Patricia Wrede - Across the Great Barrier

This one’s for my dad,

with love.

BEING A HEROINE IS NOWHERE NEAR THE FUN FOLKS MAKE IT OUT TO be. Oh, it’s nice enough at first, when everybody is offering congratulations and making a fuss, but that doesn’t last long. And when the thing they’re congratulating you for is getting rid of a bunch of bugs, which you didn’t do all by your own self anyway, it feels pretty silly. Not to mention that it annoys the other people who ought to have come in for some of the credit.

The one it mainly annoyed was my twin brother, Lan. He’s the seventh son of a seventh son, which makes him a pretty strong magician. It was his spells that held the mirror bugs off of the Little Fog settlement long enough for Wash and William and me to get there. I thought that was a lot harder than what I’d done, but the only people interested in talking to Lan much were the magicians at Northern Plains Riverbank College, and even they were more interested in me than in my brother. What Lan had done was something they understood, but what I’d done was a mix of the Avrupan magic I’d learned in school and the Aphrikan magic I’d studied outside regular hours. The professors all said it was a new thing and got very excited. Even Papa.

Everyone from the North Plains Territory Homestead Claims and Settlement Office to the Mill City Garden Club was only interested in me, Eff Rothmer.

I wasn’t used to it. The only folks who’d paid me much mind before were the ones who thought I was evil and unlucky because I was thirteenth-born. I didn’t believe they were right, not anymore, but I still didn’t like all the attention. I didn’t like strangers asking me questions or staring at me when I walked down the street. I didn’t like people asking me to make speeches and getting cross with me when I said no. I didn’t like folks expecting me to do absurd things for them, like the lady who showed up one day with a train ticket to Long Lake City, saying she wanted me to put a spell on her prize roses to get rid of the aphids. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, and Papa had to come out and be stern at her. And it wasn’t even a round-trip ticket.

I thought the fuss would die down after a few days, but it kept up all that summer long. William Graham, who’d been friends with Lan and me ever since we moved to Mill City, said it was because the newspaper reporters liked writing about a pretty young girl. I told him I was eighteen and nothing like as pretty as Susan Parker.

William turned beet red, because everybody knew he’d been sweet on Susan before he went East to school, but he stuck to his guns. Then Lan said that the newspapers would call any eighteen-year-old heroine pretty, even if she was sway-backed and had buckteeth. I whacked him with the flyswatter.

By that time, Lan had mostly gotten over his mad, which was a big relief. Or at least it was until the week before Lan went off to study at Simon Magus College in Philadelphia, when he cornered me in the kitchen garden and started asking me all kinds of questions.

“You’re going to graduate from the upper school this year,” he told me. “Where are you going after that?”

I looked at him. The last few years at boarding school, Lan had sprouted up a good bit taller than me, and he’d grown sideburns and started slicking his brown hair back like an Easterner. He hardly looked like the brother I remembered … except for the gleam in his brown eyes. I knew that gleam, and it always meant trouble for somebody.

“I’m staying right here with Mama and Papa,” I said warily. “Just like Nan and Allie did. And the other girls, before we moved to Mill City.”

Lan rolled his eyes. “That’s what I thought. You haven’t even considered any other possibilities.”

“Other possibilities?”

“After what you did to the mirror bugs at the Little Fog settlement, any of the big universities would be glad to have you as a student. You could probably even get a sponsor, so it wouldn’t cost Papa and Mama anything.”

“Lan! Don’t talk nonsense.” I went back to my weeding, but Lan didn’t leave.

“It isn’t nonsense. You have talent and power; you deserve to get the training you need to use them properly.”

I sat back on my heels, rested my muddy hands on my green weeding apron, and just looked at him for a minute.

From the time I was thirteen, when I almost blew up my Uncle Earn at my sister’s wedding dinner, I’d had more and more trouble doing normal, Avrupan-type magic spells. It had only been a month or two since I’d figured out that the trouble was mostly in my head. I’d been so worried about being an unlucky thirteenth child that I’d nearly talked myself right out of doing any magic at all, ever, on account of being afraid of what might happen if I lost my temper. For the past five years, Aphrikan magic had been the only sort I’d had any luck with. I was still getting accustomed to the notion that it was a safe thing for me to work Avrupan spells at all.

Oh, I’d learned the basic Avrupan magic theories in school, like everyone else, but I had a lot of catching up to do on the practical side. I still had trouble even with simple things like housekeeping spells. And here was Lan, proposing that I go off to college as if it was me who was the double-seven magician.

“And don’t go objecting because you’re a girl,” Lan went on. “There’s lots of girls who study advanced magic. And Mama doesn’t need you here, really — not when there’s only you and Robbie and Allie left at home.”

He ran on like that for a while; I just sat and watched. It was plain as day that he didn’t expect me to disapprove more than a token, for form’s sake. He ran down a whole long list of answers to objections I hadn’t made and worries I hadn’t mentioned. It was some time before he noticed that I wasn’t saying anything at all.

When he finally did notice, he stopped in the middle of a sentence. We looked at each other for a minute, and then he said, “Eff?”

“I’ll think on it,” I told him.

“Good,” he said, a little uncertainly. Then he grinned, and I could see his confidence coming right back. “While you’re thinking, I’ll mention it to Papa, so that —”

“If you say one word to Papa before I’ve had a good long think, I’ll sew the tops of all your socks together before I pack them.”

“Eff!” Lan laughed, but he looked a little worried, too. “It’s a great opportunity. You have to grab it while you can.”

“I’m not grabbing anything until I’m sure whether I’m grabbing a fire nettle or a sprig of mint,” I said. “You’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks at least. I can tell. I want time to do some thinking of my own.”

Lan tilted his head sideways and narrowed his eyes at me. Then suddenly he nodded. “All right. But don’t take too long. And don’t go getting all tangled up in worries about what it’d be like. Hardly anybody back East is like Uncle Earn.”

He left, and I went back to my work. Weeding is a good job to do when you need to think about things, and I needed to think even more than I’d let on to Lan.

Papa had moved the family — well, the younger half of it, anyway — to Mill City when Lan and I were five, but I still remembered what it had been like before. Most of my aunts and uncles and cousins hadn’t liked it one bit that I was an unlucky thirteenth child, and they’d taken it out on me every chance they got. We’d gone back East for my sister Diane’s wedding when I was thirteen, and none of them had changed much except for being eight years older and eight years meaner. Uncle Earn had been ready to have me arrested or worse, just because I happened to be thirteenth-born.