on a kettle getting ready to boil over; and Lan was looking as cross as ever I’d seen him. William seemed to think he was better than the rest of us because he was getting private teaching at home, and had been memorizing basic spells for nearly a year already, though he was the youngest of us all and couldn’t actually cast any of them yet. He didn’t think much of Miss Ochiba’s different ways of seeing, and he didn’t think much of learning Hijero—Cathayan and Aphrikan magical theory and history, either.
“After all, we’re Avrupans,” he said. “And our magic works better than anyone else’s. That other stuff is just a waste of time.”
“The United States isn’t in Avrupa,” Lan corrected him. “We’re Columbians.”
William waved that away. “We all came from Avrupa to begin with. From Albion, or Gaul, or Prussia, or somewhere. That’s what’s important.”
“Says you!” Robbie said. “Why should we learn about Avrupa, when we went and had a revolution to get away from them?”
“That was almost a hundred years ago!” William said. “Avrupan magic is the best, and we should learn the best.”
“How can you know it’s the best, if you don’t learn about anything else?” I said.
All three boys turned and looked at me. “Everybody knows already” William said. “Like knowing water is wet, or rocks are hard, or which way is up.”
“Magic makes its own rules,” Lan retorted.
William looked shocked. “That’s from Plato! How do you know that?”
“It’s something Papa says,” I put in quickly. It was actually something from one of the lessons Lan had with that tutor, back in Helvan Shores, but if we started in on that, sure as anything William would end up asking awkward questions, and the whole thing about Lan being the seventh son of a seventh son might come out.
Lan grinned suddenly. “Hey, school’s out! It’s dumb to waste time arguing about it. Let’s go finish the fort before somebody comes around with chores.” As they ran off, he looked back and winked at me, so I knew he’d understood.
The boys vanished into the bushes behind the house. Looking after them, I wondered suddenly what William was, that wasn’t what you’d first see in him. The notion kept me thinking for the rest of the day, and on after supper when the boys came back, and for many days after. It felt like an important question, but I couldn’t think why, and I couldn’t seem to get an answer for it. Eventually, other things pushed it out of the front of my mind— schoolwork, and chores, and Kristen Olvar asking me to join her sewing club, and planning for Harvest Feast, among other things. But they couldn’t push the question out of my head altogether. It sat waiting in the dark back of my mind, waiting for me to have time to come back to it. And eventually, I did.
CHAPTER 6
MISS OCHIBA’S CLASS WAS THE HIGHLIGHT OF THE REST OF THE school year. Some of the history was familiar—we’d learned about the Greeks and the Roman Empire the year before—but it all seemed different when we looked at their magic and not just at all the battles and emperors. The parts about Aphrika and Cathay were mostly new, and I found them fascinating, no matter what William said.
But the best part was what Miss Ochiba called “seeing.” We never knew what day it would happen, or what we’d be asked to do, only that it would involve finding different ways to look at familiar things. We spent one class coming up with different uses for a fork, and another thinking up different ways to get a basket of eggs across a creek without breaking any of them. And one day, we spent the whole class making puns.
That was what did it, in the end—the puns. Lan and Robbie had been arguing with William off and on all year about Miss Ochiba and the right way to learn magic, and up until that day, they’d looked like winning in the end. There were two of them, and Robbie was old enough to be learning the beginning spells. He got real good at distracting everybody in the middle of an argument by demonstrating how to make a stick float in the air. William was stubborn, but he was slowly wearing down.
Until the puns. Lan and the other boys loved that class, and they kept on punning long after. Making puns became a game, and then a secret code. And William was no good at it. It drove him near crazy, listening to the others go on and not being able to join in. Then when he was tongue-tied and ready to burst with it, the boys would start in all over again.
“Hey, William, cat got your tongue?”
“Maybe he’s
“If you’re sick, maybe you should try
“He can’t be feeling that bad; he’s not
“That sounds more like
“Oh, that pun really
I don’t think the boys meant any harm; they were just looking for an excuse to start in on a new chain of puns. But it always seemed to come out like picking on William, and that made William go all stubborn and ornery every time. So instead of blowing over, the argument just kept on growing like a snowbank, all winter long.
And then one day in the early spring, when the little blue starflowers were just coming up around the edges of the coarse patches of snow that still stuck fast wherever large tree trunks or boulders blocked the sun, Robbie came tearing up to the house all muddy and red-faced. I was sweeping the porch because I wanted to be outside in the sun and it was still too cool to just sit, so I saw him coming.
“Eff!” he yelled. “Get Papa, quick! It’s Lan—” He stopped at the steps, wheezing and too out of breath to talk.
I dropped the broom and ran inside. Papa was teaching a class, and we weren’t supposed to interrupt for anything, no matter what, but I didn’t care, not if Lan was in the kind of trouble that would make Robbie look so wild-eyed. I just burst in yelling, “Papa! Papa! Something’s happened to Lan!”
Papa and his five students looked up from a diagram that was spread out on the table in front of them. Papa’s eyes met mine, and then he came right over. “What is it that’s happened?”
“I don’t know!” I sobbed. “Robbie’s out front—he says to come quick!”
Papa nodded and brushed past me. The students exchanged glances, and all five of them followed. The last one, a big, soft-spoken man named Gil Mannering, stopped next to me and said, “Lan’s your twin, isn’t he?”
I nodded. I couldn’t remember anyone putting it like that before; usually, everybody said I was Lan’s twin.
“You won’t be wanting to wait to find out what’s wrong, then,” he said, half to himself. “Come along.”
I didn’t wait for any more permission than that. I just followed along.
When we got out to the porch, Papa was trying to get Robbie settled down enough to make some sense. Robbie just tugged Papa toward the creek. “You have to come quick, Papa! Before he drops him. It’s too high. Hurry!”
Sense or not, that was enough to start everyone running. I fell behind pretty quick, but Gil saw and came back for me. He didn’t say anything, just scooped me up and carried me off like a sack of flour.
Robbie led the way toward the fort the boys had built in the windbreak, and then past it a little way to the creek. The creek was swollen right to the top of its banks with meltwater and running fast. Here and there, you could see eddies and foam where the big rocks were, that we used for stepping-stones in the summer when the water was low. Over the sound of the rushing water, we heard voices, and then we arrived.
Two of the boys from our class at school were standing by the creek, staring upward. A third was dragging a fallen branch out from the bushes toward the bank. Lan stood a little apart, his face white as paper. His hands were clenched into fists, and he was holding them out in front of him like he was trying to raise up a bucket that was too heavy for him. He was staring upward at William, who was floating in the air over the creek, a good twenty feet from the ground, limp as Nan’s old rag doll and moaning softly. Every time Lan’s hands shook, William rose a little higher.
One of the college students laughed. Papa glared at him, then said quietly, “I’m here, Lan.”
“Papa!” Lan gasped. “I can’t hold him up much longer, and I can’t get him down.”
“You’re doing very well,” Papa said calmly. His hands were busy in his pockets, pulling out string and keys
