Being so close to the wild country made people here a lot less interested in making up dangers and a lot more interested in plain, practical magic. From Mill City on west, nobody would care if I had two heads and bat wings, if I could work the spells that kept the wildlife from overrunning the Settlements. Of course, right that minute I still couldn’t work the wildlife protection spells, on account of the trouble I’d made for myself over learning magic, so even in Mill City there was no reason for folks to overlook my bad points. But back East … well, Lan had been going to boarding school there for the past four years, and I believed him when he said that not everyone was like Uncle Earn. But even a few people like my uncle would make more unpleasantness than I wanted to face.
I finished the row and began carting the dead weeds over to the compost pile. Lan was right about a lot of things, I could see that. I might not be able to go to one of the big important schools, like Simon Magus College or the New Bristol Institute of Magic, but between all the attention I’d been getting and being the twin sister of a double-seventh son, some Eastern school would surely take me in. It was an opportunity that wouldn’t likely come around again, and it didn’t seem right to pass it up only on account of a worry that folks might be unpleasant.
I thought about that, off and on, for the next couple of days, and about Lan. Even though we were twins, he’d always been the one to look out for me. We’d been growing apart, though, ever since I had rheumatic fever and got behind a year at school. And for the past four years, he’d hardly even been home summers. I could see that he wanted what was best for me, but I wasn’t sure that he knew what that was. Especially since I wasn’t sure myself.
I was still thinking when William came around to say good-bye. He still had a year of preparatory school before he went to college, and he was going back early to meet up with a possible sponsor.
“What’s this I hear about you coming East to school next year?” he asked.
I scowled. “That Lan! I told him not to talk to anyone about it until I was done thinking.”
“You’ll never be done thinking,” William said. “And he didn’t actually say much. So what is it about?”
I glared at him, but I knew there’d be no point to not answering. William didn’t look like he’d be difficult about anything — he was thin and sandy-haired and already wore eyeglasses like his father. Most of the time he didn’t say much. But when he was curious about something, he was stubborner than a bear after a honeycomb. He’d pay no heed to glares or hints or scowls or much of anything else until you told him what he wanted to know. Sometimes he’d listen if you told him straight out that you didn’t want to talk about it, or that you didn’t want to tell him, but I knew as sure as anything that this wasn’t one of those times. So I said, “Lan thinks I should go off to college when I’m done with upper school.”
“So it was his idea.” William didn’t sound surprised. “What do you think?”
“I —” I looked down at my boots. “I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t!” I said. Then I sighed. I had no call to go snapping at William just because I didn’t know what to make of Lan’s notions. “It’s a completely new idea. I never once thought about me getting schooling past upper school.”
“Why not?” William asked. His eyes had narrowed and I could see he was getting ready to be cross about something.
“I just didn’t,” I said. “I’m not like Diane or Sharl.” Diane and Sharl were two of my big sisters who hadn’t come West with us. Diane had been saving up for music school when we left; Sharl had finished college and been married.
William looked suddenly thoughtful. “And your sisters who came here — Allie and Nan both went to work as soon as they finished with upper school. Rennie —” His voice cut off abruptly and he gave me an apologetic look.
My sister Rennie had run off and married a settler, a member of the Society of Progressive Rationalists who thought using magic was a weakness. Mama and Papa had been crushed and disappointed, and it tore up the rest of the family pretty bad, too, at the time. But we’d had five years to get over it, and we all pretty much had, even Mama.
“Yes,” I said, so William would know it was all right and that I knew he hadn’t meant anything by bringing it up. “And Julie got married practically right out of upper school back in Helvan Shores, too. She just didn’t run off to do it.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to do the same.”
“I wasn’t planning to!” I looked at my boot tips again. “I wasn’t planning much of anything, I guess.”
“And neither was anyone else,” William said. “Don’t look at me like that. It’d take a blind prairie skunk all of ten minutes to see that the plans in your family have always been about Lan.”
“William!”
“It’s true,” he said in that tone he had that meant there was no arguing with him. “I think Lan feels guilty about it, too. Which is probably why he came up with this idea about you going East for school.”
“It’s not just that,” I said, because I knew William was right about my twin feeling guilty. “Lan has a whole pile of good reasons.”
“Like what?”
I started rattling them off. “It would be a chance for a kind of learning I’ve never had before. The best teachers —”
William cut me off. “Those are Lan’s reasons,” he said. “There are other ways to look at the matter. What do you want to do?”
I just stared at him for a long minute. That was what Miss Ochiba, who used to teach us magic at the day school, had said over and over — there are always other ways to look at things. I thought I’d learned that lesson through and through, but it hadn’t occurred to me to try looking at this proposal of Lan’s from any other direction until right that minute.
“Other ways,” I said slowly. Lan saw going East for school as a great chance to learn spells and theory from the best Avrupan teachers in the country. Papa would see it the same way, especially if I found a sponsor so it wouldn’t cost the family so much, and he’d be especially pleased to have another child go for schooling past upper school. Mama would see it as a chance for me to get some Eastern polish on my manners, and a good way of keeping me far, far away from the settlement territory on the west bank of the Mammoth River.
And I … I didn’t know yet how I saw it, but I knew for certain fact that I wasn’t going to find out by arguing Lan’s reasons over and over in my head. I had some more thinking to do, of a different kind. I looked at William and nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Graham,” I said. “I needed reminding.”
William looked at me for a minute, then just nodded back. One of the good things about William was that he always knew when to stop pushing on a point. “You’re welcome, Miss Rothmer,” he said. “Anytime.”
We spent the rest of William’s visit talking about his plans for the next year. I told him I’d write if he would, which I figured meant maybe three times all year. William wasn’t much for letter writing.
After he left, I did some more thinking, only this time I wasn’t just chasing my tail trying to counter all Lan’s reasons why I should do what he wanted. The first thing I thought was that it was what Lan wanted, not what I wanted. Lan had always loved school, magic lessons especially, and he just kind of assumed that once I got over my problem with spell casting, I’d feel the same.