Patricia Wrede - Thirteenth Child

For Beth Friedman,

who steered this back on track more times than I care to count

EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT A SEVENTH SON IS LUCKY. THINGS COME A little easier to him, all his life long: love and money and fine weather and the unexpected turn that brings good fortune from bad circumstances. A lot of seventh sons go for magicians, because if there’s one sort of work where luck is more useful than any other, it’s making magic.

And everybody knows that the seventh son of a seventh son is a natural-born magician. A double-seven doesn’t even need schooling to start working spells, though the magic comes on faster and safer if he gets some. When he’s grown and come into his power for true and all, he can even do the Major Spells on his own, the ones that can call up a storm or quiet one, move the earth or still it, anger the ocean or calm it to glassy smoothness. People are real nice to a double-seventh son.

Nobody seems to think much about all the other sons, or the daughters. There’s nearly always daughters, because hardly anybody has seven sons right in a row, boom, like that. Sometimes there are so many daughters that people give up trying for seven sons. After all, there’s plenty enough work in raising eleven or twelve childings, and a thirteenth child—son or daughter—is unlucky. So everybody says.

Papa and Mama didn’t pay much attention to what everybody says, I guess, because there are fourteen of us. Lan is the youngest, a double-seven, and he’s half the reason we moved away from Helvan Shores when I was five. The other half of the reason was me.

I’m Eff—the seventh daughter. Lan’s twin…

…and a thirteenth child.

From the day I was old enough to understand, I heard people talking to Mama and Papa about what to do with me. Aunt Tilly was the kindest. She only sighed and said it was a lucky thing I’d come first, or Lan would have been a thirteenth child with all the power of a double-seventh son. I wouldn’t be near so much a danger when I went bad, Aunt Tilly said. Uncle Earn and Aunt Janna disagreed. They said Mama and Papa ought to have drowned me as soon as Lan was safely born, and it wasn’t too late yet if they just had the resolution.

There were plenty of others, too, all anxious to tell Mama and Papa how I was sure to go bad, and to report every little thing I did as evidence they were right. If I spilled my soup, it was done apurpose and with evil in mind; if a ball I kicked went astray and tore up the new plantings in the kitchen garden, it was done deliberately in malice and spite. And of course their children heard the talk, just like I did, and if they didn’t understand it all, they understood enough to make my life a misery.

My cousins were the worst, mainly because there were so many of them. Papa had six older brothers and three older sisters, and four of my uncles and two of my aunts had married and stayed in Helvan Shores. Sometimes I thought the whole town was related to me. But even the children who weren’t relatives took their cue from my cousins.

I tried to stay out of trouble, but when I hid away from my cousins, they said I was sly and sneaking. Mama and Papa started giving me gray, worried looks when they thought I wasn’t noticing. My older brothers and sisters, the ones nearest me in age, tried to protect me sometimes, but sometimes they joined in teasing me. Lan was the only one who always stuck up for me, no matter what.

When Lan and I were almost five, and because Lan was the seventh son of a seventh son, our grandfather had decided he should have a private tutor. “He’s still too young to learn spells, of course, but he can learn the theory,” my grandfather said, with a sidelong look at me. “Private lessons will make sure he learns goodness as well as strength and skill.” Even then, I didn’t need him to say anything more. I knew that what he really wanted was to make sure Lan got his magic lessons without me anywhere near, in case I might drag him down when I eventually went bad.

Mama and Papa looked troubled, but they couldn’t turn down such a generous offer. I was heartbroken the day Lan started lessons. He was the only person in the world who didn’t think there was something wrong with me, and now he was going to be shut away from me for hours every day. He whispered a promise to come every night and teach me what he’d learned, but that still didn’t ease the hurt.

Mama found me curled up in a sniveling ball, just down the hall from the closed door of the lesson room. “Why, Eff! What are you doing?” she began, and then she saw my face and she got right down on the floor beside me and gathered me in her arms. “Honey, what’s the matter?”

I just shook my head. I didn’t want her to think I grudged Lan his lessons. He was special, everybody said, the same way I was wicked. He deserved those lessons—but, oh, I wanted him to be with me! Or at least close enough to call or run to when the others started in.

Even though I didn’t say anything, I think Mama understood. She sat and stroked my hair for a while, and then she brought me to the kitchen and we made sugar cookies together. She didn’t scold me when I spilled the milk because I was in such a hurry to show I could help. She just studied me with a thoughtful expression.

I got a lot more of those looks over the next month or so. I didn’t know what to make of them. Then, about a month after Lan started his lessons, the two of us were doing his exercises in the attic one evening when Allie came puffing up the stairs. She was three years older than we were, and her blue eyes were snapping with excitement. “There you are,” she said to me. “They want you in the sitting room.”

“What do they want me for?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but you’d better go right now. Uncle Earn is there with a policeman, and Papa is madder than blazes!”

I felt myself cringing. “I haven’t done anything!”

“Then you don’t have anything to worry about,” Allie said, imitating the smug tones of our older brother, Hugh.

As I rose slowly to my feet, Lan’s eyes narrowed. “I’m coming with you,” he announced suddenly. “So it will be all right.”

Allie cocked her head to one side and eyed him doubtfully. “I don’t know if they want you.”

“I’m still coming,” Lan said.

We walked into the sitting room together, me holding on to Lan’s hand tight as tight. Mama was sitting in the straight-backed chair with the carved arms; Papa was standing by the windows with his hands in his pockets. Uncle Earn was standing just inside the door next to a very uncomfortable-looking man in a blue-and-gold policeman’s uniform. “There!” Uncle Earn said as we came in, stabbing his finger straight at me. “That’s the child. Officer, do what you came here for!”

“And just what is that?” Papa said in the mild tone he used when he was getting ready to lay into one of the older boys about something, but he wasn’t quite certain-sure he had all of the facts in the case just yet. “I’ve yet to hear a clear explanation from you, and until I do, this goes no further.”

“You!” Uncle Earn turned a glare on Papa that would have melted fire irons. Papa just smiled gently, without a particle of yielding. “You,” Uncle Earn said again, “you’ve kept this menace and let her live and grow with no regard to your family or the disgrace and doom she’s sure to bring on us all. Maybe the luck of the seventh son will protect you, but what about the rest of us? And now—”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” the policeman said, “but am I to understand that this is the young lady against whom you lodged your complaint?” He nodded at me, almost friendly, and I felt a tiny bit better.