The trouble was, the settlements couldn’t spare a magician to stand around holding the anti-mirror-bug spell for as long as it took to kill them all, or risk a magician running their magic to exhaustion keeping the spell going, so Papa and the others had come up with a way to use a little of the mirror bug magic to power the spell. Once all the grubs and beetles were gone, the trap spell used the last of its magic to kill the leftover mirror bugs and shut down. It worked a treat; almost all the grubs were gone by the end of summer, and the few that had turned up this spring had been killed off before they could do any more damage, or spread.
I had no idea why Professor Torgeson wanted to see the mirror bug trap. Usually, we did our plant surveying at stops along the ride, or just outside the settlement fields well away from the traps. After all, the whole idea was to find out what plants and animals normally lived between settlements, not what the settlers grew.
Novokoros had two mirror bug traps on opposite sides of the settlement, so as to be sure of drawing all the mirror bugs out of the cleared lands. The settlement magician had told Wash that he’d cast the spell again early in the spring, in case the bugs had laid eggs in the fields before they died the previous summer.
We spotted the trap well before we reached it. It looked like a little windmill with a bag underneath it, fastened to a pole at about eye level. The ground underneath it was bursting with plants. Professor Torgeson made a happy noise when she saw them.
“What is it, Professor?” I asked.
“Later. I want to get this finished by sunset,” she replied. “Mr. Morris, would you measure out and mark circles around the pole? One-foot intervals should do. Eff, record the distance from the mirror bug trap along with the usual information. You work from that side; I’ll work from this one.”
I nodded and got to work. I noticed right off that I was finding a lot of plants I hadn’t seen since we got into the area that the grubs had devastated — cloudflower and lady’s lace, fire nettle and goldengrass, greater goosegrass and witchvine. It didn’t take me much longer to figure out that all of them were magical plants, or that the farther I got from the mirror bug trap, the shorter the plants were and the more natural plants were mixed in.
Five feet from the pole, the number of magical plants fell off sharply and more and more of them looked stunted or malformed. Ten feet away, all I could find were the natural plants of the prairie: bluestem and switchgrass, yarrow and catchfly, milkweed and clover.
We worked until the light started to go, then rode back to the settlement. On the way, I told the professor what I’d noticed. She looked real pleased.
“Just what I was hoping to find,” she said. “We’ll have to check the settlement perimeter tomorrow, and the other mirror bug trap. And from now on, we’ll have to check the traps at every settlement, but I’ve no doubt they’ll confirm it.”
“Confirm what?” I said. “That magical plants only grow around mirror bug traps now?”
“That is a symptom,” the professor said, nodding. “The grubs and beetles absorbed magic in order to become mirror bugs. When they were killed in great numbers near the trap, they released that magic. So the areas where the grubs grew were temporarily depleted of magic, and few magical plants can grow there, while the area close to the traps has an unnaturally high concentration of magic and therefore a much greater than normal number of magical plants.”
Wash pursed his lips, considering. “Interesting idea,” he said after a moment. “It’d explain a few things, that’s sure.”
“It fits our observations so far,” the professor said cautiously. “And I suspect that the reduction in the available magic is the reason for the malformed bluehornets we found at the last settlement.”
“We haven’t seen any of the magical animals, either,” I put in. “Well, except for the sphinxes.”
“Which were part of a mixed pride,” Wash said, looking thoughtful. “With the bison and the deer moving back in, I’d expected to see wallers and silverhooves as well, and maybe some of the critters that hunt them.”
“But we haven’t.”
“Predators will take longer to return than plant eaters,” the professor said. “A reduction in the available magic in the soil shouldn’t affect the silverhooves or other magical herbivores —”
“Unless they need to eat magical plants,” Wash pointed out. “Even if all they need are a few every now and then, they won’t come very far back until the plants do.”
“It’s still only a theory,” Professor Torgeson reminded us. “It’s a pity we haven’t more people available to study the statistical distribution of plant species. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“But next year —” I stopped, remembering what she’d told Brant back in Oak River. “Oh! You mean that by next year, the magic will start coming back.”
Professor Torgeson nodded. “And so will the plants. It will take a few years for the balance to get completely back to normal, I expect. We really don’t have any data to compare this to. And the distribution of the mirror bug traps — and the magic that’s been collected around them — could make a big difference.”
We’d nearly reached the settlement gates. I frowned. “Wash,” I said slowly, “do you think anyone here grows calsters or hexberries in their kitchen gardens? They’re both magical plants, and if the mirror bugs pulled all the magic out of the ground …”
“They shouldn’t grow much better than the native magical plants are currently growing,” Professor Torgeson finished. “Which is to say, hardly at all.”
“I’ll ask,” Wash said. As we rode into the settlement and dismounted, he went on, “Professor, I know you’d like more proof of this idea, but I’m thinking we should let the Settlement Office know as soon as may be. Oats and barley aren’t magical crops, but meadow rice and Scandian wheat are, and I’ve heard talk of settlements trying to make up for the last few years by putting in a second, magical crop once their first one’s been harvested.”
The professor didn’t look too happy about the idea, but she said she’d think on it. Wash went off to talk to the settlement magician, and found out that a lot of the magical plants in the settlement’s kitchen gardens hadn’t come up at all, and the ones that had were doing poorly. When he told the professor, she got real thoughtful, and next morning she agreed to send a report to the Settlement Office. She even said that as long as we were out as far as we were, we should tell the settlements we passed.
We only spent the one night in Novokoros. The settlers all seemed to have the same feelings about women magicians as the settlement magician had, and Professor Torgeson didn’t much like their attitude. Also, she was eager to see if the mirror bug traps at other settlements had the same kind of magical plant growth. We let Wash tell them our idea about the magic, and then we left.
As she’d promised, Professor Torgeson wrote out a short report for the Settlement Office when we stopped for lunch, and we sent it off at the next settlement we passed. She grumbled a little about not having enough proof, though. Wash paid it no heed.
At the next three settlements, we checked the mirror bug traps. They were all the same as the one at Novokoros — lots of magical plants growing around the traps, and none anywhere else. I talked to some to the childings who had the chore of weeding the kitchen gardens, and found that ever since the grubs showed up, they hadn’t had any fire nettles or other magical weeds to pull. Also, the hexberries and calsters and other magical plants weren’t growing well, or at all.