Jinx's Magic (24 page)

Jinx heard the witch's footsteps recede. He managed to get his eyes unstuck as Elfwyn came and sat down on the floor beside him.

“You look awful,” she said.

“Thanks.” Jinx's mouth felt thick and dry. “Is there any water?”

She brought him some.

He drank it all down in one gulp. “That really sucks about your curse.”

“She can't be right,” said Elfwyn. “There has to be a way to undo it.”

“Is that really—I mean, that's really how witch's magic works, I guess. It uses the lifeforce of the—” He realized his voice was rising into a question intonation, and stopped. “I mean I guess a witch's spell uses the lifeforce of the person that the spell's being done on.”

“Wizards aren't supposed to know that,” said Elfwyn.

“And that's why it's easier for a witch to do magic on a person.”

“Don't tell anyone, please,” said Elfwyn.

“All right,” said Jinx. “Simon doesn't know—” His dream came back to him, or his hallucination or whatever it had been. “Is Simon, um, well, dead?”

“I don't know,” said Elfwyn. “I think not.”

“The Bonemaster said he would kill him.”

“I don't think the Bonemaster
can
kill him. I think that wherever he put Simon, he can't reach him now.”

“That's what Simon said,” said Jinx.

“What?” Blue-green confusion.

“I mean I kind of had this dream, and Simon said the Bonemaster didn't even know what he'd done to Simon.”

“That's very weird,” said Elfwyn. “Because I think that's actually true. What else was in your dream?”

“Ice,” said Jinx. “And a path that I couldn't walk down. Or no, there wasn't actually a path. And—well, to tell the truth I thought it was kind of about death, or something.”

“I don't think he's dead,” said Elfwyn.

Jinx refrained from saying that Elfwyn also didn't think her curse was permanent. Elfwyn was maybe taking too positive a view of things.

“Anyway, he still looks exactly the same as he did before,” said Elfwyn. “He's still inside that ice or whatever it is. The Bonemaster didn't do anything else to him and he didn't even try, and I really think he's got no idea what he's done. That's what I came to tell you.”

“How d— I wonder how you knew I was here.”

“Oh, that. My grandmother sent a message to me.”

“And the Bonemaster let you go?”

“Yes. That was a question.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, I have to go back to him now.”

“You can't!” Jinx struggled to sit up. “You really can't, Elfwyn. Supposing you end up like Simon.”

“I'm the only one who can find out how to beat the Bonemaster.”

Jinx saw that grim green determination and knew he could argue all day and not talk her out of it. “I bet he let you come here so that you could find stuff out and then he could get it out of you by asking questions.”

“Maybe,” said Elfwyn. “But you haven't told me anything important.”

And I can't,
Jinx thought. He would have liked to tell her about the portal, and about Malthus and what he'd said about paths of fire and ice. He would've liked to ask her what she thought he should do about it all. But her curse made her a spy.

There was one thing he had to tell her, though.

“When the Bonemaster does figure out what he's done to Simon—I need to know right away.” Jinx remembered the dream Simon saying, “
He can strike at you through me. You think I'll let that happen
?” What would Simon do to himself to stop it from happening? “I mean really, really right away.”

“All right,” said Elfwyn.

“Oh, and there's going to be a war. Between Keyland and Bragwood, with us stuck in the middle.” He told her what Tolliver had said. “Do you th— I wonder what the Bonemaster would do in a war.”

“I don't know,” said Elfwyn. “But I know what Reven will do. He'll ally himself with Rufus the Ruthless.”

“The king of Bragwood? But that's the guy that killed Reven's stepmother!” Jinx knew that amid all those calculating blue-and-green squares, the dead stepmother was one person Reven had genuinely cared about.

“It's going to be a temporary alliance,” said Elfwyn. “Rufus won't know it's temporary, of course. But Reven told me he'd use Rufus to help him fight Bluetooth.”

“Reven's hitting through, not at,” said Jinx. “Elfwyn, you
can't
go back to the Bonemaster.”

But she went.

 

Wendell wanted to go back through the portal.

“You can't,” said Jinx. “You'd be walking into the prison.”

The dim gray hallway hung there around knee level, weirdly out of place among the first tentative red leaves of spring. A guard stood at attention, staring directly into the Urwald at Jinx and his companions and not seeing them. Jinx wondered what reason the guard had been given for watching a blank stone wall.

“Why did you make the portal here, Jinx?” asked Sophie. “Wouldn't it have made more sense to make it to Simon's clearing?”

“I don't know why. Here is just where I thought of.”

He'd passed this spot with Reven and Elfwyn on his way to Dame Glammer's house nearly a year ago. Come to think of it, they'd stopped here, and built a fire and cooked. He'd found a bit of deadwood, right here, that the Urwald didn't need, and Elfwyn had come to help him drag it, and he'd said something and she'd laughed. He couldn't remember what he'd said.

“This just seemed like the Urwald,” he said, and shrugged.

“But I have to get back to Samara!” said Wendell. “Satya must be worried sick.”

“There's another way through,” said Jinx. “From Simon's house. If it's not being watched.”

“Maybe you should stay in the Urwald, Wendell,” said Sophie. “You're a criminal in Samara now.”

“The preceptors didn't see me at the prison,” said Wendell. “They saw me here and thought I was an Urwalder.”

“They might recognize you if they saw you again in Samara,” said Sophie.

“Just means I can't go back into the Temple,” said Wendell. “I'm out. Done. No way can I go back to the Hutch! Ever.”

“That's a shame, dear,” said Sophie.

“No it's not,” said Wendell. “I mean thank you and all, Professor, but it really isn't.”

A blue wisp of sadness escaped Sophie like a sigh. Jinx realized that Sophie could never go back to the Temple again, either. And she'd liked it there.

“They'll be able to get through again,” said Sophie. “They know the portal's there.”

“But they won't get through the ward,” said Jinx.

He poked and prodded at the ward spell with his mind. It was very strong, and anyway KnIP shouldn't work against Urwald magic. Jinx showed the image of each preceptor to the spell, and reminded it that these thirteen people must not get through.

Not thirteen,
said the Urwald.
Not those Restless, no, not the Terror. Nine
.

Nine?
Jinx asked.
So four were killed?

The Urwald murmured and susurrated its satisfaction.

“Four of the preceptors are dead,” said Jinx.

“Really?” To Jinx's surprise, there was a little puff of sadness from Sophie. “Which ones?”

“I don't know. The trees don't recognize faces.”

“Grandpa's arse,” said Wendell. “You killed four preceptors?”

“Those monsters did,” said Jinx.

They walked on. Jinx was glad to be back in the Urwald, and glad to have Wendell and Sophie with him. He'd done it—he'd rescued Sophie, with his own incomplete and jumbled magic.

He hoped Elfwyn would be able to find out what had happened to Simon. Jinx felt he ought to be doing that himself, but the truth was the Bonemaster was more likely to tell her. But would she be able to get away again?

There were a lot more seedlings growing on the path. The path seemed to be getting narrower, and here and there a tiny tree had been uprooted by a careless boot or claw.

“Do we have to do this every single time?” Sophie asked, the fourteenth time Jinx stopped to replant one of these.

“Yes,” said Jinx. “Could you give me a hand? Since I've only got the one.”

And she and Wendell helped him replant the seedling . . . off the path.

The Urwald muttered its disapproval.
Seedlings grow where seeds fall
.

Well, sorry,
said Jinx.
But if we put it back on the path, it'll just get trampled
.

Besides,
he couldn't resist adding.
The Path belongs to the Restless
.

Not now,
said the Urwald.
No, not now.
The Ancient Agreement is broken
.

According to who?
said Jinx.
I'm the Urwald too, and I say it isn't
.

“Jinx, why are we standing here? It's getting colder, and we want to get home tonight,” said Sophie.

They walked on. Jinx listened to the long argument that his words had started, crawling through the roots, rippling through the sap.

They have cut down trees. They have murdered without reason and without cease
.

The Listener says those are other Restless
.

He would say that. He's one of them. One of whom? One of the Restless. But he's not one of those Restless.

He says
.

All Restless are the same. He says those Restless aren't Urwalders. The Restless are the Urwald. Some Restless are the Urwald. Are the Restless the Urwald?

Yes,
said Jinx.
The Restless are the Urwald. The trees and the Restless. We're all the Urwald
.

This set off another discussion, along and across, over and under the tangled roots of the Urwald.

“Is your arm hurting you, Jinx?” said Sophie.

“What?” said Jinx.

“Are you talking to the trees again?”

“Thank you,” said Jinx distractedly.

Finally a decision seemed to be reached, and it came murmuring and gathering in from all sides, from above and below.

If the Ancient Agreement is not broken, then the Restless must tell us so
.

I'm telling you so,
said Jinx.

They must all tell us
.

Some of the Restless can't talk,
said Jinx.
I mean you're talking about what, all the thinking beings? Nixies and werebears and like that? Werewolves? Trolls? Ogres
?

Yes
.

They must all agree,
said the trees.
All of the Restless. The wolves, the bears, the porcupines? No, they cannot agree. But the speaking beings, yes. The trolls, the weres, the nixies, all
.
You must bring them to agreement, or you must vanquish them.

What, all by myself?
Jinx said.
I'm not exactly the vanquishing type. I mean I'm, like, utterly without claws or tusks of any kind. The Restless aren't going to listen to me, but they might eat me for lunch.

Jinx thought about the Last Listener, the girl the trees had shown him. He wondered if she'd been asked to do any vanquishing.

“Look at this,” said Sophie. “We're home. But who's this?”

28

Jinx's Rules

I
t was Hilda, the girl from Cold Oats Clearing. She was sitting beside a fire in the middle of the path, just a few yards from where it ended in Simon's clearing. She stood up. Her cousin Silas clung to her skirt.

“Thank goodness you're finally here, sir. We've been waiting for three days.” She nodded at the clearing. “A woman comes to milk the goats, but she won't take us through your ward.”

“Oh, you poor children!” said Sophie. “The ward should have let you in. Simon would never have set it to keep out unarmed, nonmagical people.”

Oops. Jinx had done it. To cover his confusion he said, “What are you doing here?”

“They threw us out. Me and Silas. And Nick came with us.” Hilda nodded at the forest. “He's out hunting.”

Sophie took Hilda's arm and drew her and Silas through the ward.

“You kindly advised us against going back to Cold Oats Clearing, sir, so we came here. We knew you'd take us in, seeing as we're relatives.”

Wendell was frowning in concentration, as if trying to pick out the Urwish words.

“These are relatives of yours?” said Sophie. “How nice.”

“No,” said Jinx. “This is Hilda.”

“But we are relatives,” Hilda insisted. “Simon's my mother's brother's nephew by marriage. And since you're his son—”

Prickly ice. “What?” said Sophie.

“I'm not,” said Jinx. “My father's name was Claus and he was eaten by werewolves.”

“That's certainly what I was
told
,” said Sophie.

“Well, you were told right,” said Jinx. “Simon lied to
his
father and said I was his because he didn't want his father treating him like a kid.”

“Simon has a father?” said Sophie. “Since when?”

“Since not anymore. The Bonemaster killed him.” Jinx's arm hurt abominably and he wished people would stop carping at him. “These aren't my relatives.”

“They're certainly welcome anyway,” said Sophie.

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” said Jinx.

“Can we go inside?” said Wendell. “It's cold out here.”

It was colder inside than out, and the cats gathered round and complained loudly that none of the new arrivals was Simon. Jinx thought about all the things that had to be done now—get some firewood in, find food for six people, sort out beds for everyone, look in the Farseeing Window and see what Reven was up to.

He went through the kitchen and up the tower stairs.

 

The window showed black night at first, though it was still daylight outside. Then it lit up and showed the clearing below. Jinx laid an aviot on the windowsill and thought of Reven's aviot.

And there was Reven. Not fighting this time—he was standing on a tree stump, his arms folded, talking. A great mass of people were gathered around him, men and women—hundreds of people, Jinx thought. Maybe a thousand people. And all of them focused on Reven.

There was no way to tell what Reven was saying. But he was smiling. And where were they, all these people? Somewhere open, with no trees, but . . .

. . . lots of tree stumps.

Jinx got a cold feeling in his stomach. Reven was in the Edgeland. As far as Jinx was concerned, the Edgeland was the Urwald. Reven went on smiling and talking to the crowd. He no longer needed Elfwyn to tell people who he was. They knew.

Well, there was no point in watching Reven talk when Jinx couldn't hear a word. He'd just have to keep an eye on the situation, that was all. He put the aviot in his pocket.

The scene switched back to Simon's clearing. The chickens were pecking and clucking their way back into the shed to roost. And more people had arrived. About a dozen of them milled around, just outside the wards. Jinx recognized them, and was
not
glad to see them.

He hurried down the stairs, jumping over a cat at the bottom and painfully jarring his arm when he landed. He wove through the kitchen, where Nick was skinning something and Hilda was boiling water while Sophie and Wendell bustled about with blankets and things.

He strode across the clearing. The new arrivals pressed as close to the ward as they could get while sticking very strictly to the path. They had bundles piled around them.

There was Cottawilda, Jinx's stepmother; and her husband, Jotun; and their daughter—what was her name? He couldn't remember. And Inga, a girl who'd pushed his face down in pig muck when he was little. And more of them . . . people from Gooseberry Clearing, where Jinx had been born.

“What the flip are you doing here?” Jinx demanded. His arm was agonizing.

“It took us over a week to find you, but then some Wanderer boy who sings to his donkey gave us directions,” said Cottawilda. “He said to tell you he was right about Urwalders. Whatever that means.”

“Well, now you've found me, you can clear out of here,” said Jinx.

“But we need help,” said Inga. “Cottawilda remembered she'd got a rich relative who would take us in, so we came here.”

Jinx was tired. Everybody suddenly wanted to be his relative. And his arm wasn't hurting any less. “Let me get this straight. You all sent me out into the Urwald to fend for myself when I was six, and I'm supposed to take you in why, exactly? First of all”—he held up a finger on his good hand—“I'm not her relative. Second, I'm not rich. And third, no, I'm not taking you in.”

“We took you in when you came through last year,” said Cottawilda.

“For money,” said Jinx. “That doesn't count. So turn around and go back to Gooseberry Clearing.”

“We can't,” said Jotun. “It's gone.”

“Then go somewhere else,” said Jinx. “What do you mean, gone?”

“A wizard came and destroyed it,” said Inga.

“The Bonemaster,” said Jotun.

“He blasted the houses apart,” said Cottawilda. “And turned people into heaps of bones, and there's nobody left but us.”

Jinx stared at them. There was that bottle-shaped green fear in all of them, the fear Simon had made when he'd warned people about the Bonemaster, and Jinx knew they were telling the truth. The Bonemaster had destroyed Gooseberry Clearing. Everybody in it, except the handful of people standing in front of Jinx, was dead.

The Bonemaster must have attacked while Elfwyn was out of the way, visiting Jinx at Dame Glammer's. And it had been done because of Jinx . . . to get back at him for not meeting the deadline and bringing the books.

It seemed the Bonemaster no longer thought of Jinx as Simon's stupid apprentice. He had identified Jinx as an enemy, and he had declared war.

Jinx owed these people from his home clearing nothing. Or at least he never used to. But now, in a horrible way, he did.

Wendell came up beside Jinx. “Who are they?”

“People I knew when I was little,” said Jinx.

Wendell leaned through the ward and picked up Cottawilda's bundle. “I am carrying you bag at them house,” he said in awkward-but-determined Urwish.

Jinx sighed. He told the ward to let them all in—and to go ahead and let in anybody who didn't have a weapon . . . and wasn't the Bonemaster.

He drew a little more of the Urwald's power into the wards, and strengthened them. And hoped they were strong enough.

 

Most of the house had been taken over by visitors. Jinx preferred to think of them as visitors. That they had nowhere to go and weren't likely to leave anytime soon was too annoying to think about. It was one thing to say that Urwalders should unite, and another to have whole bunches of them camping in your kitchen.

Still, it was nice to hear voices speaking Urwish around him. The sound was almost as comforting as the murmuring of the trees. But it would have been nicer to have the kitchen to himself again, with Simon and Sophie off in the background, and maybe Elfwyn stopping by for a visit.

He'd told Cottawilda to stop calling herself his stepmother or she was out.

He set another condition, too.

“Where's Gertrude?” he demanded.

“Who?” said Cottawilda. “I told you, everyone was killed by the Bonemaster.”

“Not Gertrude,” said Jinx. “She already wasn't there when I saw you last year. So what happened to her?”

“If you told me who she was, maybe I could tell you what happened to her,” said Cottawilda peevishly.

“Your daughter,” said Jinx. “The baby you had right before you abandoned me in the forest.”

The confusion cleared. “Oh her.”

“You abandoned her too, didn't you?” said Jinx.

Jotun cleared his throat. “I don't want you taking that tone with my wife.”

“I was taking it with both of you,” said Jinx. “You abandoned Gertrude too. Didn't you?”

“She wasn't mine,” said Jotun.

“That's not what I asked,” said Jinx. “But never mind. Find her.”

Satya's acting lessons were still coming in handy. But, he realized, he was only partly acting. Maybe he really was a little bit arrogant and sometimes imperious. It wasn't a particularly pleasant realization, but there it was.

“How can we find her?” said Cottawilda.

“That's your problem,” said Jinx. “Just find her, or you don't stay.”

He realized Sophie was standing beside him. This was really more her house than his. He didn't have a right to give orders, he supposed.

“That seems reasonable,” said Sophie.

“She's probably been eaten,” said Jotun.

“Find out,” said Jinx.

If everybody was going to move into his—well, Simon's—house, then they were going to have to abide by a few rules. Not abandoning children in the forest was one. And no claiming to be Jinx's relative. Oh, and stay out of the south wing. Those were Jinx's rules.

 

Sophie, Jinx, and Wendell were sitting just below the thirteenth step, in the south wing, where the magic door protected them from visitors. They were contemplating bottled Simon.

“How can you tell he's not dead?” said Sophie.

“He's not translucent,” said Jinx. “The Crimson Grimoire said that when the person's dead, their lifeforce goes see-through.”

“But he was walking around before?” said Wendell.

“Yup,” said Jinx. “It's only since the Bonemaster put him in that block of ice that he's been like this.”

“And Elfwyn thinks he's been sent somewhere else?” said Sophie.

“Yeah, but she doesn't know where.” He told them about how he'd walked through high walls of ice and spoken to Simon.

“A dream,” said Sophie.

“No, 'cause then Elfwyn said some stuff that made me realize it was true. It was something that was sort of . . . shown to me.”

“By whom?” said Sophie.

“I don't know. Maybe Simon? He told me not to walk any farther or I couldn't stop—something. He didn't say what.”

“Hm. We'll have to find out.” Sophie opened the Eldritch Tome. “How did he, er . . . seem?”

“Cranky.”

Sophie smiled. She squinted at the Eldritch Tome. She held the book up close to her face, then far away.

“It's kind of abstruse,” said Jinx. “And also the writing's really small.”

“The abstrusity is meant to slow us down, I'm sure,” she said. “It probably makes perfect sense to elves.”

“Elves?” said Jinx.

“Elves wrote this, presumably,” said Sophie. “Since it's in Qunthk, or Eldritch.”

Jinx had a sudden memory of elves speaking a snarly language that he now realized could only be Qunthk.

And they'd talked about wicks, he remembered. They'd said Jinx and the Bonemaster had chosen themselves.

“If it's an elf book, I wonder if it explains anything about . . . the balance and the fire and ice and all that,” said Jinx.

“It might, if we can figure it out. What about that red book of Simon's?” said Sophie. “Is it any better?”

“Yes, but I left it in Samara.”

“You what?”

“I was going back to the Temple to get it before we rescued you, and that's when the Preceptress caught me. And she recognized me. After that, I couldn't go back.”

“But we need that book!” said Sophie.

“I'll get it,” said Wendell.

“You can't,” said Jinx and Sophie together.

“Sure I can. Where'd you leave it?”

“In my room in the Temple. Under the mattress. You can't go to the Temple, you'll be recognized and anyway, there's no way the gatekeepers would let you in.”

“There may be other people I can ask,” said Sophie carefully.

“Well, I'll be happy to help out those ‘other people,'” said Wendell.

“You don't want to join the Mistletoe Alliance,” Jinx told him. “They won't even try to rescue you if you get caught.”

“Jinx, we don't talk about the Company,” said Sophie.

“I don't care about the Mistletoe Alliance's rules,” said Jinx. “They weren't even going to rescue you, you know.”

“The Company doesn't rescue people.”

“Yeah, I had that explained to me.” He turned to Wendell. “Seriously, you don't want to get involved with them. And anyway, I bet there are lots of Mistletoe Alliance spies inside the Temple who could get it.” He looked at Sophie. “Aren't there? They smuggle books out and store them in Simon's Samaran house? They change the covers of books to hide them in the Temple library?”

“Not ‘lots.' But there may be one or two people who could help us.” She frowned. “Jinx, the portal that you made—I don't understand how you did it. You don't really have enough knowledge.”

“I used the preceptors'.” Jinx described how he'd drawn on the enormous networks of golden wire.

“You can
see
knowledge?”

“Sure.” Jinx shrugged. “Everyone can who can do KnIP.”