Jinx (6 page)

“He can talk. Answer her, Jinx.”

Jinx had been stunned by Simon’s words.
They were going to kill him
. The people in his clearing hadn’t tried to kill him! Nobody had threatened him with an ax or a knife. And it was only Bergthold who had taken him out into the woods to abandon him—it wasn’t
all
the people in Jinx’s clearing. But … nobody had tried to stop Bergthold from doing it, had they? And, face it, it was generally understood that when people were taken into the Urwald to be abandoned, nobody ever heard anything about them again.

“Yes,” said Jinx. He’d never thought about it that way before.

“Why would anyone want to kill such a sweet little child?” said Sophie.

Jinx cringed inwardly at being called a sweet little child. It was like having wasps crawling inside your skull.

“Probably because he was snooping around in people’s private workrooms, messing with their stuff,” said Simon.

“Then—then that was a really good thing you did,” said Sophie. “Taking him in, I mean. Buying him.”

“Try not to sound so surprised,” said Simon.

“You saved his life.”

“Even us evil wizards have our good days.”

The anger in the room was drawing back now, toward the walls, and a peaceful, warm, blue feeling was coming into the room. Jinx finally moved. He felt stiff and achy from the wasp stings.

“You are going to teach him to read, aren’t you?” said Sophie.

“Will you teach me magic, too?” Jinx blurted.

There was a silence that was filled with Sophie’s orange-green annoyance and a bright blue bottle-shaped blob of surprise from the wizard. It was clear he’d never thought of that before.

“Simon, you can’t—”

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” Simon said. “He’s
my
boy. I found him.”

That sounded fairly close to yes.

J
inx learned to read quickly, which was fortunate because Simon was not a particularly patient teacher. He didn’t get angry when Jinx had trouble understanding things—instead, he assumed that Jinx was too stupid to understand and gave up. But it didn’t take long for Jinx to figure out that the letters and sounds that Simon was teaching him were actually a sort of obstacle that you had to get around in order to listen to what the book was saying. After that, reading was easy. And fascinating—Jinx read about magic and about strange lands beyond the Urwald.

The door to Simon’s rooms was no longer locked, and now Jinx was allowed in—and had to sweep and dust those rooms as well. Jinx suspected that before, Simon had kept them swept and dusted by magic. Now he expected Jinx to do it, by broom and brush.

But Jinx didn’t mind, because he got to watch Simon do magic—mix potions, burn dry twisty things that made purple smoke, and leaf endlessly through a red leather-bound book muttering to himself. The wizard spent a lot of time trying different spells and, it seemed to Jinx, inventing new ones. Sometimes he wouldn’t remember to tell Jinx to go to bed till nearly midnight.

The stone wall that Jinx had heard Simon and Sophie walk through remained a stone wall. Jinx thought of asking Simon if he wanted Jinx to clean the rooms behind it—but he didn’t dare. There was something in Simon that was like a stone wall too, and you couldn’t ask the questions that led beyond it.

“Don’t touch any of the things on the shelves,” Simon said. “They might kill you.”

Jinx knew now that most of the jars said
DANGER
on them, and some said it in larger, firmer letters than the wasp jar did.

A lot of the time Simon just sat on a high stool, boringly writing away in a book. Jinx sat on the floor beside the skull and read whatever books Simon would let him. Sometimes when he reached for a book, Simon would glance up briefly and say, “Not that one.”

And sometimes, if Simon said that, Jinx waited till another time when the wizard wasn’t paying quite so much attention.

If Simon said nothing, Jinx would take the book, open it very cautiously in case it burst into flames, and read. Some of the books were in neither Urwish nor Samaran, but in some other language. This didn’t matter as long as you listened to the books, he realized. He wondered how many languages there were in the world, and how many places besides the Urwald.

When Sophie was visiting, she always asked Jinx about his reading. Sometimes she talked to him using the languages he’d only read in books. Jinx listened carefully—the words weren’t pronounced quite the way he’d expected—before answering her.

“Simon, the boy’s taught himself four languages,” Sophie said.

“Mm,” said Simon.

Some of the books they discussed were in Samaran. A lot of these were about magic, and Jinx supposed Samara must be a very magical place. But when Jinx asked Sophie questions about Samara, she frowned.

“Samara’s not important, Jinx. Read about the Urwald.”

“It must be important,” said Jinx. “You live there, don’t you?”

Sophie thought flip-floppy blue-and-silver thoughts, like she was nervous. “Jinx, Urwalders don’t belong in Samara.”

“Why not?” They were speaking Samaran, and Jinx had just read a Samaran book, something about elephants, a magical beast he thought he would very much like to see.

“Because we’re not wanted there,” Simon snapped, not looking up from his writing. “Go sweep out the loft, Jinx.”

Mostly Simon just left Jinx to read, except when he wanted to give him orders.

“Hand me Calvin,” said Simon one day.

“Er, who?” said Jinx. There was no one else in the room but the skull. It grinned conspiratorially.

Simon snapped his fingers impatiently. Jinx got up and took the skull to Simon.

“Its, er, his name was Calvin?”

“It is now. Calvin’s an old enemy.”

“Oh,” said Jinx. “Er, did you kill him by magic?”

“It is very, very difficult to take someone’s life by magic.”

“Oh,” said Jinx.

“I don’t go around killing people,” said Simon, with one of those little purple laughing-at-Jinx flashes.

“Well, then what happened to him?”

Simon tossed the skull up in the air and set it spinning on one finger. “Much less than he deserved.”

He didn’t seem to mind the question, but he wasn’t going to answer it.

“Oh,” said Jinx. “The barbarians drink wine out of the skulls of their enemies.”

“Really? I use Calvin for a paperweight.” Simon set Calvin down on a scroll he had just unrolled. “Where do these barbarians live?”

“In the Blacksmiths’ Clearing,” said Jinx. “Actually, anyone who lives in another clearing is a barbarian.”

This memory had just come to him. His clearing seemed a long time ago now, and he didn’t really remember what it looked like. He wondered what exactly Calvin had done to annoy Simon.

“I’m not sure how people drink out of skulls,” Jinx added. Calvin had too many holes in him to make a good cup.

“Like this,” said Simon. He flipped Calvin over. “You just cut around the top, here, and you see you have a nice bowl. Then you add three legs to make it stand upright, and there you go.”

“Oh,” said Jinx, putting his hands to the top of his own head. “Right.”

The magic lessons did not go well. There did not seem to be any way to
listen
to magic, at least not that Jinx could figure out. He could listen to Simon, but that didn’t help much.

“
Potion
and
power
come from the same word in Old Urwish,” Simon said, holding a glass phial steady over a candle flame with a metal clamp. “All magic requires two things.”

He paused, waiting until Jinx said, “Power and concentration.”

“Right. And some kinds of magic require much more power than others. For example, magic done on a living person would require a hundred times as much power as magic done on that rock you keep failing to levitate.”

Jinx looked at the pebble on the workbench with dislike. He’d spent weeks not being able to levitate it and was beginning to suspect Simon had done something to it to make it unlevitatable.

“And some power sources are?”

“Fire,” Jinx said. “And words. Chants and stuff. Um, magic drawings with chalk. And herbs and stuff and like potions.”

“A potion enables a wizard or witch to pass magical power on to another person,” said Simon. “If I gave you a levitation potion, you would be able to levitate that rock. Although you could do it anyway if you’d only concentrate properly.”

Jinx glared at the pebble as hard as he could. Spells were much easier to do if you could keep your eyes on the object you were bespelling, according to Simon.

“Why can’t I have a power source?” If he could draw on power from a chant or a chalk drawing, Jinx thought, he’d be able to raise the pebble.

“A simple spell like that shouldn’t require one.” Simon jiggled the phial over the flame, agitating the dark green contents. “If you can’t do that, you’ll certainly never be able to do the concealment spell to protect you in the forest. Which you need if you’re going to keep running around off the path like you do.”

“I want to learn it so I can
go
places,” said Jinx.

“Well, you never will at this rate. You’ll be stuck right here like a lump of lichen.”

“Sophie says you should be more patient when you’re teaching me.”

Simon frowned. “Nonsense! I’m extremely patient. You’ve taken weeks to learn this simple spell, and—”

“—you keep calling me an idiot,” said Jinx.

“I have certainly never called you an idiot.” Simon took a tiny bird made of gold from his pocket and let a drop of the potion fall on it.

The bird glowed brightly for an instant. Simon blew on it, then picked it up and handed it to Jinx. “There.”

The gold was surprisingly heavy in Jinx’s hand.

“It’s called an aviot,” said Simon. “If you insist on going places, take it with you.”

“Is it magic?”

“Obviously. Don’t tell Sophie about it. She doesn’t need to know.”

“Sophie likes magic,” said Jinx. “It’s just that she doesn’t like that she likes it. Because she thinks she shouldn’t.”

“Figured that out, have you?”

Jinx hadn’t needed to figure it out. It was right in the front of Sophie’s head for anyone to see.

“Magic is knowledge,” said Simon. “And Sophie has great respect for knowledge.”

“Knowledge is power,” said Jinx.

A frozen block of surprise surrounded Simon. “Where did you get that from?”

“Get what from?”

“‘Knowledge is power.’”

Jinx frowned. Where
had
he got it from? “Sophie said it one time. And it made her mad. Is the aviot like a concealment spell?”

“No. It’s not as strong.”

“Is it some sort of, like, talisman? For luck?”

“Something like that. Don’t worry, I’ll find another way to keep you safe.”

There was something peculiar about the words—they were all tangled up gray in Simon’s thoughts, and
keep you
seemed to mean something on its own, separate from
safe
.

“I don’t want to be kept,” said Jinx. He wanted to go—well,
some
where.

“It’s actually
necessary
when you’re little,” said Simon, sounding as if he were arguing with himself about something. “When you’re grown up, you’ll be able to protect yourself from things.”

“I’m ten!” said Jinx.

But Simon wasn’t listening. The wizard’s thoughts were crawling around, hiding behind one another, and it made Jinx nervous.

Simon picked up the still-burning candle and set it down next to the immovable pebble. “Here. Use the power from the flame to levitate the rock. If you can’t do that, you’re hopeless.”

There were still days at a time when Jinx was alone, because Simon would go off somewhere in the Urwald. Jinx was used to being by himself, and it didn’t bother him as much as it used to, but he wished he could go too. He asked to be taken along, but Simon always refused.

Once, when the wizard was in an especially cloudy dark mood, he said, “If you don’t stop asking me, I
will
take you.”

Which was what Jinx wanted, but it sounded like a threat.

A few months later, Simon came home with a burn on his face and a purple-green cloud of despair around his head. Jinx asked what had happened.

“Nothing,” Simon snapped. “Mind your own business.”

But the closed-off shape of Simon’s thoughts made Jinx think it had something to do with the Bonemaster. Jinx wondered if Simon had been battling with him.

Whenever Simon got on his nerves, Jinx went to the Farseeing Window and talked things over with the girl in the red hood. The window showed her to him often, though only from a distance. He imagined her with yellow curly hair and sky-blue eyes (which he couldn’t see from above, because of her hood). And very sympathetic.

“He
could
actually tell me how to do things,” Jinx said after a particularly frustrating magic lesson. “He just barks at me and expects me to know what he’s talking about. He must know how the magic is done. Why can’t he just tell me?”