After he left, I did some more thinking, only this time I wasn’t just chasing my tail trying to counter all Lan’s reasons why I should do what he wanted. The first thing I thought was that it was what Lan wanted, not what I wanted. Lan had always loved school, magic lessons especially, and he just kind of assumed that once I got over my problem with spell casting, I’d feel the same.

I didn’t, and so I told him the very next day. He wasn’t happy about it, but I got him to agree that it was my decision and he would have to let it be. I could see that he thought I’d come around sooner or later, but as long as he didn’t go stirring things up right then, I didn’t mind. I figured that by the time he was around to bring it up again, I’d have done a sight more thinking about what I did want and how to get to it. Right then, I just knew that it felt wrong for me to go so far away from everyone I cared about and everything I loved, just to get more schooling that I wasn’t sure I had any need for.

Lan left on the train the first week in September, still sure that I’d change my mind before Christmas. I didn’t try to convince him he was wrong. I wasn’t certain that he was. I only knew that between him and William, I had a lot more thinking to do before I finished upper school.

CHAPTER 2

THINKING DIDN’T COME EASY THAT FALL. I’D BEEN SURE THAT ALL the fuss about the mirror bugs and the settlement and me would finally die down when Lan and William went back East, but it didn’t. Oh, the newspaper people stopped coming around, and they’d quit doing broadsheets a while back when the big fire at the grain mill gave them something else exciting to write about, but it wasn’t like anybody forgot about it.

The ones who especially didn’t forget were my teachers and classmates at the upper school. Half of them treated me like a circus lion, wanting me to do tricks for them, and the other half thought I‘d made the whole thing up and made no bones about saying so. And some of them were jealous because I‘d been out past the Great Barrier Spell and seen part of the Western settlement country for myself, and they didn’t believe me one bit when I said the part I‘d seen wasn’t so different from the land around Mill City.