his piece fizzles or blows up, the big spell doesn’t work, but it doesn’t hurt any of the other magicians or affect their magic. Still, you have to be very precise to work as part of a team of Avrupan magicians, because nobody wants to waste all that effort just because someone else got it wrong.

Hijero—Cathayan magic is group magic. They hardly have any small, everyday magics that one magician can do alone, like fire-lighting spells. They’re good at big things, like moving rivers and clearing out dragon rookeries—at least, they say it was the ancient Hijero—Cathayan magicians who cleaned out the last few nests of dragons in Ashia and Avrupa and made all the land safe for people to live in.

Hijero—Cathayan magicians almost always work in groups, with all the magicians linked together by a spell so they can pool their power. The trouble is that if even one of the magicians makes a mistake, the whole spell can come apart, and when it does, it can hurt or kill every magician who is part of it. The leader of the group, who channels all that power, usually burns out after a couple of years, if his group works steady. I could never make out why anybody would take up magic at all, if they knew that was in store for them, but I guess the Hijero—Cathayans don’t see it that way.

But different as they are, both Avrupan and Hijero—Cathayan magic have one thing in common: The main idea is to raise up and control enough magic to do things. That’s why learning either of them starts the same way, with doing small spells, and then bigger spells, using more and stronger magic to do larger and larger things each time.

Aphrikan magic starts with looking, not doing. Instead of calling up magic and controlling it, Aphrikan conjurefolk find the places where magic is already moving and then guide it somewhere else. It means that Aphrikan magicians can work together a lot more safely and easily than Avrupan or Hijero—Cathayan magicians, because they don’t have to match up their spells precisely, or worry about burning each other out. It also means that Aphrikan spells hardly ever work the same way twice. Sometimes what the magician wants to make happen is too different from the way the natural magic is moving, and he can’t get it to do what he wanted at all. Because of that, most Avrupan magicians think Aphrikan magic is unpredictable and unreliable.

Looking at things the way Avrupan magicians do, I suppose they’re right. But there’s other ways to look, and one thing Aphrikan magic is well and truly good at is dealing with other kinds of magic, especially natural magic, like steam dragons and sunbugs.

That was what Miss Ochiba started teaching William and me, our first year in upper school. Since Mill City is east of the Great Barrier, we didn’t have much in the way of magical creatures to practice on. Once a week, we went over to the little menagerie where the North Plains Riverbank College kept its wildlife specimens, and tried to persuade the animals to move where we wanted them to go or eat one part of their feed first, rather than another.

Most of the specimens were ordinary creatures, like the mammoth and the prairie dogs Dr. McNeil had brought back. There were only three samples of magical wildlife, and one of those was a plant. The other two were a scorch lizard and a daybat, and Professor Jeffries, who ran the menagerie, wouldn’t let us anywhere near them, even though they weren’t particularly dangerous.

In truth, Professor Jeffries didn’t much like having us there at first. He sniffed and muttered and peered over the top of his spectacles at us when we arrived, and sniffed and muttered some more when we left. I never could make out what it was he disliked most—that William and I were only in upper school, that we’d gotten permission because our fathers were professors, or that we were doing Aphrikan-style magic. William and I could see that he was just looking for an excuse to stop us coming, so we were extra polite and very careful about following his rules. That just seemed to make him fuss even more, right up until the end of October.

It was one of those warm, clear days in fall when all the leaves have turned shades of red and gold and half of them have fallen and gone crunchy underfoot. The sky was pale blue around the edges, and the slanting sunlight made everything shimmer in the breeze.

Miss Ochiba, William, and I had been working with the prairie dogs, which were getting slow and fat, storing up food in their tunnels against winter. The prairie dogs were especially good for us to practice on, Miss Ochiba said, because we had to concentrate a little harder to tell them from the squirrels and mice and chipmunks that lived around the college buildings. Once we’d finished persuading the prairie dogs to take particular bits of food and store them in spots we’d chosen instead of where the prairie dogs wanted, we went out to the field where Professor Jeffries kept the mammoth.

The mammoth was four or five years old, Professor Jeffries thought. That made it about half grown, though it was hard to think of something the size of a stagecoach as half grown. Its tusks were already three feet long, but they hadn’t started curling yet, and its coat was getting thick and shaggy for winter. Normally it was a peaceable animal, but it got restless every fall, when its cousins in the west started walking south to their winter feeding grounds, so Miss Ochiba made sure that we stayed outside the split-rail fence.

That day, Professor Jeffries had brought his fall class out to observe the mammoth, so there were eight men in the field when we arrived. The seven students were listening respectfully to Professor Jeffries’ lecture, paying heed to the mammoth while Professor Jeffries waved in its direction.

When he saw us, Professor Jeffries frowned. It was clear he’d forgotten it was our day to visit the menagerie, and equally plain that he didn’t want us anywhere near the class he was teaching. Miss Ochiba just nodded and took us across to the other field, where they kept regular farm animals. We worked with them sometimes, too, because she said that we needed to know the feel of useful, tame animals as well as the wild ones. There was a yearling colt that the horsebreaker thought was still too young to work on a line, though he’d been halter-broke. William thought we could use Aphrikan magic to teach it not to spook at flapping sheets, and after consulting with Miss Ochiba, the breaker had said we could try.

We’d just started work when we heard a shout and a great trumpeting noise behind us. We all turned, just in time to see the young mammoth charge up the field, swinging its head side to side as it came. It knocked two of Professor Jeffries’s students out of its way—the others had sense enough to scatter on their own—and slammed into the rail fence. The fence posts leaned over and the rails bent outward and cracked. The mammoth trumpeted and rammed the fence again. The rails flew apart.

William and I stood frozen as the mammoth charged toward us. Then Miss Ochiba stepped forward and raised one gloved hand. Just before the mammoth reached her, she clenched her fist and said a word. The surge of magic that followed was so strong that I fell right off the fence I’d been sitting on. It stopped that mammoth right in its tracks, just as if it had run into a solid wall.

The mammoth couldn’t move forward, but it was still plenty mad. It stomped its feet and swung its head, then lashed out with its trunk. Miss Ochiba stood there cool as anything, holding the mammoth in place with an invisible cage of magic.

Nobody could hold an angry mammoth for very long, though, even if it was only half grown. I groped around for the trickle of magic we’d been using to gentle the colt, and urged it toward the mammoth. I felt it take hold, but what was plenty enough, for a yearling was nowhere near strong enough to calm an angry mammoth. It snorted and stamped some more, and its big beady eyes glared at Miss Ochiba.

William shouted a warding spell we’d learned in our regular classes. The air shimmered as it went up around us. I climbed to my feet, slow and careful so as not to startle the mammoth any more than it already was. I wasn’t sure what to do next. William’s spell wasn’t strong enough to hold the mammoth off if it broke free of Miss Ochiba, but I didn’t much like the thought of walking out of it.

And then Professor Jeffries and his students ran up at last. Between them, they got a good solid restraining spell up, so Miss Ochiba could relax, and then Professor Jeffries sent one of them off to the main building, to get the ingredients for the charm Dr. McNeil had used when he’d brought the mammoth through the Great Barrier Spell. They all had a nice, busy time of it, but in the end, they got the mammoth calmed down and back in its field, and a temporary fence up with lots of reinforcing spells to keep it there.

As soon as they finished, Professor Jeffries called one of the students over, a big man in a long brown muffler, and started giving him what for. Seems he’d been the one to set the mammoth off, flapping his scarf at it to find out what it would do. Professor Jeffries told him that would have been a foolish thing to do to an elderly, well- broken cart horse, and it was downright idiotic to do it to a wild mammoth three times as big. It made me see clear and personal what Wash had meant about people who weren’t afraid of wildlife at all.

After he was done getting yelled at, the man who’d started it came over and apologized to Miss Ochiba and William and me. By then, I wasn’t paying too much attention, because I was starting to worry that when Mama and Papa heard about the mammoth getting loose, they’d make me stop coming to work with the menagerie animals.

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