Jinx's Magic

by Sage Blackwood

“Hello, Zhinx.”

  Jinx grabbed a book, meaning to hide the hole, but it was too late. Satya was coming down the aisle between two bookshelves carrying a small blue volume and sipping a cup of tea.

  She set the cup down on the hole Jinx had made in the table. The cup sat there, on empty air.

  “What are you staring at?” she said.

  “Um, nothing.” Jinx had to fight the urge to reach his hand up through the table and grab the cup from underneath.

  “We’re allowed to have tea in the library.” She handed him the book. “Take a look at this.”

  The title was Internal Force Ratio of Torque Functions.

  “Uh, yeah?” said Jinx.

  Satya smiled. “Open it.”

  The book was handwritten in tiny, cramped script. Jinx had to put his head close to even make out that it was Qunthk.

  Satya turned back to the title page.

  There, in ordinary-sized writing, were the words, in Qunthk:

  The Eldritch Tome

  “Oh wow,” said Jinx. “Where did you find it?”

  Satya’s thoughts stepped behind each other. They slid around. She smiled. “Over there, with a bunch of other books with ‘torque’ in the title.”

  She wasn’t lying, exactly. Jinx had an idea that that was where she had found the book, but that that wasn’t the whole story. Maybe someone had told her to look there. He wondered who.

  Anyway. He had the Eldritch Tome. If he deciphered it, it would tell him how to undo the deathbindings, what strange thing the Bonemaster had done with his own life, and maybe even what had become of Simon. It seemed to Jinx that he could never thank Satya enough for finding the book. The trouble with having grown up with Simon was that it didn’t provide you with a lot of resources, politeness-wise. What would Reven have said in this situation?

  Just that, probably. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  Satya beamed. But she was still frightened—of something. She picked up her floating cup of tea and left.

  Jinx stuck his hand through the table to make sure there was really a hole. Yes, of course there was. He’d known there was.

  That’s it, Jinx thought. For Satya, there was no hole in the table. KnIP spells only work if you know they’re there.

  And it was just as well, because the librarians would probably take a dim view of people making holes in their tables. When Jinx tried to make the hole go away, he couldn’t.

  The trouble with the Eldritch Tome was that it was unreadable. Not just because of the tiny print and the strange language. It was, as Sophie would say, abstruse. Way more abstruse than any other magic book Jinx had ever read. It went along like this:

  Let life equal death, and let living leaf equal cold stone. Take leaf to life, and dearth to death, and seal the whole at the nadir of all things.

  Jinx couldn’t figure out what this meant. Maybe if he managed to rescue Sophie, she’d be able to explain it to him. After all, Sophie was pretty abstruse herself.

  Jinx practiced KnIP for the next couple of days. He got pretty good at creating spells—tiny spells. He didn’t have enough power to do more because he didn’t have enough knowledge.

  The more KnIP he did, the more clearly he saw his own knowledge—a woven ball that kept adding to itself, sending out threads that connected to other threads and looped around and caught old bits of knowledge and connected them to new bits and created completely different bits out of the connections.

  And he saw other people’s knowledge. He would’ve expected Satya to have more than Wendell. But she didn’t. They both had quite large amounts.

  But the adult scholars had more. Jinx figured it was just because the weaving and the connections had been going on for longer.

  Even Professor Night had more knowledge than Jinx did. But Omar, Jinx’s teacher from the Hutch, had more than Professor Night. Jinx was rather pleased by this, because he liked Omar.

  The preceptors had huge amounts of knowledge. They walked around in great glistening interwoven glowing spheres like dense matrices of golden wire. It wasn’t twice as much knowledge as Jinx had, or five times as much. It was a thousand times as much.

  How could a person ever know that much?

  Wendell had gone to do his guiding job. Jinx hoped he wouldn’t miss any gossip about Sophie’s trial. As for Jinx, he had to find a way to get back to the Urwald.

  There was no getting around it—if knowledge was the power that made KnIP work, Jinx just didn’t have enough. Sophie couldn’t escape from prison through a hole the size of a coffee cup—not unless Jinx turned her into a snake, and he definitely didn’t have enough knowledge to do that. Plus she would hate it.

  He needed Simon.

  It was two o’clock in the morning. Jinx went up the street of close-set doors. He put down the Eldritch Tome and tried the door to Simon’s house. It was shut as tight as before. Jinx thought into a possible future in which the door opened, and he knew that the future existed, and therefore he knew the door opened. Quickly, before the certainty could escape from him, he tugged at the door.

  It gave a little bit—what was stopping it this time was an ordinary lock, Jinx thought, not a magical one. Okay. Jinx knew there was a hole in the door. The hole appeared, and he reached through it and found a bolt. Which was odd. There had never been a bolt there before.

  Jinx slid back the bolt, picked up the Eldritch Tome, and stepped into the house. It was pitch dark.

  He heard a hasty sound from the room beyond, like a book being shoved onto a shelf. He moved toward the sound. The person in the book room was absolutely silent—but there. Jinx could see a blue-green cloud of fear. They were afraid of him? Good.

  “I can tell you’re here,” Jinx said. “Whoever you are.”

  Surprise, purple and pink, mixed with the blue-green fear. Then someone burst out of the room and shoved past Jinx, knocking him down. The Eldritch Tome went flying. The door to Samara opened and the footsteps ran out through it.

  Jinx scrambled to his feet and looked out onto the empty Samaran street. There was no sound and no sign of anybody. Hastily he felt around on the floor for the Eldritch Tome, and was relieved when his hand closed on it.

  Rattled, Jinx shut the door and latched it. His heart thudded in his ears. Someone had managed to get into Simon’s Samaran house. What had they found, and what did they know?

  Jinx went all through the Samaran part of the house, searching for thoughts and feelings. Nothing. He was alone.

  Well, there was no way he was hiding the Eldritch Tome under the sofa cushions now. Clutching it tightly, he opened the KnIP-hidden door into Simon’s Urwald house.

  Cats approached him, mewing and yowling. Jinx could tell from their complaints that Simon hadn’t come home.

  Jinx checked the Farseeing Window. He didn’t bother with the aviot, because he wasn’t interested in Reven right now. The window showed him nothing but the night darkness of the Urwald. He checked Simon’s bottle. The Simon figure was still lying on its side. Still breathing. Jinx locked the Eldritch Tome under the thirteenth step, beside the bottle.

  The house felt hugely empty and bereft, except for the cats. It was hard to believe it had ever had Simon in it. Jinx wondered if it had felt this way to Simon when Egbert the Onion died.

  But Simon couldn’t be, well, dead. As nearly as Jinx had been able to understand from the Crimson Grimoire, Simon’s lifeforce would become less visible when Simon died.

  There had to be an explanation. And Jinx knew where he would have to look for it.

  And he had to look now, because without Simon, Jinx wasn’t going to be able to rescue Sophie. He needed Simon. Simon would know what to do.

  He went and put on his warm Urwald clothes. He looked around for food and found some hopelessly desiccated apples and a chunk of extremely unlikely-looking cheese. That was odd. He didn’t remember the cheese from his last visit. Someone must have been in the house since then.

  He looked out the window. It was pitch dark.
He ought to wait for daylight before he started, but the house was cold and he was too nervous to sleep.

  He went out the front door, and began his journey to the Bonemaster’s house.

  21

  The Paths of Fire and Ice

  Jinx walked through the woods, off the path, in the dark. The last time he’d been in the Urwald, it had argued with him. The trees had told him he wasn’t listening, and he’d mentioned that they didn’t listen much themselves. The trees had said that Listeners burned.

  But now the trees murmured and whispered. The Urwald’s lifeforce filled and surrounded him. It calmed and warmed him. He felt safe, even when monsters passed by him in the dark and he had to stop and do a concealment spell.

  At dawn he reached a path. He noticed there were a few seedlings growing on it, which was a thing he had never seen before.

  He asked the trees About this burning stuff you mentioned before . . . is there any way I can keep from burning?

  You burn already, Listener. Seeds cannot grow without fire.

  Right. I know that, said Jinx. Or anyway some can’t. Lodgepole pines, for example. But I’m not a seed.

  Seeds are everywhere.

  The forest was being cryptic and no help at all. Still, Jinx preferred it to Samara, which had had a great forest’s lifeforce and lost it.

  Listeners leave, and gain knowledge, said the trees. Knowledge is power.

  What? Jinx tried to get the trees to explain, but they murmured and grumbled to each other. They had no idea they’d said anything important.

  He walked on, careful not to step on any seedlings.

  Jinx stopped once, in Badwater Clearing, to buy some of what passed for bread there.

  At least the people in Badwater Clearing didn’t slam their doors on him. Maybe the rumors about him hadn’t reached this far into the Urwald. They gathered around and watched him as he picked stones and husks out of the bread. Jinx saw curiosity, interest, suspicion—and grim gray clouds of Urwish fear.

  “You don’t like our bread?” a woman demanded.

  “No, it’s okay,” Jinx lied. “It’s good.”

  “Maybe not what fancy-dressed rich people are used to,” said another woman.

  Jinx bit into the bread. It was stale and took a lot of chewing. He swallowed painfully. It felt gritty in his throat.

  “You shouldn’t insult him,” said a girl. “He’s a very powerful magician.”

  With a start, Jinx recognized her. It was the girl who’d called him “sir” in Cold Oats Clearing.

  “Hilda! How did you get here?”

  “Walked, sir.”

  “You got away,” said Jinx. “Was everyone else—”

  “Thirty-two people were killed, sir,” said Hilda.

  Jinx thought about how much power the Bonemaster must have gotten from killing thirty-two people. “So how many got away?”

  “Twelve,” said Hilda. “Me and Silas came here—”

  There was a general harumph through the crowd.

  “Silas being my cousin,” said Hilda. “He’s four.”

  “He’s not even her brother,” someone muttered.

  “Where did the others go?” said Jinx.

  “I don’t know. We went in different directions, because we figured nobody was going to take us all in.”

  “Wait, are you the evil wizard who destroyed that clearing?” a man asked.

  Before Jinx could answer, someone else said, “Of course he ain’t, it was the Bonemaster that done that.”

  “How do we know he ain’t the Bonemaster?”

  “He can’t be, he’s just a kid.”

  “He can’t even be a wizard.”

  “He lifted an enormous fallen tree off our house,” said Hilda. “By magic.”

  They all looked at Jinx with a deep purple awe that was rather gratifying.

  “We had someone disappear in Bone Canyon last month,” said a man.

  “Did you go looking for them?” Jinx asked.

  “Why would we need to do that?” asked the man. “The Bonemaster got her.”

  “Well, to see if she was really dead. And to let the Bonemaster know you weren’t going to stand for it,” said Jinx. “If everyone banded together—”

  People began giving him angry looks.

  “Trolls could’ve got her,” another man said fairly.

  “Yes, we don’t know for sure.”

  But what they really meant, of course, was that they didn’t want to end up like Cold Oats Clearing.

  “Wait a minute,” said Merva, the woman who’d perpetrated the bread. “You ain’t the boy that turned an army of trolls into rocks, are you?”

  “No,” said Jinx.

  “We heard about somesuch happening over that way.” She gestured to the east. “Folks are strange over there.”

  Jinx gave up on trying to eat the bread. “People there are about like people here,” he said. “We’re all Urwalders.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t turn trolls into rocks?” said Merva. “Because the boy I heard done it had the same name as you.”

  “Sort of thing we could ask the Truthspeaker,” someone said.

  “Yeah, if the Truthspeaker was here, she’d know.”

  “I’m sure I didn’t turn anyone into rocks,” said Jinx. “Listen, there are people in the east trying to cut down the Urwald—”

  “I told you they were strange over there,” said Merva to a man standing next to her.

  “It’s not Urwalders doing the cutting, though,” said Jinx. “They’re—”

  “You just said we were all Urwalders,” said the man next to Merva.

  “We are!” said Jinx, getting frustrated. “But these other people are from Keyland, which is outside the Urwald—”

  “There’s an outside to the Urwald?”

  “’Course there is, it’s where them Wanderers come from,” said another woman.

  “What makes it outside of the Urwald, then? Why ain’t it the Urwald?” Merva demanded.

  “Because there are no trees there!” Jinx said. “Or at least hardly any. So the Keylanders come into the Urwald and cut down ours.”

  The people of Badwater Clearing looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “Well, like I said, folks are strange over that way,” Merva said.

  Jinx did not have time to waste trying to pound new ideas into the Badwater people’s heads. So he took his leave of them.

  He had just started down the path when a voice said, “Hey, wait up, um—what’s your name again?”

  Jinx stopped. A boy with the scraggly beginnings of a red beard came trotting up. Jinx had seen him hovering behind Hilda, listening.

  “Jinx. What’s yours?”

  “Nick. Listen, are you sure you didn’t turn anyone into stones?”

  “Completely sure,” said Jinx.

  “Oh.” A little blue cloud of disappointment.

  Jinx made a decision. If people were going to talk about him, it might as well be the truth. “I turned one guy into a tree.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “He was cutting down trees,” said Jinx. “He was one of a whole bunch of Keylanders that were cutting down the Urwald. But nobody cares.”

  “Like the Bonemaster,” said Nick.

  “What?” said Jinx, confused.

  “Nobody cares about the Bonemaster. I mean not enough to do something. It’s like we just keep quiet and hope he doesn’t kill us next, right? You heard what he did to Cold Oats Clearing, right?”

  “Yeah. Are you from there?”

  “No, but Hilda is.” There was a purple glow around the name “Hilda.” “And she’s told me all about it. It’ll keep happening unless we all stand together and fight back.”

  “Yup,” said Jinx.

  “There’s not much we can do,” said Nick. “But if you can turn people into trees, then—”

  “I can’t,” said Jinx. “Not the Bonemaster. He’s . . . well, kind of powerful.”

 
“You’ve been places, right? Are there people in other clearings that have talked about fighting back?” said Nick.

  “Um—I’m not sure.” Jinx didn’t want to discourage Nick when the guy was just talking himself into fighting.

  “Sometimes I think about going somewhere else. Folks in Badwater Clearing are mad because Hilda won’t get rid of Silas.”

  “Won’t abandon him in the forest, you mean.”

  “Right. I can understand her thinking. He’s all she’s got left. We’ve talked about going to Cold Oats Clearing, but we can’t live there alone, can we? We’d need more of us—it’s not safe to be just three people in a clearing. And one of them only Silas.”

  “I think it would be a really bad idea to go there with just the three of you,” said Jinx. “Listen, that Truthspeaker that people were talking about . . . have you seen her?”

  “Seen her?” Nick looked confused. “No. It’s just a tale that’s been going around. There’s this girl that only speaks the truth, no matter what. Anything she tells you, you can believe.”

  The rumor had gotten it wrong, but it sounded like Elfwyn. “You don’t know where she is?”

  “No, I don’t know if she’s even real. I mean a lot of things you hear are just tales.”

  Drat. So the story could be old, and not news about Elfwyn at all. “Look, I have to get going.”

  Nick looked crestfallen.

  “You understand that there’s a country called Keyland and that the people there want to cut down the Urwald?” Jinx asked.

  “Oh, sure,” said Nick, though there was a purple-pink tangle of confusion around his head. “It’s not the Urwald, and this is the Urwald, and we don’t want the trees cut down.”

  “And we’re Urwalders,” said Jinx. “And the Urwald is our country.”

  “We’re Urwalders,” Nick repeated. “Got it.”

  “Do you think you could try to explain it to those idio—to the people in your clearing?”

  “Sure,” said Nick. “And listen, if—well, if you’re ever looking for people that are willing to band together against the Bonemaster—well, it’s not much, but you can count on me and Hilda.”