Thirteenth Child Page 9

  “Eff!”

  “Go on without me, then,” I said, knowing perfectly well he wouldn’t. “I still want to ask Miss Ochiba some things.”

  Miss Ochiba stopped tidying her desk and looked at me expectantly. I swallowed hard. I hadn’t meant to say that straight out until I’d thought a little more. But now I was stuck, so I said, “When the steam dragon came down, I felt real peculiar for a minute. Why was that?”

  “Peculiar in exactly what way?” Miss Ochiba asked.

  I described the sinking in my stomach and the cold-knife sensation, while Alexei and William left off struggling with their coats and sidled close enough to hear.

  Miss Ochiba pursed her lips. “The sensations you felt are quite normal,” she said after a moment. “That is, they are part of your developing world sense. When you begin to know things in this way, your mind tries to fit the new knowledge into old, familiar patterns.”

  “Like smelling something funny?” William broke in. “Or hearing a strange noise?”

  “Exactly,” Miss Ochiba said. “But the world sense is very .. . individual. The exact sensations—and their meanings—are not the same for every practitioner, and it will be better if you all learn for yourselves how to interpret them. It will no doubt feel ‘peculiar’ at first, but it becomes more natural with time and practice.”

  “Time and practice, time and practice,” Alexei grumbled. “Isn’t there anything magical we can just do?”

  “Sure,” Kristen said. “You can mess up.”

  William snickered. Alexei turned angrily, but Kristen said, “Listen! The bells have changed.”

  That sent us all scrambling for our coats, and then out the door. The boys went straight toward the area where the steam dragon had fallen, and I trailed along behind. It wasn’t too hard to find. Practically everyone else on the street was heading the same way, especially as we got closer.

  A good-sized crowd had collected by the time we found the place, so we never actually got near the dragon. Still, even from the back we could see the bottom half of it draped over the feed store, like a silver fire hose twice as big around as I was. A big strip of snow had melted off the roof on either side, and I heard one of the men say it was a good thing the dragon had come in winter or the buildings would have caught fire.

  I didn’t stay long. It was too cold to stand around watching the backs of people’s coats, and I’d already seen more of the dragon than I’d wanted. I couldn’t get away from it, though, because even when I got home, it was all anyone could talk about. When the alarm started, Nan and Allie had been almost home, and Robbie and Jack had already arrived. Robbie was in a temper because Mama hadn’t let him go out to look after the alarm was over. I didn’t tell him I’d actually seen the dragon, even though it was just from a distance. I thought it would only make him cross.

  Keeping quiet didn’t help, though, because when Papa and Lan got home, Robbie found out that Papa and Professor Graham had been among the magicians who’d brought the steam dragon down. He started complaining right off, but what really made him pitch a fit was that Lan had been allowed to go along, on account of his double-seven training. Even though Lan hadn’t actually done anything but watch, Robbie was furious. He kept saying that he was two years older than Lan and it wasn’t fair, until Mama sent him to his room for the rest of the evening. He was grumpy for days afterward.

  In the end, everyone who wanted to get a good look at the steam dragon had all the chance they wanted, because it took the best part of a week to move its body from the place where it had fallen. Some of the men got it coiled up and mostly out of the street and off the roof before it froze too solid to move, but then the argument started.

  Mr. Stolz, who owned the feed store, said that the dragon belonged to him because it had landed mostly on his property. He wanted to sell the body to a circus. The Settlement Office wanted to have it stuffed and mounted and put on display for people who wanted to be settlers, to give them some idea what they’d be in for. The North Plains Territory governor wanted to send it to Washington. And the Northern Plains Riverbank College wanted it to study.

  In the end, the college won, since it was the college magicians who’d brought the dragon down before it did more than eat a horse and dent Mr. Stolz’s roof. Also, President Grey convinced everyone that letting the magicians study up on a brand-new, fresh steam dragon would be the best thing for all of them. The Settlement Office went along with it right away, because they thought the magicians might find better ways to deal with the dragons, or at least tell when they were coming in time to get livestock indoors. The hardest one to convince was Mr. Stolz. He’d really wanted that circus money to fix his roof with, but in the end, even he gave in.

  So they got four teams of horses and a special flatbed wagon and most of the students and professors and handymen, and moved the frozen steam dragon over to the wildlife experiments building. It was too big to fit inside, so for a while there were crowds of people outside staring at the dragon and the professors working on it. After a bit, though, folks got tired of watching the naturalists climbing around with their measuring sticks and slide rules, and things got quiet again.

  After the naturalists finished, the magicians started in. All the college students—and Lan—were in the thick of it. Over half of the magic students were planning to go for settlement magicians or do fieldwork on the wildlife when they graduated, so they were even more excited about having a brand-new steam dragon to study than the professors were.

  The college made regular announcements in the paper of what they’d found out, mostly to reassure people. The steam dragon had been a female, probably blown east by a freak storm. None of the settlements west of the barrier had reported attacks or other sightings, so we weren’t likely to be seeing flocks of them come spring. There was some unpleasantness when the weather warmed up and the dragon began to thaw out.

  “It’s because we didn’t expect it to go bad and smelly all at once like this,” Lan told Robbie and William and me. “We thought we’d have a couple of weeks when the inside would still be frozen, even though the outside was thawing out. But Papa says that it has enough magic, even dead, to warm up fast all over.”

  “Yuck,” Robbie said with considerable relish. “I bet it’ll stink up the whole college. Maybe even half the city. Hey, Eff, your bedroom is on that side of the house. Better not open your window ‘til you’ve had a good sniff of the wind!”

  “Don’t be dumb,” Lan told him. “Papa and Professor Graham already have teams of students doing preservation spells on different sections of the body.”

  “My father said they couldn’t have the whole neighborhood complaining about the smell,” William confirmed.

  “I wish they’d let me help more,” Lan said crossly. “They wouldn’t need such big teams if they let me do one of the preservation spells.”

  “Are you doing preservation spells already?” I said, impressed.

  “Well, no,” Lan admitted. “But I bet I could if Papa would let me. I sneaked a look at the next study book, and they don’t look that hard.”

  “You aren’t thinking of trying them on your own, are you?” I said.

  “Of course not,” Lan said loftily. “I know better than that.” He grinned. “Besides, Papa’d know in a minute that it was me. That’s the problem with being a double-seven—nobody else’s magic feels the same, so it’s too easy to get caught.”

  I didn’t find that particularly reassuring, but in the end, it wasn’t Lan who got in trouble over the steam dragon—it was Robbie. Late in the spring, when the snakes came out, he went down to the meadow and caught himself a dozen garter snakes. He dipped them in gray milk paint and then told the boys in his class they were baby steam dragons, hatched from eggs the dead steam dragon had laid before the magicians got it. He sold all but two of them for a quarter each before Mrs. Bertelstein came calling on Papa, all indignant because he’d dare let his own son spread such dangerous creatures all over town. She was e
ven more indignant when Papa called Robbie in and made him admit what they really were. Robbie had to pay back all the money, and explain and apologize to all the parents, and on top of that he had extra chores for weeks.

  Papa wasn’t so upset by the fake steam dragons as he made out—I heard him telling Dean Farley about it later, and laughing. Mama was upset, though. After Mrs. Bertelstein’s visit, Mama was the one who had to smooth down the neighbors and the other mothers, and while she was plenty good at smoothing, she didn’t much care for having to do it. A week after it all came out about the painted garter snakes, Mama gave Robbie a talking-to. None of the rest of us heard what she said—Mama never yelled, even when she was mad as fire—and Robbie wouldn’t talk about it to anyone afterward, but it must have been something to hear, because Robbie shaped up and didn’t so much as pull the girls’ pigtails in the school yard for nearly a month.

  CHAPTER 11

  ONCE MAMA’S TALKING-TO STARTED TO WEAR OFF, ROBBIE WAS pretty impressed with all the fuss his fake dragon babies had caused. Mrs. Bertelstein wasn’t the only one who’d believed the painted garter snakes were really baby dragons, so a lot of rumors got started. The college and the Settlement Office had to issue announcements, and Papa and the other professors had to spend a lot of time talking to the Mothers’ League and the police and the Firemen’s Association and a lot of other people. Most of the other boys admired Robbie’s cleverness, too, except for the ones who’d bought the painted snakes. And William.

  William was almost as cross with Robbie over the fake dragons as Mama had been. I thought at first that it was because of all the extra work his father had to do on account of the snakes. Professor Graham had to go around to almost as many reassuring meetings as Papa, so he wasn’t home much for a while. I knew that having his father gone so much bothered William, but when I tried apologizing to him for my brother’s behavior, he got cross with me instead.

  “You haven’t done anything wrong,” he said.

  “But he’s my brother.”

  “That doesn’t make you responsible for everything he does,” William shot back. “Why are you always apologizing for things that aren’t your fault?”

  I stared at him, speechless. William had been my friend for so long by then that I’d clean forgotten that I’d never told him about me being an unlucky thirteen.

  “Come to think of it, that big steam dragon last winter is the first thing I can think of that you didn’t find some reason to blame yourself for when something went wrong.” William gave me a long frown. “Have you got a curse or something?”

  “N-not exactly,” I said, and then the bell rang for class and we couldn’t talk any longer.

  I thought about that conversation for a couple of days. Mostly, I thought about how I’d never warned William I was a thirteenth child, and whether I ought to now. But it didn’t seem like something I needed to do right away, the way it had when I was stewing over whether to tell Miss Ochiba. Partly that was because I was afraid that William wouldn’t be my friend anymore if he knew I was an unlucky thirteen, and partly it was because I was beginning to think that maybe Uncle Earn had been wrong about what being a thirteenth child meant.

  Until William pointed it out, I hadn’t noticed that the steam dragon had come and gone without me ever worrying that it’d come on account of me being an unlucky thirteen. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the steam dragon might have been my fault somehow. Now that I came to think about it, it still didn’t seem to me that a steam dragon turning up like that could have been my fault. I was quite sure that Uncle Earn would have blamed me for it if he’d been around to see, but for once I was just as sure that he’d have been wrong. Just thinking that felt so peculiar that I almost forgot to worry over what to tell William.

  Luckily, William didn’t ask again about me being cursed. Even after thinking about it for a week, I wouldn’t have known what to say. And then it was the end of the school year, and time for the placing tests, and I forgot about it. I might have remembered again if the news about Dr. McNeil’s naturalizing expedition hadn’t come right at the end of school and thrown everyone into a tizzy.

  Nobody’d heard any word from the expedition since they’d passed the last settlement boundary back in September. All the people who had friends or relatives out with Dr. McNeil had been worried sick for months, and all the people who’d been against the expedition from the start were pulling long faces and reminding everyone how nobody’d ever come back from the Far West, and they’d said all along no good would come of such a thing. Then, the day after school let out, a report arrived at the Settlement Office from one of the circulating magicians, saying that the McNeil expedition had passed through a settlement to the southwest a few days before his own arrival, heading home.

  If he’d known what a fuss it would cause, I bet that circulating magician would have put more in his letter than just a couple of lines. The Settlement Office was practically mobbed by people wanting details. Finally, they printed up the whole report on broadsheets and passed them out to everybody, even though most of it was just about crops and planting acreage and weather. People still stood in line outside the office wanting to know more, but they were a lot more patient about it after that.

  The Settlement Office sent out a fast rider right away. When he got back a week later with more news, even the people who hadn’t been interested got excited. Not only had Dr. McNeil done all the mapping and nature study that he’d planned on, but he had also found the camp where the Lewis and Clark expedition spent the winter just before they vanished! Along with all his own samples, Dr. McNeil was bringing back some things the earlier expedition had left behind.

  The news that the expedition had lost two men out of fifteen barely dampened the enthusiasm. A lot of people thought that if Dr. McNeil could go nearly a hundred miles west from the last settlement and spend a winter with only two men lost, everybody else should be able to do it, too, and they were as excited over the idea of the Settlement Office opening up a lot of new territory for settlements as they were over the expedition coming back.

  Right away, the city began planning a big welcome-back ceremony and celebration for when the expedition arrived, even bigger than the send-off had been, with fireworks and a picnic and music and a parade and speeches. This time, everybody thought there was a good chance that at least some of the speeches would be interesting, because Dr. McNeil was going to be one of the speechifiers, and of course everyone expected him to talk about the expedition.

  “I don’t know what Harrison is thinking,” Professor Graham grumbled to Papa. “Asking a man to make speeches the day after he comes back from a long, dangerous journey is unreasonable, in my opinion.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” Papa told him. “Dr. McNeil knew what to expect when he left, and even if he didn’t, he’s surely had enough notice by this time. The Settlement Office has had message riders going out and back every day, it seems.”

  Papa and Professor Graham were in the middle of the planning right from the start, because the expedition was bringing back live specimens, including two swarming weasels, a baby mammoth, some rocketflowers, and a couple of other things that the Great Barrier Spell had been specifically designed to keep out. That meant that the college magicians had to open a hole in the barrier, long enough for the expedition to get everything across to our side of the Mammoth River. Papa had all of his students down to watch while they did it, and all the boys, too, from Jack right on down to Lan. Mama took some convincing.

  “It will do very well for your young men…” That was what Mama called Papa’s students from the college. “…and perhaps for Jack, but I’m not so sure about Robbie and Lan.”

  “It’s an excellent chance for them to watch the practical application of team spell casting,” Papa told her.

  “I’m of the opinion they’ll be far more interested in watching the baby mammoth,” Mama said. “And perhaps more than watching, if you take my meaning.”

>   In the end, she let all the boys go, with Nan along to keep an eye on them. Rennie sulked all afternoon because she thought she should have gone, being older, but Mama said the boys wouldn’t mind her as well as they would Nan. Then Mama kept all of us busy for the rest of the day. There was plenty to do—besides regular chores, we’d been asked to make up three dozen little cloth figures of mammoths and wagons and dire wolves and other such things, to use for table favors at the celebration.

  When Papa and the boys got back, Rennie insisted on hearing about the whole afternoon in detail, even though all the boys wanted to talk about was the baby mammoth and the magic. “It’s as tall as a man, even though it’s just a baby,” Robbie said. “They had to give it a whole barge just to itself, because it didn’t much like crossing the water. Or maybe it was the barrier spell; we couldn’t tell from away off where we were.”

  “I don’t see why Father wanted us there at all, if he wasn’t going to let us close enough to see anything,” Lan complained.

  “We were supposed to be watching the magic,” Jack said, as if he hadn’t been just as interested in the mammoth and the swarming weasels as ever Robbie and Lan were, before they left.

  “Well, we couldn’t see that, either, from way up on the bluffs where we were,” Robbie grumbled.

  “I could see it,” Lan said. “The spells, anyway. Well, not see it, exactly, but I could tell where they were and what they were supposed to do.”

  “Oh, that,” Robbie said. “Anybody could do that. I meant the casting.”

  “You shouldn’t need to see it,” Jack told him. “You can look up the words and ingredients and gestures anytime you want. It’s the actual magic part that’s important, and the way everybody’s pieces have to fit together just so.”

  “Did Dr. McNeil and his men help with the spells?” Rennie asked.

  “No, they were too busy with the mammoth,” Robbie said. “It didn’t want to get on the barge, and then it didn’t want to stay on. It almost went over the side twice.” He sighed. “I wish I’d gotten to see it up close.”