Patricia Wrede - Thirteenth Child

“Surely the importance of this expedition has been made clear to them,” Mr. Harrison said, looking at Papa as if he was sure it was Papa’s fault if it hadn’t.

Wash shook his head. “Those folks aren’t just standoffish when it comes to magicians. They purely dislike them. I’m frankly surprised they agreed to this study at all, let alone as fast as they did. I doubt it’d take much for them to change their minds.”

“And we can’t afford to take that chance,” Papa said firmly. “If you won’t recognize that, Mr. Harrison, we’ll leave you here tomorrow morning and pick you up on our way back in a few days.”

“You can’t do that!” Mr. Harrison spluttered.

“I can and I will,” Papa said. “You don’t seem to realize that this trip was not organized with the backing of the Settlement Office, nor is it sponsored by the Northern Plains Riverbank College. Officially, this is simply a family visit. You can complain to whomever you like when we get back to Mill City, and much good may it do you, but there’s nothing anywhere that says I’m obligated to let you ride along on my wagon when I’m going to visit my daughter.”

“There’s always walking,” Wash added in a thoughtful tone. “The Rationalists do it all the time, though usually not alone. It’s easier to hold off an angry bear or a pack of Columbian sphinxes if you’ve got more than one rifle in use.”

Mr. Harrison paled. He sputtered some more, but in the end he had no choice but to agree with what Papa said. Lan frowned, and later on I heard him tell William that if Mr. Harrison tried to change his mind after we got to Oak River, Lan was going to put a laryngitis spell on him. I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea, but I was glad that somebody else had thought to wonder whether Mr. Harrison would keep his promises.

Next morning, we started off again. We passed several more tinytowns surrounded by bare land. One of them sent a man out to find out who we were; when he heard that Papa and Professor Jeffries were magicians, he pretty near got down on his knees and begged them for help. Professor Jeffries told him they weren’t miracle workers, and Papa said that as soon as they had an answer, they’d let everyone know, but until then, there wasn’t anything they could do. Mr. Harrison didn’t say anything, but he kept looking at Lan. Nobody said much for a good while after that.

Around mid-morning, I started seeing little clumps of dead grass and weeds every so often, instead of just bare dirt. Shortly after, the clumps came closer together, and then some of them started being green. The wagon ride got bumpy, and then transformed again as the plants got bigger and smoothed out into a meadow. “We must be getting close,” Mr. Harrison said.

Papa nodded. A minute later, Lan shouted from up ahead that he could see the Rationalist settlement, and Papa pulled the wagon to a halt.

“What is it?” Mr. Harrison asked.

“Mr. Morris!” Papa called to Wash. “Would you say this is a reasonable distance?”

“It’ll make them happier than it makes me,” Wash said. “But you’re right to say we shouldn’t go much farther.”

“What are you talking about?” Mr. Harrison demanded.

Papa ignored him. “Jeffries! The settlement’s in sight. Time to shut down.”

Professor Jeffries nodded and took out the gold disc that he’d used to do the protective spells for us that morning. He breathed on it, muttering, and I felt the spells around us collapse and fade away. I shivered, knowing that if there was any wildlife nearby, it could come straight for us now, and we wouldn’t even know until it was close enough to see.

“What are you doing ?” Mr. Harrison said.

“Canceling the protective spells,” Papa said. “It’s part of their settlement contract—anyone visiting has to forgo magic while they’re on settlement land.” Which Mr. Harrison ought to have known, him being head of the Settlement Office, but from the look on his face, he hadn’t bothered to check before he came on the trip. I frowned. What else didn’t he know about?

Mr. Harrison opened his mouth, looked at Papa, and closed it again. Papa nodded to Professor Jeffries and set the horses moving. Half an hour later, we reached the settlement.

The Oak River settlement was on top of a hill with a palisade of logs around it, like most of the other settlements we’d seen, but the resemblance ended there. At the other settlements, the palisade was more of a tall fence made of branches woven together. It wasn’t meant for serious protection; it was just an anchor for the settlement magician’s spells.

This palisade was a double wall of logs sharpened to a point on top and then sunk half their length into the ground. The inner wall rose a good fifteen feet higher than the outer one, and there was a gap between them large enough that nothing could climb to the top of the first wall and jump from there to the second. Two log watchtowers stood at opposite ends of the compound, with the national and territory flags flying over each one. Around the outside of the outer wall, about thirty feet from the base of the logs, the hill had been carved away to make the slope steeper.

Professor Jeffries nodded in approval. “Good work. I think those walls would even stop a mammoth stampede.”

“They wouldn’t stop a steam dragon,” Lan pointed out.

“Very few steam dragons come this far east,” Professor Jeffries replied.

“It’d only take one.”

William was studying the settlement with a thoughtful expression. “They probably have some other way to handle steam dragons,” he said. “They’d have plenty of warning, with those towers.”

They had plenty of warning of other things, too. By the time we got to the settlement, the gate was open and two men were waiting for us. One of them was Brant Wilson. The other man was older, but he still looked familiar. It took me a minute before I remembered—Toller Lewis, the president of the Long Lake City Rationalists, who’d come with Brant to see Papa the first time, all those years ago. I was more than a little surprised that such an important person had chosen to be a settler.

Papa pulled the wagon to a halt next to them. Mr. Lewis stepped forward. “Welcome to Oak River, Professor Rothmer,” he said.

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Lewis,” Papa replied just as formally.

Brant looked at Papa and hesitated a second before he said, “Yes, welcome.”

Papa nodded at him, and the awkward moment passed over. First I was a little surprised that that was all there was to it, and then I was surprised that I’d expected anything else. After all, it’d been five years, and Papa wasn’t one to carry a grudge, especially when he’d recorded Rennie’s marriage and childings in the family Bible. Brant would probably never be his favorite son-in-law, but done was done. Papa went right on and introduced the rest of us. When the introductions got to Wash, he and Mr. Lewis gave each other a little nod, and I remembered Wash saying he’d stopped at the settlement a time or two on his way back to Mill City.

When everyone had finished their rather stiff greetings, Mr. Lewis offered to show us around before we went along to Brant and Rennie’s house. We started off as soon as we’d stabled the horses. Unlike most settlements, Oak River didn’t have an open paddock for visitors’ livestock. Everything was covered, and after a minute I figured out why—it was because in a normal settlement, the protective spells kept the flying wildlife off, but here, folks would be taking a big chance if they left everything open. I remembered Lan’s comment about steam dragons and shivered. It was all I could do not to keep looking up at the sky every other minute.

Inside, the Oak River settlement was as different from the other settlements as it had been from the outside. For one thing, it looked scruffier, almost makeshift. The buildings were smaller, shorter, and farther apart, and all of them had dirt heaped up around the walls nearly to the roofline. William asked if they’d started as dugouts, but Brant shook his head.