Jinx (4 page)

“Wives are always carrying something,” Jinx explained.

“My wife carries things in her head,” said Simon. “She is a well-known and important scholar.”

Sophie shot Simon an annoyed look. “Where do you come from, Jinx?” she asked.

“The Clearing,” said Jinx.

“And do you want to go back there?”

Jinx looked over at Simon to see what was the correct answer to this. Simon stood up and went down the steps to stir the fire. Jinx got the message—he had to answer on his own.

He thought. He was very lonely sometimes. In the Clearing—which was already becoming fuzzy in his memory—there had always been people around. In fact, you were never alone at all—especially not when you had to sleep at the foot of a straw bed with your stepparents’ smelly feet in your face. Here he had his own pallet with no babies leaking on him. And enough to eat all winter long. And Simon, who seldom actually yelled and never beat him at all.

He still hadn’t figured out what Simon intended to use him for—but maybe it really
was
just to work.

And then, he realized, he wasn’t as afraid as he used to be. Oh, sure, Simon was scary, and witches were scary. But back in the Clearing,
everything
had been scary. Fear crept up the walls of the huts and dripped down from the ceilings, and you didn’t even have to have frightening things in front of you to be afraid. Everyone was afraid all the time on general principle … afraid of the Urwald and monsters and winter and hunger and what might happen next and the possibility that
nothing
might happen next. It had been, now that Jinx thought about it, exhausting.

“No,” he said at last. “I don’t want to go back. I like it here.”

Simon was still stirring the fire, but Jinx could almost hear the loud
Ha!
that he thought at his wife.

“Don’t you miss your family?” asked Sophie.

“They’re all dead,” said Jinx.

As soon as he said it, Jinx realized his mistake. Simon had just told Sophie that he’d
bought
Jinx from his family. It was difficult to conduct business with dead people—probably even for wizards. Jinx took a bite of pumpkin bread to hide his confusion.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Sophie gently.

Jinx nodded warily. There was a new hint of iron behind her kindness.

“Tell me, Jinx, were they all dead
before
you met my husband?”

Simon stopped stirring the fire and froze, the poker in his hand. The room went still and waiting.

Jinx smooshed the slice of pumpkin bread in his hands. “Yes! A long time before! It was my stepparents that … that sold me. They weren’t any relation to me.” He took a bite of mashed pumpkin bread and said around it, “That’s why they wanted to get rid of me.”

The stillness in the room went away. Jinx had said the right thing. It hadn’t been the truth, entirely. It had left out a minor matter of trolls, but it had been the right thing to say. He could see that when he watched Simon tilt a
so there!
look at Sophie, and Sophie smile an apology. The room thawed and just a little bit of silver-sweet feeling seeped back. Not enough to make you squirm, really … but Jinx very much wanted this midnight meeting to be over now. He wasn’t sure why he had felt he had to lie to protect Simon from this sudden unexpected wife. But he was sure it had been the right thing to do.

Later, when he lay in bed listening to the kitchen fire sizzle away, it occurred to him that
Were they all dead
before
you met my husband?
was a very odd question.

A
fter that Sophie was around often, though she never stayed more than a few days. There was no more of Simon disappearing into his rooms for days on end—Sophie made it very clear that she came to visit Jinx as well as Simon. Jinx liked this. Sophie was different from anybody he’d ever met—smart without being cranky or cackly, and kind, and unafraid.

She also spoke a language he’d never heard before. Simon spoke it too, and Jinx had to listen for a while before he understood it. They tended to discuss things in it that they didn’t want Jinx to hear. Jinx heard them talk about a place called Samara—sometimes they argued about it. Jinx wondered where it was.

“Where’s Sophie?” Jinx asked once, when she’d been around for three days and suddenly wasn’t.

“She left,” said Simon.

“Where did she go?”

“She went home. Her home.”

“Why doesn’t she live here?”

“Never you mind,” said Simon.

“How does she get here? She never comes through the front door; she always comes out of your rooms.”

“Well, then, that must be how she gets here, mustn’t it?”

“But there’s no door to the outside from your rooms.” Jinx had looked all around the outside of the house.

“Perhaps she climbs in the window, then,” said Simon.

“Is there a secret passage back there?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret.”

“I think she must get here by magic,” said Jinx.

“That seems likely, doesn’t it? I think it’s time you swept out the loft.”

Sweeping out the loft meant Simon was tired of Jinx’s questions.

Jinx was sure that magic went on in the south wing, and he knew that the rooms contained the secret of where Sophie came from. As Jinx grew less afraid of witches and wizards, he grew more and more curious. But Simon never left the forbidden door unlocked. Jinx had tried to peer through the magic cat flap, but it knew he wasn’t a cat and it wouldn’t open for him.

One day when Jinx was eight years old, the three of them were walking in the Urwald together. They did this a lot. The feeling Jinx had had before, that the Urwald was reaching out to grab him, to pull him in and swallow him, had changed. He felt now that the forest enveloped him, as if he and it were part of a single, enormous living thing. He wasn’t afraid to stray from the path anymore—at least as long as he was with Simon and Sophie. The Truce of the Path protected you from monsters and other humans when you were on the path. But if you spent all your time being protected, you never got to find out anything new.

So the three of them left the path on their walks all the time and ventured deep into the Urwald.

“The Urwald isn’t just trees. People are part of it too,” Simon said.

“People used to be able to talk to the trees,” said Sophie. “I’ve read that. They used to know the trees’ language.”

“Oh, we still know a little,” said Simon. “Trees speak in the way their leaves rustle.”

Sophie smiled at Simon, but Jinx could see that she didn’t believe him. Jinx didn’t either. Trees
couldn’t
rustle their leaves, except in the wind.

“It’s more like they sort of are,” said Jinx.

“Are what?” said Sophie.

“
Are
. And then I think we have to figure out how to listen.”

“Listen to the leaves?” said Sophie.

“I think you’d kind of have to listen to their roots,” said Jinx. “If you wanted to hear trees talk.”

“Nonsense. You can’t listen to roots,” said Simon.

Sophie smiled, but Jinx could tell from the shape of their thoughts that they were both laughing at him.

“Anyway, there hasn’t been a Listener in a hundred years,” said Simon. “If there ever was such a thing.”

“You mean those people who talked to trees?” said Sophie.

“A myth,” said Simon.

Jinx hung back. He wanted to see if he was right about how trees spoke. Simon and Sophie walked on, speaking to each other in that other language, which always seemed to feel as strange to Simon’s mouth as Urwish felt to Sophie’s. Jinx let them go. He was more interested in the forest.

The leaves did move in the wind, but trees wouldn’t be able to see that, would they? They didn’t have eyes.

Two tree branches rubbed together, sounding nearly like a human voice. Jinx could almost understand something, but it felt more like it was coming up through his bare feet. Jinx dug his toes into the crumbling leaves that were rotting into soil, as if he were a tree taking root.

Now he could hear the trees quite clearly. They mumbled about grubs that ate their roots. They thought about rain and summer. Dirt interested them. And sunlight, which was very hard to get in the Urwald, unless you were old and tall. And … pain.

The pain came from the edge of the Urwald. Jinx hadn’t known there
was
an edge of the Urwald. He wondered what that was like—what lay beyond it? He buried his toes deeper into the soil. The pain was very far away. It—

There was a smell of dirty dogs. Jinx looked up. Werewolves. Three of them.

They were almost man-sized, standing on two legs. They grinned at Jinx, baring knife-sharp yellow fangs. Their claws were as sharp as their teeth. They moved toward Jinx.

He opened his mouth and said “Help.” It came out very quietly.

The werewolves barked bright red flares of greed and amusement.

Jinx took a step backward. The werewolves took a step forward.

Jinx took several more steps backward. The werewolves followed, grinning.

Jinx turned and ran. He heard the werewolves running along behind him. He felt their hot breath on his neck. One of them struck him with its claws, playfully, digging deep into his skin. Jinx ran harder. The werewolves kept up easily.

He wanted to scream for help, but he needed all his breath for running. He knew the werewolves could run faster than him, for longer than him. They were just amusing themselves until he dropped from exhaustion. Which would be soon. His lungs were sore from trying to gulp in enough air to keep running.

Then he tripped and fell.

He got up on his hands and knees and wondered why he wasn’t dead. He scrambled to his feet. He heard the sound of running claws scrabbling desperately over the forest floor. He turned and looked. An enormous yellow dragon was chasing the werewolves away.

Jinx felt very lucky that the dragon had wanted werewolves for lunch instead of boys. Then something grabbed him from behind.

“You idiot!” Simon turned him around and shook him. “I told you to stay with us! How many times did I tell you to stay with us?”

Sophie grabbed Jinx away from Simon and hugged him like he was a baby, which he should have minded but didn’t. “Leave him alone, Simon! He’s had a terrible fright.”

“So who hasn’t?” said Simon. His voice was all shaky, and Jinx, even though Simon wasn’t shaking him anymore, found himself still shaking. Especially his knees.

Sophie reached out an arm for Simon. “It was a wonderful dragon, dear,” she said. “But why was it yellow? Oh no, the poor child is bleeding.”

Jinx pulled away from her because being called a poor child was too much. “I’m all right.”

Actually the werewolf scratches hurt quite a bit. Sophie tied her handkerchief around Jinx’s arm.

They started home. Simon kept a firm grip on Jinx’s shoulder. Jinx didn’t mind much, because he kept expecting the forest to break out in werewolves at any moment.

“Those were werewolves?” said Sophie, speaking her own language. “The pictures I’ve seen show them looking more like wolves.”

“Some are more like wolves and some are more like people,” said Simon. “Magic has its uses, doesn’t it?”

“I never said it didn’t—”

“—not more than a thousand times, anyway—”

“—I just said it ought to be studied as theory—”

“If you just study magic as theory, you can’t conjure up a dragon illusion when you need one.”

“Well, it was a lovely illusion, dear—”

“Why didn’t you make us invisible?” Jinx said. “Like you did that time when—” And it was only because he was speaking Sophie’s language for the first time, and trying to get the words right, that he was able to stop himself in time. “That time with the trolls?”

He’d almost said
when the trolls took my stepfather
. And that was something Sophie probably wasn’t supposed to know about.

“Did Simon teach you to speak Samaran?” said Sophie, surprised.

“No, of course I didn’t,” said Simon.

“I just figured it out from listening,” said Jinx, putting his words in order carefully. Speaking it was a lot harder than listening to it. And he was still busy looking all around him for werewolves.

“How clever of you, Jinx!”

“Wouldn’t have worked,” said Simon. “The concealment spell just keeps things from noticing us. Those werewolves had already noticed you. I could have kept them from noticing Sophie and me. But not you.”

“So that other time, you kept the trolls from noticing us,” said Jinx.

Simon looked down at him hard, and Jinx looked back up, and they both knew that Jinx hadn’t added
but not my stepfather
.

Sophie probably wouldn’t have approved of letting trolls eat Bergthold. After all, she’d never met him.

Jinx wondered if he could learn to do magic. Simon was right: Magic was useful stuff. It could save you from trolls and werewolves.