The Far West Read online

  “Is that why you’re so late?” Allie sniffed. “I can’t imagine what would make up for all the worrying we’ve done.”

  Lan shot me a look; then he turned to Allie and his grin broadened. “You tell me if it was worth the wait,” he said, and called back down the hall, “Come on in!”

  There was a rattle of footsteps, and six people crowded into the room, two adults and three childings, with Papa bringing up the rear.

  “Rennie?” Mama said, her eyes going wide. “Rennie!”

  “Auntie Eff!” my almost-eight-year-old nephew, Albert, said importantly. “Uncle Lan brought us. We came in a giant wagon! It took weeks, and there was a whole herd of mammoths. I was hoping they’d follow us, but they didn’t.”

  My niece, Seren Louise, aged six, was right behind him. “Auntie Eff, we saw a lady with a feather on her hat!”

  “Annie Eff, Annie Eff!” yelled Lewis. He was the littlest of the childings, barely three, and he seemed more interested in having an excuse to shout than in understanding what was happening.

  All three of the childings had grown enormously in the year since I’d last seen them, and they were all happy to be admired and wondered at. When Mama finished exclaiming over Rennie and passed her along to Allie, I told Albert and Seren and Lewis to come and meet their grandmother. Mama and Allie and Robbie had never met Rennie’s childings before, because they’d never made the trip out to the Oak River settlement, and neither Rennie nor Brant had been back to Mill City since they’d run off together eight and a half years before. I’d been to visit them at Oak River twice in the last two years.

  While Mama was busy hugging the little ones, I sat back. Brant was standing quietly beside the door, just watching. His brown eyes were tired, and there were lines in his face that hadn’t been there a year ago. My stomach clenched. He looked much too sad and worried for this to be an ordinary family visit.

  I glanced at Lan. He looked just as tired, which didn’t surprise me if he’d just spent a week helping ride herd on Rennie’s brood, but there was something else. His shoulders were tense, and a second after his eyes met mine, he looked away. I felt more uneasy than ever, in spite of the way the childings were bounding around.

  After a bit, Lan pulled some extra chairs up to the table for the grown-ups and offered to take the childings to the kitchen for some dinner. As soon as they were out of the room, Allie fairly exploded into questions. “Oh, Rennie, it’s so good to see you, but why didn’t you tell us you were coming? Or did the letter get lost? Settlement mail isn’t always reliable, I know. Why haven’t you come before?” She gave Brant an unfriendly look, like she thought he was to blame — as if Rennie wouldn’t have just upped and come home if she’d really wanted to. “How long are you staying? And where?”

  Rennie looked down at her plate and picked at the carrots she’d just served herself. “We — it was kind of a last-minute decision. We haven’t settled much yet.”

  Mama’s eyes narrowed, and I could see that she’d gotten over her surprise and was starting to add things up … and I didn’t think she liked the total she was getting any more than I did. “Rennie,” she said, “I hope you and Brant know that you and your children are welcome here, no matter what has happened.”

  “I — thank you, Mama,” Rennie whispered without looking up.

  “Now, why don’t you tell us what is going on?”

  Allie opened her mouth to say something, and Mama shot her a glance that made her close up again real quick.

  “The long and short of it is, we’ve parted company with the Oak River settlement,” Brant said heavily. “They’re buying out our share, but … well, it wasn’t exactly a friendly parting.”

  There was silence while everyone waited for him to go on. Before it got awkward, Papa said, “I see. Have you had time to consider what you’re going to do next?”

  “Not really, except looking for work as soon as I’m able.” Brant hesitated. “I was hoping that Rennie and the childings could put up here for a few days, until I can get a place lined up for us to stay.”

  “With Jack and Nan and Hugh gone, there’s plenty of room for all of you. I won’t hear of you staying anywhere else,” Mama said firmly. “I expect you’ll have enough to do without househunting on top of it, so don’t argue.”

  “I wouldn’t dare, ma’am,” Brant said with a faint smile, and Robbie laughed.

  “The wagon with our things is still over at the Settlement Office holding pen,” Rennie put in. “We —”

  “Your father and Robbie can go with Brant to pick them up tomorrow,” Mama told her before Rennie could get any further. “You’ve had a long trip, and you need a quiet evening. If you don’t have enough with you to get through the night, I’m sure we can find something in the attic. Lewis is too old to need any of the baby clothes I passed on to Nan, and most of the things for older children are still there.”

  Mama and Allie spent the rest of the meal going over details with Rennie, deciding which rooms Rennie’s family would have and tiptoeing around the question of what they might need, in case asking straight out or waiting for Rennie to ask would make her feel worse than she already did.

  I wasn’t as worried as Mama. It wasn’t as if Oak River had failed and left Rennie and her family with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing. Oak River was actually one of the more successful settlements, and Brant had been one of the founders. He and Rennie might not have brought much home with them, but if the settlement was buying them out, they should have a fair stake to start over with.

  The real question was why they had to start over at all. The settlement had been founded by the Society of Progressive Rationalists to prove that people could manage well without magic, and they’d always been strict about making people avoid using spells even if they were only visiting. Every year, the settlers had gotten stricter about making sure no one used magic, and by my last visit, most of them had just about stopped speaking to Brant and Rennie because Brant didn’t think they should be so firm about making folks abide by their rules if the folks were just passing through. I hadn’t thought the settlers were worked up enough to kick someone right out of the settlement, though, especially not someone like Brant.

  I didn’t find out what had happened that night, nor the next day (which was mostly occupied with getting Rennie and the children settled in). Neither Brant nor Rennie would talk about it, so it wasn’t until Saturday, when I cornered Lan in Papa’s library, that I got the whole story.

  The problems at Oak River had started with the mirror bugs. They hadn’t been drawn to Oak River the way they were drawn to all the other settlements, because it was magic that drew them and the Oak River settlement didn’t use magic. You’d think that the settlers would have been pleased, but I’d already figured out that the Rationalists weren’t any more rational than most other folks. Sure enough, a lot of them hadn’t been happy. The spells the other settlements used had attracted the mirror bugs, keeping them away from Oak River, and some of the settlers didn’t like feeling that they’d benefited from spells, even if they hadn’t been the ones to cast them.

  Then Professor Torgeson found out that the mirror bugs hadn’t just been using whatever magic was around them, the way normal magical creatures did. They absorbed it and took it with them, and it didn’t go back into the surroundings until they died. The mirror bug traps that the Settlement Office set up had really high levels of magic around them, and would for a few more years until the magic evened itself back out.

  When they found that out, some of the more dedicated Rationalists at Oak River had taken the notion that they should find a way to get rid of all the natural magic anywhere in their allotment. Unfortunately for them, there was no way to do that without using magic or magical critters, and it wouldn’t have lasted, anyway. They’d backed off from that idea, but now they were talking about keeping all of the magical plants and wildlife away from their land, as well as not using any spells themselves.

  “Th
at’s crazy,” I said. “Even the settlement protection spells can’t do that, not completely. They only try to block out the dangerous things. And are the Rationalists going to stop growing hexberries and calsters in their gardens? Or Scandian wheat, or meadow rice?”

  “They’re scared,” Lan said softly. “Scared people do crazy things.”

  Something in the way he said that made me narrow my eyes at him. “How crazy?” I demanded. “And how did you end up traveling with Brant and Rennie, anyway? I thought you were riding the middle settlements with Paul Roberts. Oak River is part of Wash’s circuit.”

  Lan flushed and kicked at the floor. “We finished the circuit early, so I talked Mr. Roberts into taking me through Oak River on our way back. I wanted to talk to Brant.”

  “To …” I stopped, thinking hard. There had been a point, a few years back, when I’d thought that giving up magic and becoming a Rationalist was the best way to keep from ever doing harm with my magic. I’d almost done it, and I’d only been worried that I might hurt someone. Lan had actually killed his professor by accident. “You wanted to talk to someone who doesn’t use magic.”

  Lan nodded without looking at me. “Mr. Roberts tried to talk me out of it, but I thought it was just because the normal Rationalists don’t like magic. I told him I’d been to Oak River before and it hadn’t been that bad, and he finally gave in. I didn’t realize how much they’d changed.

  “When we got to Oak River, we found out that Brant and Rennie were the only folks who were still letting magicians stay with them. If a group came through that was too large, the rest of the settlers made some of them stay outside the palisade wall. Without protection spells.”

  I was horrified. “But their charter says that magicians can stay in the settlement, because they don’t have a wagonrest. They did it that way on purpose! And now they’re going back on the agreement? Does the Settlement Office know about this?”

  “They do now,” Lan said grimly. “Anyway, the second day I was there, I went for a walk. There were a couple of boys playing marbles … remember that game Robbie and William invented, with the marbles changing color? I showed them how to play.”

  “Lan, you didn’t!”

  “It’s just a game!”

  “It’s still using magic.”

  “Not for anything important.”

  I gave him a stern look, and he shrugged. “All right, I did know better. But I was angry. And I really didn’t think there was any harm in it. None of the Rationalists I know ever minded using magic for little things that don’t count. It’s only useful things that they insist on doing by hand.”

  “How many Rationalists do you know? Besides Brant. And how many of them care enough about Progressive Rationalism to leave everything and go off to live in a settlement, just so they can get away from magic?”

  “I know, but …” Lan shrugged again. “The point is, the boys’ mother caught me at it. She threw a fit right there in the street, and next thing I knew, practically everyone in the settlement was out there threatening to get a rope and string me up.”

  My eyes widened. “No wonder you didn’t want to tell Mama! She already worries about the wildlife; if she took a notion that the people out West are dangerous, too, she’d never let any of us get within a mile of the Mammoth River, ever again.”

  “And it wouldn’t do any good to tell her that even if they’d actually tried to hang me, they couldn’t have done a thing,” Lan said. “Not without magic.”

  “They didn’t try, then?”

  “No. Brant got there first. He was just in time to hear them muttering about ropes, and he blew up.” Lan paused. “You know, ‘blew up’ probably isn’t the right way to put it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He … well, he tore strips off them,” Lan said. “And he did it without even raising his voice. He told them they were a disgrace to the whole Rationalist movement, talking about hanging someone without a trial, and then he went on about how magic wasn’t against the law but murder was, and a bunch of other things about Rationalist philosophy.

  “The boys’ mother went red in the face and yelled at him that I’d been corrupting her sons and she didn’t want me in the settlement, wildlife or no wildlife. Quite a few folks had drifted off by then, but most of the ones who were left agreed with her. One of them called out that Brant should be ashamed to call himself a Rationalist, supporting a magician the way he had.

  “Brant went real quiet for a minute, and then he said that he wasn’t ashamed to be a Rationalist, but he was sure as anything ashamed to belong to the Oak River settlement. Right about then, Mr. Lewis showed up.”

  “And?”

  “After he heard what happened, Mr. Lewis told everyone to go home while he had a talk with Brant and me.” Lan shook his head. “Brant said he didn’t have anything to hide, and went on some more about Rationalist philosophy. He finished up saying he and his family were leaving Oak River, and Mr. Lewis just looked …” He paused again. “Tired and stricken.”

  “Brant is his nephew,” I said. “I always thought they were pretty close. He must feel like Mama felt when Rennie ran off, almost.”

  Lan nodded, but he didn’t look as if he’d really thought on it much. “There was some more talk, and Brant and I went home. I apologized for putting him in such a situation, but he said he and Rennie had been talking about leaving the settlement since early spring, and it was better to go now than to wait and maybe get caught by an early winter. Rennie gave me one of her scolds, and we spent a couple of days packing up. Mr. Lewis came around and talked some more with Brant — I think that’s when they worked out how the settlement would buy out Brant’s share — and we left.”

  I thanked Lan for telling me, and we agreed that neither of us would say anything to Rennie or Brant unless they brought it up first. I was pretty sure that Rennie was glad to be back, but I wondered how Brant felt, and about how my niece and nephews would feel when they saw the rest of the family using spells.

  I was right to worry. The first couple of weeks were difficult. Seren Louise got terribly upset the first time she saw Nan use the dusting spell, and Albert lectured everyone about how wicked it was to use magic for anything until Brant told him it was bad manners. Rennie alternated between flinching whenever someone cast a spell, and using spells herself even for the littlest things. Brant just looked tired all the time, and a little sad whenever he saw Rennie doing spellwork.

  The third week after Rennie came home, two more families arrived from Oak River. They’d left for the same reasons as Brant and Rennie, and they brought letters from Brant’s uncle. Having them around seemed to make Brant and Rennie feel better, though they didn’t spend a lot of time together that I knew of.

  Gradually, things settled down. Albert and Seren Louise started at the day school, and Brant found a job at one of the riverboat companies. Rennie started acting more like her old self, and stopped making such a point of casting spells in front of Brant, though she didn’t hide that she was doing it.

  The trouble was, I’d never much liked Rennie’s old self, and I liked her new-old self even less. She’d always tried to boss us younger ones, and as soon as she was back to feeling better, she started in trying it again. Having Rennie around made Allie’s bossing worse, too. Between the two of them, I wished more than once that I could move into Mrs. Jablonski’s rooming house just to get away from them, but I knew Mama and Papa would never allow it, even once I turned twenty-one come June.

  I started staying as late as I could at work, though there wasn’t much to do. The Frontier Management Department had lied about getting started on the medusa lizard in November; by the end of the month, they didn’t even have a preliminary list of people who they thought would be good choices to study Lizzie, much less an actual schedule of folks to show up and do things.

  By mid-December, winter had settled in for sure. With the ground frozen, work on the study center had stopped. Work on the medusa lizard still hadn’t
started. I spent most of my time at the office sending letters to the Frontier Management Department asking when their so-called experts would arrive, or trudging back and forth through the snow to the Settlement Office to see if they had any news. At home, I watched the childings for Rennie and Brant and helped with the extra laundry and mending that came with having so many more people in the house.

  And every night as I fell asleep, I wished I were back in settlement territory. Facing saber cats and medusa lizards might be a lot more dangerous than minding childings and writing cranky letters, but it was also a lot more interesting.

  Right before Christmas, a man came up from the Society of Progressive Rationalists in Long Lake City to talk to Brant and the others who’d left Oak River. The Long Lake City branch of the society were the ones who’d provided a lot of the people and money to start up the Oak River settlement in the first place. Mr. Lewis had been sending them progress reports for years, and the Long Lake City Rationalists were very unhappy about the turn the settlement had taken. The man they sent up to Mill City spent a week talking to all three of the families who’d left the settlement and then spent another couple of days talking to Mr. Parsons at the Settlement Office, and he wasn’t any happier when he left than when he’d come.

  Rennie and Brant stayed on at the house after Christmas, though Brant had been with the riverboat company for over two months and they’d gotten their settlement buyout. I didn’t bother asking why. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I felt snappish all the time, the way the golden firefoxes at the menagerie acted when we had to put them in the small cages in order to clean out their usual pen.

  Even the Frontier Management Department deciding to let us start dissecting Lizzie at last didn’t help, though at least I finally had something to do at work besides write letters. Actually, it made things even harder. I’d spend my day taking notes and making sketches while Professor Torgeson and Professor Jeffries eased the preservation spells back from one bit of the medusa lizard or another so they could work on it. We’d talk and speculate about the lizard’s magic and development, and I’d help write up the report of their findings.