Jinx On The Divide (25 page)

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Felix was aware of a film of moisture on his face, then on his clothes, and on his hands.... His fingers became really slippery, and before he knew what was happening, he'd dropped the jinx box and the lid had sprung open.

"Well, hello again," said the box, in its slimy little voice.

"Pick it up and get rid of it
now,
Felix," said Betony.

"Have you forgotten what I offered you, darling?" said the box. "The antidote to the spell that froze your parents? What an ungrateful daughter you are. Imagine how your parents would feel if they knew you'd had the opportunity to bring them back to life, and you'd refused it."

"Stop it," said Betony.

"They fed you, clothed you, played with you, read to you, dried your tears ..."

"No, they didn't. That was my sister," said Betony.

The box changed tack. "Imagine what it will be like for them, if you leave them petrified for another sixteen years. When they awaken, their friends will all be old people. Their own parents will probably have died. They may have grandchildren by then, and they'll have missed their growing up ..."

"Shut up," said Betony, covering her ears.

"The potions trade will have moved on. They'll be way behind the times, they'll have to retrain.... But you can prevent all that. All Felix has to do is to say
hocus pocus."

Felix looked at Betony. He remembered how devastated he had felt when Snakeweed turned his own parents to stone,

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six months earlier. And he remembered how wonderful it had felt when he brought them back to life. Hearing his father's voice again, and giving his mother the hug to end all hugs. It was within his power to give Betony the best present ever.

"Two little words, Felix," said the jinx box. "Just two little words. Think of the
good
you will do."

"Betony?"

"I ..."

"Hocus pocus,"
said Felix, thinking,
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

"Felix!" Betony sounded absolutely horrified. "What have you
done?"

Felix suddenly felt shortsighted and naive. Gullible, even. What
had
he done? It was as if he'd been hypnotized by the box, and now he'd come to his senses again. He looked around. Everything had remained exactly the same. Not one of the party had keeled over, and the sky had stayed where it was.

"So what did it do?" asked Betony.

"What did what do?" The jinx box sounded genuinely perplexed.

"The powerword," said Felix. "What did it achieve?"

"What powerword?"

"You know."

"No, I don't."

"It's forgotten it, Felix," said Nimby. "Same as it forgot the other one, once Grimspite had used it."

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Felix picked up the box, being careful to hold it in such a way that it couldn't spring shut on his fingers. "Chuck it in the pool," said Betony.

Felix hesitated. Drowning the box in a pool of boiling water had never seemed as foolproof as hurling it into a spitfire crevasse. He imagined the box sinking to the bottom and lying there in wait, plotting its revenge, so he decided to follow Ironclaw's instructions to the letter, and snapped the box shut. It made a crunching sound, as though it had crushed some tiny bones in the process. The others looked a bit dubious when he told them what he'd decided, but they agreed in the end that a fissure was safest. It took Felix three tries to put the box away -- he kept missing his pocket altogether and dropping it in the snow. At one point, he could have sworn it wriggled, but his fingers were now so cold he couldn't really be certain of anything.

"Here, Betony," said Fuzzy, removing something from her leg pouch. "Take this inside and see if you can discover anything of interest." Although she didn't say it in so many words, they all knew what she meant -- see if your parents have come back to life.

Betony took the crystal ball from the brazzle. "I don't see what use that's going to be," she grumbled. "It doesn't even work right."

"It hasn't been showing the future," said Fuzzy, "but it
has
been showing things that are happening elsewhere. Go inside, order some supper, and surf it for a while."

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"Surf it?"

"I've been telling Fuzzy about the Internet," said Felix. He couldn't understand Betony's reluctance to find out what had happened. If it had been
his
parents, wild horses wouldn't have stopped him. Betony went inside, but she was dragging her feet.

Fuzzy ruffled her feathers. "I know you were trying to do the right thing, Felix, but I think we're still going to get the double effect," she said. "Something good and something bad, in equal measure."

Felix was feeling really miserable. "I never get it right, do I?" he snapped. "I try so hard to do things for the best, but they always seem to have repercussions I never thought of."

"It's not your fault, Felix," said Fuzzy. "Blame the sorcerer who irresponsibly created the jinx boxes all those centuries ago, just to make money. It can be easy to invent something, and surprisingly difficult to get rid of it again." And with that, she put her head under her wing and went to sleep.

Felix rolled up Nimby, and he and Betony joined Rhino inside. The big log fire was blazing away in the fireplace, and there was a welcoming smell of hot spiced drinks and new bread.

"Three of you this time," said the landlord, "and not one of you a japegrin. You'll give this place a bad name."

"Our gold's as good as anyone else's," said Betony furiously.

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"What gold?" queried Rhino.

"Ironclaw gave me some, to tide us over," Betony hissed at him.

They made their way to the same booth as before, and sat down. The candle on the table guttered wildly as the family of japegrins at the next table got up and left. Felix insisted that they all look at the menu, although Betony was wriggling with impatience.

"We don't want to antagonize the landlord any more than we have to," he said. "If the waiter tells him you're using a crystal ball, he might think you're a ragamucky in disguise -- and then we
would
be out on our ears in the snow."

"On our ears?" said Betony, and she giggled. "You couldn't land on yours -- they're not big enough." She giggled again, but the giggle sounded like nerves.

They ordered the fish casserole. As before, it took a long time to arrive, but once the waiter had come and gone, Betony was free to set up the crystal ball. She stood it on a rush place mat, put her hands on it, and blew out the candle so they were in semidarkness. The glass began to glow with a pearly lavender light.

At first, all she saw were swirling gray shapes, like speeded-up clouds. Rhino leaned over her, trying to see into the ball as well, so she elbowed him out of the way. When that had no effect, she kicked him on the shin -- and that
did
work. The gray turned to a speckled green -- trees, probably.

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Gradually, other things came into focus, and she realized she was looking at her own home, the tree house in Geddon. It was dusk, and a few pink clouds lingered overhead. Her sister, Tansy, was busy with the yard rake, and her brother, Ramson, was sitting on a pile of logs, playing a lute. She grinned. Good thing there was no sound. She looked harder at the lute. It wasn't Ramson's; it was a much classier model altogether.

"Move your hands over the glass," said Felix. "You can control the view -- see farther to the left, or the right, or higher up. Do you know where you are?"

"Geddon," said Betony. "I can see Tansy, raking the yard. Oh -- there's Vetch."

"Who's Vetch?"

"Tansy's boyfriend. Maybe that lute belongs to Vetch, because it's ...
Blazing feathers."

"What?" said Felix, clearly alarmed. "You've gone as white as a sheet."

Betony let go of the ball and turned to him. Her eyes were glistening, and her lower lip wobbled for a moment. "They're not there anymore," she said. She turned back to the crystal ball and ran her hands feverishly over its surface. "Oh, why can't I get the picture back?" she wailed. "I should never have taken my hands off it...."

"Hey," said Felix, putting a hand on her arm, "calm down.
Slow
down. What aren't there anymore?"

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"The statues of my parents," said Betony. She moved her hands a little to the right. "Maybe it's good news."

Betony bit her lip and moved her hands more slowly, although it was an effort. The picture came into focus again.

Tansy had stopped sweeping. Betony watched her go over to the rope ladder and lean the broom against the trunk of the tree. Then she climbed the ladder, disappearing from view for a moment, and reappearing on the lowest balcony, which led to the sitting room. Betony slid her hands up until she could look through the window.

And there was her mother, standing with her hands on the windowsill apparently talking to Socrates, the family's potted plant. Betony rubbed her eyes with the hem of her tunic and looked once more. No, she hadn't been mistaken. And then the emotions crowded in on her so quickly that she felt as though someone had beaten her up and cuddled her -- both at once. Her mother was really, truly standing there, no longer made of gray-and-white marble. Her blond hair stuck out in the slightly old-fashioned tangle that Betony knew so well; her cheeks were pink, and she was dressed in that horrible sludge green dress she'd been wearing when the accident happened, four years ago. Only four years? It seemed like a lifetime. Betony wanted to fling her arms around her, smell that musky cologne she always wore, hear her laugh, feel that horrible scratchy dress against her face. The trouble was, all

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she could hear inside her head was her mother complaining about the way she didn't do her homework, the way she brushed her hair, the way she answered back.

After a moment, her father came into view, carrying a piece of paper covered in green writing. The sitting room candles had all been lit, and the room looked warm and cozy and welcoming. She felt a stab of homesickness. Her father crossed over to the biggest candle and held the paper above it until it caught fire.-Then he watched the paper burn until he couldn't hold it any longer, and he had to drop it into a ceramic dish.
It's a spell,
thought Betony.
It has to be if it's in green ink. I bet it's the broken-bone spell, the one that went wrong and turned them to stone.
She felt a powerful urge to hug him and tell him it didn't matter that he got things wrong all the time. Then she remembered his vagueness, the way he never remembered her birthday, the way he sometimes seemed to look right through her. Why was life never straightforward? After a moment or two, Tansy appeared, looking flustered, and started to say something.

"Oh," said Betony out loud, "how I
wish
I could hear what they were saying."

"What who are saying?" queried Felix.

Betony turned to him, her eyes shining.
"My parents."

"Your
parents':"
He felt so relieved that his knees went weak, and he had to sit down. "It worked, then?"

"I'd much rather
not
hear mine," said Rhino.

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"Well, yours haven't been turned to stone for four years, have they?" snapped Betony. "I wish."

"Betony, I am so pleased," said Felix, giving Rhino a dirty look and feeling that
pleased
was a woefully inadequate word. What on earth did you say to someone whose parents had just been brought back to life? "Does that mean you want to go home instead of coming over to my world, then?" he said. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized they were the wrong ones.

Betony's mouth narrowed to a thin line. "I don't know what I want," she said. "It's all a little sudden."

"What's going on in here?" said the landlord, striding over. "Why have you blown out the candle?"

Betony hurriedly put the crystal ball under the table, on top of Nimby.

"You want to get a better supplier, you do," said Rhino quickly. "Cheap rubbish." He flicked the wax rim with a fingernail, which rather obligingly came away, allowing the molten wax around the wick to spill onto the table.

The landlord looked annoyed, but he took the candle away and brought another one. Rhino grinned at Betony and Felix. For the first time, they'd all been pulling together. And, for the first time, they actually grinned back.

That night it was feather beds, hot baths, warm spiced milk, and no complaints. Bliss.

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***

Grimspite was going for a job interview. He had applied for kitchen jobs before -- as a lickit, naturally -- and going for a junior cook's position seemed the best way into Squill's headquarters to find out what Snakeweed was up to. Brazzles were a no-no in Yergud, so he left Ironclaw at the perching rocks, feeling he had to apologize for leaving him out of the action.

"Don't mind me," said Ironclaw cheerfully, smoothing out an area of sand with his wing. "You're never bored with a dirtboard. That carpet has quite a brain for a textile, suggesting that the combination of science and magic isn't thirteen plus thirteen at all. It's thirteen
times
thirteen -- or even thirteen
to the power of
thirteen. Thirteen plus thirteen is chickstuff -- twenty-six. So is thirteen times thirteen -- one hundred and sixty-nine. Thirteen to the power of thirteen is another matter altogether." He ruffled his feathers with glee, and immediately started scratching things in the dirt. "Thirteen times thirteen times thirteen times thirteen times thirteen ..."

Grimspite left him to it, and went off to Squill's HQ. He announced himself at the reception desk, smoothed down his white robe, checked that his fingernails were clean and that the cut on his hand wasn't too obvious. It was healing nicely; his two-legged form was better for the wound than his four-legged form, because he didn't have to walk on it. He made his way to the kitchen.