Wash had been over unloading the wagon, but I saw his head whip around when he heard someone say that, and a minute later he was over where we stood, frowning.
“What was that you just said?”
The settler gave Wash a puzzled look. “I said it was a good thing we chased the herd off before they got to the fields. We can’t afford to lose any of the crops this year.”
“Mmmm.” I knew that noise; it was the sound Wash always made when he had a powerfully strong opinion on something, but wasn’t going to say it until he was sure he had all the facts. “Where’s your Mr. Farrel?”
Sebastian Farrel was the settlement magician for Greenleaf. The settler looked puzzled for a minute, then cupped his hands to make a speaking trumpet and yelled, “Hey, Sebastian! Wash wants a word.”
A medium-sized man with thinning blond hair broke away from a clump of people standing near the settlement gate and trudged over to us. He tried to thank Wash again, but Wash cut him off before he could rightly get started.
“How far out do you have your protection spells set?” Wash asked.
Mr. Farrel straightened up a little. “Inner layer goes to the settlement wall; the outer layer runs to the stone markers at the edge of the fields. Why?”
“And have you had trouble with the wildlife getting into your crops? Apart from the grubs the last few years, I mean.”
“Not what you’d call trouble out here,” the settlement magician said. “The spells aren’t a hundred percent effective, but —”
“What have you had that you don’t call trouble, then?”
“Some of the natural wildlife has crossed the outer layer of spells a time or two,” Mr. Farrel said. “Mainly the larger animals, like the bison, which is why everyone was glad to see them run off. A lone deer or prairie wolf doesn’t do much damage before we chase them away, but a whole herd …”
“I think you’d best show me your spells close up,” Wash said. The two of them went off for half an hour, and when they came back, Wash pretty near had steam coming out his ears. He told the settlers straight out that some of them had been taking shortcuts when it was their turn to help with the spells, and he told Mr. Farrel that it was part of his job as settlement magician to make sure that his helpers did the job right.
Then he told everyone that they needed to take a lot more care about casting spells that might conflict with the settlement protection spells, especially when they were outside the walls, working. He pointed out that they’d been lucky to have just a deer or two get past the outer layer of spells, and not a saber cat or a terror bird. He was perfectly polite about it, but by the time he finished you could just see that half the people there wanted the ground to open up and swallow them right down.
In the end, Wash and Professor Torgeson spent the rest of the evening and most of the next day working with the settlement magician and the settlers, drilling them all on what to do and what not to do. They even had me go over the basic spells, the way they taught them in upper school. I felt awkward and unhappy — it didn’t seem right that I would be tutoring a bunch of folks when I’d only just finished my schooling a couple of months back, especially since magic was just about my worst subject. At least Wash didn’t try to have me demonstrate anything.
A few of the settlers got grumpy about all the lessons, but Wash just shrugged and said a lot of greenhorn settlers started off thinking they didn’t need to be as careful as the Settlement Office and the experienced settlers said, and they were welcome to get themselves killed as long as they didn’t take the rest of the settlement with them. That shut up the complainers, and the rest of the settlers were mostly grateful that they hadn’t lost their crops or had the protection spells fail at an even worse time.
We stayed at Greenleaf for an extra two days to do a really thorough survey of the plants and wildlife around the settlement (and to make sure the settlers were doing the spells right) and then rode on. We’d gone nearly a hundred and fifty miles west of Mill City when it finally came time to turn north. We stopped that night in an abandoned settlement, one of the seventeen that had failed because of the grubs. The settlers had given up and gone back right before winter set in, when they realized they didn’t have enough food to last them, and the settlement was an empty, spooky place.
Wash made the professor and me stay outside the palisade with all the travel protection spells still going strong, while he went in to make sure no dangerous wildlife had taken up residence. A few gray squirrels or daybats wouldn’t have been a problem, but a colony of swarming weasels or a black bear could have been trouble.
We were lucky; nothing nasty had moved in, so we put our horses in the stable and made camp. We could have stayed in one of the empty buildings, but nobody suggested it. It was creepy enough camping by the palisade wall with the dim, silent shapes looming behind us.
“I thought the Settlement Office reassigned empty settlements right away,” Professor Torgeson said after a while.
“They do, usually,” Wash replied. “It keeps the wildlife from homing in. Just now, though, the Settlement Office isn’t assigning anyone new to allotments, whether they’re brand-new places or ones that someone tried previously.”
Professor Torgeson frowned. “That’s shortsighted, I think. By next year, something could have moved into these buildings that’ll be next to impossible to root out.”
Wash shrugged. “When they finally decide on a new lot of folks, I’ll come out with the settlement magicians to make sure everything is in order before the first batch of settlers arrives.”
“Wash!” I said, slightly shocked by his casual acceptance of such a risk.
“What? I’ve done it before, more than once. It’s part of a circuit magician’s job.” He leaned back against the palisade wall and smiled at the campfire. “The hard part is making sure all the buildings are fit for living in. Chasing the squirrels and raccoons and daybats out isn’t hard, but if quickrot or termites have gotten into the roof beams or walls, the houses can come down without warning.”
Professor Torgeson’s eyes narrowed. “Has anyone ever done a test to see what conditions promote that sort of rapid deterioration?”
“Not that I know of, Professor,” Wash said. “Sounds as if it’d be a right useful thing to do, though.”
The professor was looking out into the dark shadows with a speculative expression I’d learned to recognize. I made a bet with myself that we’d be spending an extra day or two here, too, so as to check what wildlife might have sprung up inside the settlement palisade and how it was different from what was outside.
That night I had the second dream.
I dreamed of walking down the hall of the house in Mill City where Lan and I had grown up. I climbed out onto the roof of the porch and jumped off, but instead of falling, I flew. First I skimmed over the rooftops of Mill City, watching shifting lights and colors flicker past beneath me; then I rose until I could see the whole patchwork of magic below me. The railroad tracks shone like the obsidian in the science laboratory at the college, slashing through the middle of the rainbow sheen that covered the rest of the city. To the west, I could see the wide silver ribbon of the Mammoth River curling around the city.
I felt the wind whispering through my fingers and tangling my hair. I circled up and away from the glitter of the Great Barrier Spell, hanging like a curtain above and along the indent of the Mammoth River as far as I could see. I climbed higher, until I was well above it, and flew west over the settlements that surrounded a patch of lakes and swampland, then farther west over a shining lacework of creeks and rivers that cut through the dark, icy land.