Patricia Wrede - Thirteenth Child

That set everyone looking for reasons why. People pretty nearly tore the college and the Settlement Office apart, getting hold of records of wind and rain and temperature for every settlement in the North Plains, and marking up maps to see if there was a pattern that fit where the grubs were. Lan was kept busy making more illusion maps, and William volunteered to help me copy some in pencil, so we wouldn’t need to have the illusion spell renewed. Right in the middle of it all, Mr. Harrison came storming into Professor Jeffries’s office, waving the first map that Lan had done up for him.

“Jeffries!” Mr. Harrison shouted. “What do you mean by this?”

“Blast it!” Lan muttered as all the lines on the map he was trying to enchant disappeared. He straightened and walked around the table where we were all working. “Professor Jeffries isn’t here, Mr. Harrison,” he said a little too politely. “Is there some problem?”

“There certainly is, young man,” Mr. Harrison said. “This map is incorrect.”

“It’s an exact copy of the professor’s,” Lan said even more politely than before. “I made it myself last week.”

“ You made it?” Mr. Harrison growled. “You mean Jeffries has been passing off student work on the Settlement Office? What’s your name?”

“Lan Rothmer.”

There was an awful silence. Then Mr. Harrison said in quite a different tone, “Oh, I see. Then—you’re the one who enchanted this map? You’re certain.”

“Quite certain, Mr. Harrison. What seems to be the problem?”

Mr. Harrison spread the map out over the top of the one I’d been working on and jabbed his finger at it. “This clear area is supposed to be around the Oak River settlement, but instead it’s around something called River Forest.”

“It’s the same thing,” William said. “This is an older map that shows the name of the first settlement, that’s all.”

Mr. Harrison reddened. Then he huffed and glared at the three of us. “I require a map that is up-to-date,” he said stiffly. “I can’t be forever explaining this discrepancy.”

“I’m sure that’s made this past week very difficult for you, sir,” William said. Mr. Harrison looked at him suspiciously. William picked up one of the maps he’d finished, and held it out. “I’m sure this one will suit you.”

“Very good,” Mr. Harrison said after a cursory glance over the map. “I’ll tell Jeffries about this myself. Good afternoon.” He tucked the map into his pocket and left.

“I see why Professor Jeffries says he’s an imbecile,” William said in a thoughtful tone.

“He didn’t even thank you!” I said. “Or ask your name.”

“It’s just as well,” William replied. “He really hates my father. He’d probably have exploded again if I’d told him my name. That is, if he’d realized I was Professor Graham’s son. He might not have; it took him a week to notice the difference in the map, after all.”

“I’d forgotten that the Oak River settlement site had been used before,” Lan said. “How long ago was that?”

“The River Forest settlement collapsed about eight years ago,” William said. We both looked at him. “I was curious, so I looked it up. They didn’t make it the full three years from when they started, and their claims reverted to the Settlement Office.”

“Eight years,” Lan said slowly. “It’s a long time, but there’ve been cases where there were still traces after ten or even fifteen years. I wonder if anyone has checked?”

“Checked what?” I asked.

“Checked for traces of old spells,” Lan replied. “I did a special project on the subject last year. The River Forest settlement wasn’t run by Rationalists, so they must have had settlement protection spells and a settlement magician like everyone else. There might still be shadows of those spells around. It takes a long time for them to fade out completely, if the magician doesn’t erase them on purpose.”

William bent over the map Mr. Harrison had left. “Look. When it was founded, the River Forest settlement was right at the far edge of the frontier. Way out there, they’d have needed a really good magician to make it even for two years.”

“Wash said once that the magicians in the farthest-out settlements are always trying things to make the protections work better,” I said.

We looked at each other, and I could see we were all thinking the same thing. Lan was the one who put it into words.

“I wonder if something that old settlement magician did is what’s keeping the grubs away from Oak River?” he said.

LAN AND WILLIAM AND I DIDN’T WASTE ANY TIME TELLING PROFESSOR Jeffries about Lan’s guess. I thought for sure somebody else must have noticed the same thing, but nobody had. Right away they started looking for the old River Forest settlement magician. Unfortunately, it turned out that the reason the settlement had collapsed was because their magician had died of a fever, and they’d been wiped out by a herd of woolly rhinoceroses before the Settlement Office sent a replacement.

Papa spent the next week wobbling between being proud enough of Lan to bust his suspenders and being mad enough at the Settlement Office to spit railroad spikes. Mr. Harrison made a terrible fuss over how long it had taken the college to figure out that there might be old spells at the Rationalist settlement, and never mind that his office had more maps and better ones, since they were the ones who handed out the settlement allotments. He sent people from his office over to the college labs and workrooms every day, and even came over himself a few times, until President Grey told him the visits were disrupting the college and wouldn’t be allowed any longer. That only helped a little, though, because right away he switched to peppering us with notes full of demands and suggestions.

We all ignored Mr. Harrison’s notes as best we could, and got on with our work. Everybody knew we didn’t have much time before the grubs emerged from their pupae as beetles, and if they kept on spreading, they’d be all the way to the Gulf of Amerigo in another two years, leaving nothing at all of the farm settlements west of the Mammoth River. So the college didn’t want to waste any time getting a group out to the Rationalist settlement to see why they didn’t have grubs, when everyone around them did.

The trouble was the Rationalists. The ones in Mill City flatly refused to let any magicians go out to their settlement. It took nearly the whole first week to get them to agree that if the people in the settlement itself were willing to let some magicians in, maybe it would be all right. Then the college had to negotiate with the settlement, which took even more time.

“I don’t understand those people,” Professor Graham said to Papa one evening. Professor Graham and William had been coming to dinner fairly often since the whole muddle began, because it was the only time they could be sure of talking without interruptions. “Don’t they understand how important this is?”

“They don’t like magic,” Lan said calmly. “Or magicians. That’s more important than anything else, to them.”

“It’s not that they don’t like it, exactly,” William said. “They think it’s a weakness to depend on it. At least, that’s what Brant Wilson said, when we used to argue while he was visiting Miss Rothmer.”

“They really wanted to prove people don’t need settlement spells to survive in the West,” I said. “I bet they’re pretty unhappy, hearing that they’re maybe doing so well because of some old settlement spells. We haven’t heard from Rennie since that came out.”

Papa set down his fork and pursed his lips. Then he looked at Professor Graham. “You know, Anthony, we may have been approaching these folks the wrong way.”