“I suppose,” William said doubtfully. He looked like he wanted to say more, but thought better of it. “Where did you learn that spell, anyway?”
“From Jack. He got it from one of Papa’s students, I think.” Lan gave William a sidelong look. “I’ll teach you, if you want,” he offered. “It’s easy.”
William hesitated, then nodded. I wanted to object, but I didn’t. After all, Lan hadn’t said anything to Tad about leaving William alone, just about me.
It wasn’t until later that night, thinking things over in bed before I fell asleep, that a niggling little worry started in the back of my head. Lan had said that the flame that shot out of Tad’s snowball was illusion, but I distinctly remembered hearing the hiss and spit of water hitting a hot surface. I tried telling myself that it was part of the illusion, that Lan had remembered to include sound as well as sight in his spell. I convinced myself well enough to get to sleep, but not enough to make the worry go away for good.
That was just about the end of the nasty tricks from Tad and his friends. The very end came a couple of days later. I was walking back to my seat in class, and I saw Tad shift his feet under his desk. I knew that he was going to try to trip me as I went past him. Only then he looked down and turned white as a bleached shirtfront, and went completely still. His head twitched as I came up next to him, like he’d started to look at me and stopped himself, but that was all.
I looked down at his desk as I passed, and saw his slate with all the math problems we’d been doing. Right in the middle was a blank spot, like somebody had swiped a sponge across it, and in the middle of the blank were three words and two numbers:
After that, Tad didn’t just leave me alone; he avoided me every chance he got. That was fine by me. At the end of that week, Lan asked casually whether I’d had any more trouble. I told him no, and I didn’t think I would. I didn’t tell him I’d seen his message to Tad, and I didn’t ask how he’d done it, though I thought on it more than a little.
Then, just when I figured the worst of the year might be over, Mama slipped on the back steps while she was carrying the wash water and twisted her knee and broke her leg in two places. The doctor strapped her in a heavy cast and she was weeks mending.
Nan had just found a job in the shipping office at the railroad, so Allie and I had to take over running the house. You’d have thought that with Hugh at university in the East and Rennie off in the settlement, there’d be enough less work to notice, but it didn’t seem like it. It was harder on Allie than it was on me, because I’d been having as much trouble learning normal housekeeping spells as I did with my other magic lessons, so Allie had to do most of the chores that needed magic. Neither of us complained much, though, except to each other. We didn’t want Mama to take the notion she should get up and manage things herself, not until the doctors said she could, anyway.
In the middle of everything, a letter finally came from Rennie. Papa didn’t pass it around to us all, the way he usually did with family letters, but he said she was sorry she’d caused a fuss. She was happy at the Rationalist settlement, she said. And she’d had a baby boy, named Albert Daniel Wilson after his two grandfathers, who she hoped to bring to Mill City to meet us all when he was older and better able to stand the journey. She didn’t mention a birth date, which annoyed Nan, but Papa added Albert Daniel Wilson and the year to the family Bible and said we’d put the rest in later.
The news from Rennie cheered Mama up some. By the time school let out, she was up and around again, but she tired easily, so Allie and I kept on with the householding. It didn’t leave me time to worry over Lan, or Tad, or Rennie, or anything else, all that summer.
CHAPTER 17
THAT FALL, LAN WENT BACK EAST TO A BOARDING SCHOOL IN Pennsylvania. I’d known, out on the edge of my mind, that he and Papa had been talking about it all spring while Mama was in her cast, but I’d been too busy to pay it much mind. Papa said that it was time Lan had different magic teachers, who could show him a wider range of techniques.
Lan didn’t seem too pleased with the notion. He said he wanted to stay in Mill City and go to the upper school that Allie and Robbie were in and study magic with Papa and the other college professors, the way he’d been doing. But Papa said the Mill City upper school wouldn’t give him the theoretical grounding he needed, and picking up bits and pieces from the other professors wasn’t anything like the kind of education he’d get from a top-drawer Eastern school.
I heard them arguing about it more than once before Lan agreed to go. After a while, I noticed that Papa never once said straight out that Lan was a double-seventh son, but he talked a lot about how Lan needed to stretch and challenge himself and about reaching his full potential. He’d never talked like that to any of the other boys.
He didn’t fool Lan one bit, either. A week after school let out, Lan came looking for me. I was out behind the house with Allie and Nan, beating the winter’s dirt and dust out of the big parlor rug. It should have been done weeks before with the other carpets, but we’d left it for last because it was so large, and then had gotten busy with other things. Whaling away with the carpet beaters was usually fun, but that day was warm, with no wind to carry the dust off, so it was just hot, sweaty, dirty work. It is truly amazing how much dust and dirt you can pound out of a carpet in the spring, even one that’s been sitting in a room that’s hardly ever used.
We’d almost finished going over the carpet when Lan showed up with two buckets and asked if I could go frogging with him. I wasn’t slow about putting my carpet beater aside, though I wondered what Lan really wanted. He usually went fishing or frogging with one of the boys from down the hill, or by himself, if they couldn’t come.
Lan handed me a bucket, and we started for the creek. As soon as we were well out of earshot, he said abruptly, “You know Papa’s been at me to go to this boarding school out East, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“What do you think of it?”
“What do I think of it?” I stared at him. “That’s for you and Papa to decide, surely.”
“Yes, but you’re my twin,” Lan said impatiently. “And…well, what if you need me again?”
“Need you…Oh, you mean if Tad Holiger starts in on me again?” I considered. “He hasn’t bothered me or William since that time last winter. I don’t think he’ll start up again. And if he does, I’ll just remind him that I’m a double-seven’s twin.”
“That should work.” Lan looked relieved. Then he frowned. “But what if—”
“Lan.” I cut him off before I got to feeling cross with him. It was bad enough that he’d be going, even if we had drawn apart some, but it was worse that he was dragging me into helping him dither over a decision that was none of mine. “You’ll be at the upper school next year, even if you stay in Mill City. And I’m not totally helpless, just because I’m no good with magic.”
Lan snorted. “That’s not the point.” But he didn’t say what the point was. He just stood there, digging the toe of his shoe into the dust and swinging his frogging bucket.
“What do you want to do?” I asked suddenly.
He flushed and looked away and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then finally he said, so soft I almost missed hearing it, “It’s not fair.”
“Fair?” I thought at first that he meant it wasn’t fair that he was made to go off East to school, when he wanted to stay. Then I saw his face clear, and all at once I knew that he wanted to go as badly as he’d ever wanted anything in both our lives. What wasn’t fair was that he got sent East to school, just for being a double- seventh son, when there’d never even been talk of sending anyone else.
If it hadn’t been for Miss Ochiba’s teaching, I don’t think I’d have seen even that much. I know for sure that I wouldn’t have seen, right then, that being a double-seventh son was near as bad for Lan, some ways, as being a thirteenth child was for me. Only nobody’d ever expected me to like being a thirteenth, or to be happy about it.
“No, it’s not fair,” I said, thinking hard. “But it’s not like Robbie or Jack ever wanted to go to school out East.”
Lan had to grin at that. Robbie had discovered girls, and there were lots more girls at the Mill City upper
