table, then took a chair and started pouring water and handing it around. I backed quietly into the house and left. I could see she’d forgotten to bring any napkins or biscuit plates, and I knew as soon as she realized, she’d look for me to get them if I was still there.
So I never did hear the rest of the conversation, and Rennie was cross with me all evening. But when the college classes started three weeks later, Brant Wilson was one of my father’s students, squared-off hat and crow’s feather and all.
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
