But I could see that I wouldn’t get anything more out of him then, and we’d almost reached the house, so I huffed a little and asked where he was going next, after he left Mill City.
“Out to finish teaching the last few settlement magicians those new spells of yours,” he said. “After that, downriver for the winter.”
I must have looked surprised, because he shook his shaggy head at me and grinned again. “It seems the Settlement Offices up and down the river got together and decided that somebody should train a few magicians farther south, just in case some of those mirror bugs turn up in the Midlands next spring. We don’t know how far they spread before we got a handle on them, after all. And it’s been a long time since I visited New Orleans.”
“New Orleans is a long, dangerous trip,” I said, before I thought to remember who I was talking to. Going down to New Orleans wasn’t near as dangerous as riding circuit in the settlements, and the reason they’d asked Wash to ride a circuit in the first place was that he was one of the few men who’d gone off to explore the Far West on his own and come back alive to tell about it.
“Not so far as you think,” Wash said. “I’ll be there well before Christmas, even stopping at settlements. Might even have time to swing east a bit and see how things are changing there, before I come back in the spring.”
We turned in at the gate of the big lumber-baron house the Northern Plains Riverbank College had given Papa when we first moved to Mill City thirteen years before. It was a lot quieter now that Robbie and Allie and I were the only ones left at home, even with Papa’s students in and out all the time.
I left Wash in the front parlor and went to find Papa and then to make tea. I had a million questions still to ask, but I didn’t think Wash would answer any of them right then, and certainly not when he had Papa to talk to. Besides, I had more thinking to do. Wash was almost as good at giving me things to think about as William.
CHAPTER 3
THE FIRST THING I DID, THE MORNING AFTER THAT TALK WITH Wash, was to work on the Aphrikan world-sensing technique that Miss Ochiba had taught us. Only instead of just doing it and stopping, I tried to keep it going all the time.
It was difficult. Paying attention to everything at once, while being very quiet inside your own head, is hard enough when you’re sitting still. Doing it while you are walking around and talking to people and doing breakfast dishes and solving math problems and answering history questions seemed pretty near impossible at first. I kept getting distracted by the warm feel of a wooden table or the swirly sense of the soap in the dishwater. The more I worked at it, though, the easier it got. I still couldn’t keep it up all the time, but the more I tried, the longer it worked.
Oddly enough, one of the first things that happened was that my Avrupan spell casting got better as soon as I started doing the world-sensing in class. It was late November before I tried, because I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to mix Avrupan and Aphrikan magic, but after my pencil-mending spell reduced my broken pencil to a heap of splinters and black powder, I figured that world-sensing couldn’t make things any worse than they were already.
Two days before Harvest Feast, I walked into magic class concentrating on world-sensing for all I was worth. I almost dropped my books in surprise. The practice tables where we set up our spells were covered with warm spots and cool spots, like someone had scattered snowballs and lit candles over them and left them to melt. My table was the coldest spot in the room, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that the reason was the way my spells always went wrong.
That day, Mr. Nordstrom had us working on a spell for balancing an uneven weight from a distance. It was actually a blend of two spells we’d already learned, and the point was to learn to control them both at the same time. A lot of the advanced spells, like the travel protection spells that folks need west of the Great Barrier Spell, use two or more spells at once, so it’s important to know how to work with combinations.
I was actually fairly good at the spell for doing things at a distance, because it was so useful at the menagerie. Cleaning the scorch lizard’s pen was downright dangerous if you got too close, but with the distance spell, I could just stand outside and lift the mess into the bucket without getting anywhere near the lizard’s teeth or breath. I’d never been able to do the weight-adjusting spell, though, so I expected the class exercise to be a failure, as usual.
I set up my table the way the instructions said, with a little wooden teeter-totter at the far end and a stubby candle, a feather, a linen string, a lead weight, and a paper fan in front of me. Most Avrupan spells need a lot of equipment to get them to work when you’re learning; it’s only after you’ve practiced a lot that you can do them without the supplies, and there are some spells that only the most powerful magicians can ever learn to do without gear. Being a combination spell, this one needed supplies from both the spells we were supposed to combine, plus some extra things to make the spells work together properly.
I measured the herbs carefully and set part of them aside so Mr. Nordstrom could see that I’d done it properly and maybe give me partial credit. Then I tied one end of the string to the feather and the other end to the weight, and looped the middle around the base of the fan. I started murmuring the spell as I lit the candle and sprinkled the herbs across the fan and the candle flame.
As I picked up the fan (carefully, so as not to let the loop of string fall off), I felt the magic thicken around me like a warm blanket. It gathered around the flame and the fan, getting stronger and warmer as the spell shaped it. I was fascinated; I’d never watched an Avrupan spell casting through my world-sensing before.
And then my spell started to go wrong. Instead of balancing evenly between the candle and the fan, the feather, and the lead, the magic grew hotter around the fan. It was speeding up, too, and I knew that in another minute my paper fan would catch fire.
So I reached out and pushed the magic back toward the candle. I’d done something like that at the Little Fog settlement, using Aphrikan magic to make the mirror bugs’ magic do what I wanted instead of what it was supposed to do, but I’d never thought about doing it to my own spells. It worked better than I expected. The spell slowed and the magic evened out, and a minute later I finished the casting.
The teeter-totter on the far end of my table shivered. I held my breath. Slowly, the lower arm rose until the bar of the teeter-totter was dead level, just the way it was supposed to be.
I got full marks in magic class that day for the first time since I’d started upper school. After that, I made sure to keep doing my world-sensing whenever I was casting spells. It let me sort of feel where things were going wrong before they fell apart, in time to push them back together again. My grades in magic class went right up and stayed.
Of course, improving my spells also meant that Allie made me take on a bunch of the housekeeping magic that I hadn’t been able to do before. I’d have been cross about it, except that she made Robbie take over most of the chores that were just plain hard work and no magic. I didn’t much mind trading hauling firewood and hoeing the garden for working the fly-block spells and the fast-dusting charms.
Lan and William didn’t come home for Christmas that year, not either one of them, nor did most of my other brothers and sisters, but there were letters from everyone. Even Rennie sent a letter, the first we’d had from her since Papa and I had been out to the Rationalist settlement back in June. It was kind of sketchy for something covering all that while, but we didn’t have much time for thinking on it because of Professor Jeffries and William.