The room was full of people, or it seemed that way, even though only about half of the seats at the long tables were filled. Dean Ziegler led us to a platform at the far end, where there was another long table raised up so everyone could see it. Lan and Mama and I were supposed to sit there with most of the faculty, right in the middle with Dean Ziegler and the president of the college.
They put Lan with the president on his right and Mama and Dean Ziegler on the president’s right. I was on Lan’s left. I was relieved to find Professor Lefevre on my other side; at least I’d met him before. I’d have remembered him from that first day in Philadelphia, when he’d sniffed about poor Professor Warren and Lan needing to be a hero, but he’d also come to the house twice with Dean Ziegler to pay his respects to Mama and Lan.
I sat quietly for a few minutes, watching the crowd, until Professor Lefevre asked how I was and what I thought of the college. I wanted to roll my eyes, but that would have been very impolite, so I only said I was fine and that the college was a lot larger than I was accustomed to. Then he asked what I thought of the refectory.
“It’s a pretty building,” I said without thinking, “and it certainly holds a lot of people!”
Professor Lefevre snorted. “Under normal circumstances, there is more than enough room for students and their guests.”
“This isn’t normal?”
The professor’s mouth twisted. “Three-quarters of Philadelphia society has spent the last week angling for an invitation to this dinner.”
“Looks to me as if at least half of them managed to get one,” I said before I thought.
Professor Lefevre’s lips twitched. “Very nearly,” he said. “You disapprove?”
“I’m not used to so many people all at once,” I said. “You could fill up two or three whole settlements with just the folks at one table, I think.”
The professor gave me a skeptical look.
“Really,” I said. “Well, the newer settlements, anyway. The Settlement Office figures on ten families or the equivalent, plus one settlement magician. Those long tables have at least twenty-five people on a side, looks like, so —” I shrugged.
“You’re very knowledgeable about the frontier settlements.”
“Anyone in Mill City could tell you that much. Everybody knows the settlement rules. But I have a sister and brother who are out in the West, and I spent a lot of the last two summers in the settlements myself. Not by myself,” I added hastily. “Nobody goes out West alone, except the circuit magicians and maybe a couple of crazy fur trappers.”
The professor looked interested, so I told him about Wash and the two trips I’d made, first to the Oak River settlement the summer when the grubs were eating everything, and then with Professor Torgeson and Wash on the wildlife survey. He listened very carefully, and when he started in asking questions about the stone animals we’d found, it was pretty obvious why.
“I’ve read the published accounts of this … discovery,” he told me. “It sounds unlikely.” I could tell he was trying hard to be polite and not say straight out that it was all a hoax, the way some of the letters to Professor Torgeson did.
I sighed. I’d gotten tired of answering those letters a long while back; it was one of the things I hadn’t missed about home since we’d been in Philadelphia. I hadn’t figured on getting the same questions out here. “I haven’t read what the papers said, but I was there when Professor Torgeson found the first one, the squirrel’s paw. What I said is what happened.”
“You just stumbled across these … statues?” he said, giving me a sharp look. “I thought that area had been thoroughly explored and mapped; it seems unlikely that someone would miss such a … unique find.”
“The folks at Promised Land said they’ve been finding bits of the stone in Daybat Creek since they settled there,” I told him. “But what washes down the stream is too small to notice anything special about. And the ones we found were mostly in the part where the hill collapsed.”
“Ah, yes, that convenient landslide.”
I frowned at him. “It wasn’t convenient. The settlement at Promised Land would have been flooded for sure, if Wash hadn’t cleared the blockage. The professors in the Agriculture and Land Sciences Department said that it probably would have happened sooner or later, anyway, but it happened when it did on account of the grubs eating away all the grass and tree roots that usually held everything together.”
“Runoff erosion,” Professor Lefevre said thoughtfully.
I nodded. “They had a fair bit of rain in the early summer, so the ground was soaked and the creek was high. And it was a cold, snowy winter before that, and winter ice can cause problems along riverbanks all by itself.”
“Very true.” The professor looked amused. “That still doesn’t explain how a cartload of statues ended up under a hill in the middle of nowhere.”
“Nobody knows how many there are,” I corrected him. “I’d guess it’s a lot more than a cartload, though, especially if there’s more than one hill’s worth of them. And they’re not statues — at least, not the normal sort. Even magicians use chisels and punches and sanding tools to finish off their statues, and there aren’t any tool marks, even under a microscope.”
“So you, at least, are convinced these are petrified animals?”
“I don’t see what else they could be,” I said. “They have stone bones and stone veins and stone stomachs and stone everything on the inside. What else would do that?”
Professor Lefevre looked shaken. “Some sort of natural process, then,” he said, half to himself. “Like those fossils that Albionese fellow came up with.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said. “And Professor Torgeson won’t say what she thinks.”
“No?” He gave me another sharp look.
“She hates telling people anything until she has enough information to be really sure it’s right,” I said. “She didn’t want to tell anyone about the problems growing magical plants straight off, either, even though she was sure herself. Wash had to be pretty firm about persuading her that people cared more about getting a good crop that year than about whether she was as right as she wanted to be.”
“Magical plants?” said the professor, raising an eyebrow.
So I had to explain about the grubs absorbing magic and the mirror bugs moving it away to where the mirror bug traps were, and how it was going to take a couple of years for everything to even out so that most of the settlements in the grubbed-over area could grow magical crops again.
“Commendable,” Professor Lefevre said when I’d finished. “And was there any magical residue where you found those statues? Or whatever they are,” he added quickly when I frowned.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “The grubs had pretty well killed the forest; there were some natural plants coming back, but I didn’t see anything magical. Or sense it.”
He nodded, pleased. “A natural fossilization process, then.”
“Maybe, if it was really fast,” I said. The professor gave me a questioning look. “A lot of the stone animals we found looked like they were caught in the middle of moving,” I said. “The bird I brought back still has its wings open, like it was landing on a branch. I didn’t think natural fossilization could work that fast.” I’d learned quite a bit about the subject in the course of answering Professor Torgeson’s mail.