As we worked our way west, we found more and more plants and animals that nobody had ever seen before. All the magicians and half of the survey folks got all excited every time we ran into something new, and Mr. Corvales had to keep reminding them that we’d be coming through the same territory on our way back, and it’d be a lot easier to pick up samples then than to take them now and drag them on an unnecessary round trip to the mountains.
By June first, we were almost to the Grand Bow River. The Grand Bow ran from somewhere way out in the Far West all the way down to St. Louis, where it joined up with the Mammoth River. Lewis and Clark had gone up it in 1804, and sent some of their men back with their maps when they stopped at Wintering Island at the end of that summer, so the first part of the river was pretty well mapped. Unfortunately, nobody knew what they’d found upriver from Wintering Island, because they’d gone on the next spring and never come back. There’s a monument to them in Washington, right next to the one for all the folks who came from Avrupa to all the earliest settlements that failed, and the ones for the Lost Explorers — Jeremy Stokes, who was the first Albionese explorer in the Northeast and who vanished in 1587, and Daniel Boone, who disappeared back before the Great Barrier Spell went up, on his third trip to map the parts of the country that are now the states of Cumberland and Franklin.
We planned to follow the Grand Bow, too, though we had wagons instead of boats. Going up one bank of the river meant we didn’t have to worry so much about wildlife coming up on us from that side, and it also meant we’d always have water for the horses and the mammoth.
The day we reached the river at last, we stopped early to make camp. That night, we had a party, and Captain Velasquez passed out a little tot of rum from the stores to anyone who wanted one. Mr. Zarbeliev brought out his fiddle, and one of the soldiers had an English flute, and we sang until the full moon was sliding down the far side of the black and starry sky.
We’d planned to stay camped there for two days, so that the scientists and survey people could do a more thorough job than usual. I spent the first day with Professor Torgeson and Dr. Visser, examining plants and bugs down along the bank of the river, and making lists and sketches of them.
Dr. Visser was the agricultural expert who’d been added at the last minute, and he was mainly interested in plants that might make new crops. He had a bunch of specialized spells to check whether things were safe to eat or not. They worked fine for finding out whether you could eat something, but they didn’t tell you anything about taste, so every once in a while he’d stop and nibble on something he thought was promising.
When we got back to the camp, Bronwyn and Elizabet were in the middle of a loud discussion with Mr. Corvales. “The readings are too high,” Elizabet was saying in a stubborn tone. She shook a small leather-bound book at Mr. Corvales for emphasis. Her bag of surveying tools sat half open at her feet, and both she and Bronwyn were covered in mud to the knees.
“Miss Dzozkic,” Mr. Corvales replied in a harried tone, “by your own admission, they’re only a point or two above normal. The natural variation from season to season —”
“I’m not an amateur!” Elizabet snapped. “I took seasonal variation into account.”
“It’s not just at the surface, either,” Bronwyn put in. “I can feel it all the way down to the aquifer. And the flow is all wrong, too. It’s tangled, which you don’t expect around a river.”
The raised voices had attracted a great deal of attention; most of the expedition members who weren’t actually out doing something were sliding closer and closer to the argument.
“It’s still only a few points,” Mr. Corvales said. “And we don’t actually know what normal is, this far west, do we?”
Bronwyn’s lips thinned. Elizabet’s eyes narrowed as she said, “There’s no reason to expect that the coefficient of magic generated by a flowing river would be any different for the Grand Bow River than it is for the Mammoth River.”
“But you don’t know —”
“Excuse me, but we do know, and the coefficient is the same,” Roger’s voice broke in. “Or at least, it was when they measured it at the confluence just above St. Louis ten years ago. And surely one of the reasons we’re out here is to find just this sort of anomaly?”
Mr. Corvales sighed. “Yes, of course. All right, we’ll stay an extra day so Miss Dzozkic can take additional readings, but no more than that! And if you think any of the others can provide a useful perspective, Miss Dzozkic, feel free to draft them.” His eyes cut sideways at Roger.
Bronwyn and Elizabet exchanged glances as Mr. Corvales left and the circle of onlookers began to break up. “Looks as if you’re part of the team, Mr. Boden,” Elizabet said. “At least for now.”
Roger laughed. “I wouldn’t miss this for all the tea in Albion. Would you mind if I looked at the readings?”
Elizabet opened the book she was holding and pointed. Roger leaned forward, his expression one of deep concentration. I hadn’t seen hardly anything of Roger since the expedition started. Even though the three expedition groups tended to clump together when we made camp, we did a fair lot of mingling day to day, so I was pretty sure he’d been avoiding me. I couldn’t honestly blame him, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to keep on that way. I wasn’t about to interrupt him while he was studying Elizabet’s work, though.
Dr. Visser and Professor Torgeson walked over to Bronwyn. “What was that about?” Professor Torgeson asked.
“The magic readings along the banks of the Grand Bow are too high,” Bronwyn said. “She checked in four places, and they’re running consistently one point seven to two point two above the normal range. It’s not an underground river; I checked.”
“It’s not a remarkable difference,” Dr. Visser said, frowning. “Still, we know so little of the Far West that any deviation from normal is worth investigating, I would think.”
“Two points above normal?” Professor Torgeson got a considering look. “That might be enough to affect the distribution of plant species. I didn’t notice an unusual number of magical plants, though.”
“It could be a subtle difference,” Dr. Visser pointed out. “Perhaps you’ll find something when you look at the statistics.”
“It won’t prove anything, one way or another, if we don’t find anything,” Professor Torgeson told Bronwyn. “But if there is an anomaly —”
“I’ll go get started adding up the species,” I said, suppressing a sigh. That was the part of my job I didn’t like much — going through all the notes we’d made and making a list that showed how many of each type of plant we’d found. “You’ll want them separated into natural, magical, and new or unknown, right?”
“Yes, thank you, Eff,” Professor Torgeson said, and I went off to start listing.
That night, I had a dream, the first one of those dreams I’d had since last summer. I was walking through trees, along the bank of a stream that got wider and wider until I stopped at the edge of an enormous lake. On my left was a cliff of gray rock, rising up into the clouds.
I looked across the lake and saw a wave starting on the far side. It swept slowly toward me, drawing up more and more water as it came, and I could see right off that if I just stood and waited for it, I’d probably drown. I started trying to climb the cliff, but I couldn’t find handholds, and I didn’t get far.
The wave was getting closer, and I was frightened and frustrated. I kicked at the cliff, and a piece of it fell off in front of me. I looked at the rock, and at the wave, and then I started kicking and hitting the rock. More rocks fell, piling up in front of me. The wave crashed into them; it showered me with ice-cold spray, but it didn’t break through the dam.
I woke up shivering even harder than I usually did after one of those dreams. Sergeant Amy and Mrs. Wilson were sound asleep, and I crawled out of the tent very carefully so as not to wake them. The sky was lightening in the east, just enough that you’d notice that you could see fewer stars than if you looked toward the west. I sat on the grass by the fire, as close to the edge of the firepit as I could get without burning myself or setting my jacket aflame. As soon as I warmed up enough to think, I looked at the pendant.
The top layer of spells, the ones that felt like me, had changed. I considered for a minute. They’d never before done that after a dream, not that I’d noticed. I frowned and looked closer. It almost felt like I’d cast a spell in my sleep. Almost, but not quite — and there was no record of a new spell casting. “This is impossible,” I muttered.
“What’s impossible?”
I looked up and saw William. “What are you doing awake at this hour?”
“I could ask you the same thing.” William plopped down beside me. “I woke up thinking it was time for Adept Alikaket’s morning session. By the time I realized it was still too early, I was up and dressed and it seemed silly to go back to sleep. What’s that?” He nodded at the pendant in my hand.
I hesitated. “I don’t know if I should say.”
William turned his head sharply, and the firelight flashed off his glasses, so I couldn’t make out his expression properly. “It looks like an Aphrikan teaching ornament. Where did you get it?”
I gaped at him. “You know what this is?”
He nodded. “There’s one in the magic museum at Triskelion; it has a bad crack, and the current holder didn’t want to keep using it for fear it’d break all the way and lose the whole spell history. So he loaned it to the college to study. They only let a few people work with it, because it’s so fragile.”
“I’m going to murder Wash,” I muttered, clenching my fist around the pendant. “All that mystery, and they have one at a college for studying?”
“Well, it’s the only one like that, at least in North Columbia,” William said. “Professor Ochiba says that in South Columbia, the folks who have one wear it openly, but here it’s usually kept secret. Did Wash give you that?”
So I explained about Wash and the pendant and the dreams. “Please don’t say anything to anyone else,” I said when I finished.
“Not even Professor Ochiba?”
I thought for a minute. “If it’s usually a secret, there’s probably a reason. I think Wash might have told her already, though. He said something once …” I shrugged. “I think I’d better ask him straight out before either of us says anything. But it surely would be nice to have someone to talk to about it.”
“If you’re looking to get clear answers, I’m not sure talking with Professor Ochiba will help,” William said. “She’s always making me work things out for myself, even when I know she has the solution.”
“I remember,” I said, and sighed. “Wash does the same thing. Do you think it has something to do with Aphrikan magic, or is it just them?”
“It’s them,” William replied without hesitation. “The other professors at Triskelion aren’t like that, not even the ones who teach Aphrikan magic.” He looked suddenly thoughtful. “And Professor Ochiba’s students generally do better than anyone else’s. I bet that’s a good part of why.”
That turned the conversation to what Triskelion was like and what William had been doing there. I knew some of it from his letters, but there’s only so much you can write down before your hand cramps up, so he had a lot of stories I hadn’t heard before. The sky lightened rapidly, or that’s how it seemed, and before we knew it, Adept Alikaket had come out for his morning practice.
As soon as we saw him, William and I stopped talking and got up to join him. We’d both been practicing long enough to know the motions by heart, and as I stepped and reached and bent in slow, smooth movements, my mind started to drift. I felt almost the way I did when I used the Hijero-Cathayan concentration exercise, except that instead of focusing on one specific thing, I was letting my mind drift wherever it wanted to go. It was very relaxing, even though by the end of the session I always felt like I’d just chased my nephew Albert down to the creek and back.
We stayed at that first stop on the Grand Bow for the full three days. By then, we were sure that Elizabet was right — the ambient magic levels around the river were just a little higher than they ought to be — but nobody had any idea why. Roger and Mr. MacPhee said that it didn’t have anything to do with the geology of the area, and Bronwyn dowsed for water, oil, and every kind of metal anyone could think of to confirm that it wasn’t on account of any underground mineral deposits.
Everyone else spent a lot of time trying to figure out what effects the higher magic levels might be having and what else strange might be going on. The lists I made for Professor Torgeson showed a few more magical plants along the banks than you’d expect, but not quite enough that it couldn’t have been normal variation.
Professor Ochiba and Wash spent a long afternoon doing advanced world-sensing, and they both agreed with Bronwyn that the flow of magic in and around the river was unusual. Professor Ochiba said it felt like a skein of yarn that a pair of cats had been at, all tangled and knotted up; Wash described it as more like a fast creek with a lot of rocks and whirlpools and backflows that all interfered with each other until you couldn’t figure out which way it was actually trying to go. Neither one of them thought it was dangerous for us, though everybody was sure we ought to keep a close eye on it.
We broke camp at last and went on up the Grand Bow. At every stop, Elizabet took readings, Roger and Bronwyn checked for underground changes, and Professor Ochiba spent time doing world-sensing on the river. It wasn’t long before it became obvious that the magic level was climbing as we moved upriver. It wasn’t climbing much, but Roger pointed out that we didn’t know how long the Grand Bow was, and that if the river went all the way to the Rocky Mountains, as seemed likely, and if the magic level kept increasing at the same rate, then by the time we reached the mountains, the magic levels would be sky-high.
That worried everyone, for a lot of reasons. Rivers generate magic as they flow; that’s the main reason why the Great Barrier Spell runs up the Mammoth River and down the St. Lawrence Seaway — so that the natural magic of the river can keep the spell going without any magicians needing to add power every so often. But the magic always flows the same way as the river, getting stronger and stronger as it moves from its headwaters down to the ocean. Nobody, not even Adept Alikaket, knew of any exceptions. Except the Grand Bow.
Mr. Corvales was especially puzzled because he thought that somebody would have noticed before now if the magic along the Grand Bow was behaving oddly. After all, a couple of hundred miles of the river flowed through settlement territory in the Middle Plains. Finally, Roger and Elizabet did some calculations on the rate of change and showed him that if the change in magic was consistent all up and down the river, the magic levels would be well within the normal range long before the Grand Bow reached settlement territory. And as long as they were normal, nobody was likely to notice that they were always on the high side of the range.
“Which is all very well,” Lan said to me that night, “but it doesn’t do anything to explain why this river is behaving so oddly.” He sounded very cross, and I thought maybe it was because he’d been asking Roger questions and not getting answers.
“No, but everything we find out is important.” I’d been working with Professor Torgeson for three years, and if there was one thing I’d learned from her, that was it. “You never know what is going to be the key thing that tells you what’s going on.”
“There’s too much that we don’t know,” Lan grumbled.
I understood how he felt, but I couldn’t help thinking that he ought to try coming to Adept Alikaket’s practices more often. It’d help him calm down, or at least work off some of his mood instead of taking it out on the rest of us.
I knew better than to say so.