had gifted me with, and it wasn’t anything he’d thrown together over an evening. Some of those spells were very, very old.
At least now I understood why no one else had said anything about the spell—a good chunk of the magic on the pendant was going to making sure nobody noticed it. I shook my head. It was one thing for me to take a minor charm from him, but this was something else again.
As I finally drifted off to sleep, I resolved to have a long talk with Wash in the morning.
CHAPTER 27
TALKING TO WASH DIDN’T TURN OUT TO BE AS EASY AS I THOUGHT. First there was breakfast to make, which meant rousting out Wash and the boys so Rennie and I would have room to move around the stove. Then Professor Jeffries arrived right after breakfast to start setting things up to look for the old settlement spells.
“What on earth are you doing?” Rennie demanded when Lan and William showed up with the first of the supply boxes from the wagon.
Papa glanced at Brant, then explained about the old settlement spells and finding out what was keeping the grubs away from the Oak River settlement.
Rennie scowled. “That’s nonsense,” she said. “We’ve had grubs and beetles here, just like everywhere else. You should have asked about it first, before you came on a wild-goose chase.”
“What’s that?” Professor Jeffries said. He frowned at Wash. “I thought Oak River was clear of those grubs!”
Wash shrugged. “I haven’t found any, passing through, and you saw the difference in damage for yourself on the trip here. But if Mrs. Wilson has seen some, I expect they were here. Some of them, anyway.”
That got Professor Jeffries so interested that he almost forgot about setting up the detection spells. He wanted to go out looking for grubs right away, and it took Papa reminding him that all the grubs were pupating into beetles right at the moment to settle him down some. Then Wash suggested that he and Brant and Lan and William go out and try to find some of the pupae for the professor to study. Wash said he knew just the sorts of places to look, even if there weren’t as many grubs around Oak River as there were in other places.
Professor Jeffries agreed that looking at the actual pupae might be very useful, especially since they should be just about ready for the beetles to come out. Papa was dubious about the whole thing, at first. He didn’t like the idea of letting the boys outside the settlement when there weren’t any spells to keep the wildlife off. But Brant told him the settlers hadn’t found it as dangerous as everyone said, and Wash promised to keep an extra eye on them (which made Lan and William very cross, as they felt quite old enough to keep an eye on themselves). Finally Papa let them go. So the boys and Wash all left, and Papa and Professor Jeffries went back to setting up their spell.
Rennie wasn’t too happy about what Papa and Professor Jeffries were doing. She said she had enough trouble with the neighbors on account of being a magician’s daughter, without Papa and everybody doing actual spells. I thought that was awfully two-faced of her, when she was doing all sorts of spells on the sly herself. I almost told her so, but she caught me frowning at the fly-block netting and closed her mouth with a snap, so I didn’t have to say anything after all.
Setting up the detection spells was a long and fiddly business. In order to keep the spell casting to a minimum and not upset the Rationalists too much, Papa and the other magicians from the college had decided not to do things in stages, the way they usually did. Instead, they’d wrapped everything up into one big spell that was supposed to do everything at once—detect the residue of the old settlement spells, find the places where it was strongest, collect as much information as possible about it, and analyze the information to find out how they were different from normal settlement spells.
That meant every element of all those spells had to be balanced and combined into a new spell. Papa said that what they’d done was a big step forward that would help magicians all over with combining spells, once they’d tested it a few more times and gotten some of the bugs out, but for now it was a cranky, fussy, delicate bit of magic.
Mr. Harrison was another big problem. He arrived around mid-morning, and right away wanted to know where Lan was. He got really angry when he found out that Lan was off hunting for pupae and beetles instead of working on the detection spell.
“It is foolish for you to waste such valuable talent on something anyone could do,” he said. “Digging for beetles? Bah! And the risk—the wildlife—”
“I’m quite confident that Brant and Mr. Morris will take good care of
“
“This spell requires skill and finesse, not power,” Professor Jeffries put in. “As you’d know if you’d read any of the reports the college sent you. Or understood them.”
Mr. Harrison scowled. “A double-seventh son has luck as well as power,” he pointed out.
“I think my luck will be quite sufficient,” Papa said in a dry tone.
“Your…oh.” You could just see the moment when Mr. Harrison realized that if Lan was a double-seventh son, Papa had to be a seventh son. I don’t think that it had occurred to him before.
Mr. Harrison subsided at last, still muttering. Papa and Professor Jeffries finished setting up the spell while Rennie and I finished the household chores. Rennie did most of the housework herself, with baby Lewis in tow, while I watched out for Albert and Seren. The little ones were a handful and then some, but at least it was a change from the chores I had at home. Still, I couldn’t help wishing that I was out with the boys, hunting pupae.
Right around mid-afternoon, Papa and the professor finished laying out the materials for the spell. I didn’t get to see them cast it, because I was outside with the childings. When we came back in, Papa and Professor Jeffries and Mr. Harrison were in the middle of another argument, and Rennie was glowering at all three of them.
“What is it?” I asked Rennie in a low voice.
“Their precious spell didn’t work,” Rennie said bitterly. “Or maybe it worked but didn’t find anything. They can’t decide. So they’re going to try it again tomorrow.”
I just looked at her. Thinking about it, I could see why the spell casting bothered her. Even if she’d been doing everything exactly the way all the Rationalists wanted, Papa’s magic was bound to make some of them suspicious. And it was Rennie who’d have to deal with them; we would be gone in a few days, but she had to live here.
On the other hand, I’d seen the bare hills and fields where the grubs had been. Rennie hadn’t. So she didn’t realize how bad things were, other places, or how important it was to find some way to stop the grubs.
The argument went on and on. Just when it seemed that Mr. Harrison was going to start yelling, there were noises outside. A minute later, Wash and Brant and the boys came in.
“Is that the detection-spell setup?” Lan asked, making a beeline for the table with the measuring sticks and detection meters all over it. “Did you cast it while we were away?”
“Did you find any pupae?” Professor Jeffries asked.
“Everyone except Lan,” Wash said. He held up a small covered bucket.
Lan gave him a dirty look. “I found plenty of cases, but they were all empty. And the only bugs where I was looking were those mirror-winged things. Not the beetles we were hunting for.”
“That’s very odd,” the professor said, frowning. “Were you looking in a different area from everyone else?”
“No,” Lan said. He sounded cross.
“Nobody found very many,” William said. “We only got about twenty among us, all day, and maybe five or six beetles. You just didn’t have any luck today, that’s all.”
Mr. Harrison gave William a strange look. “There, you see?” he said to the professor. “I told you it was a waste of talent to send this young man out on a pointless bug-hunt.”
Professor Jeffries didn’t even hear him. He had his little black notebook out, and was flipping through the pages, muttering. He looked up at Wash. “How many pupae, exactly? From how large an area?”
