Jinx Read online

  Jinx decided not to take Simon’s suggestion. He had to find out what these two magicians were up to. For all he knew, they were plotting to turn him into a toad and cook him up in a magic potion. He crept back downstairs, holding his breath for fear of being heard.

  Simon and the witch were looking at a little pile of dried-up twigs on the table.

  “I thought wormwood was poisonous,” said Simon.

  Poison?

  “Oh, it is,” said Dame Glammer. Her black eyes flashed up at Simon eagerly. “But it makes you fly, this kind.”

  Simon made a doubting gesture with his lips. “People can’t fly.”

  “All right, makes you think you’re flying.”

  “What use is that?” said Simon.

  Dame Glammer laughed, then leaned back in her chair, scattering cats, and swung her feet up onto the table. She wore a many-colored patchwork skirt that came down just over her knees and no further, so her legs in their thick woolen stockings showed to the world. Simon frowned at the feet, but the feet and Dame Glammer ignored this. She took a deep, satisfied swig of cider, and a mustache of foam stuck to her lip. She wiped it off with the back of her hand.

  “You take things too seriously, Simon. Sometimes magic is just for fun, you know.”

  “No.” Simon took a sip of cider and didn’t elaborate.

  “I don’t think even the Bonemaster can make flying potion,” said Dame Glammer.

  “He can’t.”

  The witch didn’t have that green flash of fear at the Bonemaster’s name—she had nothing. With a start Jinx realized that he couldn’t see any clouds around her at all. He’d never met anyone with invisible feelings before. That made her even more dangerous.

  “It’s like history repeating itself, isn’t it?” said Dame Glammer. “You’ve gone and found yourself a nice little chipmunk to gobble up, just like you were gobbled up by—”

  “Nonsense—gobbled up! I’m right here in front of you.” But the words came with jagged orange consternation.

  “Where’d you get him from, anyway?” said Dame Glammer, nodding at the doorway where Jinx was standing.

  “He came along,” said Simon. “Didn’t I tell you to go to bed, boy?”

  “What’re you going to use him for?” she asked. “If you’re not going to—”

  “He’ll work for me. He’ll keep the house clean,” said Simon, with another pointed glance at Dame Glammer’s feet.

  “Good eating on children,” said Dame Glammer. “I had a boy and a girl just this past autumn. Parents left ’em in the woods … well, you can imagine. I bewitched the house to make it look like gingerbread—”

  So that was how they did it! Jinx had always wondered why witches didn’t have a problem with animals coming to eat their gingerbread houses. And what happened when it rained.

  “That’s not funny,” said Simon. “You’re scaring the boy.”

  “Oh, I didn’t really eat them! Just made ’em think I was going to.” She cackled.

  Jinx thought probably she really had.

  “I’m not giving you dragon scales for that,” said Simon, nodding at the wormwood. “It’s not reasonable, Dame. You know I have to buy them direct from the dragon.”

  Dame Glammer grinned. “Why not give me the boy?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Saving him for the Bonemaster?”

  “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.” He nodded at the wormwood again. “Are we trading, or not?”

  “What will you give me?”

  “If you show me how to brew the wormwood, I may give you an ounce of cinnamon.”

  “Very well.” She swept the twigs into a red polka-dot kerchief.

  “Come into my workroom. You can show me now,” said Simon.

  There was a heavy oaken door in the wall opposite—Jinx supposed it must lead to the other tower. Simon went to it, then stopped and turned around.

  “Everything in the south wing is off limits, Jinx. My rooms are back here, and you are not allowed in them. Understand?”

  Jinx was immediately seized with a desire to see the off-limits rooms.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because there are dangerous things in here, and because I said so. Now go to bed. And don’t lie awake worrying about the gingerbread house—it’s not true.”

  Simon went through the heavy oaken door, leaving it half open for Dame Glammer to follow. Jinx inched forward, eager to get a look at the forbidden rooms. He caught a glimpse of a cold stone hall, and dark shadows dancing in flickering torchlight. But before he could see any more, Dame Glammer darted forward and grabbed him by the chin.

  “You seem like such a sweet little chipmunk. Such a shame a wizard’s gone and gotten ahold of you.”

  Her hand squeezed his face. Jinx jerked his head away, freeing himself.

  “Don’t you wonder what he’s going to do with you?”

  “He said he wants me to work for him.”

  “Shall I tell you what he really wants you for?” The witch grinned, and Jinx couldn’t tell if she was teasing him. Her thoughts remained frustratingly invisible.

  “Tell me,” he said. He was more curious than scared.

  “Ask nicely.”

  “Please tell me,” said Jinx, glaring at her.

  “Little boys are more use for spells than for work,” Dame Glammer said.

  “I don’t know any spells.”

  “Little boys are useful ingredients for spells.”

  Oh.

  “Are you coming or not?” Simon stuck his head back out into the kitchen and frowned. “You’re not scaring the boy again, are you?”

  “Oh no. He’s a very, very brave little chipmunk.” Dame Glammer grinned, and went into Simon’s rooms with her wormwood.

  Jinx was very watchful after Dame Glammer’s warning. But weeks went by, and Simon didn’t brew Jinx into a potion, and Jinx decided she’d just been trying to scare him after all.

  A lot of witches came to visit Simon. Jinx didn’t like it when they looked at him and cackled. But he listened hard to their conversations, which were all about spells and magic and, now and then, the Bonemaster. They said nothing new about the Bonemaster—just that he would suck your soul out with a straw and stack your bones up crisscross. Jinx could mostly see the colored clouds around the witches’ heads—Dame Glammer was the only one with invisible feelings.

  Wanderers came to stay too, but they insisted on camping outdoors in Simon’s clearing, although they did come in to use the bathroom. Jinx hadn’t met many Wanderers before. They bought and sold stuff, mostly, and Jinx’s clearing had been too poor to interest them. Jinx hung back in the shadows when they gathered around their campfire at night. He listened to their talk of other clearings, and journeys along the Path, and monsters they’d run into (and then run away from). They spoke in their own language, but Jinx found he could understand it if he listened.

  Jinx worked hard. He swept and scrubbed. He milked the goats, gathered eggs, and brought in firewood. He explored the clearing and as much of Simon’s house as he could. He wondered how he could get a look into the off-limits rooms.

  As for his own room, he didn’t like it. It was too cold and far away from everything. So he made a nest of blankets under the kitchen table, on top of the warm stone stove. Cats walked across him every night. But the kitchen smelled of cinnamon and cider, woodsmoke and cooking.

  It was nearly winter, and no one had turned the garden over yet. There were old, black, dead-looking weeds poking up through the thin snow. Jinx found a hoe and went to work.

  “No, no, no!”

  Simon came running out of the house, his purple robes flying. “Idiot!”

  He grabbed the hoe out of Jinx’s hands. Jinx braced himself, but Simon didn’t hit him.

  “What have you done to my night-blooming bindweed?” Simon knelt down on the ground. “These are supposed to be in the ground all winter!”

  “I’m sorry,” Jinx said, hastily.
r />   “Never mind sorry,” Simon said through clenched teeth. “Help me dig them back in. They’re very rare—I was lucky to get them to grow.”

  The dark purple cloud of a very bad mood surrounded Simon and blotted out the sunlight. Jinx got down and dug the plants back into the cold, damp dirt. His fingers ached with cold, and his nose ran and dripped down onto the plants, but he kept working and apologizing to Simon.

  “I’m sure you meant well,” said Simon. “You did rotten, but you meant well.”

  The thing that Jinx liked most about Simon, besides his cooking, was that he never hit Jinx at all. Not once. No matter what Jinx did and no matter how jaggedly orange or darkly purple the wizard’s moods got. This was something completely new in Jinx’s experience.

  At the top of the north tower was a round stone room with a big, dark window in it. It always seemed to be night behind this window. A chair sat facing it.

  One winter day, when the kitchen was full of Dame Glammer and she was cackling way too much, Jinx went up and sat in the chair. He saw himself reflected in the glass, a thin boy with black hair, brown eyes, and tan skin.

  Suddenly the window cleared—the night was gone. Jinx saw Simon’s clearing below, bright in morning sunlight. He could make out the tracks from Dame Glammer’s butter churn in the snow. Beyond the clearing the Urwald rose, trees hundreds of feet high. Jinx could see just a little way into its green darkness.

  Then, with a lurch, Jinx was seeing far into the forest. Tree branches zipped past him as if he were flying. He was hurtling through the trees so fast, he expected to be flattened against one at any second. Then he dove down and was rushing along the path, his eyes inches from the ground. He saw footprints, hoofprints, and clawprints frozen in the mud. A second later he was swooping upward, looking down through branches at a party of trolls running through the forest. Then the trolls were gone and he was watching a werebear climb a tree.

  Now he was hovering over a clearing, looking at a girl about his own age dressed in red, who was digging in a garden, turning the soil over for winter. He would have liked to watch her for longer, but already he was zooming through the trees again, at dizzying speeds—

  “Meow!”

  A cat jumped on him, and Jinx was so dizzy, he fell to the floor. He was back in the tower. He got shakily to his feet and saw Simon looking down at him.

  The wizard nodded at the window. “You want to be careful with that thing.”

  “What is it?” said Jinx.

  “The Farseeing Window.”

  “How does it work?”

  “You need a spell to control it,” Simon said. “If you want to keep an eye on someone in particular, they have to be connected to the other end of the spell. Otherwise the view just slides around.”

  “Could it show me my clearing?” Jinx asked. He wasn’t homesick exactly. Not entirely. He just thought he’d like to see how things were getting on there.

  “Probably, if it wants to,” said Simon. He rapped on the window, casually, as if the glass wasn’t worth more money than most people saw in their lives. “It’s got a mind of its own. Only shows you what it wants to. I think.”

  “Don’t you know?” said Jinx.

  Simon flickered irritation at him. “Of course I know. I just told you.”

  3

  Strange Feet

  Winter settled in to stay. Simon was away a lot. He went places, leaving Jinx alone with the cats, and he often came back in a foul mood. But when he was home, life was better. The wizard was terrifying, but gradually it became a homey, woolen-smelling terror, as comforting in its own way as the howling of a winter storm.

  Jinx liked storms—they put Simon into a cooking mood. Simon could go on cooking for hours—pies, bread, honey cakes, soup, stewed fruits, and baked apples—and Jinx stayed nearby, fetching things and cleaning up, and feeling safe inside the warm cloud that surrounded the wizard, even if he was usually pretty cranky.

  Jinx got used to the witches. Simon fed them and listened carefully to everything they had to say about magic, and then he usually disappeared into the south wing—perhaps to test what they’d told him. It was very lonely when Simon locked himself away for days at a time. Sometimes Jinx went up and gazed into the Farseeing Window, which never wanted to show him his home clearing but seemed to like showing him the little girl in the red hood.

  Jinx got into the habit of talking to her. Since she couldn’t hear him and didn’t even know he was watching her, he had to make up her parts of the conversation.

  “I wonder where he goes,” he said to the girl.

  But she had no more idea than Jinx did.

  Try as he might, Jinx hadn’t been able to see into the forbidden rooms. He had explored every other part of Simon’s house, inside and out. He had even climbed onto the roof of the shed that the goats and chickens lived in, and then slid off it into the snow—at first by accident, and then several more times on purpose. But he couldn’t get into the forbidden wing. Simon kept the door firmly locked at all times.

  Then sometimes Simon would come into the kitchen in the middle of the night, and Jinx would awaken to see the wizard’s gnarly feet. Jinx liked to crawl out from under the table and sit down and have some cider and a piece of bread and cheese in the dark with him. Neither of them said anything. They sipped and ate slowly, letting the night noises and the night chill slide around them, and now and then pushing a cat off the table.

  One night in the early spring Jinx awoke to see a different pair of feet. They were pretty feet, narrow and brown with nice neat toes that, unlike Simon’s, had nothing in common with tree roots.

  There was a clunk of things being put on the table, and then Simon’s feet appeared beside the new ones.

  “You were away for too long,” Simon said, quietly so as not to wake Jinx.

  “Only a week.” It was a lady’s voice.

  “It seemed longer.”

  Jinx didn’t know much about weeks and months—he knew what they were, but time ran together in a blur. Winter had come and gone since he’d been in Simon’s house. Longer than a week, then. And yet Jinx had never seen this lady’s feet before.

  “You know they don’t want me coming here,” said the lady.

  “Uh-huh. But you do it anyway.”

  An icky, silver-sweet feeling ran down the edges of the table and threatened to drip on Jinx. Alarmed, he gave a loud snore to remind Simon he was there.

  “What’s that?”

  “The boy. He sleeps under the table.”

  Jinx had his eyes shut tight when they both bent down to look at him. He didn’t need his eyes to see people’s feelings—feelings came through anyway, as a color or a sound or a shape. Sometimes even a taste.

  “‘The boy,’” the lady said. Suddenly the silver-sweet feeling had bristles in it. “Where did you get a boy from?”

  “I got him from his family. I paid a silver penny for him.”

  This, Jinx realized, was not actually, strictly speaking, the truth. Simon had certainly said he was going to pay a penny for Jinx, but then trolls had come along and saved Simon the money.

  “And what exactly do you need a boy for?” The lady’s voice came from above again; they were no longer peering at Jinx. She spoke with an accent, as if the Urwish words weren’t quite at home in her mouth.

  “He cleans up around the place. Brings in firewood. Things like that.”

  “A slave,” said the lady. Silver-sweet frozen, like February ice.

  “He’s not a slave. I’m going to pay him wages when he’s older.”

  “So this is why you’ve been keeping me out of the kitchen all winter. You’ve been hiding a boy.”

  “I knew you’d make a ridiculous fuss,” said Simon. “He’s just a boy.”

  Jinx was still wondering how the lady could have been in the house only a week ago if she hadn’t come through the kitchen. There were no other doors to the outside.

  “Anyway, he’s company,” said Simon. “Like the cats,
only less demanding.”

  “Children are not house pets, Simon. Why does he sleep under the table? You have plenty of rooms in this barn.”

  “I gave him a room—he won’t sleep in it. He likes it under the table. I put a cat-repellent spell under there for him.”

  Jinx had noticed that the cats that used to climb on him and wake him up no longer did so, but hadn’t known it was because Simon had cast a spell.

  “Anyway, it’s my business,” said Simon testily. “Which I thought we agreed was completely different from your business.”

  The silver-sweet feeling was entirely gone now, and Jinx wasn’t as pleased by its departure as he might’ve expected.

  “If you’re going to do anything evil, then it’s my business,” said the lady.

  “If I’m going to do anything evil, you’ll be the first to know. Jinx, get up,” said Simon, not raising his voice at all.

  He must’ve known Jinx wasn’t asleep. Jinx unrolled himself from his blankets and crawled out from under the table.

  A golden-brown lady in a dark red robe was sitting at the table. She smiled at Jinx. Her hair was shiny black and curly. Her eyes were like the night sky—Jinx even thought he saw a shooting star in one, before she blinked. She had a formidable nose.

  “This is Jinx,” said Simon. “As you can see, he’s perfectly healthy. I haven’t cut off any bits to use in spells. Jinx, this is Sophie. My wife.”

  “Your what?” said Jinx. He was still half asleep or he would have had the sense to say something more polite.

  “My wife,” said Simon. Jinx could feel amusement bursting in the wizard in little purple flashes—he was laughing at Jinx, but silently. He often did.

  “No,” said Jinx.

  “No what?” said Sophie. She was still smiling. Jinx felt a soft green kindness from her and liked it.

  “He means no, you’re not my wife,” said Simon. “Sit down, Jinx. Have some cider.”

  Jinx sat down and accepted the flagon of cider that Simon poured for him. He took a slice of pumpkin bread from the loaf on the table and turned it over in his hands. He had been exploring Simon’s house and clearing diligently for months, and he felt he would have noticed a wife.