The Far West (Frontier Magic #3)

by Patricia C. Wrede

  Wash looked even scruffier than he usually did when he was coming back in from the settlements, with his beard grown raggedy and his hair at least three inches longer than normal. His buckskin jacket was covered in dust, and when he got close in and dismounted, I could see that his dark face looked tired. The nod he gave me was as polite as ever. “Miss Eff.”

  “Hello, Wash!” I said. “What brings you by? Was Professor Jeffries expecting you?”

  “If he was, I’m not aware of it,” Wash said. “Is he still out here? I thought you all would be back to Mill City by now.”

  “We’d planned to be,” I said, “but having the Cathayans come visit slowed everything down.”

  “Cathayans?” Wash asked.

  So I told him while I finished filling the mammoth’s feed bin, and then I took him into the storage building to show him the medusa lizards. He frowned when he saw the size of them — the largest was nearing waist-high by then — and asked, “How long are you all planning on keeping them?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Professor Jeffries thinks they’ll be safe for a while yet, and he wants to find out whether they hibernate, so probably a couple months more, at least. We’re moving them to a new pen tomorrow, out by the lake where they’ll be away from everything else.”

  Wash pursed his lips. “I’ll be speaking with the professor, then. Is he up at the main complex?”

  I nodded. “I wonder, sometimes, if that parent thing works both ways.” At Wash’s puzzled look, I explained, “He says that the medusa lizards think he’s their parent, because he was the first thing they saw after they hatched, and that’s why they haven’t attacked anybody. Professor Torgeson thinks it’s just because they’re still too young.”

  “Could be, but it’s not something I’d be inclined to rely on for long,” Wash said. “Well, that’s for the professor to explain. What all have you been doing, this last year? And how’s that brother of yours liking his work at the Settlement Office?”

  As we walked toward the main buildings, I answered Wash’s questions and asked a few of my own about folks I’d met out in the settlements. About halfway in, I mentioned the strange dreams I’d been having.

  “I know the pendant you gave me has something to do with them, but I haven’t figured out what yet,” I finished. I didn’t ask Wash to explain, because he never had before, and by this time I’d figured out that a lot of Aphrikan magic was about learning how you yourself did things, which wasn’t something other folks could help out with much. But I thought he ought to know what it was doing.

  “Dreams,” he said in a thoughtful tone. “That’s different. Same one every time?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s always at least a little different, and sometimes it changes a lot. I’ve been writing them down, but I still can’t make sense of them.”

  “Magic doesn’t make sense, if you think hard on it,” Wash said. “Not even Avrupan magic, much as it tries.”

  “It’s still more head than heart,” I said. “Avrupan magic, I mean.”

  Wash looked startled, then nodded. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “There’s always other ways,” I said, and grinned at him.

  “Maybe you should find one,” he said seriously.

  I thought about that for a minute. Then I reached for the cord around my neck. I’d worn the pendant constantly for over three years, though most of the time I hid it under my clothes to avoid folks asking questions about it. The polished wood gleamed in the sunlight as I held it out toward Wash. “Has it changed any since you had it?”

  For a moment, Wash stared at the pendant without any expression. I felt a brush of something, like a breeze against my hand, followed by an icy trickle down my back. Then he gave a slow smile that erased all the tired lines around his eyes. “It has indeed, Miss Eff.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to explain how?” I said after a minute.

  He reached out and brushed a finger across the pendant. I felt a tiny burst like Fourth of July fireworks, right at the back of my head. “Not quite yet,” he said. “But I’ll advise you to do some looking of your own.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from snorting. “That’s all you have to say?”

  “For now.” Wash grinned. “Getting irritated is part of the process.”

  “If getting irritated is that important, I should be done with it three times over by now,” I said as I put the pendant back on.

  “It’s only part of it, not the whole,” Wash said.

  I thought about that while I stabled Wash’s horse, and on my walk back out to the menagerie pens, and while I did the routine work of cleaning and feeding the animals. That night, I read through the journal where I’d written down all the dreams I’d had. I’d been over it before, trying and trying to find some rhyme or reason to the images, but I’d never managed.

  This time, I spread my world-sensing out around me and just read, letting the dreams play over in my head without worrying about what they meant. When I finished, I sat and let my mind drift. The dreams were important, I knew, but they didn’t feel like any kind of foretelling. The very first ones I’d had had been about the far past, when I was five and we still lived in Helvan Shores. And the next ones, where I’d been trying to cross the river and kept sinking in and drowning, certainly hadn’t ever come true.

  I sighed and pulled out the pendant itself. It sat in my hand, a dark whorl of wood a little smaller than a robin’s egg, polished smooth with much handling. I wondered idly what kind of tree it had come from; I didn’t recall ever having seen wood quite like it before.

  A picture formed behind my eyes, of a tree with leaves like silver lace and a twisting, curling trunk. It wasn’t much taller than an apple tree, but its roots spread wide and reached down toward the heart of the world. It felt strange and familiar, both at once, and I knew nothing like it had ever grown in Columbian soil.

  After a minute, the image faded, and I was left staring at the pendant. I didn’t move. I hardly dared to breathe. In the three years I’d worn the pendant, it hadn’t ever done anything like that before. I wondered briefly whether it would answer other questions, but I didn’t think so. I tried asking anyway, every way I could think of, but nothing else happened.

  Finally, I reached out with my magic and poked at the pendant, the way I’d poked at my Avrupan spells to make them work properly. I’d felt the layers of spells around it before, but I’d never been able to tease apart more than the topmost few. There was a bit of my magic wrapped around the outside, and then some that felt like Wash’s, and then several layers that were full of magic that felt like concealment and not-noticing, wound through with both Avrupan and Aphrikan magic. Past that, I’d never been able to tell much.

  On the second or third poke, the pendant started to look fuzzy, and after a minute I realized that it looked like the Cathayan magicians had, when they were spell casting. The fuzz around the pendant was almost the same color as the wood itself, and not as foggy. It looked more like wool yarn that someone had wrapped tight around the pendant in complicated layers.

  The layers seemed to have loosened up a bit in places, and if I held it right I could see straight through them all to the wood at the heart of the pendant. I wondered briefly whether Wash had done that when he touched it, or whether the loosening was something that just happened after the magic had a chance to get accustomed to a new wearer. I thought it probably just happened after a while; almost all the magic curled around the pendant felt like Aphrikan magic, and Aphrikan magic often works more slowly than Avrupan magic.

  I sat back suddenly, feeling as if I’d been very dense. I knew that pendant was Aphrikan magic, and I’d known that right from the minute Wash gave it to me. And yet I’d still been thinking about it as if it were Avrupan magic, something that I could take apart into neat piles that would tell me how it worked and what it did.

  Oh, there was Avrupan magic wound around the pendant. I’d felt it. But Avrupan spells compel thi
ngs to change and be the way the magician wants them to be; Aphrikan spells mostly nudge or coax things in the direction the magician wants — and the heart of the pendant was Aphrikan. Heart, more than head.

  I set the pendant down and read through my dreams again. I still couldn’t make sense of them, but I could feel that they’d been nudging me. I frowned and shook my head, knowing that wasn’t quite right. The pendant didn’t have a mind or personality or will. It was just a lot of magic, wrapped around the wood.

  And then I understood. The dreams were mine; all the pendant did was pull them out and make me pay attention to them. I’d been nudging myself, without knowing.

  That felt true, though I couldn’t say why. Now all I had to do was figure out what I’d been nudging myself to do or think. Some of the dreams were different, so it was probably something different every time. I sighed. I’d have to start writing down a lot more than just the dreams, I thought. I’d need to know what I was doing and thinking, and maybe what I thought I wanted to know at the time.

  Then I stopped, wondering if that was really such a good idea. It would be just the thing if I were working with Avrupan magic, but it might not be so helpful in understanding Aphrikan magic. I looked at the pendant and slipped the cord back over my head. I fingered it, and slowly I smiled. I wasn’t Aphrikan, and I wasn’t Avrupan, not really. I was Columbian, born and raised, for all my grandparents weren’t. I didn’t have to do things one way or the other. I could do either, or both, or mix them up until something worked.

  That night, I dreamed of standing on a high rock in the middle of the ocean. The water changed constantly. One minute, the waves dashed furiously against the stone, showering me with spray; the next, the water was calm and smoother than the real ocean ever could be; the minute after that, it swirled and eddied around the base of the rock.

  I tried to catch the spray, but there wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I looked down into the shifting water, took a deep breath, and dove.

  The water rose to meet me. As it closed over my head, I laughed and woke up.

  A few days after Wash’s visit, Professor Torgeson and I headed back to Mill City to get ready for fall classes. Professor Jeffries was staying at the study center until the very last minute, on account of the medusa lizards. He and Professor Torgeson planned to alternate weekends at the center through the fall, to check on the animals and see how Mr. Siwinski was getting on with all the observations.

  Lan and Papa came to meet the ferry and bring me home. When I walked in the door, Allie hugged me, read me a lecture on how awful and unladylike it was for me to be running around in the settlements, and burst into tears. Robbie rolled his eyes and told her she wasn’t Mama, and anyway I was old enough to decide things like that for myself, which got Allie started on scolding him instead of me.

  In between all the talk, I got caught up on the family news. Robbie had finished his degree and found a job at Mr. Imhada’s pharmacy while he thought about what he wanted to do next. Nan was in a family way again, and Robbie teased her about it constantly, which got both Nan and Rennie mad at him. Brant and Rennie were still staying in the big house with Papa and Mama and the rest of us, though it was nearly a year since they’d come back from Oak River. Brant was saving up from his job at the shipping company. He said it was for a house, but I noticed that neither he nor Rennie said much about where the house would be. I figured they wanted to go back out to the settlements and were avoiding arguments.

  Mama had made a special welcome-home dinner, with roast chicken, chestnut-and-black-rice dressing, greens with hexberry sauce, candied beets, and bread pudding. She’d made sure the whole family would be there for it, too, at least everyone who was still in Mill City. In addition to Nan and her husband George, Mama had invited Professor Graham and Roger Boden to come for dinner, so it was almost as many folks around the table as we used to have when all of my brothers and sisters were home.

  I was surprised to see Roger at first, but Mama said that he’d taken a job at the Settlement Office, and he and Lan had gotten friendly. I wasn’t surprised. Lan might have decided he was done with schooling for good, but he’d always liked talking magic theory and finding out about strange and exotic new spells, and you couldn’t get much stranger than the things Roger had specialized in.

  Being the center of attention made me a little uncomfortable, but it wasn’t long before one of the childings distracted Rennie. Then Papa, Lan, Roger, and Professor Graham got to talking about the latest experiments in the magic laboratory, and pretty soon there were a lot of little conversations all around the table and I could relax and not be noticed.

  Or at least not until there was a lull in the conversation and Lan took a notion to quiz me about the Hijero-Cathayans. I couldn’t help rolling my eyes, but I described the adept’s spell casting in as much detail as I could remember. He frowned when I told him about the way the adept’s aides moved the whole time.

  “Dancing?” he asked.

  “Well, not exactly dancing,” I said. “But not like the hand passes for third-declension spells, either. Slower and smoother, and moving their whole selves, not just their hands.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that.” He sounded like he didn’t quite believe what I was telling him.

  “It’s what they did!”

  Roger leaned forward. “It’s not that unreasonable. There are a couple of Scandian spells that work with whole-body movement.”

  “Those aren’t coordinated magic,” Professor Graham said. “You can’t get the precision necessary for a group working by depending on physical movement alone.”

  “Besides, nobody could cast a spell the way you describe,” Lan said in an infuriatingly superior tone. “It’s too slow. The magic would leak away before you could do anything with it.”

  “The aides weren’t casting the spell,” I pointed out, holding on to my temper with both hands. “Master Adept Farawase was doing that.”

  Professor Graham frowned. “They had to be doing some spell to pool their magic. That’s how Hijero-Cathayan spells work.”

  “I didn’t see anything. They just … danced, all together. Except for the master adept herself.”

  “I’ll have to be sure to ask Professor Jeffries for his write-up,” Papa said thoughtfully. “It’s a pity the adept was not willing to allow other observers. There are so few opportunities to see genuine Hijero-Cathayan spellwork in this country.”

  Professor Graham snorted. “Few? None, I’d say. To see genuine Hijero-Cathayan spellwork, you need a genuine Hijero-Cathayan team, and Farawase’s was the first to come to Columbia that I’ve ever heard of.”

  “We may not have seen actual spell casting, but we know the theory behind Hijero-Cathayan spellwork,” Lan said. “I spent most of that last year at Simon Magus studying it. And I never heard about anything like this dance of yours, Eff.”

  “One actual observation is better than a hundred theories,” Roger said, like he was quoting someone. “Maybe the Hijero-Cathayans haven’t told us as much about their magic as we think they have.”

  “Or maybe your professors didn’t know as much as they might,” I said before I thought. I froze for just a second. Then, before all the implications of what I’d said could really sink in, I went on quickly, “Why are you so interested, anyway?”

  “Because of the expedition,” Roger said instantly.

  “Expedition?” I said, puzzled.

  “Master Adept Farawase’s expedition,” Lan said. “Didn’t you hear? Nobody at the Settlement Office has talked about anything else for the past week.”

  I frowned at him. “I’ve been out at the study center ever since the Cathayans left, and we didn’t exactly get a lot of mail. Is she taking her aides out to the Far West?”

  “Sending them, more likely,” Roger said. “At least one.”

  “She’s talked President Trent into sending out an exploratory expedition,” said Lan. “The Cathayans are going to cosponsor it. She’s been push
ing the idea ever since she got back to Washington from Mill City and caught out the Secretary of State and the head of the Frontier Management Department in an argument about whether it would be worse for the country to have another failed expedition, or another surprise like the medusa lizards. At least, that’s what Mr. Parsons said.”

  “It doesn’t sound like an opinion he’d get from official correspondence,” Professor Graham put in dryly. “Nor has there been any announcement of such an expedition. It’s all just rumor and speculation, if you ask me.”

  “Interesting speculation, though,” Papa said. “And it’s high time the government got over losing those other groups and sent someone to do a proper job of mapping the territory, at least. The McNeil Expedition came back without a man lost, and it’s been nearly ten years since then with no progress. I’d have thought we’d see two or three others go out in that amount of time.”

  “If it’s a government expedition, they can’t have a Hijero-Cathayan in it,” Allie said, as if that settled everything.

  “They can if the Cathayan Confederacy is sponsoring it,” Lan retorted. “Weren’t you listening?”

  “Rumors,” Professor Graham said with a snort.

  Mama gave Papa a sidelong look. “It’s been a while since you wrote your brother Gregory, hasn’t it?”

  Professor Graham and Roger and Brant all looked a little startled by what seemed a total change in topic, but everyone in my family smiled a little. Uncle Gregory lived in Washington and worked at the Bureau of Magic and Technology, and Papa always said that he was a worse gossip than my Aunt Janna. He liked to write long letters full of tidbits about all the important people he’d met and what they were doing. If anyone could find out what was going on and tell us, it would be Uncle Gregory.

  Papa did write, and Uncle Gregory was happy to write back everything he knew. From what he said, Lan’s rumors weren’t far off. When Master Adept Farawase got back to Washington, she’d said nice things about our study center, but she hadn’t been too pleased with the lack of information about the Far West in general. She’d made it clear that she expected someone to fix that, and fix it now. Within days, the plans for a Western expedition had gone from something that might happen in another five or ten years if everything went well and enough folks agreed, to being a settled thing that would leave next spring. It helped that the Cathayans had offered to provide money as well as the master adept’s personal backing.