There’d been a bunch of other spells like that last summer, little things that Rennie’d done to make life easier and more comfortable, things the Rationalists wouldn’t notice. I slipped into the Aphrikan world-sensing, and saw that they were all gone, too. I glanced over at Rennie, but her back was still turned on the rest of us.
“I apologize for the cool welcome, Mr. Morris,” Brant said. “Things have gotten a mite tense since you passed through last fall.”
I tried to remember back to October, when Wash brought the golden firefoxes to the menagerie, but if he’d said anything about stopping by the Rationalist settlement, he hadn’t said it in my hearing.
“Just what is going on here, Mr. Wilson?” Professor Torgeson asked.
Rennie snorted but didn’t turn around. Brant raked his hand through his hair. “Like I said, things have been a mite tense. A few of the folks here —”
“A few!” Rennie whirled, still holding the wooden spoon she’d been stirring with. Thick brown drippings ran down the handle and dropped onto the floor, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Half the settlement, more than like!”
“Not that many,” Brant said with a sigh. I got the feeling from the way he stood that this was an old argument between them. Still, I wished the floor would open up and swallow us. Watching Rennie scold was bad enough; watching her scold while Wash and Professor Torgeson looked on was awful, even if it wasn’t me she was scolding at.
“Too many!” Rennie retorted. “And you’re just letting it happen. Even when they take it out on your children!”
“Rennie, I’ve talked till I’m blue in the face,” Brant said. “What more do you want? I can’t force people to behave —”
“Rationally?” Rennie snapped. She pointed the spoon at Brant. “Next to Toller Lewis, you’ve more influence than anyone else in this settlement. Use it!”
“If I tried what you’re suggesting, it’d split the settlement!” Brant snapped back. “Is that what you want?”
“I want my children to be safe,” Rennie said. “And I want them to have choices, and a proper education. And if that means burning your precious settlement to the ground, I —”
Wash cleared his throat very loudly. Rennie broke off and looked at us like she’d only just remembered we were all standing there, then flushed beet red and turned back to her cookpot to hide her face. Brant rubbed the back of his neck, trying and not succeeding very well to look like he wasn’t embarrassed.
“Perhaps we should step outside for a few minutes?” Professor Torgeson suggested.
“No!” Brant and Rennie said together.
“Why not?” I asked bluntly. I could see Professor Torgeson was going to keep trying to be polite, in a no-nonsense sort of way, but politeness never worked once Rennie’d gotten up on her high horse.
“Anti-magic sentiment has been growing all winter,” Brant said heavily after a moment. “I wouldn’t put it past some to try to … provoke you into using magic in violation of the settlement rules.”
“It’s bad enough they know you’re here,” Rennie put in. “It’d be worse to have you loitering outside our door, making it clear that this is where you’re staying.”
“If you’d rather we spent the night somewhere else —” Professor Torgeson began.
“There isn’t anywhere else!” Rennie said. “And no matter what they say, Eff’s family. I’ve given up a lot, but I’m not giving up that.”
I looked at her in surprise as Brant said soothingly, “No one’s asking you to.”
“You mean, you aren’t asking me to,” Rennie said, but she didn’t sound quite as snappish as she had before. “The rest of the settlement’s another matter.”
Everyone looked at her a little warily, and Rennie sighed. “Oh, sit down, the lot of you. It’s too late now; the damage is done.”
We looked at each other, then took seats at the little table. Brant glanced once at Rennie’s stiff back, then leaned up against the wall with another quiet sigh.
“What happened?” I said when it was clear nobody else was going to ask, or even speak.
Brant didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “It started last summer, after your visit. After everyone realized that the whole reason our fields weren’t infested with grubs was that the grubs and beetles were drawn away by the magic that all the other settlements practice.”
“Like going after bait in a trap,” I said, nodding. “Except it wasn’t on purpose.”
“Yes, well, some of our people feel that we’ve benefited from magic as a result, even if we didn’t do it deliberately,” Brant said.
“And they object to that?” Professor Torgeson said. “That’s ridiculous! Every adult in this settlement has benefited from magic all their lives long, right up until they crossed the Mammoth River on their way here. Don’t they realize that?”
“Some do,” Brant replied, “but they still don’t like it. We believe that magic is a crutch and people would be stronger and better off if they didn’t depend on it. The whole point of this settlement was to show that we don’t need magic, not the way people east of the Mammoth do.”
“Was it? Even so, you don’t sound as if you’re sure it’s such a good idea any longer,” Wash commented mildly.
“I —” Brant glanced at Rennie, then looked down. “I don’t know. But it’s one thing to refuse to use spells ourselves, and it’s another thing entirely to talk of deliberately bringing in a lot of grubs in order to destroy the natural magic in our settlement lands forever.”
“What!” the professor, Rennie, and I all burst out at once. Wash just stroked his chin and looked thoughtful.
“I thought you must have heard,” Brant said to Rennie. “Charlie came up with the idea last month. I didn’t think anyone would take it seriously, but …”
“But some of them are,” Rennie finished. “I told —” She snapped her mouth shut on the last of the sentence. I was impressed. Marriage must have been good for Rennie, if she’d learned to stop before she finished saying “I told you so.”
“That,” Professor Torgeson said after a minute, “has to be one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard, even apart from the fact that it won’t work.”
“Why?” I asked. “I mean, I can see all sorts of reasons why it’s a bad idea, but why won’t it work?”
“Because you can’t permanently destroy ambient magic,” Professor Torgeson said. “Helmholz proved that ten years ago. You can drain an area of magic temporarily, but it always returns to normal within a few years.”
“The land does,” Wash said. “Draining animals or people … that’s different.”
“Different how?” I asked.
“Animals and people regenerate their magic a lot faster than land. Providing there’s anything left to regenerate — drain a living creature too far, and it dies. Hard to recover from that.”
“But the mirror bugs didn’t drain animals or people,” Brant said.
“Not directly,” Professor Torgeson said. “Not as far as we know at present.”
“Not directly?”
“We actually know very little about the life cycle and abilities of the mirror bugs,” Professor Torgeson said. “However, we have considerable evidence that both grubs and beetles could absorb magic from cast spells, and certainly from each other. That is how the trap spell kills them, after all — by using their own ability to drain magic against them. It is not inconceivable that a sufficient number of mirror bugs could drain animals or even people. It’s not an experiment I would ever wish to perform.”