Jinx's Magic
Page 26
“The abstrusity is meant to slow us down, I’m sure,” she said. “It probably makes perfect sense to elves.”
“Elves?” said Jinx.
“Elves wrote this, presumably,” said Sophie. “Since it’s in Qunthk, or Eldritch.”
Jinx had a sudden memory of elves speaking a snarly language that he now realized could only be Qunthk.
And they’d talked about wicks, he remembered. They’d said Jinx and the Bonemaster had chosen themselves.
“If it’s an elf book, I wonder if it explains anything about . . . the balance and the fire and ice and all that,” said Jinx.
“It might, if we can figure it out. What about that red book of Simon’s?” said Sophie. “Is it any better?”
“Yes, but I left it in Samara.”
“You what?”
“I was going back to the Temple to get it before we rescued you, and that’s when the Preceptress caught me. And she recognized me. After that, I couldn’t go back.”
“But we need that book!” said Sophie.
“I’ll get it,” said Wendell.
“You can’t,” said Jinx and Sophie together.
“Sure I can. Where’d you leave it?”
“In my room in the Temple. Under the mattress. You can’t go to the Temple, you’ll be recognized and anyway, there’s no way the gatekeepers would let you in.”
“There may be other people I can ask,” said Sophie carefully.
“Well, I’ll be happy to help out those ‘other people,’” said Wendell.
“You don’t want to join the Mistletoe Alliance,” Jinx told him. “They won’t even try to rescue you if you get caught.”
“Jinx, we don’t talk about the Company,” said Sophie.
“I don’t care about the Mistletoe Alliance’s rules,” said Jinx. “They weren’t even going to rescue you, you know.”
“The Company doesn’t rescue people.”
“Yeah, I had that explained to me.” He turned to Wendell. “Seriously, you don’t want to get involved with them. And anyway, I bet there are lots of Mistletoe Alliance spies inside the Temple who could get it.” He looked at Sophie. “Aren’t there? They smuggle books out and store them in Simon’s Samaran house? They change the covers of books to hide them in the Temple library?”
“Not ‘lots.’ But there may be one or two people who could help us.” She frowned. “Jinx, the portal that you made—I don’t understand how you did it. You don’t really have enough knowledge.”
“I used the preceptors’.” Jinx described how he’d drawn on the enormous networks of golden wire.
“You can see knowledge?”
“Sure.” Jinx shrugged. “Everyone can who can do KnIP.”
“I don’t think so,” said Sophie. “And I don’t think everyone can draw on other people’s knowledge for power, either.”
“Oh,” said Jinx.
“Exactly how much magic can you do, Jinx?”
Jinx told her.
He only left out the seeing-thoughts part, because that was kind of awkward to talk about.
“All of that?” A purple blop of surprise, but only a very small one, Jinx noticed. “That must be very unusual, Jinx.”
“But I don’t really know it all,” said Jinx. “A lot of it’s only kind of half there and I don’t understand it and stuff.”
“We’ll figure it out.” Sophie peered at the Eldritch Tome, then stood up. “I need a magnifying glass. There’s one in the book room.”
“But the book room is in Samara,” said Jinx, to her back. He heard her go through the KnIP door and into the Samaran house.
“I should be getting back,” said Wendell. “I just hope I haven’t lost any guiding jobs while I’ve been gone.”
“The Preceptress will recognize you if she sees you again.”
“So I won’t let her see me. Besides,” he said, in the kind of casual off-hand voice that didn’t conceal that this was the main point, “somebody’s got to find Satya and tell her we’re all right.”
“That’s not worth dying for,” said Jinx. “And neither’s getting that stupid red book. Look, I’ll feel rotten if I get you killed.”
“You, get me killed? You saved my life. You got me out of the Hutch.”
“You weren’t dying there,” said Jinx.
“Not where it showed.” Wendell picked up Simon and frowned at him. “My family’s going to disown me, of course. But that means I never have to eat dinner with Grandpa ever again.”
Jinx thought they’d better get one thing clear before Wendell went and got himself boiled in oil for nothing. “Satya’s um—” He wasn’t sure how to put this. “She’s not thinking pink fluffy thoughts about you.”
“I wouldn’t expect her to. She’s not a pink fluffy kind of person.”
Jinx was surprised. He had to admit to himself that he didn’t know much about pink fluffy stuff, and he wondered if Wendell could be right. Probably not. Jinx was the one who could see such things, after all. And he was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to waste time following around a girl who didn’t think pink fluffy thoughts about him. He thought of Elfwyn. For example. It would be useless him thinking that kind of thoughts about Elfwyn—for example—because she definitely was not thinking any thoughts at him that were at all pink, or the least bit fluffy.
“Yeah, but another girl I know,” Jinx said, “she’s also not a pink fluffy kind of person, and she still thinks pink fluffy thoughts. About some people.”
Wendell shrugged. “Well, sometimes people just aren’t themselves. So this is really the wizard you’re apprenticed to?”
“Essentially,” said Jinx. He took the bottle from Wendell. The tiny, somnolent Simon seemed like the biggest problem he’d ever faced in his life. There had to be a way to get Simon back. Maybe Sophie would find something in the Eldritch Tome. But would she find it in time?
There were a few other problems, too. Reven, who was going to invade the Urwald. The Urwald itself, which was taking back the paths and denying the Ancient Agreement. And, of course, the Bonemaster.
“How do I get back to Samara?” said Wendell.
“Oh, there’s a KnIP portal right downstairs,” said Jinx. “But it goes to the house that the preceptors sometimes have watched, so we’ll need to be careful.”
“Will I be able to come back here?” said Wendell.
“Hopefully,” said Jinx. “We’ll figure something out.”
“Can’t you make another door into Samara from somewhere else?”
“No,” said Jinx. “I don’t have enough power.”
“I figured,” said Wendell, with a shrug. “I figured that was why we had to walk here from Dame Glammer’s house, instead of you just making a door.”
“That wouldn’t have worked,” said Jinx. “Because—”
“Yeah, I figured it wouldn’t have worked.”
“Because—” Jinx stopped. Because why, exactly?
It wouldn’t take a huge knowledge bomb like the preceptors’ to do that. Would it? It wouldn’t be as easy as making a hole in a wall, but it should be easier than breaching a dimension. If he could do it, he could travel anywhere in the Urwald in an instant. He could even connect the clearings by a new kind of path.
“Oh, wow,” he said.
About the Author
SAGE BLACKWOOD lives at the edge of a large forest, with thousands of books and a very old dog, and enjoys carpentry, cooking, and walking in the woods of New York State.
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Jinx
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Cover art © 2014 by Iacopo Bruno
Copyright
Jinx’s Magic
Copyright © 2014 by Karen Schwabach
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blackwood, Sage.
Jinx’s magic / Sage Blackwood. — First edition.
pages cm
Sequel to: Jinx.
Summary: “A young wizard’s apprentice, Jinx, learns that his forest home, the Urwald, is under threat, and to save it he must travel to a new land”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-06-212993-2 (hardcover bdg.)
[1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Wizards—Fiction. 3. Orphans—Fiction. 4. Forests and forestry—Fiction. 5. Fantasy.] I. Title.
PZ7.B5345Jl 2014
2013010171
[Fic]—dc23
CIP
AC
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EPUB Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780062129956
13 14 15 16 17 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
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