Patricia Wrede - Thirteenth Child

“Miss Ochiba going to Triskelion University,” William said. “If she’s teaching there, the school board can’t say this new person is a better teacher.”

I nodded. Triskelion University had been founded shortly before the Secession War, and it made a point of teaching all three types of magic. Even though it was so much newer than the other schools that specialized in magic, it was almost as well known as the New Bristol Institute of Magic or Simon Magus College in Pennsylvania. I’d been surprised to hear that Miss Ochiba had brothers, but if she had them, I didn’t find it at all surprising that one of them would be teaching at Triskelion, or that he wanted Miss Ochiba to come teach there, too.

By the end of July, Miss Ochiba was gone, and William was preparing to leave for boarding school. Professor Jeffries, Professor Graham, and Papa were off in the Far West settlements with most of the other college magicians. The grubs, it turned out, hadn’t vanished; they’d just changed into pupae for a few weeks. They emerged in mid-July as round, yellow-and-green-striped beetle-like bugs. They didn’t have any wings, but they crawled like crazy. Anything above ground that the grubs hadn’t eaten, the beetles got, and the settlement spells didn’t work on them any better than they had on the grubs. So the Settlement Office called on the college magicians to find or invent a new spell to take care of the beetles, or at least keep them from spreading farther east.

With Professor Jeffries gone, I didn’t have much to do at the menagerie. Wash was as busy as all the other magicians, so his packets of notes had stopped arriving, and there was no one to look at them anyway. The two students who were caring for the animals didn’t need my help. After a week, I stopped going over. I told myself I’d start again once Professor Jeffries came back.

But Papa, Professor Graham, and Professor Jeffries didn’t come back right away. In late August, just before classes were supposed to start at the college, the basic protective spells at several of the settlements failed. It took all of the magicians another three weeks to get them back up again, and everyone said it was just luck that none of them had any serious problems with the wildlife while the spells were down. All the college magic classes were late starting, and when the college magicians weren’t teaching, they were meeting with people from the Settlement Office and the Farmers’ Society and the governor’s office, as well as writing letters to people back East about the problems with the settlement spells.

Things changed faster and faster. William left for boarding school before his father got back from the settlements. Nan took up with a young man from the mills, whom she’d met at the railroad shipping office, and by Christmas she was wearing a ring and planning her wedding. Allie took the teacher’s exam and went to work at one of the new day schools. Robbie had graduated from the upper school in spring, and everybody expected him to spend a year or two studying, the way Hugh and our older brothers had, and then go East for his schooling. Instead, he surprised everyone by going straight into the Northern Plains Riverbank College.

I felt lonelier than ever. Lan was gone; William was gone; Miss Ochiba was gone. Except for Rindy, my friends from the year before were gone—back in the settlements or working, like Susan—and Rindy was studying grimly for the teacher’s exam and didn’t have time for anything else. For the first time in a long while, I caught myself thinking that maybe Uncle Earn had been right after all, and I was bad luck for everyone I knew.

I had more trouble than ever with my magic classes. By mid-year, my spells weren’t just fizzling anymore—they were going off in little explosions. The teacher shook his head and said it was only to be expected, since the class was moving on to more difficult spells. He told me to just do the set-up and write out the procedure for him, and for a while that worked. But then the people on either side of me started having trouble getting their spells to work, the same way I’d had trouble at first. I knew it was my fault, but I had no idea how to stop it from happening.

Working with the little blue book Miss Ochiba had given us was the one bright spot for me all year. It wasn’t like the lesson books we’d used in the day school or the texts we used in the upper school, and it wasn’t a list of exercises like the ones we’d done in her after-school class. Instead, it was full of stories and tales, some of which didn’t seem to have anything to do with magic at all. I didn’t know what to make of it at first, but I still read them over and over.

My favorite ones were the transformation stories, like the one where a frog turned himself into a bird to help a chief’s daughter, or the one where a lion turned into a snake because he’d lied to his wife. I still didn’t see what any of them had to do with Aphrikan magic, though. Until one day, when I was specially cross and frustrated. I’d just read three of the stories over again, and I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. I dropped the little blue book on the table with a thud, and said out loud, “This is stupid! It’s just a lot of tales.”

As I glared at the book, I remembered Miss Ochiba, and all the times she’d said, “That is certainly one way to look at the matter. There are others.”

“What others?” I grumbled, but I knew better than to expect an answer. Even if she’d been there, Miss Ochiba wouldn’t have said anything. In all the years I’d known her, she’d never once told anyone how to look at things. She just insisted that we look.

So I spent the rest of that year looking for different ways to see each of those stories. I saw that if you looked at it a little differently, the frog turned into a bird because he wanted to fly, not just to help the chief’s daughter. It was a story about the way natural things change in ways that aren’t natural to them, once people get involved. The more I looked, the more I found, and the more I found, the more I could see.

And then it was May, and the grubs were back worse than ever.

STRICTLY SPEAKING, THE GRUBS AND THE SETTLEMENT SPELLS WEREN’T my worries, I suppose. But Papa had been part of the group that invented the new spells that were supposed to keep the grubs from spreading, so when the grubs showed up in three-quarters of the settlements—nearly all the way to the river, in some places—people came to him and the others to complain. Papa was very annoyed about it. He said that he and the other professors didn’t have time to waste settling down a bunch of bureaucrats when they ought to be figuring out what had gone wrong and how to fix it.

Professor Jeffries came around to our house on the second or third day after the news about the grubs reached Mill City. “Good afternoon, Miss Rothmer,” he said when he saw me on the porch. “Is your father about?”

“Papa isn’t home yet,” I said. “I can send Robbie over to the college to fetch him, if you like.”

“It’d be a mercy, if he’s still tied up with those idiots from the governor’s office,” Professor Jeffries said, so I went and found Robbie. When I got back, the professor was staring west, toward the river, though you couldn’t see it from our porch. “This is a bad business,” he muttered as I came up.

“You mean the grubs, Professor?” I said.

Professor Jeffries nodded. Then he looked at me as if he’d only just realized I was there, and his eyes narrowed like he was seeing me for the first time. I’d put up my hair and lengthened my skirts since last he’d seen me, and I couldn’t deny it made me look like a grown woman, though I was only middling tall. “It has been some time since we’ve seen you at the menagerie, Miss Rothmer,” he said after a moment.