Jinx (17 page)

“You were amazing,” said Reven a little too heartily, as if he were talking to someone not quite right in the head. “The way you swung the ax—where did you learn to do that?”

“Firewood,” said Jinx. “If you hadn’t stepped out of my concealment spell, I wouldn’t have had to swing anything. I mean it, that troll was my stepdad.”

“Er—do you mean that your mother married a troll?” said Elfwyn.

“Of course not! My mother’s dead. And he didn’t use to be a troll, he—Why are we still sitting here? Let’s get off the Troll-way!”

“Oh,
now
it’s the Troll-way?” said Elfwyn.

This sarcasm was better than her treating him like he was insane, so Jinx didn’t mind it. They walked rapidly, almost running, Reven carrying the bloody ax. Jinx didn’t want to bring it—the sight of it made him sick—but Reven insisted. He said he wanted Jinx to teach him ax fighting.

When they were off the Troll-way and had come to a small stream, Jinx agreed to stop and wash the gouge on his face. Elfwyn said it would probably leave a scar.

Jinx told about how his stepfather had been carried off by trolls.

“Simon says that violent, greedy people draw trolls to themselves,” he explained.

“So what does that make us, then?” said Reven.

“Simon says, Simon says,” said Elfwyn. “Does it ever occur to you that Simon might be lying? I think that wizard of yours turned your stepfather into a troll himself.”

“He can’t,” said Jinx. “It isn’t that easy to do magic on people, Simon sa—well, it isn’t easy.”

“Did he say he couldn’t
do
it, or just that it wasn’t easy?” said Elfwyn.

“He said it’s a hundred times harder than regular magic. But easier for witches.” Jinx frowned. Of course Simon could do magic on people. He’d done it on Jinx. But it had taken a lot of preparation, and extra power drawn from fire and chalk figures, and those sinister-smelling roots of Dame Glammer’s.

“Anyway, Bergthold wasn’t a troll the last time I saw him,” Jinx said. “He was a man, and he was being carried away by trolls. And then I think he turned into one.”

“People can turn into trolls?” said Reven.

“I don’t know. I never heard of them doing it before.”

“I never heard of it either,” said Elfwyn, frowning. “I thought trolls came from—you know, starting out as baby trolls.”

“Maybe if you act like a troll, you turn into one,” said Reven. “I’m not saying your stepfather acted like a troll—”

“He did.”

“Oh, well. There you go then.” Reven seemed to feel that this explained it. “I mean, stuff is just magic in the Urwald, right?”

Now Elfwyn and Jinx exchanged a glance. They were Urwalders, and they knew magic was complicated.

The fact was that they were lost.

It had been three days since Jinx had cut off his stepfather’s arm, and the feeling of sick revulsion sometimes left him for whole minutes at a time.

Jinx had stopped saying “It’s this way” each time they came to a new path and had to decide which way to go. The others were still letting Jinx choose. But he could see them exchanging glances that said that they knew he was lost.

Well, so what? So were they.

It began to rain.

They slogged on, their feet cold in their soggy boots, and their sodden clothes clinging and weighing them down.

“Maybe you should leave the ax,” Jinx said, not for the first time.

“No, we need this! You were killer with this thing,” said Reven. He seemed to have the ability to stay cheerful no matter how tired, cold, wet, and miserable things got. It was annoying.

“He doesn’t want to talk about it, Reven,” said Elfwyn.

“Why not?” said Reven, splashing through a puddle. “The way he cut that troll’s arm off was—”

“You said that already.” Jinx tried to shut out the memory. He wondered if Bergthold had survived.

“Remember what you said to me before about those tree limbs I cut to make shelters? You said the forest would take limbs off people. Wouldn’t it be funny if that were true?”

“It is true, and it’s not funny,” said Jinx.

“Trolls aren’t people,” said Elfwyn.

“Actually, I think maybe they are,” said Jinx. “I mean, that one was my stepfather. And they obey the Truce of the Path—”

“That one didn’t,” Reven said.

“That wasn’t the Path, that was the Troll-way.”

“There’s something over there,” said Elfwyn. “A clearing, maybe.”

The smell of smoke came through the rain, and there was a small path branching off. They went down it. They all wanted to get out of the rain.

The clearing was small, gray, and drizzly. Wisps of steam spiraled upward from fresh-turned earth, which was rapidly becoming mud. Shovels, abandoned when the rain began, stuck up here and there.

The houses were triangles of twigs and thatch, black with soaked-in rain. Jinx splashed up to a door and knocked. Reven and Elfwyn stayed behind him.

“Who’s there?” came through the door.

“A party of wet travelers seeking shelter,” said Jinx.

“Hoity-toity!” The door swung inward. “‘Seeking shelter’? Here we just look for dry. Come in.”

Jinx ducked, even though the doorway wasn’t too low. Something about the little hut just made him feel too big for it. He heard Elfwyn and Reven come into the house behind him.

“You can put the ax down; we don’t none of us need chopping up,” said the woman.

Jinx stared at her. He never forgot a face.

“You can sit down if you want,” said the woman. “’Stead of standing around crowding up the place.”

Besides the woman there was a girl about three years old, and a man sprawled on a bed in a corner.

Jinx and Elfwyn sat down beside the fire, cross-legged so as to take up less room. Rain was falling down the chimney and hissing in the flames, and the wind blew down it and filled the room with puffs of eye-stinging smoke.

Reven held his hands out to the little girl and smiled. “Hello, princess.”

She ran and hid behind her mother, then peered out at Reven suspiciously.

Jinx looked from the woman to the man on the bed, and decided to be blunt. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

“Should I? I never had any truck with any rich people.” She leaned past him to stir the cauldron hanging over the flames.

“You’re my stepmother,” said Jinx.

She dropped the ladle into the pot. “Fudge!” She brushed her hair out of her face and glared at him.

He looked steadily back at her.

“Now how am I going to get that out of there?” She reached for the fire tongs.

Jinx wasn’t sure why he did what he did next—maybe because he didn’t want to eat soup that had had the ash-covered fire tongs stuck in it, but more likely because he wanted to force his stepmother to react to him in some way. She didn’t look the least bit interested in what he’d just told her.

So he stood up, looked into the bubbling, steaming pot until he could see the ladle swimming among chopped squash and cabbage leaves, and levitated it. He’d gotten better at levitating things, and he’d noticed magic was easier when he wasn’t inside Simon’s stone house. The ladle rose easily through the water. It hung in the air a few inches above the pot. Everyone stared at it. Jinx pulled his sleeve down over his hand, grabbed the thing, and handed it to his stepmother.

She took it, squawked, and dropped it on the floor.

“Sorry. It’s hot,” said Jinx. He really hadn’t meant to burn her. Honestly. Probably.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about her.

He looked at her and her family. Their clothes were patched and colorless, the dye probably washed out years ago by other wearers who might be dead by now. He realized he was among people who would never wear new clothes in their lives.

“I guess you got married again,” he said.

He heard an intake of breath and a tsk from Elfwyn, and guessed he was in danger of being not-nice again. He tried to control himself and think nice thoughts. After all, the woman—Cottawilda—had let them in out of the rain.

“Are you a wizard, or an elf, or what?” said Cottawilda, backing up to the bed and sitting down next to the man. She turned to Elfwyn, maybe as one woman to another, and asked, “What is he?”

“He’s a wizard’s servant,” said Elfwyn.

Cottawilda and her husband recoiled in horror.

“You shouldn’t have told them that,” Jinx muttered.

Elfwyn shot him an apologetic look.

“What! The Bonemaster?” said Cottawilda.

“No, the evil wizard Simon,” said Elfwyn.

“Can’t you keep anything to yourself?” Jinx snapped, not caring if she thought he was nice or not. What a blabbermouth!

“No,” said Elfwyn.

“I’m your stepson,” he told Cottawilda. “Jinx. Remember?”

He was conscious of dominating the tiny house and being at the center of an audience. Reven was sitting against the wall and had somehow coaxed the child into his lap.

“You don’t look nothing like him. He was a tiny brat.”

“Yeah, well, it was a while ago. I’ve grown.” The woman didn’t seem to feel guilty or anything. “You don’t remember? You abandoned me, you left me to die in the Urwald.”

“I would never do anything like that.” Cottawilda shook her head firmly. “I’d’ve sold you.”

“You
did
do it!” Jinx struggled not to raise his voice. He saw the little girl bury her face against Reven, in fear of Jinx. “Bergthold took me out in the woods to abandon me.”

“Oh, Bergthold.” Her face twisted with disgust. “He was a mean old thing.”

“Why’d you marry him then?”

She shrugged and looked at the man. “He was next in line.”

That was how people got married in the clearings; they married whoever was next in line.

“Anyway, trolls got him and the boy both. People went looking, and they found the tracks.”

“They got him,” said Jinx, his anger deflating as he remembered Bergthold-the-troll’s arm. “They didn’t get me.”

“And you’ve done right well for yourself. Nice clothes, fancy talk, and an evil wizard to look after you. If you
are
a servant and not some rich man’s son. So what are you complaining about?”

Jinx didn’t know what to say. Standing in the squalid, cabbage-smelling hut with the rain beginning to leak through the thatch in one corner, it was hard to complain because he’d been forced to leave it and go live with Simon. Cottawilda and Bergthold hadn’t known Simon would come along—trolls or werewolves were a much more likely outcome—but Jinx found he didn’t feel like arguing the point. And he certainly wasn’t going to point out that Simon had taken his magic.

The thing was, had his magic been too high a price to pay? Yes, it had. And yet Jinx was very glad he didn’t live like this.

The man on the bed cleared his throat. “I don’t need no wizards around my family. I think you should leave.”

“We’ll leave when it stops raining,” said Reven easily. “We haven’t come to harm anyone. We’re just travelers in need of shelter, which we’ll pay for.”

Jinx watched the expression on Cottawilda’s and her husband’s faces change. Jinx was getting better at understanding faces.

“We’ll feed you all for a farthing,” said Cottawilda.

“And let us stay the night,” said Elfwyn.

There were nervous looks from Cottawilda and her husband at this. Jinx didn’t really want to stay the night, but the rain looked like the kind that stays around for a while, and he didn’t want to sleep outside in it.

He jerked a thumb at Reven. “He’s paying.”

The next morning Jinx walked around the clearing, which was bright with sunlight and raindrops. People gathered in clumps to stare at him. Word of the flying ladle had gotten around. He saw people he recognized, some of whom he had never thought of once in the years he’d been gone. There must be people missing, because of the werewolves and the winter plague that Simon had mentioned, but Jinx couldn’t tell who they were.

Nobody seemed to recognize him. He spoke to a few people who should have. They didn’t remember him. Most of them shied away from Jinx and his companions, though, suspicious of strangers and of anything that came out of the Urwald.

He had hoped—well, maybe
hoped
was too strong a word, but somewhere in the back of his mind had been the idea that since he had first had the magic of seeing people’s thoughts in Gooseberry Clearing, maybe it would come back to him here. It did not.

“Everything must seem smaller to you, eh?” said Reven, walking beside him. “I’ve heard that happens when you go back to where you were little.”

“Yeah,” said Jinx. Actually, everything seemed dingier, poorer, drabber, sadder. He wanted to get away from the place.

A girl a little older than Jinx was standing beside a hut, watching them.

Reven smiled at the girl and she stared back blankly.

“Inga,” Jinx remembered. “You’re Inga, right?”

“How do you know my name, wizard boy?” the girl asked, suspicious.