Read Online Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede - Free Book Online

thought if William dropped in the creek, maybe he could grab hold of the branch and we could pull him out.” He looked at the dark swirling current. “I guess I wasn’t thinking too clearly.”
    “At least you were trying to do something,” I said. “Everybody else was just standing there.” I paused. “What did William say to get Lan so mad?”
    Dick started to say something, then stopped and looked in the direction where Papa and everyone had gone.
    “What did he say?” I asked again.
    “William lost his temper first,” Dick said slowly. “Over the puns. He said they didn’t have anything to do with real magic. And then he dared Robbie to float something bigger than that little stick he practices with all the time.”
    “He dared Robbie?” I said.
    Dick nodded. “And then he said that when he turns ten, he’ll be floating plates and bricks and all sorts of things, because he already knows the spells. Lan told him not to talk twaddle, and William told Lan that with the training he was getting in school, he’d never even be good enough to be a drudge magician—that none of your family had any real magical talent, and that your father must know it or he wouldn’t be sending all of you to the day school.”
    “Oh,” I said. Even hearing about it secondhand made me just as mad as Lan had been. No wonder he’d yanked William right up to the treetops like that. For a minute, I was sorry I’d tried to calm Lan down.
    I told Dick thanks and trudged on home, thinking hard the whole way. I wasn’t sure if I should tell Papa what I’d learned, or not. It felt important. But I could also feel a nasty part of me that wanted to tell Papa the whole story in order to get William into trouble, a part that wanted its own revenge on William for what he’d dared to say about Papa and Lan. The evil part of me, I thought. By the time I got back to the house, I’d decided not to give in to it, so I didn’t say anything to Papa at all.

CHAPTER 7
    T HAT SPRING LEADING UP TO MY TENTH BIRTHDAY, WE HAD MORE rain than a mammoth has hair. It rained in slow, steady, daylong streams and in sudden rushes like someone dumping a bucket out. The streets that weren’t paved went ankle-deep in mud or worse, so that taking out a carriage or wagon became something that took care and planning. The few days of sun we had were nothing like enough to dry things out.
    Then, just as school was letting out at last, it dried up and got hot. The churned-up mud took a week to bake nearly as hard as bricks, full of deep cracks that were wide enough to stick your whole finger in. The leaves on the trees curled up, and the grass dried out hard and sharp as pins. Over it all hung the sun and the dust. Not a breath of air stirred.
    Naturally, the boys spent all their time down at the creek. Lan went with them whenever he could get away from his extra magic lessons. Everyone else stayed on the porch, because even Papa’s best spells couldn’t cool the house off enough for comfort in the daytime. Everyone except me, that is.
    I spent my time on the roof, in the hiding place I’d found the summer before. If I didn’t move much, it wasn’t any hotter there than on the porch, and no one could interrupt me to do chores or errands.
    The day Professor Graham came by, I was on the roof and Mama and Papa were on the porch, having the same conversation they’d had nearly every day since the hot spell started. Mama complained about the heat and the dust and the extra work it made, and Papa said she should think of the settlers, trying to farm when first they couldn’t plant for the rain, and now anything they had gotten in was drying up and blowing away. Mama said if she felt for anyone, it was the settlers’ wives, who had even more dust to deal with than there was in the city. They could go on like that for hours, play-arguing. They’d already been at it long enough to chase Rennie and Nan and Allie off to find someone to visit.
    I wasn’t really