Patricia Wrede - Across the Great Barrier

“I don’t want anyone else to know,” Lan muttered.

“You told me.” I studied the dark shape against the window. “And what about Professor Warren? You’re the only one who knows everything that happened; according to Dean Ziegler, all the other students were confused and couldn’t explain anything after Professor Warren set up the spell. If you don’t say what happened, they’ll likely put the blame on him, and that’s not right.”

“No, it isn’t.” Lan sighed. “You fight dirty, Eff.”

“Think about it, anyway,” I said. “You made a bad choice, and some of it can’t ever be fixed. But you have a lot more choices coming up. The important thing is to try really hard not to make another one this bad, ever again.”

He nodded. We stayed a long time in companionable silence, watching the gaslights and the shadows they cast on the street outside. Finally, Lan pushed away from the window and walked over to where I was sitting. He didn’t speak; he just put a hand on my shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze, then went on out of the room.

LAN WAS STILL QUIET AND UNHAPPY AT BREAKFAST, BUT NOT QUITE as much as he had been. Not that I had a lot of time to watch him. It was our last day in Philadelphia, so everyone we’d met came to call and wish us a good journey, and a bunch of new folks dropped in because it was their last chance to meet up with us.

Professor Lefevre came early in the day, and I showed him the stone bird with the broken-off wings. He’d brought a magnifying lens, and he studied it carefully the same way Professor Torgeson had when we first found the statues. I could see he was surprised, and right away he started muttering about his laboratory and testing. I took my bird back before he could get too excited, and promised him again that I’d make sure we sent him a good sample as soon as the collectors got home.

Next day, we boarded the train for the two-day trip back to Mill City. It rained most of the way. Mama occupied herself with tatting a lace trim for a baby bonnet to send off to the next grandchild, and Lan and I sat and read.

As soon as we were home, I went back to work for Professor Jeffries and Professor Torgeson. I was surprised to see Professor Torgeson that first day. I’d expected her to be off collecting more stone animals, but she said that between finishing up teaching her classes and making arrangements for all the mules and a guide, she’d be lucky to leave town before July. Then she asked if I still wanted to come along.

I hesitated. Lan was still brooding, and I didn’t want to leave him on his own. Of course, with Mama and Papa and Allie and Robbie, he wouldn’t exactly have been alone much. Professor Torgeson very kindly gave me some time to think on it, and that night over supper, I brought it up.

The next thing I knew, Papa took the notion to send both me and Lan along with the professor. He’d noticed the way Lan was dragging around the house, and he decided that a trip to the West would be just the thing to take his mind off his troubles. That’s what Papa said, anyway; I had a strong suspicion that he and Lan had finally sat down for that talk I’d suggested, and Papa wanted Lan off doing something useful when he broke it to the rest of the family.

What with the sample-collecting trip being mostly a college project, it wasn’t too hard for Papa to arrange for Lan to go on it. For the next couple of weeks, Lan came over to the office house with me. Between the two of us, we got caught up on all the mail the professor had gotten, and we even made a list of all the people who’d asked for samples of the stone animals after we ran out.

Working with the professor seemed to cheer Lan up some, but he wasn’t the same as he had been. Robbie commented on it once when Lan wasn’t around, and Allie lit into him good and proper. She said that almost dying from a bad spell was enough to sober up anyone, and Lan was a lot more grown up now, and that was a very good thing.

Robbie shook his head, but he didn’t try to argue with her. I was pretty sure he suspected more than he let on, though. He’d spent more time with Lan when we were growing up than Allie had, and knew him better than any of our other brothers. I half expected him to badger me for information, but he didn’t. He only came close to admitting that he was worried once, when he and I were talking about the sample collecting.

“You’ll be safe out there?” he asked me.

“I expect I will,” I said. “It’s plenty dangerous, but we did all right last summer.”

“Fine for you,” Robbie said. “But I don’t know about Lan, after all that’s happened.” He paused, then looked me straight in the eye. “You take care of him.”

“Of course I will,” I said. “He’s my twin.”

“Right, then.”

And that was all he ever said about it in my hearing.

Once the semester was over, it didn’t take as long as Professor Torgeson had predicted to get the sample-collecting trip put together. The Homestead Claims and Settlement Office had been working on it all along, and by the second week in June, two days after Lan and I turned twenty, we made the crossing to West Landing.

There were so many of us that we pretty near filled the ferry all by ourselves. There was Lan and me and Professor Torgeson, plus two of Professor Torgeson’s students who were to help with the specimen gathering. All of us had horses, plus two pack animals, and the college had arranged for two muleteers and eight mules to meet us on the far side of the river.

Our guide was a tall, whip-thin man with raggedy blond hair and three scars down the side of his right cheek where something had clawed for his eye and barely missed. His name was Lawrence Jinns, and I never met a grumpier, more close-mouthed man. He knew his job, though. Mules and all, we got on the road out of West Landing less than two hours after the ferry docked.

The trip out to Daybat Creek took us a bit under two weeks this time, even with the mules. Instead of swinging south around the lakes and marshes straight west of Mill City, we went north and then angled west and north through Water Prairie, Mammoth Hill, Wyndholm, and Hoffman’s Ford to Adashome. From Adashome, we followed Daybat Creek downstream through the hills to where the landslide had dammed it up.

The third day out from West Landing, we ran across a bison herd, and later on we saw a couple of prairie wolves following it. Luckily, the wolves were interested in the bison calves, not us, and they didn’t give us any trouble. Mr. Jinns shot a porcupine one day and made soup at the wagonrest later. It was pretty good soup, too. Other than that, we didn’t see much wildlife except for a few birds.

Once we passed Mammoth Hill, the land was still coming back from the grub-killing. Where there was open prairie, the only sign left was a lack of magical plants, but the natural plants like bluestem grass and coneflowers and catchfly had grown back so tall and thick that if you didn’t look close, you wouldn’t know anything had happened. Wherever there’d been woods, though, the bare, dead trunks still stood black against the sky. Even in the dead woods, though, there was new growth — young birches and aspens poking up knee-high like they were in a hurry to replace what was gone, and weeds and bushes that had only needed light to sprout up.

Lan wasn’t talkative on the trip out, but he didn’t seem as gloomy as he’d been. I thought it helped that he was out of doors and away from people he knew. Mr. Jinns and the students didn’t know anything about what had happened in Philadelphia, and Professor Torgeson knew there’d been an accident, but she didn’t much care about details.

When we finally started down Daybat Creek, it didn’t take long before we began seeing bits of gray-white stone scattered along the banks. Professor Torgeson was pleased and excited, but she wouldn’t let us collect any of them. “We’ll leave them for the historical excavators,” she said. I couldn’t help wondering just how many acres of hills she expected them to dig up, but I knew better than to say such a thing straight out.