Jinx (7 page)

“It’s completely unfair,” said the red-caped girl, in Jinx’s imagination.

“And the other day he says to me, ‘Why is it witches can do magic on living people more easily than wizards can?’ And I say, ‘I don’t know.’ Then I wait for him to tell me, right? But instead he goes, ‘Oh. I was hoping you would know.’ And I go, ‘Well, why can they?’ And he says, ‘I don’t know.’ And I say, ‘How’m I supposed to know if you don’t?’ and he goes, ‘I thought you might use your brain.’ How’m I supposed to use my brain to know things that he doesn’t?”

“I don’t know how you put up with it,” said the red-caped girl, somewhat admiringly.

“Oh, well. He’s mostly not that bad,” said Jinx. “He made me a good-luck charm to keep me safe in the forest.”

“I think you’re awfully brave to go out in the Urwald by yourself,” said the girl.

“Oh. Well. I’m not scared of it. After all, it’s where we live, right?”

“That’s why we know to be scared of it,” said the girl.

Jinx spent a lot of time in the forest with his toes in the dirt, listening to the tree roots. He was getting better at understanding them. The thoughts of the roots of trees crawled with worms and grubs, sucked at moisture, and wriggled at anthills. Still, it was company. The trees called people—and all other sorts of creatures—“the Restless.” They called Jinx “the Listener.” Those weren’t the exact words, but they were the general idea and the closest Jinx could get to it in human-talk.

The Restless didn’t interest them much, but they mentioned them now and then as annoyances, pressures on their root hairs—travelers on the paths, werewolves skulking in the moonlight, vampires pretending to be travelers, and trolls tearing their way through the Urwald, not caring if they broke someone’s branches or ripped someone’s bark.

These scraps of stories made Jinx nervous. But he wanted to see more of the world. And so he would wander farther and farther into the forest, always checking to make sure that he knew the way back to Simon’s house, always listening for footsteps or the snuffle of anything dangerous.

One day the trees were alarmed—some Restless just off the path were cutting up fallen trees for firewood, and not the right fallen trees. They were chopping up fine old trunks that the trees had actually been planning to eat themselves. The Urwald was angry.

Jinx crunched his way through the undergrowth until he came to the path. A party of Wanderers was camped there, busily chopping up fallen trees with axes.

“Stop!” Jinx yelled.

The Wanderers looked up. “It’s that wizard’s kid,” a boy said in his own language, and not nicely.

Jinx clambered up on the enormous dead trunk the boy was hacking at. “You can’t have this one. Take that one over there. It’s crushing some saplings anyway.” He pointed.

“Who taught you to speak Wanderer?” said one of the women.

“You guys did,” said Jinx. “But that’s not important. What’s important is you can’t chop this tree up, or the Urwald will get mad and take some awful kind of revenge on you.”

“Says who?” said the boy.

“Says the Urwald,” said Jinx. “If you cut off the limbs of this tree, people will lose their limbs. The trees said so.”

“Oh wonderful, he talks to trees,” said the woman, but she dragged her ax over to the other dead trunk.

“Don’t hurt those saplings,” said Jinx as the other Wanderers followed her.

“Bosses people around like he’s a bloody wizard himself,” the woman muttered.

The boy hung back. “What’s your name?”

“Jinx. What’s yours?”

“Tolliver. How old are you?”

“Eleven,” said Jinx.

“You are not.
I’m
eleven. You’re little.”

“I was eleven at the winter solstice.” Jinx
was
littler than Tolliver. This worried him.

“How did an evil wizard catch you?” said Tolliver.

“I just met him in the forest one time. He’s not evil.”

“What does he use you for? Does he drink your blood?”

“Wizards don’t drink blood,” said Jinx. “Vampires do that.”

“But he uses it in spells, right? Wizards use people’s blood and livers and things in spells—everybody knows that.”

“Then everybody’s wrong. Simon doesn’t do that. I’ve watched him do lots of spells, and he hasn’t used even one person’s liver.”

“Can you do spells?”

“Yes,” Jinx lied. Then, realizing Tolliver was about to ask him to do one, he added, “I’m not allowed to in front of other people, though.”

“Oh yeah?” Tolliver grinned, and Jinx saw that he knew Jinx was lying. “If you can do magic, you better stay out of the kingdoms. You know what they do to magicians there? They make them dance in red-hot iron shoes.”

“They do not.”

“Do too. I’ve seen it.”

“You have not.” Jinx was almost sure Tolliver was lying. His thoughts were a purple cloud of laughing at Jinx. Well, as long as he was going to be laughed at anyway … “What
are
the kingdoms?”

“Man, you never heard of the kingdoms?”

“That’s why I asked,” said Jinx. None of the books he’d read had mentioned them.

“They’re all around the Urwald. The biggest ones are Keyland and Bragwood. Keyland’s that way”—Tolliver pointed to the east—“and Bragwood is that way.” He pointed west.

“So what’s that way?” said Jinx, pointing south.

“Keyland. Mostly. And a little bit of Bragwood.”

“How about that way?” Jinx pointed north.

“Oh, all kinds of kingdoms,” said Tolliver airily, so Jinx guessed he didn’t know. “Anyway, you want to stay out of Keyland. They’ll kill any kind of magician there. They kill everybody. The king killed his brother—”

“Kings are just in stories,” said Jinx.

“No they’re not; shut up and listen. The king killed his brother, who was actually king, so that
he
could be king. Then the dead king’s wife and baby disappeared, on account the baby would’ve been king, so the brother probably killed them, too. They do that kind of thing all the time, kings do. They can kill anybody they don’t like.”

“What did you want to be in a place like that for?” said Jinx.

“Man, that’s where everything comes from. That’s where we get that paper that your wizard likes so much. And that blue cloth you’re wearing. When you outgrow those clothes—
if
you do—we’ll sell ’em to some other clearing, and then when they wear ’em out, we’ll sell ’em back in Keyland to be made into paper. Haven’t you ever been anywhere?”

“Of course,” said Jinx.

“Where?”

“Oh, around.”

“If you never go anywhere, you’ll always be stupid,” said Tolliver.

“I’m not stupid!” said Jinx. But he could see Tolliver’s point. Tolliver clearly knew all sorts of things that Jinx didn’t, and it was probably from having been places.

“I can’t do it.” Jinx pushed away the book he’d been trying to levitate.

“Of course you can’t if you think you can’t,” said Simon.

“I know I can’t.”

“Bah. Even worse. Don’t waste my time,” said Simon. “You levitated a rock, a bottle, and a spoon. What’s the problem?”

“The book weighs more.”

“So draw on more power.”

“I don’t have more power.”

Simon uttered one of his favorite swear words. “Use the fire. You’ve always got the fire.”

The fire was the only spell Jinx had managed to learn besides levitation. He could set things on fire, and then put the fire out by reabsorbing it into himself. As long as it wasn’t a big fire. And whenever the fire wasn’t burning, it was inside Jinx—this in itself was power, according to Simon. A very small power.

“I can’t find the fire,” said Jinx.

“Of course you can. It’s right there.” Simon pointed at Jinx. “Can’t you feel it?”

“No,” said Jinx, frustrated. Simon kept insisting power was something you could sense—practically
see
—and Jinx had no idea what he meant.

Jinx couldn’t open and close doors with magic. He couldn’t use magic to split firewood. He couldn’t levitate any living thing—he’d tried on kittens—because its lifeforce countermanded what little power he had. He certainly couldn’t make illusions. And worst of all, he couldn’t do the concealment spell that Simon had used to save himself and Jinx from the trolls.

“Can we try the concealment spell again?” said Jinx.

“For whatever good it’ll do. Go ahead.”

How’m I supposed to think I can do it when
you
know I can’t?
Jinx didn’t say this. He went to the middle of the room, stood in the center, and tried to draw power from the fire inside him. Power and concentration. He concentrated hard on not being there.

“No good,” said Simon. “You’re as there as you ever were.”

“I don’t have enough magic.”

“Magic isn’t something you
have
. It’s something you do. Or in your case, don’t do.”

“I can understand the trees, though,” said Jinx, defending himself.

“Nonsense.” Simon turned back to his books.

“I can too. They told me—” Jinx remembered his conversation with Tolliver. “Are there countries outside the Urwald?”

“Of course.”

“With kings? Um, Bragwood and Keyland?”

“Among others, yes.”

“Why aren’t they in your books?”

“Oh, they’re in there somewhere. They’re just not very interesting places,” said Simon.

“Why are so many books about the Urwald?”

“Because it’s more interesting, of course,” said Simon, flipping open a book. “If you’re not going to do the concealment spell, go muck out the goats’ shed.”

Jinx remembered something else Tolliver had said. “Do you think I’m small?”

“Of course you’re—” Simon stopped and looked down at Jinx in surprise, as if he hadn’t seen him in a long time. “Hm. Didn’t you use to be a lot smaller?”

“Yes,” said Jinx. “Because I used to be six.”

“How old are you now?”

“Eleven. You made pumpkin pie on my birthday,” Jinx reminded him. “But am I
too
small?”

“No, no, you’ll grow.” Simon’s thoughts were twisting around again, crawling over one another. If Jinx was worried about not growing, it seemed like Simon was just as worried about him growing.

For some weeks after that Simon took to paging furiously through stacks of books about magic. But when Jinx asked him what he was looking for, Simon just grunted or told him to go sweep out the loft.

It was ages before Simon finally agreed to take Jinx on one of his journeys.

“Where are we going?”

“If you’re going to pester me with a whole lot of questions, I’ll leave you home.”

Jinx didn’t think just asking where they were going counted as pestering, but he shut up. The next thing he’d been going to ask was
Does this have something to do with the Bonemaster?

Simon didn’t have the green-bottle-shaped fear of the Bonemaster that most people did. But his Bonemaster thoughts tended to be angry. And for some reason now they were mixed up with those worries about Jinx growing.

Anyway, Jinx was finally going somewhere. That was the important thing.

They walked all the short winter day. There were tracks in the snow on the path, stamped in by boots, claws, and cloven hooves. Once they met a man carrying an ax over his shoulder, and though he was probably just a woodcutter, you could never be sure in the Urwald. Jinx drew closer to Simon and was gratified by the look of terror the stranger cast at the wizard. They passed each other without speaking.

The winter day was never very bright, and it darkened quickly.

“Here we go,” said Simon, stopping suddenly. “We’ll spend the night in this tree house.”

Jinx looked up through branches laced with snow, purple in the gathering dusk. He could make out a sort of box.

“Now to figure out how to get up,” said Simon.

There was a distant thumping sound from farther up the path.

“Something’s coming,” said Jinx.

“Mm,” said Simon, ignoring him. He ran his hands over the tree trunk.

The thumping grew louder—a small thump followed by a bigger one.
Ker
thump
,
ker
thump
.

“It’s something big and heavy,” Jinx added.

“It looks like if I boost you up, you can probably grab that broken branch up there,” said Simon. “When you get up to the tree house, you can tie this rope to a branch, and I’ll climb up.”

“It’s getting closer,” said Jinx.

“Well, hurry up then, boy, don’t dawdle.” Simon handed Jinx a coil of rope, then made a stirrup of his hands. “Ouch. You couldn’t have brushed the snow off your boots?”

With the rope looped over his shoulder, Jinx teetered one-footed in Simon’s hands and groped for the broken branch Simon had pointed out. His hands closed around the rough bark. He tried to pull himself up.

The thumping grew louder.