Wash was a circuit-rider, one of the six or seven magicians who rode from settlement to settlement to bring them news, share new spells, and help out when the settlement magicians needed helping. He’d been out in the settlements all summer, spreading the anti-mirror-bug spells that Papa and Professor Jeffries had worked out, and I hadn’t looked to see him again until spring. His black hair was a mass of frizz grown nearly to chin length, and his beard looked as if he’d used a crosscut saw to trim it. Circuit magicians always got a mite shaggy when they’d been out in the settlements for months, but Wash usually stopped at the barber in West Landing, on the far side of the river, before he came on into town. I thought he must have been in a powerful hurry to have skipped sprucing up.

As soon as he saw me, he broke off and his dark face split in a wide grin. “Hello, Miss Rothmer!” he said, and I could tell that he was tired because the hint of Southern drawl in his voice was a lot stronger than usual.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Morris,” I said.

“Wash,” he corrected me.

“Not if you’re going to call me Miss Rothmer,” I told him. “I thought we got that settled last summer.”

“Miss Eff, then,” he said, still grinning.

I couldn’t keep from rolling my eyes, but I let that stand. It should have felt peculiar, being on a first-name basis with a gentleman a good fifteen or sixteen years older than me, and a black man to boot, but Wash never paid much attention to other people’s rules, and he had a way of making everyone else forget about them, too. I always thought that was why he spent most of his time out in the wild country: because there was no one there to make rules for him.