on. I had to see that everything we’d packed up in Mill City was still there and safely unloaded.
The main worry was the extra boxes we were sending on to settlements farther along on our route, so that we could pick them up later. With all the settlement failures, there weren’t so many carriers going back and forth, and we had to change our plans some. That meant repacking some of the preserving jars and labels, a couple of blank journals, ink, and about half of the extra spell-casting ingredients, so as to get the right amount to the right places. It took the rest of the day to get it all done and sent off.
Wash didn’t say a thing to me all that afternoon that wasn’t about the business in hand. At first, I felt lower than a snake’s belly, but after a while I started to get a mite peeved. I hadn’t done anything except make sure my horse stayed calm, the way I was supposed to.
I went to bed grumpy and woke up grumpier. I’d gotten in the habit of working on my Aphrikan world-sensing first thing every morning, but that day I didn’t. I told myself it was because it felt peculiar to be sitting there concentrating while Professor Torgeson bustled about the hired room we shared, but really it was just bad temper.
Neither Professor Torgeson nor Wash noticed my mood, which didn’t help matters any. My horse did, though. He was skittish the whole time I was saddling him, and I thought for a while I was going to have to put a calming spell on him again. I didn’t know if I could get it to work, though, not without using Aphrikan magic to prop the spell up from outside, and that made me grouchy all over again.
Fortunately, the packhorse was dead calm, and by the time I had her loaded up, I’d gotten over some of my grump. I triple-checked everything — the last thing I wanted was for Wash or Professor Torgeson to find a loose rope or an unbalanced load on the very first day. I was glad I had, too, because the professor and Wash each checked everything over again before we all mounted.
Once I was in the saddle, my horse settled down. Then Wash took the lead rein for the packhorse and led us out onto the streets of West Landing.
CHAPTER 6
WEST LANDING WAS THE OLDEST SETTLEMENT ON THE WEST BANK of the Mammoth — at this end of the river, anyway. It was founded right before the Secession War, though back then it was just a couple of big warehouses built of mortared fieldstone, meant to make it easier to catch the free timber that floated downriver from the lumber camps up North. The settlement had hung on through the war, just barely, and then started growing fast when the war was over and all the Homestead Claims and Settlement Offices started working at getting the Western Territories settled before anybody else laid claim to them.
Riding through the town settled me down even more. I liked the feel of West Landing, from the double-wide dirt streets to the people in their long tan dusters and home-sewn calico. A lot of the folks recognized Wash and waved when they saw him. One man yelled to him that it was about time he got out on circuit.
“Take it up with the Settlement Office, Lathrop!” Wash yelled, and the man made a show of rolling his eyes, then grinned back.
A few of the men on horseback turned to come along with us for a little way, so they could ask Wash about what was happening farther out in settlement country or back at the Settlement Office in Mill City. Some just wanted to complain about the way the North Plains Territory Homestead Claims and Settlement Office was handling everything from the mirror bug problem to the freeze on new settlements. One or two had information to pass along.