what they do to stay alive, and apply it to your own self.” He paused, then said with another slow grin, “And being as how you’re Miss Maryann’s students, you can call me Wash, all of you. I’m more accustomed to it, you see.”
“What are mammoths afraid of?” another boy demanded.
Wash’s eyes narrowed. “Even a mammoth will flinch when a steam dragon flies overhead.”
“What about steam dragons, then?”
“I don’t rightly know.” Wash shook his head. “But I’ll tell you this: About twelve years back I took a notion to see for myself those big Rocky Mountains you hear tell of sometimes. It was a hair-raising journey, and I don’t propose to carry on about it now, but I got to a place where I could see the mountains rising up off the horizon every time I topped a hill. They had a sort of pull on me. Every evening I’d tell myself I’d come far enough, and every morning I’d tell myself that it wouldn’t hurt to go on just one more day.
“One morning I was packing up my saddlebags and having that same conversation with myself, when something made me look west. Suddenly I saw a full-grown steam dragon burst up off the side of the mountain. It tore through the sky like it was running from Judgment Day, and passed overhead without even pausing to consider what a tasty meal my horse and I would make.”
“What did you do?” one of the girls asked.
“I finished packing my saddlebags in a right hurry, and headed back east at as good a clip as seemed wise. I don’t know what put the fear into that steam dragon, but I knew for certain-sure that whatever it was, I didn’t want to meet up with it.”
He paused for a minute, and sighed. “We don’t know enough about the critters on the far side of the Great Barrier,” he said, half to himself. “We don’t even know what all of them are yet. I’ve seen things on the far frontier that no one here can tell me names of. You can’t ward things off if you don’t know what they are or when they’re coming.”
Those words hit me and sank in deep. I thought of some of the tales I’d heard of failed settlements, and the reasons they’d failed. I remembered Dr. McNeil’s expedition, and how they’d almost been killed because they didn’t know to look for a swarming weasel burrow near their camp, and how Brant Wilson had saved them with his pistols and knowing about bees and a lucky guess. At that moment, I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to go into the frontier, not as a settler, but as a naturalist, to study the wildlife the way Dr. McNeil had, the way Wash said was needed. I sat there thinking so hard about it that I hardly heard the rest of what Wash said, and the more I thought on it, the more I knew I wanted to do it.
It wasn’t until the recess bell rang that it occurred to me that if I wanted to do all that, I was going to have to go to upper school after all.
CHAPTER 18
ONCE I MADE UP MY MIND TO GO TO UPPER SCHOOL, I WORRIED CONstantly about the day school’s final exam. William had been studying hard for it for weeks, and I hadn’t done a thing. I spent the next three weeks with my nose in my books, trying to make up for lost time. It worked, mostly. I didn’t do as well as I could have—I missed two of the arithmetic questions, and I got some of the presidents mixed up—but I passed.
William got the best score in the class. He’d worked so hard for it that I thought he’d be happier, but he just looked tense and worried when they announced it. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out why. William wanted to go to the Mill City upper school, but his father had been talking about sending him off East, like Lan. He’d been hoping that if he did well on the final exam, his father would see that it was all right for him to stay in Mill City.
Professor Graham wasn’t best pleased by the notion, but William was just as stubborn as he was. He argued that he was getting plenty of learning right where he was and the exam proved it. Professor Graham said that doing so well on the exam proved he needed more challenging than he could get in a frontier-border city. I guess there was some yelling involved, but finally they struck a deal. William could have a year at the upper school, but if Professor Graham wasn’t satisfied with his progress, he’d go off to boarding school the year after.
I didn’t see why William was so set on biding in Mill City, and I said so.
“I just want to stay here for a while,” William said crossly. “Is that so hard to understand?”
“I can see that you’re dead set on it,” I said. I was near as cross as he was, for him snapping back at me when I’d asked a civil question. “What I don’t see is why. The best magic teachers don’t come out to the far edge of the country—they’re all back East. If you’re going to be a magician like your father—”
“I’m not going to be
I stared at him in surprise. “But you’re good at magic. I thought you wanted to be a magician?”
“Of course I want to be a magician. That’s not the problem!”
“Well, what is, then? You’re not making any sense.”
William was silent for almost a minute. Then he sighed. “Sorry, Eff. It’s just that my father…he used to be worse, I think. It’s all right.”
“William Graham, you explain what you’re talking about right this minute, or I’ll put ants in your lunch pail every day from now ‘til the end of school!”
“There’s only a week left. I can stand it that long,” William said, but he grinned. We walked in silence for a bit, then he sighed again. “My father wants me to be like him, only better. Or if I can’t be like him, he wants me to be like Lan. That’s the real reason for this boarding-school idea. He never talked about it even once, before he found out Lan was going.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound nasty, even if I didn’t mean it that way. Lan was a double-seventh son; there was no way William’s magic would ever be a match for his, no matter where they went to school. Both William and Professor Graham had to know that already.
“My father wants me to be a teaching magician, the way he is,” William went on. “Only I’m supposed to be better and teach at a famous Eastern school. The New Bristol Institute of Magic, maybe. He has my whole life planned out, to make sure I’ll have all the knowledge and skills and experience I’ll need. It’s not what I want, but he won’t listen when I tell him that.”
“What do you want, then?” I asked.
“I don’t know all of it yet.” William tilted his head back and looked up at the sky, and spread his arms wide. “But I want—first, I want to be
I nodded, though it seemed to me that William might be a sight better off at a boarding school out East, where his father wouldn’t be looking over his shoulder every minute. I could see that right then wasn’t the time to tell William that, but I figured I’d have other chances.
Lan only came home for three weeks that summer and had to miss our fifteenth birthday, because the boarding school had year-round classes. He wouldn’t have been able to come at all for such a little time if Nan hadn’t been working in the railroad shipping office so he could ride the train for free. He’d shot up another couple of inches, passing me by for height, and he wore his hair long and slicked back. All his talk was about the school and his new friends and teachers—for the first few days, anyway. Then we had a glorious two weeks, and then he was gone again.
I didn’t miss Lan quite so much this time. I had too many new things of my own to pay attention to, what with starting at the upper school and leaving the day school—and Miss Ochiba—behind. William was just as unhappy about leaving the Aphrikan magic class as I was, and he wasn’t much inclined to resignation. He went and talked to Miss Ochiba, and then to the principal at the upper school, and in the end he arranged for the two of us to keep on with our Aphrikan study as a special tutorial. I was happy because we’d finally learned enough to start doing actual spells—or at least things that were more like the sort of spells we learned in our regular classes.
Aphrikan magic isn’t much like Avrupan magic, or even Hijero—Cathayan magic. Avrupan magic is individual. Even when teams of magicians work together on something, they do it by each casting one particular spell that fits together with all the other spells, like the teeth on a set of gears fit each other. If one magician gets it wrong and
