Jinx's Fire (24 page)

“Why did you—” he began. “You shouldn't have done that! I don't see the point!”

“He's much more powerful than us, you know,” said Elfwyn. “But he came out of that conversation thinking that
we
were more powerful.”

Jinx thought about this. It was true.

“Which in a way we are,” Elfwyn added. “Because we've got you.”

“Yes, if you need anything levitated or set on fire, I'm your man,” said Jinx.

“Is that really all you can do?” said Elfwyn.

“Don't rub it in,” said Jinx.

“It's just that I don't think it is,” said Elfwyn. “We need to think about it some more.”

“You told him we were more powerful than all the magicians in the world, and that if we used our power, the results would be terrible!” Jinx accused.

“Well, I'm pretty sure that's the truth,” said Elfwyn.

Magic Battle

E
lfwyn went back to Simon's house. Jinx needed to think. He walked across the charcoal field in the gathering dawn. High shoots of fireweed with bright purple blossoms surrounded him. Birds called to each other in the forest, announcing the day.

He walked for a long time before he reached the edge of the burn and leaned against a cedar tree.

He looked out at the burnt space and imagined the whole Urwald like that—the tall trees gone, the lifeforce gone. Branches curling as they burned, fire spreading through the tree roots underground, the porcupines and bears and squirrels gone, the werebears and werechipmunks
and ogres gone, the nixies boiled out of their underground pools.

Then what? More Keyland, more Bragwood, or maybe a wasteland, a desert like Samara, only colder.

No magic, anyway. The Urwald's magic came from its lifeforce. And without the Urwald, the lifeforce would retreat back down to the Path of Fire, back to the stone. It would spend itself making mountains and rockflows and pretty gems.

Terror,
said the trees.
Terrors.

Yeah,
said Jinx.
I know. They're everywhere.

You must drive them out, Listener. We must drive them out.

Yeah, well, we've tried to do that,
said Jinx.
We haven't had much luck. They're armed, they know more about fighting than we do, and they outnumber us.

They do not outnumber us. No, not them. Not any of the Restless. We outnumber them.

What, you mean . . .
Jinx thought about this.
All right, so the trees outnumber them. That's not going to help.

We will fight them.

How?
said Jinx.
By falling on them?

There was a murmur among the trees, a long ripple and hum of thought, a quiet conversation that spread outward. It seemed to Jinx that it extended to the very edges of the Urwald. And after what seemed a very long time—it was full day now, and the sun's rays slanted into the purple mass
of fireweed—the ripple of talk came back.

We have shown you the way before, Listener,
said the trees.
Perhaps you have forgotten.

Shown me what way?
said Jinx.

Again the conversation spread far away, along the intertwined roots of the mighty lifeforce that was the Urwald. Thousands of trees, millions of trees, discussed and discoursed. Jinx couldn't hear most of it, except as a distant sense of something happening. It made him feel very small.

And then, in the blackened land before him, amid the fireweed, a tree appeared.

It was a copper beech, and it was bigger around than Jinx was tall, and taller than the tree he leaned against. It looked as if it had grown there for hundreds of years. But a gentle wind blew through it, onto Jinx's face, and he knew it wasn't really there at all.

A young woman walked through the fireweed—literally through it, Jinx noticed, as he watched a tall spear of purple flowers disappear into her dark brown face and then reemerge behind her head. She wasn't really there, of course. Jinx knew who she was.

The last Listener,
he said.
You showed her to me before.

The Listener, yes. The last Listener.

It felt odd to hear the trees calling someone else “the Listener.” The Listener was supposed to be Jinx.
What was her name?

Name? Name. Listener. Her name was Listener.

She must have had a name,
said Jinx.

Listener. Listen.

I suppose you're not going to remember my name either,
said Jinx.

The trees would not understand why this bothered him, of course. Trees didn't have names. They didn't need them. Nobody ever had to ask where they were. No one ever had to distinguish them from some other tree so that they could be paid or fed or put in jail or married. They never went to a new place where they'd have to explain themselves to anybody.

My name is Jinx,
said Jinx.

The trees paid no attention to that.

The young woman stopped, under the spreading branches of the mighty beech. She was about Jinx's age.

She reached up a hand, and a branch bent down. The grace of its motion reminded Jinx of Reven bowing to kiss a lady's hand.

The last Listener took hold of the end of the branch as though she were shaking hands.

She's making the branch move?
said Jinx.

The Listener has deep roots,
said the trees.

The Path of Fire, you mean,
said Jinx.

The branch bent lower still, and the last Listener sat on it and was lifted gently as it rose. High in the air, she
looked off into the distance, as if searching for something. The beech bent some branches aside to give her a clear view.

So she used the power of the Path of Fire to move the trees,
said Jinx.

The trees murmured.
Move? No, we did not move. We are rooted deep into the earth.

To move their branches, then
, said Jinx.

He thought he saw what the trees wanted him to do.

No,
he said.

The enemy armies moved inexorably inward.

By now it was probably clear to Reven that the Urwald's magicians could
not
turn a man to stone with a glance. But they could make things explode—rocks, fallen trees, and nearly anything except people. They could levitate anything that wasn't alive, and drop it on the invaders.

The goldfish were useless, but the wizard Alphonse could put his purple prison up around two or three invaders at a time, and maintain up to ten purple prisons as long as his eyes didn't get tired. Spiders rained down on the invaders. Here and there an unfortunate soldier's boots became mud, and his clothing turned to leaves and fell rustling to the ground. But it wasn't enough. Whenever one soldier was hit by a spell, two more seemed to take his place. Many of these wore the red uniforms of King Rufus.

Reven's men were almost (but not quite) used to having illusory dragons and firebirds dive-bomb them from the sky.

“If only we could get real dragons and firebirds,” said Elfwyn. “But dragons are rare—”

“And firebirds aren't thinking creatures,” said Jinx.

Simon had divided the magicians up among the Urwish army sections, making each one responsible for casting spells to protect a group of humans, werewolves, and trolls. Jinx was surprised that the wizards and witches deigned to take orders for Simon, but then, no one could deny Simon was turning out to have a talent for war.

Simon kept the Truthspeaker near him, ostensibly so that people would trust him. Jinx suspected it was also so that Elfwyn could do spells now and then and people would think Simon had done them. She used the purple flash spell a lot. It knocked enemy soldiers down, or sent them flying.

Hilda and Nick were in the army section commanded by Cottawilda, along with Gak the Troll, a number of humans, and several werewolves.

Sophie, meanwhile, had taken charge of treating the injured, because she knew more about that than anyone else did. She insisted that everything she used had to be boiled—bandages, thread, needles, knives, and weird-looking implements that Wendell and Satya bought in Samara. If you came near Sophie, she'd dump a heap of
stuff into your arms and say, “Boil that, please.”

At first she had the idea that it would be quicker to have Jinx sterilize things by magic, but after Jinx accidentally set a pile of bandages on fire and melted an expensive and nasty-looking hooked knife, she went back to boiling.

Jinx had learned the pink goo spell. Using the Urwald's power he could make big lakes of it. This slowed down the attacking soldiers, but it slowed down the Urwalders too, so it had to be used carefully.

He could use the clothes-freezing spell too, of course. He rather hated this one. It enabled Urwalders to disarm and capture the invaders. It also enabled Urwalders to slaughter the invaders, which happened a few times.

“He said it was an accident,” said Wendell, after one of these incidents.

“He
ate
the guy,” said Jinx. “How could that be an accident?”

“Well, trolls are . . . trolls see things differently,” said Wendell.

“Bergthold wasn't born a troll,” said Jinx. “He knows the difference between disarming someone and eating them.”

“He sees it differently now that he's a troll,” said Wendell.

The situation was even worse with the werewolves. With them it wasn't just a matter of forgetting; they
seemed to regard the invaders as their lawful prey.

“That's the way werewolves fight,” said Malthus, when Jinx complained. “We're not in this war to help you humans, you know. We're fighting to defend our territory.”

“Yes, but—”

“And as we seem to be losing anyway, perhaps it's time you became a little less squeamish. I feel certain you could be doing more than you are.”

Jinx looked away. “I'm in every battle. The same as everyone else.”

The werewolf tapped his lower lip with a claw. “Yes. The same as everyone else. And yet you're
not
the same as everyone else. Where is the Path of Fire when we need it?”

Jinx didn't pretend he didn't know what Malthus meant. “I can't use the Path of Fire. People would get hurt.”

“And what do you think will happen if you don't use it?”

The battle was not going well.

Reven's and Rufus's armies were massed along a line a mile wide, just east of Simon's clearing. The Urwalders had abandoned Blacksmiths' Clearing the week before, along with the other eastern clearings. Butterwood Clearing was held jointly by Reven and Rufus the Ruthless. A few Butterwooders had managed to escape, but the rest were prisoners or dead.

“You should go home,” said Jinx to Wendell, as they prepared for yet another attack.

A little orange blurp of surprise. “Why?”

“Because,” said Jinx, “we're losing. You should get out while you still can.”

“I can always get out through Simon's house,” said Wendell. “They won't be able to get into Simon's house because of the wards.”

“You won't be able to trust the wards once we've lost,” said Jinx. “All the kings need is a few magicians to go over to their side. And once we've lost the Urwald, I think they'll get that. If they manage to break through the wards anywhere . . . I won't be able to fix them once the forest's gone.”

“Well, that can't happen quickly,” said Wendell.

“It can if they set fire to it,” said Jinx.

“Ah.” Wendell thought about this, then turned to look at the advancing forces of Rufus the Ruthless. “I'll stay till things get to that point, anyway.”

He went off to join his section.

The wizards had floated logs, rocks, and branches through the air and piled them between the Urwish army and the invading forces, forming a huge barricade. Jinx climbed a maple tree so that he could see where to throw his spells. His fear of heights never bothered him when he was in a tree. He felt at home in trees.

The invaders began climbing over the barricade.

The battle cry “The Urwald!” rang out among the trees, accompanied by werewolf howls and troll bellows. The Urwald's human soldiers, armed with axes, drove forward in a line, with werewolves moving in to harry the invaders from the side. The trolls were interspersed with the clearing folk, armed with clubs.

Jinx stood on a branch with one arm wrapped around the maple's rough trunk and, with his free hand, cast clothes-freezing spells and threw pink goo.

He could see the other magicians' spells—illusions to distract the invaders, and clothes-freezing and leaden-foot spells to freeze them in their tracks, wards to keep them from advancing. Then several wizards cast a spell together. A large chunk of the barricade exploded, sending the invaders flying. Logs and stones thundered down on them.

The elderly wizard in black robes, whose name was Frank, threw green thunderbolts which struck like lightning. The Carrot made the ground roll and ripple under the invaders' feet.

And still the invaders poured through the forest toward Simon's clearing.

Some of them suddenly found themselves wielding swords the size of pins, and Jinx hoped that meant that somewhere in the boiling mass of battle, Elfwyn was alive
and doing shrinking spells. But the invaders dropped the pins and grabbed up the swords of their fallen comrades.

Witches bounded amongst the trees in their butter churns, making illusions and doing a few nastier spells. Witches, unlike most wizards, could do magic directly on people. Led by Dame Glammer, they'd worked out ways to combine their power. They made the invaders stand on their heads. They curled them up into balls and sent them rolling back the way they had come. They made the soldiers climb trees and then jump out again.

Jinx could only work magic against the soldiers he could see. He froze their clothes. He heated their swords till they dropped them.