The Far West (2 page)

I couldn’t help feeling cheated, though. If I’d known that the Frontier Management Department was going to make us wait until November to work on the medusa lizard, I could have spent the last couple of months out in the settlements with Lan and Wash. I was very grumpy for the rest of October.

Three weeks after the man from the Frontier Management Department left, right before Halloween, we had an early snowstorm. It was only about half an inch, and it melted off before the next morning, but it put Mama and Allie in a considerable taking, because Lan still hadn’t come back from the settlements. Nothing anyone said made any difference; they were both convinced that Lan would be stuck out West for the whole winter. Papa and Robbie and I couldn’t make a dent in their notions.

“Even Mr. Parsons doesn’t know for sure where Lan is,” Allie announced. “I saw him after church yesterday, and I asked.”

“Allie, I thought you knew better than that,” Papa said. “Mr. Parsons isn’t likely to have the whereabouts of a settlement rider at his fingertips, especially this late in the season.”

“Well, he should!” Mama said in a cross tone that meant she knew Papa was right but she didn’t like it one bit. “Anything could happen out there.” Robbie made a face behind her back that nobody saw but me.

Before Papa could reply, there was a knock at the door. Papa frowned; no one in Mill City came calling during the
dinner hour. “I’d better see who it is,” he said. A minute later, we heard muffled voices in the front hall, but Papa didn’t come back. Just when Mama was about to send me or Allie to find out what was going on, the door of the dining room opened.

“I’m home!” Lan announced.

Allie burst into tears of relief. Mama gasped, then stood up to give him a hug. “My stars, Lan, you gave me a turn! Why didn’t you let us know when you were going to be back? We were expecting you a week ago!”

“Allie had just about convinced herself that you’d been eaten by saber cats,” Robbie put in.

Lan winked at me over Mama’s shoulder, then let go of her and turned to Robbie. “Things happened, and by the time I knew for sure when I’d get here, there wasn’t a mailbag heading east that would have beat me home.”

I was looking from Lan to the doorway. Papa hadn’t come back yet, and Lan had an expression on his face that he only ever got when he was planning to surprise someone. “Lan?” I said. “What sort of things happened?”

“Oh, this and that. No saber cats, though,” Lan said, and grinned. Now I was positive he was up to something. He stepped to one side and said in a too-casual tone, “I brought you a surprise, Mama.”

“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.

“That’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.