Settlement Office, but from the look on his face, he hadn’t bothered to check before he came on the trip. I frowned. What else didn’t he know about?
Mr. Harrison opened his mouth, looked at Papa, and closed it again. Papa nodded to Professor Jeffries and set the horses moving. Half an hour later, we reached the settlement.
The Oak River settlement was on top of a hill with a palisade of logs around it, like most of the other settlements we’d seen, but the resemblance ended there. At the other settlements, the palisade was more of a tall fence made of branches woven together. It wasn’t meant for serious protection; it was just an anchor for the settlement magician’s spells.
This palisade was a double wall of logs sharpened to a point on top and then sunk half their length into the ground. The inner wall rose a good fifteen feet higher than the outer one, and there was a gap between them large enough that nothing could climb to the top of the first wall and jump from there to the second. Two log watchtowers stood at opposite ends of the compound, with the national and territory flags flying over each one. Around the outside of the outer wall, about thirty feet from the base of the logs, the hill had been carved away to make the slope steeper.
Professor Jeffries nodded in approval. “Good work. I think those walls would even stop a mammoth stampede.”
“They wouldn’t stop a steam dragon,” Lan pointed out.
“Very few steam dragons come this far east,” Professor Jeffries replied.
“It’d only take one.”
William was studying the settlement with a thoughtful expression. “They probably have some other way to handle steam dragons,” he said. “They’d have plenty of warning, with those towers.”
They had plenty of warning of other things, too. By the time we got to the settlement, the gate was open and two men were waiting for us. One of them was Brant Wilson. The other man was older, but he still looked familiar. It took me a minute before I remembered—Toller Lewis, the president of the Long Lake City Rationalists, who’d come with Brant to see Papa the first time, all those years ago. I was more than a little surprised that such an important person had chosen to be a settler.
Papa pulled the wagon to a halt next to them. Mr. Lewis stepped forward. “Welcome to Oak River, Professor Rothmer,” he said.
“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Lewis,” Papa replied just as formally.
Brant looked at Papa and hesitated a second before he said, “Yes, welcome.”
Papa nodded at him, and the awkward moment passed over. First I was a little surprised that that was all there was to it, and then I was surprised that I’d expected anything else. After all, it’d been five years, and Papa wasn’t one to carry a grudge, especially when he’d recorded Rennie’s marriage and childings in the family Bible. Brant would probably never be his favorite son-in-law, but done was done. Papa went right on and introduced the rest of us. When the introductions got to Wash, he and Mr. Lewis gave each other a little nod, and I remembered Wash saying he’d stopped at the settlement a time or two on his way back to Mill City.
When everyone had finished their rather stiff greetings, Mr. Lewis offered to show us around before we went along to Brant and Rennie’s house. We started off as soon as we’d stabled the horses. Unlike most settlements, Oak River didn’t have an open paddock for visitors’ livestock. Everything was covered, and after a minute I figured out why—it was because in a normal settlement, the protective spells kept the flying wildlife off, but here, folks would be taking a big chance if they left everything open. I remembered Lan’s comment about steam dragons and shivered. It was all I could do not to keep looking up at the sky every other minute.
Inside, the Oak River settlement was as different from the other settlements as it had been from the outside. For one thing, it looked scruffier, almost makeshift. The buildings were smaller, shorter, and farther apart, and all of them had dirt heaped up around the walls nearly to the roofline. William asked if they’d started as dugouts, but Brant shook his head.
“No—they’re deeper and more purposeful than that. Uncle Lewis studied the reports on the western wildlife, then decided we should store most of our critical goods underground. The burrowing beasts are fewer and easier to keep out, for the most part.”
“Rather like the storm cellars they build down in the Middle Plains Territories,” Professor Jeffries said.
“Like them, but larger,” Brant said, nodding. “Every home and store has at least one full room underneath it; most have more.” He grinned. “Digging them out was no picnic, let me tell you!”
“They’re well worth it,” Mr. Lewis added. “We’ve been glad of them a time or two already. And if we had a major disaster—if a woolly rhinoceros came through the palisade or a tornado smashed the part of the settlement that’s above ground—we’d have a lean year or two, but we wouldn’t lose all our tools and supplies, and we’d have safe places to live while we rebuilt.”
It kept on like that the whole time they were showing us around, with Brant answering most of the questions and his uncle chiming in every now and then. Everyone except me and Wash and Mr. Harrison asked lots of questions, and Brant seemed to get more and more cheerful the more of them he answered. You could see that he was proud enough of the settlement to bust his buttons off, and didn’t get near as much chance to brag on it as he’d have liked.
I thought it was all very interesting, but I didn’t need to ask questions because Papa and Professor Jeffries and the boys were asking plenty enough without me. Wash didn’t say much, but he was studying everything in a way that made me wonder if he was
Just about the time I thought that, a woman in a plain stuff dress and deep bonnet came out of one of the buildings and stopped short, staring at us. First she looked surprised. Then her eye lit on Wash and her expression turned dark. She gave him a good glare, then glared at everyone else for good measure, ending with Mr. Lewis. “So you did it after all,” she said to him. “For shame!”
“Morning, Mrs. Stewart,” Mr. Lewis said, though I noticed he didn’t wish her a
Mrs. Stewart ignored the greeting. “Magicians!” She said it the way some of Mama’s church lady friends said “saloons” or “actors,” like she was cross that the word even existed for her to have to say. “Magicians, in Oak River! It’s a scandal, that’s what it is, and it’s all your fault. I told you how it would be when you first gave in to that nephew of yours.” She looked at Brant and sniffed.
Brant’s lips tightened. Mr. Lewis gave him a sharp look, then turned his attention back to the woman. “The settlement council agreed to this visit, Mrs. Stewart,” he said.
“You’ve always been lax, Toller, and I make no bones about saying so,” the woman went on. “I’ve half a mind to report you to the national headquarters. We’ll see what
“I’m sure they’d be pleased to tell you, Mrs. Stewart,” Mr. Lewis said. His tone was mild enough, but Mrs. Stewart flinched like he’d slapped her.
“Magicians,” she said again, scowling at us all. “I never thought I’d see the day.” She sniffed once more before she finally brushed past us, holding her skirts aside so they wouldn’t come near touching anyone.
“What was that about?” Lan asked after a minute, looking at Mr. Lewis.
“I thought it was fairly obvious,” William muttered, but he spoke softly enough that only Wash and I, who were standing right next to him, heard.
“Some of our people don’t approve of having magicians here for any reason,” Mr. Lewis said with a sigh. “And they’ll hold to that no matter what the settlement council has agreed on.”
“There are always people in any group who will go along with authority only so long as authority agrees with their opinions,” Papa said.
“And sometimes that’s not such a bad thing,” Wash commented. Mr. Lewis and Papa both gave him startled looks, but he just smiled. “It all depends on the authority and the opinions, doesn’t it?”
That put paid to the discussion, and nearly to the tour of the settlement. Mr. Lewis showed us a few more things, but you could see his heart wasn’t in it any longer. We saw a few more folks out of doors, and now that I was paying attention, I could see that at least half of them were giving us dark looks of one shade or another. The rest mostly had on polite faces, though one or two of the younger ones looked curious.
