Lan’s eyebrows drew together. “Three,” he said.
Wash’s eyebrows rose, but all he said was, “Three, then.”
“You’re more than welcome,” Professor Torgeson said.
“Thank you kindly,” Wash replied. He tipped his hat again and then rode off to camp. The rest of us got back to work picking rocks until dinner. Thanks to the professor’s wire screens, we’d found a lot more good specimens than we’d expected, though we still didn’t have any that were completely whole. Everything seemed to be missing the thin, fragile bits — legs or feet or tails or ears. The closest we came to a whole animal was a loon with its feet tucked up. The head had broken off, but we found it, too, so there were just a couple of missing chips around where the break was.
Wash’s news made for quite a conversation over dinner. Lan was particularly excited. “It proves that the petrification is some kind of spell,” he said.
“It doesn’t prove anything of the sort,” Mr. Torre, one of the students, said. “Until somebody actually sees it happen, we can’t know for sure. And I think it’s some kind of natural process.”
“Fast enough to petrify a live animal all at once?” Lan said scornfully. “That’s ridiculous. The only natural petrification we know of is fossilization, and fossils take thousands of years to form.”
“Obviously they’re not fossils,” Mr. Barnet, the other student, said. He’d just graduated, and he and Lan didn’t get on. I thought it was because he felt that being two years older and finished with college made him the next most important person in the group after Professor Torgeson. Lan thought he was just an idiot. “But they can’t have been the result of a spell; they haven’t any magical residue at all.”
“Neither does anything else around here,” Lan shot back. “The grubs and the mirror bugs ate it all.”
“That’s an interesting theory,” Professor Torgeson said. “I’d assumed that the lack of magic was a feature of the stones themselves, but it might very well have happened later.”
“Professor!” Mr. Torre said reproachfully, like he’d expected her to side with them because she was their professor. She just looked at him, and he drooped a little. Then he straightened up. “But most of the stones we’re finding were buried in the hill,” he said. “I could believe that the mirror bugs absorbed the magic from all the ones near the surface, just like they did with everything else, but could they have pulled magic from that far underground?”
“Something did,” I said.
Everyone looked at me. I sighed. “It’s just common sense. Everything that’s alive, and a lot of things that aren’t, has magic. Natural animals only have a tiny bit that doesn’t do them a lick of good, but they still have it. Even rocks and dirt have magic, most places — Professor Torgeson said last summer that the magical plants can’t grow here because the grubs absorbed it all and it’ll be a while coming back.”
“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Barnet. “What does that have to do with the petrification problem?”
“If all these stone animals used to be live critters, they had magic in them when they were alive,” I said. “It has to have gone somewhere.”
“Very true,” Professor Torgeson said. “Which is why you and I are going on with Mr. Morris tomorrow morning, Miss Rothmer.” She looked at Lan. “Since you are something of a volunteer, you may come or stay as you see fit. The rest of you will stay here with Mr. Jinns and continue with the sample collecting. You know how by this time.”
In spite of the professor’s no-nonsense tone, that caused a bit of uproar. Both of the students thought they should be the ones to go with Wash and the professor, if anyone was going, and Lan and I should stay to collect samples. The professor told them that they’d been hired to collect samples, not to do scientific investigations. She said that I was along as her assistant, and she wouldn’t do without me, and Lan wasn’t employed by the college or the Settlement Office at all and could do whatever he liked.
“We could all go,” Mr. Torre suggested.
“Well, now, I’m sorry to disabuse you of that notion,” Wash said, “but a group travels a sight slower than one man alone, and the larger the group, the slower it goes. The professor here talked me into taking her and these two, but that’s my limit. It was an urgent message, after all.”
“And I’m not sitting around babysitting a bunch of mules, waiting for all of you to get back,” Mr. Jinns growled. He glared at the two students and added, “Not that the two-legged mules are likely to be any better, to my way of thinking.”
Once the students were finally convinced that they’d have to stay, they wanted to know how long we’d be gone.
“It’s about two, two and a half days’ ride if we nip right along,” Wash said. “Call it five days for travel, and one or two when we get there to find out what’s actually happened.”
“A week, then,” Mr. Barnet said. “What if we finish filling all the packs before then?”
Mr. Jinns snorted up his coffee. I got the feeling he didn’t think much of their chances of being done in a week, but he didn’t actually say anything.
“If you finish before we return, you will of course take the samples back to Mill City,” the professor said. “We’ll probably catch up with you on the way; you’ll travel more slowly with the mules to see to.”
I could tell that the students still wanted to argue, but I knew it wouldn’t do them any good. Professor Torgeson was in charge and it was clear that neither Wash nor Mr. Jinns would back them up. I poked Lan and nodded at the dishes, and the two of us collected them and took them down to the creek to wash up. We stayed a mite longer than was strictly necessary for dish washing, so that by the time we hauled everything back to camp, the argument was over and done with.
And the next morning, barely after dawn, Lan and Professor Torgeson and I rode out with Wash, just as the professor had said in the first place.
CHAPTER 25
TRAVELING WITH WASH WHEN HE WAS IN A HURRY WAS A LOT different from the way we’d traveled the previous summer. We didn’t take a pack animal, and we alternated trotting and walking so as to go as fast as possible without foundering the horses. When Lan asked about speed-traveling spells, Wash said that he’d only ever used one once, west of the Mammoth, and he’d only do it again if someone was likely to die if they didn’t get somewhere on time. Mostly, if there was a real emergency but nobody dying, he’d gallop and walk, then trade his tired horse for a fresh one at the next settlement. We couldn’t do that because settlements only had to provide mounts for circuit magicians, and anyway this wasn’t an emergency yet.
Wash’s estimate for time was dead-on. We got to the Big Bear Lake settlement near sunset of our second day traveling, mainly because it was high summer and the sun rose early and set late, and we rode pretty nearly every minute it was up.
The settlement folks were surprised to see us; they’d only expected Wash. They found room for all of us, though, in the newcomers’ longhouse. That was a big, plain building three times as long as it was wide, meant for new settlers to stay in until they got their own houses built. Most settlements built one first thing, and then after they earned out their allotments they turned it into a general store or town hall. Professor Torgeson said the settlers got the idea from the Scandians and Vinlanders, who’d been building longhouses since medieval times.
It was too late in the day to do much in the way of talking, especially with three of the four of us well and truly tuckered out from the fast ride. Wash was the only one who didn’t seem bothered by it. The rest of us turned in as soon as we could and slept as late as they let us, which wasn’t much later than we’d been getting up at the camp.