Jinx's Magic Read online

  The front room was thick with dust. Were there footprints in it? Jinx couldn’t tell. Anyway, the table was right where it had been. Simon hadn’t come back.

  Jinx went through the book room to the enchanted door that led to the Urwald. Once he passed through it he’d be in the Urwald—and subject to the Bonemaster’s deathbinding curse.

  Suppose Simon had killed the Bonemaster, and triggered the curse? Then Simon was dead. What about Jinx? Would he drop dead when he opened the door? Or would he survive because he hadn’t been in the Urwald when the Bonemaster died?

  Jinx opened the door. So far, so good. He took a breath, which might be his last, and stepped into the stone hallway of Simon’s Urwald house. He was still alive.

  He lit a candle. Cats punched their heads against his knees and yowled. The workroom was exactly as Jinx had left it. He went out to the kitchen. There was no sign of Simon anywhere. He had never come back.

  Jinx went up the winding staircase to the Farseeing Window. He willed it to show him Simon, but it showed him nothing but the dark Urwald night.

  Jinx felt a longing to talk to someone. Elfwyn, for example. The window used to always show him Elfwyn, before he’d ever met her. It didn’t now.

  He put an aviot on the sill, and concentrated on the bespelled coin in Reven’s boot.

  Shapes moved in the darkness of the window. Gradually Jinx made out a boiling mass of fighting men and women, some armed with axes, some with swords, and some with sticks. Then the moon came out from behind a cloud, and he could see Eric the Lumberjack lying on the ground, not moving. Somewhere in that seething battle must be Reven, but Jinx couldn’t pick him out. He couldn’t see Elfwyn. He really hoped she wasn’t there. But she probably was. Thinking pink fluffy thoughts amid the mayhem.

  He put the aviot in his pocket, ending the spell. Then he stood looking into the window for a while, hoping it might show him what had happened to Simon. It didn’t.

  Maybe Simon had been captured by the Bonemaster. Or maybe Simon was, well, dead, in which case there wasn’t anything for Jinx to do but try to figure out how to do the bottle spell.

  The bottle! Why hadn’t Jinx thought of that before? Clutching the candle and tripping over cats, he rushed downstairs, through the kitchen, and up the stairs that led to Simon’s room. He knelt before the thirteenth step, said “Khththllkh,” and drew out the bottle containing Simon’s life.

  He examined it in the candlelight. The tiny Simon was sitting on the floor of the bottle, his arms around his knees, staring straight ahead. Was he dead? No, Jinx could see him breathing. But why was he just sitting there? He did sit down sometimes, it was true, but mostly he paced around. Jinx gave the bottle a shake.

  The figure didn’t glare at him as the real Simon would have. But then it had never seemed to notice what went on outside the bottle. Jinx pinged the bottle with his fingernail, but the figure didn’t look up.

  One of the cats rubbed its head against the bottle. Jinx shoved the cat away, and, clutching the bottle, ran down the steps to Simon’s workroom. He tore feverishly through the bookshelf till he found the Crimson Grimoire, the only book Simon had about the bottle spell.

  He turned the pages. Jinx found Qunthk impossible to understand. Usually languages just talked to him if he paid attention. Qunthk didn’t. It was the same language as the khththllkh spell, but that was about all he could tell. How had Simon ever learned it, anyway?

  Frustrated, Jinx tossed the book aside and gave the bottle a shake. The tiny Simon inside it fell over.

  Simon made no effort to get up. He just lay there. Still breathing.

  “Sorry,” said Jinx. He wondered whether he should shake the bottle some more to try to get Simon upright again.

  Probably not.

  But what did it mean?

  Jinx was going to have to decipher the book. He’d have to take it back to Samara with him, where having it was almost certainly illegal. Should he take Simon back, too?

  No, probably not. There were three spells protecting the bottle—the wards around the clearing, the door spell, and the khththllkh spell.

  Jinx went back up to the thirteenth step, scooped a cat out of the hollow under it, put the bottle away, and said the word to seal it in.

  The house felt impossibly lonely, and Jinx needed to talk to someone. Anyone who wasn’t a cat. He went outside. The night was cold and starlit. He crossed the clearing. He heard the trees murmur and whisper to each other, and that made him feel better.

  Trees didn’t get frustrated and upset like Jinx did, and he had to calm himself and slow his thoughts.

  Where’s Simon? he asked. But although the trees knew what Jinx meant by Simon—he’d taught them that—they didn’t know where he was, amid the vastness, any more than they knew where a particular porcupine or werewolf was.

  He told them about what he had seen in the bottle.

  Wizard’s magic, said the forest.

  Yes, said Jinx. But how do I find out what’s happened to Simon?

  He is not dead?

  I can’t tell. I have to read the red book. He explained to the trees what a book was—a spell for sending thoughts through time and space.

  Perhaps he’s gone dormant.

  I don’t think humans go dormant, said Jinx.

  Wizard’s magic, the trees murmured.

  Could the Bonemaster do something like that? Jinx almost asked, but then he decided it would be annoying to hear the trees say “wizard’s magic” again, as if that explained everything.

  Instead he asked the trees if they’d seen Elfwyn, and he showed them the idea of Elfwyn. But they had never noticed her.

  They weren’t much help. But there was one thing he could ask them.

  What does it mean to be a Listener?

  A Listener. There has always been a Listener. No, for many circles of years there was no Listener. The Listeners have deep roots. The Restless have no roots. Yes, they do. The trees’ argument with each other was a soft rustle, like wind in spring leaves.

  It was also not very informative.

  That girl you showed me before, the one who the tree branch reached down to touch . . . was she a Listener?

  The Listener, yes. The last Listener.

  Why was she the last?

  The last? But not the last. You are here, Listener, the trees murmured.

  What do Listeners do? said Jinx. Besides listen, obviously.

  They reach deep. Their roots explore. Their roots reach to the very base of the world. The joining. They grow high into the sky. They burn.

  They what? said Jinx.

  The flame. The wick. The Listener. Fire and ice.

  Would you mind saying something I can understand? said Jinx.

  To listen is to understand.

  No, it’s not, actually. What do you mean by burn? I don’t want to burn!

  You burn already, Listener. We have noticed this. The Restless always burn. But the Listener burns more.

  Jinx was somewhat relieved to hear that he was already burning. It meant the trees might be speaking figuratively. They did sometimes, especially when they were trying to get across ideas that Jinx, not being a tree, couldn’t really understand.

  Yes. To burn is to die, but also to make room for new life, said the forest.

  That did not sound encouraging. In fact, it sounded downright bad. And the trees weren’t going to explain it any better. Jinx could tell they weren’t. He lost patience.

  You know, you could try a little listening yourselves once in a while, he said. Are you saying this Listening stuff is going to kill me? What is it, anyway?

  Listen.

  No, said Jinx. He turned angrily and stalked back to the clearing, through Simon’s ward spell.

  Oh . . . the ward spell. It was all that was protecting Simon’s clearing from the Bonemaster.

  He felt his way into the ward spell. He understood now how he learned magic. He explored inside the spell and made it stronger. There was no way the Bonemaste
r could get through it, when Jinx was done. Neither could anybody else. Wait—there were people Jinx wanted to let in. The Wanderers. Ermentraud, who looked after the animals. And Elfwyn. Oh, and Simon and Sophie, of course. Jinx told the ward to let them through. But no one else.Then he went back into the house. Simon was nowhere to be found, the trees were getting weirder, and Elfwyn was probably off getting herself killed in some stupid revolution. He needed to find Sophie, and fast.

  Jinx was already back in the market square, the Crimson Grimoire hidden inside his shirt, when he noticed footsteps echoing his own. He turned around and looked up at Wendell.

  “Did you know someone was following you?” Wendell asked, politely. “Not me. Someone else.”

  Jinx’s heart sank. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, they were.” He pointed back toward the Eastern Crescent. “Moving through the shadows and along the rooftops. They followed you right up to the door of that house you went into.”

  “Um . . . oh,” said Jinx.

  “Just thought you’d want to know,” said Wendell.

  “Right,” said Jinx. “Thanks.”

  They walked back to the Temple in silence.

  18

  The Preceptress

  Jinx was in the Hutch library, sitting at a table with an enormous stack of books in front of him. This was to hide the fact that he was studying the Crimson Grimoire. He still couldn’t make anything of the language, and this struck him as really unfair. He wasn’t good at spells—he wasn’t good at a lot of stuff—but he was good at languages.

  A shadow fell across the page. Jinx looked up and met the cold gaze of a grim-faced gatekeeper.

  “You are to accompany me at once,” she said. “The Preceptress has summoned you.”

  Someone had followed him to Simon’s house. Did they know it was Simon’s house?

  Jinx closed the illegal book slowly.

  “At once,” the gatekeeper repeated. “Leave your books here.”

  Not a good idea. Jinx waited till the gatekeeper turned around, then he hid the red book under his shirt. There was no time to do anything else. He followed her through the Hutch to the locked iron door. The gatekeeper opened it with an enormous skeleton key.

  Jinx hadn’t seen the Temple from this end before—it felt old and grand, and for a moment he had a sense of himself as very temporary and unimportant. People didn’t matter; the Temple mattered. The Temple only needed people as vessels, to carry knowledge.

  They went down a corridor and up a broad marble staircase, past paintings of stern old scholars in dark robes. Jinx felt as if he was marching to his execution. Maybe he should have left the Crimson Grimoire behind.

  Scholars moved quietly through the halls, their robes brushing the floor. The gatekeeper scowled and opened a door. Jinx took a deep breath and went in to meet his doom.

  The room was full of scholars. Behind a great polished desk at the far end sat the Preceptress.

  She looked every bit as formidable as she had when he’d last seen her. She did not look like a woman who forgot things. Like, for example, faces.

  Don’t let her get a good look at you, Simon had said.

  There was a wide, empty expanse of floor, covered with a rich red carpet. In the center of it stood Satya.

  Jinx went over to Satya—still a good safe distance from the Preceptress. “What’s this all about?” he whispered.

  “Shh,” she said. Jinx could see that she was frightened.

  “You have forgotten to bow, Zinks,” said the Preceptress.

  Jinx put his hand to the front of his shirt and bowed, clutching the hidden book tightly. He was still about twenty feet away from the Preceptress.

  “So, Zinks, you understand why you have been summoned here?”

  “No,” said Jinx. Her thoughts were blurry at this distance, but her eyes were knife sharp. He felt certain she could see the book hidden under his shirt.

  “We are promoting you to scholar.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “Well, I haven’t been here long enough,” said Jinx.

  “We have received reports that you both show promise,” said the Preceptress. “In particular, Docent Omar has said that you raised some unusual points about government and the formation of nations. Therefore, he nominated you for scholarhood. You will endeavor not to disappoint us.”

  “Uh—sure,” said Jinx. “Right. Of course.”

  “Their robes,” said the Preceptress, turning to a red-robed man standing beside her.

  He came forward bearing folded garments and, with a bow, presented one to Satya and then one to Jinx.

  “You will put them on,” said the man.

  “Here?” said Jinx, looking around at all the watching scholars. The illegal book had slid down his shirt and been stopped by his belt.

  “Over your clothes,” the man specified.

  Jinx shrugged into the robe. It smelled of soap. It came down to the floor and a little farther, pooling around his feet.

  “You will need to hem that,” said the Preceptress. “All right then. You are now both scholars, with the rank and title of Questor. You will not return to the Lectors’ Square.”

  “Can we at least go back to the Hutch to visit?” Jinx didn’t want Wendell to think he’d abandoned him.

  “I see no reason why you should want to,” said the Preceptress. “You must devote yourselves to your studies now, and prove that you are not unworthy of the trust we have placed in you. You may go.”

  They went. Jinx wasn’t sure if the Preceptress had recognized him or not.

  As soon as they were out of the room, Satya dragged him into an alcove behind a statue of a pudgy scholar. “What do you think you’re doing? Arguing with the Preceptress like that!”

  “I wasn’t arguing,” said Jinx. “I was just asking her—”

  “The preceptors are already suspicious enough of both of us,” said Satya.

  “Suspicious about what? Why’d they promote us, then?” said Jinx.

  “How should I know? So they can keep an eye on us!” Satya frowned at the stone scholar’s bare feet. “Why’d they promote us so soon?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jinx. “Omar said we were both doing okay with the Fallacies and stuff.”

  “It just doesn’t feel right,” said Satya.

  “Why are you scared?”

  “I’m not.”

  Jinx didn’t contradict her. He’d learned from Elfwyn that people don’t necessarily appreciate being told how they feel. But Satya was definitely afraid . . . of something.

  At last, Jinx was free to do the things he’d been sent to Samara to do. But none of Simon’s tasks seemed as important now as finding Sophie.

  He searched the Temple frantically for her. He went through corridor after corridor, up and down winding staircases, through lecture halls and libraries. He saw hundreds, thousands of red-robed scholars. Not one of them was Sophie. It was maddening.

  When he had time to spare from looking for Sophie, he searched for the Eldritch Tome. He didn’t find it. He found a few books he thought might be about the bottle spell. They were all in Qunthk—that indecipherable khththllkh language.

  The main library was vast. Jinx had trouble finding anything among the long streets and alleys of books. There was a system, of course, but Jinx didn’t understand how it worked. He was used to Simon’s system, which was to cram as many books as possible into the shelves and stack the rest on the floor.

  He did not find any books on KnIP, the Samaran magic Simon wanted him to learn.

  There was a whole neighborhood—two streets and an alley—of books about the Urwald. Jinx looked for anything about elves, or werewolves, or, most especially, Listeners. He found nothing about elves, except a book with drawings of cute little people with peaked caps and belled shoes. These did not look like the elves Jinx almost remembered seeing.

  He found only one book that mentioned Listeners, but it seemed
to consider them an amusing legend, on a par with witches who rode broomsticks and girls who inadvertently turned their brothers into swans.

  There were many books about werewolves, but none that mentioned werewolves having names or wearing spectacles. The authors all seemed to think werewolves were a kind of animal. For example, here was a book called Differentiation in Werewolf Types of the Central Urwald. It talked about hides, limb lengths, claws versus hands, and the shapes of werewolves’ ears. Who had written this nonsense, anyway? Jinx flipped the book over to check the author’s name.

  Sophie Maya Simon.

  Jinx took the book up to a librarian.

  “Excuse me, Scribe Aboyomi,” he said, remembering to bow. “Do you know the lady who wrote this book?”

  She looked at the spine. “No.”

  “But—isn’t she a scholar here?”

  “She may have been, but it could have been ages ago. Centuries, even.”

  “The book looks new.” Jinx remembered that, a few years ago, Sophie hadn’t known the difference between kinds of werewolves, and had asked Simon about it.

  “Well, I don’t know the author,” said the librarian.

  She didn’t have clear, distinct thoughts like Omar, but they were clear enough for Jinx to see that she was lying. The name “Sophie” in her mind was locked in a grim, dank cube of foreboding.

  “Do you know who might know?” Jinx tried to keep the anxiety out of his voice.

  She frowned. “Why is it so important?”

  Jinx heard a sound and looked up. Satya was studying book titles on a shelf nearby. He lowered his voice.

  “Because it’s a really interesting book and—um—” Jinx couldn’t think what to say. “I just wondered about the lady who wrote it, that’s all.”

  Aboyomi had that puff of suspicion that they all did when he asked about Sophie—hers was a blue-green color—but then there was a little click, like she had just made up her mind.

  “Ask Professor Night,” she said. “Urwald Studies Department.”

  And she turned around firmly and went back to shelving books with great precision.

  Jinx took the book back to the table where he’d been working. Satya followed him, and sat down.