It was nice to be fussed over, and nicer still to sleep in a proper bed again. I was surprised by how fast I got used to being home. I fell right back into my old routine, working for Professor Jeffries and Professor Torgeson most of the day and then coming home to do chores. It almost felt as if I hadn’t been away, except for the little broken stone bird on my nightstand. And then, a month after we got back, I had the dream again.
This time, when the raft touched the shore at my feet and the little gate swung open, I backed away. For a long moment, the raft just sat there, and then it sank all at once, boom. The dark river swooshed in to cover where the raft had been. And then the riverbank collapsed under me, and once again I was sinking in the cold, dark water.
My head went under, but I didn’t wake up the way I had before. I opened my eyes and saw the raft, glowing in the depths below me. I knew I couldn’t get back to the surface, so I swam down toward the raft instead.
As I drew near, I saw a braided silver rope as big around as my thumb floating toward me. At the far end of the rope, the three strands of the braid separated. One was tied to the raft; the other two strands went off into the dark depths of the river, and I couldn’t see where they ended.
Part of me wanted to grab hold of the silver rope, and part of me was afraid of what might happen if I did, and all of me was running out of air and time. I woke up before I died or decided what to do, though at least I wasn’t in a panic the way I’d been the last two times.
I still didn’t know what to make of the dreams. I couldn’t see talking to Mama or Papa about them, and William and Lan were both still out East. Wash was back out in the settlements, checking on some of the ones we hadn’t visited.
That left Professor Torgeson, but even after spending over three months with her in the West, I felt a little shy of speaking with her. I didn’t have much in the way of other choices, though, so after two days of dithering, I went to her office late in the afternoon when I was done working for Professor Jeffries.
CHAPTER 18
PROFESSOR TORGESON’S OFFICE WAS A NARROW LITTLE ROOM IN A back corner of the house that the college had used to hold science classes when it was just starting up, before they got the first two-story classroom building built. Her desk, two chairs, and a bookcase used up every bit of space there was, so she’d found a long wooden table somewhere and stuck it just outside her door to hold all the specimens we’d brought back. When I got to her office, she was standing over the table, fiddling with a skinny, rectangular glass jar and looking harried.
“Eff!” she said in tones of relief when she saw me. “You’re just the person I need. I’ve run out of long-term holding jars, and some of these specimens will begin to deteriorate soon if they’re not moved to some semblance of proper storage. Would you mind checking with Dean Farley to find out whether there are any ordinary containers around that will hold a medium-long-term enchantment? Even if they only hold the spells a month or two, it’ll save these materials long enough for us to get more jars shipped in from the East.”
“Of course, Professor,” I said, and went off to see if I could catch the dean. I didn’t find him, but I did run into Professor Graham, who said he thought there were some glass containers in the cellar. They turned out to be canning jars with lids too old to be used for canning food, but when I showed them to Professor Torgeson, she said they’d work admirably for temporary specimen storage, as long as nobody banged them around.
“Has Professor Jeffries taught you the spell for preserving samples?” she asked me.
“No, Professor,” I said.
“I’ll teach you, then. Enchanting all these jars will go much faster with two of us working. You know the general storage spell?”
I nodded hesitantly. “They taught that in second year of upper school.” I didn’t add that I hadn’t ever made it work until I started pushing at my spells with Aphrikan magic. I’d been casting it fine at home as part of my chores since then.
“The sample-preserving spell is based on that one, but it’s more advanced — much more specific, and considerably stronger. You shouldn’t have any trouble learning it.”
“I guess,” I said doubtfully.
“It’s a bit fiddly, but not actually difficult,” she assured me. “Like this.” She showed me how to set up the work area, and what the hand motion was, and told me the chant. She was right; it was fiddly. The three white feathers had to be exactly in position, and they had to be laid down first, so that I had to take extra care with every movement I made after that so as not to shift them while I drew the circle around them. The timing of the passes and the chant had to be exact, too — no speeding or slowing the pace. But the motions weren’t hard, just a flat-palmed wave three times over the jar and the feathers in the circle, and the chant wasn’t a tongue-twister. Mostly, you just had to pay attention and be careful.
“Now you try it,” the professor said after she’d enchanted the first jar and walked me through.
I stepped up to the corner of the table. I cleared the work space, then reset everything and drew the circle. Out of habit, I started up my Aphrikan world-sensing and the Hijero-Cathayan concentration exercise that Miss Ochiba had taught me, so I could tweak the magic of the spell directly if it started to go wrong.
I felt a little uncomfortable when I noticed what I was doing. Ever since our first crossing of the Great Barrier Spell back at the start of summer, when Wash had noticed me tweaking the calming spell on my horse, I’d been trying to do all my Avrupan magic properly, without using Aphrikan magic to prop it up if it went wrong. But I hadn’t had much call to do Avrupan spells during our time out in the settlements, and since I’d been home, I’d only been working household spells that I knew pretty well already and didn’t have much need to prop up. I told myself I was just worried about learning a new spell because I’d been using the Aphrikan and Hijero-Cathayan magic to help learn all through my last year at upper school.
Then I had to put my worrying out of my mind, because I had to pay attention to the actual spell casting. At first, it went fine. I could sense the spell rising up around the little jar, slow and steady, like making a box by balancing jackstraws on each other one at a time.
And then the box started wobbling. Without thinking, I pushed at it, trying to put it back in balance, but that only made the wobble worse. In another second, the whole structure of magic collapsed, leaving three burned feathers and an ordinary, unspelled jar sitting in the middle of the table.
Professor Torgeson didn’t seem disturbed. “I did say it was fiddly,” she told me. “It took me four tries to get it to stick, the first time. Try again.”
She fetched more feathers while I cleaned up the work space, and I tried again. This time, I hadn’t even finished the first hand pass before the spell caved in. Professor Torgeson just handed me some more feathers.
By my eighth try, the professor was frowning slightly and I was getting frustrated. I hadn’t tried to tweak the spell since my first try, but I was so annoyed by this time that when I saw the magic starting to break down again, I couldn’t stand it. I made a mental circle around the outside of the box made of magic, like cupping my two hands around it, and held it all in place.
For a few seconds, I thought it would work. The canning jar I was working on started to glow, and Professor Torgeson smiled. Then the spell collapsed inward. There was a bright flash, and when our eyes cleared, the professor and I were staring at a puddle of glass where the canning jar had been. The top of the table was charred black for two inches around the glass, and the feathers were little smears of ash.