Thirteenth Child Read online

  I worried and fretted about that talk all day and got two bad marks for inattention in reading and history. I thought about taking it back, or saying I wasn’t feeling well and needed to go straight home. But that would just be putting it off, because I knew Miss Ochiba wouldn’t forget.

  So when school was over for the day, I went into the big room where Miss Ochiba taught her magic classes. Miss Ochiba was just locking up the big cupboard where she kept all the ingredients for the spells she taught, and there were two older boys and one girl from the last class still fiddling with little brooms and dust cloths at the big tables across the back. The girl giggled and whispered to the boy next to her when she saw me.

  “I will be with you in a moment, Miss Rothmer,” Miss Ochiba said as I hesitated in the doorway. “Take a seat on the left, if you please.”

  The girl at the worktable had seen me come in. She glanced from me to Miss Ochiba’s back. Her eyes widened, and she nudged the boy next to her and whispered some more. Miss Ochiba turned and gave the girl a long look. A moment later, the top of the table made a popping sound, and a bright green cloud puffed up, right into the girl’s face. A smaller cloud puffed in front of one of the boys; the other one jumped back, though nothing seemed to be happening to his part of the table.

  “Well done, Mr. Legrande,” Miss Ochiba said. “Miss Wilkerson, Mr. Cohen, I trust that after this you will remember that cleaning up after a spell requires as much care and attention as casting it.”

  The smoke began to clear, and I saw that the girl’s hair and face and the whole front of her calico dress were colored bright green. The boy was blue from his nose down. They looked at each other in horror, while the second boy gave a bark of laughter, then darted a scared look at Miss Ochiba.

  “Just so, Mr. Legrande,” Miss Ochiba said. “I believe you are all finished for the day. You may go.”

  The boy who hadn’t turned color gave her a wide-eyed look and bolted out of the room. The other boy hesitated, and the girl burst into tears. “I can’t leave like this!” she wailed. “Miss Ochiba, how long will this last?”

  “One day,” Miss Ochiba replied.

  “A day! How am I going to get home without anyone seeing me? What am I going to tell my parents? Miss Ochiba, can’t you do something? This is humiliating!”

  “Humility is as good for the soul as it is for the memory” Miss Ochiba said, and her lips twitched as if she was trying not to smile. She handed each of the two unnaturally-colored students a note. “Give that to your parents. I shall expect you in class tomorrow, coloration and all.”

  “No!” the girl said. “I can’t—I won’t! Everyone will laugh at me.”

  “You are neither the first nor, I fear, the last to need such a reminder. Be thankful I intervened; the usual result of that particular mistake is a set of tentacles that are extremely painful to remove.”

  The blue boy looked suddenly very thoughtful. The girl didn’t seem to hear. “Please, Miss Ochiba!”

  “Twenty-four hours,” Miss Ochiba replied implacably, and shooed the two of them out the door.

  “Now, Miss Rothmer,” she said, crossing back to the table where I sat. “I believe you wished to speak with me. I hope this unfortunate incident has not put you off.”

  “N-no, Miss Ochiba,” I said. After watching those three students, I had the feeling Miss Ochiba could handle just about anything, even a thirteenth child. I wasn’t sure I’d like it much, but that was beside the point. But now that I was here, I didn’t know quite how to begin. I’d kept silent on the subject for eight years, ever since we moved to Mill City, and the habit was just about as strong as the fear that lay behind it. And that old fear was as strong as it had ever been. On top of it, I was afraid of how Miss Ochiba would see me once she knew.

  My head was near certain that talking to Miss Ochiba was the right thing to do, but my heart wanted to turn around and run. I managed to keep my feet from moving, but I couldn’t get my mouth started. I just sat there, feeling scared and tongue-tied.

  “Was it something regarding your magic lessons?” Miss Ochiba prompted after a minute.

  “Yes. I mean, no, not exactly. I—” I twisted my fingers together and looked down at my hands. “You know Lan’s a seventh son. Well, there are seven of us girls, too.”

  Miss Ochiba studied me, frowning slightly. I waited for her to do the addition, but her expression didn’t change. Finally I said, “I’m a thirteenth child, Miss Ochiba.”

  “So I gather,” Miss Ochiba said, tapping one finger lightly against the tabletop.

  “I-I thought you ought to know,” I said. “Since you’re doing the magic teaching. Uncle Earn said—” I stopped, because Miss Ochiba’s eyes had narrowed and she was nodding. “You know Uncle Earn?”

  “Not in the least, nor do I wish to,” Miss Ochiba said. “I take it that your uncle is a primitive Pythagorean, and has inflicted his unfortunate views on you?”

  “Uh—” We’d studied about Pythagoras in our magic-history classes, two years before, but I didn’t remember it as well as I should have. “Pythagoras started number magic?” I said.

  Miss Ochiba beamed. “Very good, Miss Rothmer.” Her voice took on the lecturing tone she used in class. “Pythagoras laid the numerical foundation for both mathematics and magic. Unfortunately like many of the ancient Greeks, his work was not always as rigorous as it might have been.”

  “You mean he was wrong about thirteenth children being evil and unlucky?” I said.

  “Say rather that his comprehension was woefully incomplete,” Miss Ochiba replied. “Which is no serious fault in Pythagoras, who lived over two thousand years ago and did not have the benefit of later work to improve his understanding, but is inexcusable in anyone with a modern education.”

  My heart sank. Even if I didn’t remember much about Pythagoras, I knew that “woefully incomplete” didn’t mean wrong.

  “So it’s really true,” I blurted.

  Miss Ochiba made a clucking noise. “Miss Rothmer, you appear to be a sensible young woman. Consider. Yes, in Avrupan numerancy the number thirteen is associated with a variety of ills, and yes, you are without question a thirteenth child. But you are also a seventh daughter, and the number seven has as much or more association with positive power and good luck as the number thirteen has with bad.” Her eyes narrowed suddenly and she looked at me with an extra-thoughtful expression. “Is your mother by chance a seventh daughter?”

  I had to think for a minute which of my aunts were Mama’s sisters and which were sisters-in-law. “No, ma’am. Mama has two sisters and two brothers.”

  “Then you are not a double-seventh daughter,” Miss Ochiba said. “But you are the first of twins, a position second only to being the eldest in a family for imparting self-mastery and general authority. Taking a wider view, I presume that with your father’s family being so large you have some number of cousins; so long as you have even one who is older than you, you cannot be your paternal grandfather’s thirteenth grandchild. Are there cousins on your mother’s side of the family? More than one, older than you are?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you cannot be your maternal grandfather’s thirteenth grandchild, either. I daresay you were not born on the thirteenth day of the month, and as there are only twelve months, you cannot have been born in the thirteenth month of any year. You are not old enough to have been born in the thirteenth year of this century. All these numbers, and more, have meanings and importance, according to Avrupan numerancy theory.”

  My head was whirling, but not enough to miss noticing that she’d made a point of mentioning Avrupa twice. I frowned. “Miss Ochiba, are you saying that all those numbers don’t mean anything in other kinds of magic?”

  Miss Ochiba smiled. “Some of them don’t mean anything; others don’t mean the same things. Hijero—Cathayan number magic is quite different from Avrupan, and the Aphrikan tradition hardly deals with numbers at all.”

  “Different how?” I asked s
uspiciously.

  “The Hijero-Cathayans view life as a process of change,” Miss Ochiba replied. “A small child is not the same as a young man or woman, and a youth is not the same as a parent or an elder, though they may have been born on the same day and have similar places in their respective families. Since the day of birth does not change, the Hijero—Cathayans change the meaning of the number. A thirteenth child—” She stopped and looked at me, then went to a small cupboard at the back of the room. She took down a short, fat book bound in faded red leather and leafed through it for a moment.

  “What does it say?”

  “‘Thirteen is of fire and heaven, thus of the sun,’“ Miss Ochiba read. “‘The changes are also of the sun. At dawn, the fire is cool and distant, growing stronger and more passionate as the sun climbs the sky. At noon, the heat is greatest, for good or ill. The afternoon holds strength until the sun falls into twilight. Travel up or travel down; remember balance. Two feet on the ground are unshaken; two feet on the rungs of a ladder are unsteady whether they move up or down.’”

  “What?” I said.

  Miss Ochiba read it again. I still didn’t understand it, but it didn’t sound too bad, especially the part about “for good or ill.” I said so, and Miss Ochiba smiled again. “The Cathayans think that both people and magic are too complex to be summed up clearly in a few words, so the fewer words they use, the more ambiguous they are.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “What about Aphrikan magic?”

  “That is too difficult to explain in one short afternoon,” Miss Ochiba said, “and I have lessons to prepare. If you will come again tomorrow, however, I shall be happy to teach you as much as you wish to know, within my own knowledge.”

  “Yes, please, Miss Ochiba,” I said.

  And that was how I started getting my own extra magic lessons.

  CHAPTER 10

  FOR THE REST OF THAT YEAR, AND A GOOD MANY YEARS THEREAFTER, I stopped by Miss Ochiba’s classroom when school was over. For the first few days, it was only me, but then William and Lan noticed that I wasn’t coming directly home after school, and came around to see what was up. Then Miss Ochiba asked some of the other students who’d shown an interest, and all of a sudden we were an extra class.

  Lan only came for the first few weeks. What with his regular schooling and the extra lessons he was already getting from Papa and Professor Graham, it was just too much time for him to spare. William kept coming, same as me, which was a surprise. I hadn’t thought he’d care for extra work, especially after all the bad things he’d said about learning Aphrikan magic.

  But Miss Ochiba could make almost anything interesting, and she knew a lot about Aphrikan magic. Both of her parents had been conjurefolk. Her mother had been brought to Columbia on one of the slave ships, back before the Secession War, and her father was one of the anti-slavery advocates from the Aphrikan colonies in South Columbia. He’d come north with enough funds to buy a whole shipload of slaves free, then settled down in Pennsylvania with Miss Ochiba’s mother to help the abolitionists in the North. So Miss Ochiba grew up learning first-rate Aphrikan magic from her parents at home while she was learning Avrupan magic at school.

  By Christmas, we’d learned the first basic spells in the day class—snuffing candles, stopping a rolling ball without touching it, silencing a specially made squeaky machine—and were beginning to work on things that required more energy and concentration, like lighting the candles and getting the balls rolling in the first place. In our after-school Aphrikan class, we were still doing foundation work, which is like a cross between trying to watch everything around you very closely and trying to meditate quietly inside your head, both at the same time. It was very difficult. Miss Ochiba insisted that we keep trying until we could do it to her satisfaction, but she never said what would satisfy her.

  We found out unexpectedly, about three weeks after Christmas. It was a bitter day, clear and sunny, but so cold the snow squeaked underfoot and the air outside hurt to breathe. Most everyone hightailed it for home as soon as the regular classes were finished, because everybody knew it would get colder the later it got, and there’d probably be a nasty wind. That was why there were only four of us in the after-school class that day—Alexei Sokolov, Kristen Olvar, William, and me. I should have gone straight home with Lan, because on extra-cold days Mama still worried about the rheumatic fever coming back, but I hated missing my extra class, no matter what the reason.

  Miss Ochiba had us put our chairs in a half circle, and we started in, sitting very still, trying to see everything and not think about anything, to hear Miss Ochiba’s instructions and follow them without really listening. We’d been working for ten or fifteen minutes when my head whipped around toward the window, without me intending it to. An instant later, I realized that everyone else had done the same thing at exactly the same moment.

  Something moved across the sky at the upper corner of the window. It looked like a small, dense cloud, but we all knew it wasn’t a cloud. The sun sparkled and flashed from the heart of the “cloud,” and it left a thin white tail behind it for the crosswind to rip to shreds.

  “Miss Ochiba,” Alexei said, “what is that?”

  “A steam dragon,” Miss Ochiba said calmly. “You cannot see it clearly because the cold air condenses the outer part of the steam around it.”

  “But—” said William.

  “Hush,” said Miss Ochiba. “Listen.”

  In the quiet, we heard the first alarm bell start, and then another, tolling one-two-three-pause, one-two-three-pause. I’d heard the bells a time or two before, but never in the rhythm of the wildlife alarm before.

  Kristen shivered, still staring out the window. “How did it get past the Great Barrier?” she whispered.

  “It flew over,” William said in a that’s-obvious tone. “Just like the ducks do. The barrier doesn’t go up much higher than the clock tower on the town hall. It—”

  My stomach dropped as the white sparkly cloud suddenly dove toward the ground. Miss Ochiba moved in front of the window, but not before the cloud was stripped away by the dragon’s speed and we all got a glimpse of its silver-snake body trailing steam all the way down. The nearest alarm bell lost its rhythm and went into an urgent jangle. I felt something hard and bitter cold run down my side, like the flat of a knife blade left out of doors in winter. I shook my head, and everything around me seemed to whirl around once and then drop into its usual place.

  Alexei licked his lips. “Miss Ochiba, what was that?” he asked, and from his tone we all knew that this time he didn’t mean the steam dragon.

  “That was your sense of the world, unfolding,” Miss Ochiba replied. “Excellent work, all of you.”

  “‘Sense of the world?’“ William said doubtfully. “Because we saw the steam dragon?”

  Miss Ochiba’s lips curved in the faintest of smiles. “No, Mr. Graham. Because all of you knew the small cloud you saw was really a steam dragon, because all of you knew that each of your friends was also aware that it was a steam dragon, and because all of you knew those things before the dragon came into sight.”

  I saw right off that Miss Ochiba was right. We’d all turned toward the window without thinking, before we could have seen anything outside. Kristen and William even had their backs partly toward the window, and they’d whipped right around with the rest of us.

  Kristen and Alexei were nodding, like they were thinking the same as me, but William had a stubborn frown on his face. Miss Ochiba’s smile grew a little more. “You will have plenty of opportunity to test your world sense,” she said to William. “Foundation work is not something you master in one or two tries. You four will move on to circle work, but only three days each week. The other two days, you will continue to do foundation work with the rest of our group. And,” she added with a significant look at Alexei, “you will progress much faster if you also practice on your own, even when you are not working on it here.”

  Everyone at school k
new that Alexei did as little extra work as ever he could. It was a nine days’ wonder when he joined Miss Ochiba’s after-school class, and I’d heard that some of the older boys had a bet on how long he’d keep coming. But now he only looked thoughtful. “If I practice, can I learn to feel a steam dragon coming from farther away?” he said.

  “Yes,” Miss Ochiba said. “I can safely promise that with additional practice, you will increase the distance at which you can sense steam dragons and other creatures. How great an increase will depend on a number of factors, including your native ability, so the skill may not be as useful in the end as you hope.”

  “Even a little…” Alexei said under his breath. Then he nodded, once, as if he was making an agreement with her. “I’ll do it.”

  “The bells have stopped,” Kristen said.

  We all looked at the window, except for Miss Ochiba, but there was nothing to see but sky. “They’ll ring the emergency-over in a moment,” Miss Ochiba said. “I think this will be enough for today, so you may leave as soon as they do.”

  William and Alexei immediately started for the coat hooks. William looked back over his shoulder at me. “Come on!” he said. “I’m not going to miss seeing a real steam dragon, just ‘cause you’re slow.”

  “Oh!” Kristen said, and shuddered. “You’re not actually going after that thing, are you?”

  “Why not?” Alexei demanded. “It can’t have come down very far away, and it’s not like it’ll still be alive. Not once they ring emergency-over.”

  “This may be our only chance to get a good look at a real steam dragon,” William added. “Eff, are you coming?”

  Truth to tell, I was a lot more of Kristen’s mind than William’s or Alexei’s. Just seeing the steam dragon from the window had given me the shivers. But William was the closest thing to a friend I’d ever had, and I didn’t want him looking at me the way he was looking at Kristen right then. “Hold your horses,” I said. “An extra minute or two won’t matter. That thing was big—they’re not going to cart it off in a hurry.”