Mill City was different. It was right at the edge of the country, just this side of the Great Barrier Spell that kept the steam dragons and mammoths and other dangerous wildlife away from the settled parts. Some days it seemed like half the folks in Mill City were looking to move out past the Mammoth River into the Far West, just as soon as the Homestead Claims and Settlement Office approved their applications, and the other half had relatives and friends and customers out past the barrier, even if they didn’t go their own selves.

Being so close to the wild country made people here a lot less interested in making up dangers and a lot more interested in plain, practical magic. From Mill City on west, nobody would care if I had two heads and bat wings, if I could work the spells that kept the wildlife from overrunning the Settlements. Of course, right that minute I still couldn’t work the wildlife protection spells, on account of the trouble I’d made for myself over learning magic, so even in Mill City there was no reason for folks to overlook my bad points. But back East … well, Lan had been going to boarding school there for the past four years, and I believed him when he said that not everyone was like Uncle Earn. But even a few people like my uncle would make more unpleasantness than I wanted to face.

I finished the row and began carting the dead weeds over to the compost pile. Lan was right about a lot of things, I could see that. I might not be able to go to one of the big important schools, like Simon Magus College or the New Bristol Institute of Magic, but between all the attention I’d been getting and being the twin sister of a double-seventh son, some Eastern school would surely take me in. It was an opportunity that wouldn’t likely come around again, and it didn’t seem right to pass it up only on account of a worry that folks might be unpleasant.