Aphrikan or Hijero–Cathayan.” He grinned at my startlement. “You’re Columbian, Miss Rothmer, bred and borne. As is Mr. Graham here, and your talented brother, and even myself, though some might prefer it otherwise.”
“I—” My mouth felt dry, and I had to swallow twice before I could get any words out. “I never thought of that before. But what difference does it make, really?”
“Nobody really knows yet,” Wash said. He tilted his hat back and looked down the street, to where the protective palisade blocked the westward view, and his eyes had a faraway look to them. “We’re still inventing ourselves. But we’re not starting from just one kind of magic, no matter what the folks back East may think. Columbian magic is a mixture and always has been—Avrupan and Aphrikan and Hijero–Cathayan and some traditions that haven’t ever grown large enough to make a theory or a style of magic, plus a few bits folks have just made up for themselves at need, all thrown together.”
“That sounds messy,” I said without thinking.
Wash laughed. “So it is, oftentimes.” He looked down at me, and his expression turned serious. “You’re still inventing yourself, too, Miss Rothmer. You’ve been working your hardest to invent yourself right out of being a magician, and it’s plain to me that if you keep on, you’ll succeed in the end. You’d likely have succeeded already, if your heart had really been in it.”
“But my heart
“No, it isn’t,” William said. “Wash is right. You don’t want to stop being a magician. You just want to make sure that you don’t ever use your magic to blow up that uncle of yours, or anybody else, even if they deserve it.”
“It’s the same thing!”
“Oh?” William shoved his glasses up on his nose and glared at me. “So if you stop your magic completely, and then one day you grab a shotgun and use
“No!” I could see where William was going, and I could see he was right, and it upset me almost as much as nearly blowing up Uncle Earn had. I’d known in my heart since my first day in Oak River that I didn’t want to live without magic; I just hadn’t admitted it straight out to myself. Because if I was going to go ahead and be a magician, even just an ordinary everyday magician, how was I going to keep my magic from doing something horrible one day?
William made an angry noise, and I realized I’d said more of that out loud than I’d meant to. Wash just nodded and said, “It’s a puzzlement, Miss Rothmer, and not one you’re alone in having.”
“I—what? What do you mean?”
“You seem to think your magic is a separate thing from you yourself,” Wash said. “Something you can pick up or leave alone, like that shotgun Mr. Graham mentioned a minute ago. But magic is as much a part of you as your voice. What you do with it is your own decision. And you’re not the only magician with a terrible temper, you know.”
“You’re not even the only magician in your own family with a temper,” William muttered, and I knew he was thinking of the time when he was nine and Lan hoisted him in the air.
We’d gotten back to Rennie’s house by then, despite walking slower and slower, and Rennie came out wanting to know why Wash and William had come back instead of going off with Papa and the professor to hunt bugs. So I never got to say anything back to Wash and William about tempers and magic, but I worried at the notion all morning long while I helped Rennie with the weekly washing.
Lan had a temper, sure enough. I’d never gotten round to asking him how he’d felt about magicking William that time, but I could see that it hadn’t slowed him down even a little when it came to being a magician. Thinking on it, the whole reason I’d started yelling back at Uncle Earn was because I could see that Lan was about ready to lose his temper. I’d forgotten that. And Lan hadn’t ever seemed too concerned about misusing his magic by accident, even though he was a double-seventh son and crammed to the rafters with power.
But Lan had been getting special training since before he was old enough to cast spells. And Wash had said something about habit being more powerful than fear. I frowned down at the wash water. Maybe I’d been going about this all the wrong way. I decided to talk to Lan when he got back, and maybe to Papa when we got home to Mill City. I’d have liked to start trying things out right then, but the middle of a Rationalist settlement didn’t seem like the best place to suddenly start experimenting with my magic.
Papa and Lan didn’t make it back for lunch, and they still weren’t back by mid-afternoon when Mr. Harrison came to see what they were doing. Mr. Harrison grumped and fussed at Wash about it, until Wash offered to take him over to the other settlement to check on things. That didn’t sit too well with Mr. Harrison; he wasn’t much inclined to do things himself, if he could get other folks to take care of them, and he was especially unwilling to do any more dangerous traveling, even though we hadn’t had any trouble with the wildlife the whole trip.
Mr. Harrison was just winding up one of his rants when there was a loud rattling noise from the corner. “What’s that?” he demanded.
“It’s the pail with Papa’s mirror bugs,” I said slowly. I frowned uneasily at it, waiting for the rattling to stop. It didn’t.
Mr. Harrison sniffed and turned back to continue his one-sided argument with Wash. The pail kept rattling, and I kept staring at it. After a minute, I started to feel floaty as well as uneasy. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I walked to the corner and picked up the pail. “William, Wash, could you come outside for a minute, please?” I said.
I didn’t wait for them to answer. I walked out the door and around back, to the cleared-off circle where Papa and Professor Jeffries had been doing their magic tests. I felt light-headed and cut off from everything, as if there was a wall of glass between me and the whole rest of the world. Right in the middle of the circle, I stopped. I glanced back to make sure Wash and William had caught up, and then I held the bucket out and took the lid off.
All the mirror bugs in the bucket took off in a glittering streak of silver, heading in the same direction. “Wash,” I said in a voice that sounded very far away, “what direction was that settlement Papa and Lan were going to?”
“Southwest,” Wash said.
We all stared after the twinkling line of mirror bugs, flying as hard and fast as they could toward the southwest.
“Something has happened to Papa and Lan,” I said with certainty. “I have to go find them.” I set the bucket down and started for the settlement gate.
CHAPTER 29
GOING AFTER PAPA AND LAN WASN’T QUITE THAT SIMPLE, OF COURSE, but it turned out to be a lot easier than it could have been. Mostly, this was because Wash and William both believed me right off. Rennie and Mr. Harrison argued, though as soon as she realized that Mr. Harrison didn’t want me to go, Rennie stopped arguing and just glared at everybody. It would have been funny if I’d had an inclination to be amused right then. Mr. Harrison just couldn’t get on anybody’s right side.
I just kept walking toward the gate, while Mr. Harrison said there was no point in jumping to conclusions because of a few bugs. It was getting late, he told us, and there’d be time to send a messenger in the morning. We collected quite an audience as we went up the street, on account of Mr. Harrison not bothering to keep his voice down. Finally, just as we got to the corral, Mr. Harrison yelled, “You aren’t going anywhere, any of you! I forbid it.”
I stopped and looked at him.
“In the absence of Professor Rothmer, I am in charge of this expedition,” Mr. Harrison said in a slightly more normal tone. “And I will not allow—”
“Mr. Harrison.” I kept my tone as polite as I could manage, which I fear wasn’t too much because Mr. Harrison’s eyes went wide and he stopped in mid-sentence. “Papa told you before that this was a family trip. You aren’t my family by a good long ways.”
“That was a ruse to get into this place, and you know it!” Mr. Harrison said. A lot of the Rationalists who’d
