Since I seemed to do most of the writing, I started a letter to William right off. I wrote Roger Boden, too; it hadn’t seemed right to write before, when it would take so long for a letter to get to Albion that by the time he got to worrying everything would be over. I had to put both letters aside a couple of times when Mama thought of someone else who needed to know how Lan was, or to be thanked for inquiring after him. I wrote Roger a straightforward account of everything that had happened, with as much detail as I had about the spell that had gone wrong and the treatments the doctors had used, because I knew he’d be interested in that. William’s letter turned into a long ramble about everything that had happened and what I felt about it, including my worries about Lan and the business with the pendant that I didn’t feel I could tell anyone else. It was the only letter I didn’t mind writing, because it was the only one where I could tell the truth as I saw it.
And the truth was, the more I saw of Lan, the less sure I was that he was “all right,” or likely to be so anytime soon. Oh, his burns were healing, and so was the damage inside him that they hadn’t told us about right off. The doctors said that with magic as strong as his, he’d be back to normal in no time. Nobody but me seemed to notice the shadows in his eyes, or the way he flinched when anyone talked of the accident (even before they told him about Professor Warren), or that he hardly spoke except when somebody asked him a question.
I tried once to say something about it, but Papa and the doctors said it was a normal reaction to being hurt so badly, and that Lan would be fine once he got his strength back. I thought they were wrong, but it was plain nobody would listen to me, and I wasn’t sure what they could do, anyway. So I let it go, and only complained in my letter to William. It ended up being four pages long and needing an extra stamp, and I had to apologize at the end for taking so long to write it when he ought to have been told about Lan straight off, as soon as he woke up.
The doctors let Lan out of the hospital two weeks later. His injuries had mostly healed up, but he was still shaky and weak. Mama and Papa had a long talk one night, and the next day Papa went out and hired a house for a while. Mama and Lan and I moved in, and Papa went back to Mill City and his students.
Slowly, Lan got stronger, but he stayed quiet and gloomy. A week after he got out of the hospital, he came down to breakfast and said, “I’m not going back to Simon Magus, Mama.”
“What?” Mama looked up from her tea and eggs with a startled expression.
“I’m not going back to school,” Lan repeated in a low voice. “I can’t — I just — I’m not.”
“It’s all right, Lan,” Mama said after a minute. “The year is almost over, and after what you’ve been through, I’m not sure it would be a good idea, anyway. By the fall —”
“I’m not going back ever,” Lan interrupted. His right hand was clenching and unclenching at his side; Mama couldn’t see it from where she sat, but I was on the same side of the table as Lan, and I could. “Not ever, Mama. I mean it.”
Mama looked stricken. “Sit down and have breakfast, you,” I told Lan before Mama could come up with something to say.
Lan gave me a look like one of the wild animals in the menagerie about to bolt. I rolled my eyes at him.
“Sit,” I said to him. “You don’t have to settle everything right this very minute.”
“I suppose not.” He glanced at Mama, and the wild look left him. He pulled out a chair and sat next to me, bowing his head. He wasn’t clenching his fist anymore, but I could see that his hands were shaking before he shoved them under the edge of the tablecloth to hide them.
Mama’s eyes narrowed just a hair, and she looked from me to Lan and back. Then she nodded once. I reached for the teapot and poured for Lan, then dumped a big spoonful of eggs in the middle of his plate. He looked up, startled.
“Eat now, talk later,” I told him sternly.
“Eff,” he started uncertainly, “I —”
“You aren’t all the way better yet,” I said. “And you’re going to need the energy once the knocker starts up.”
Lan groaned, but he nodded and picked up his fork. Once word got out that Lan was well, or at least improving, we’d had a steady stream of visitors — first the students who were in the accident with Lan, to thank him for whatever he’d done to save them; then his friends from other classes and from the rooming house where he usually lived; then his professors and a bunch of important folks from all over the city who, as far as I could tell, just wanted to be able to say they’d met a double-seventh son.
Lan was polite enough to everyone, but I could tell that he hated every bit of attention worse than ever I had. He tried to change the subject whenever anyone brought up the accident, and he’d get real quiet if people wouldn’t let up on it. Once he even walked out of the room in the middle of a conversation. Mama was not happy, and read him a lecture on manners like he was ten again, instead of almost twenty.
By the end of April, we’d been in Philadelphia over five weeks. Lan was a lot better, except for still being as twitchy as anything. Mama decided that it was time for us to get back to Mill City, and asked Dean Ziegler to get the train tickets for us. The next thing we knew, the college had decided to throw Lan a farewell dinner. Lan didn’t want to go, but Mama gave him another talking-to and he finally agreed.
Two nights before we left for Mill City, the three of us dressed in our Sunday best and went off to Simon Magus College for what we thought was going to be a quiet dinner with the faculty and a few students.
CHAPTER 22
SIMON MAGUS COLLEGE HAD ABOUT FIVE TIMES AS MANY STUDENTS as the Northern Plains Riverbank College where Lan and I grew up, and a whole lot more buildings crammed into a whole lot less space. It was one of the oldest colleges of magic in the United States, and one of the best, too, or at least that’s what everyone always said. Dean Ziegler certainly thought it was good; he spent most of the carriage ride from our hired house to the college telling Mama and me about all the awards the school had won, and all the important spells they’d developed since they were founded in 1694. Lan didn’t even pretend to be interested, but I don’t think Dean Ziegler expected him to be.
When we came to the college and got out of the carriage, Dean Ziegler pointed out important buildings as we walked up to the refectory. Most of them were square, three-story redbrick buildings with white window trim. They looked nice enough, but they were all so similar that even two minutes after Dean Ziegler told us, I couldn’t have said which one was the Department of Alchemical Science and which was the Experimental Spell Design Laboratory.
The college refectory, where they were having the dinner, was different. Dean Ziegler said it was because it was the first building they’d put up, and the magicians who’d founded the college wanted it to impress people, so they’d gotten together and used magic to build it faster and better than anything else in Philadelphia at the time. It was two stories tall and made of large granite blocks, with a low peaked roof that stuck out over the front doors. In front, a row of tall pillars held up the stuck-out part of the roof, and a row of narrow windows with pointed tops ran along both sides, like the windows of a church.
When we got inside, it was even more like an old church, because it was all one big room and the windows were stained-glass pictures of important events in the history of magic. The first window showed the Unknown Pharaoh guiding the Nile floods into the Egyptian fields; the second one showed Pythagoras at his desk, writing out the numerical foundations for magic; and so on. The floor — what we could see of it — was stone tiles that made a picture. I couldn’t tell what, because most of it was hidden under tables draped in white tablecloths.