Jinx

by Sage Blackwood

  Jinx crept toward the door of the workroom and was just about to peer around it when Simon burst out of the wall and walked down the corridor.

  “—probably some in the kitchen,” Simon said. He was speaking over his shoulder, his head turned away from Jinx.

  Jinx jumped behind the door just in time.

  “Is Jinx out there?” said Sophie. She came down the corridor too. “I must say hello to Jinx.”

  Now they were both in the kitchen. Jinx peered around the doorway again. How had they walked through a stone wall? Fascinated, Jinx slid out into the corridor. Listening hard for any change in the sounds from the kitchen, he ran his hands over the blank wall. It was solid stone. He felt around for an invisible doorway. There wasn’t one—this was a smooth stone wall, just what it looked like. But somehow Simon and Sophie had walked through it. And Sophie had arrived at the house when Simon wasn’t expecting her. This wall had to be the answer to the secret of Sophie’s comings and goings.

  And it might be a way Jinx could get out of the south wing without Simon seeing him.

  But it felt and looked and smelled like a stone wall. Jinx almost smacked his hand against it in frustration, then realized that that would make a noise.

  Jinx was trapped. He went back to the workroom and over to the window. Diamonds of thick, wavy glass were set into a lattice. He could see a latch, too high up for him to reach.

  He’d have to hide under the workbench until Sophie and Simon went somewhere else. He crawled under it and sat down.

  Beside him on the floor was a green-glazed jar. Jinx hadn’t noticed it before in the mess. There were some sort of red markings on the outside of it. Curious, he pulled at the lid of the jar—it came off easily.

  Fiery pain stabbed into Jinx’s hand.

  A swarm of wasps buzzed out of the jar. In an instant they were all over Jinx. Jinx leaped to his feet, hitting his head on the workbench, and swatted at the wasps with his hands. He got stung in the hand again. Then one stung him in the neck and one on the leg.

  Then, suddenly, he couldn’t move.

  “I thought something smelled wrong in here.”

  Jagged orange anger. Jinx couldn’t turn around to face Simon. Neither his arms nor his legs would move. His neck and hands still seemed to have some freedom, but with wasps crawling all over him, Jinx felt it was best to stay completely still.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to come in here? I’m sure I did.” The sharp edges of Simon’s anger cut his words neatly apart.

  Jinx felt a wasp walking across his upper lip and decided it wouldn’t be safe to say anything.

  Sophie’s footsteps sounded in the hall. “Simon! What have you done to that poor boy?”

  Simon didn’t answer. Jinx could feel them both staring at his back now, and he would have liked to be anywhere else in the world.

  “Simon, you’ve frozen him,” said Sophie.

  “No, I haven’t. I’ve told you before, it’s very difficult to work spells on living human beings.”

  “Then why isn’t he moving?”

  “I’ve frozen his clothes.”

  That was it, Jinx realized. His clothes weren’t frozen, because they weren’t cold, but they were as inflexible as iron. A wasp crawled up his left cheek and waved its antennae before his eye.

  “You’ve no right to work magic on the boy.”

  “Right. Or on anybody or anything,” said Simon crisply. “I know.”

  “Simon—”

  “There are dangerous things in this room. He needs to stay away from them.”

  Simon’s tone made it clear that the most dangerous thing in the room was Simon. Jinx was trying to think up a perfectly reasonable explanation for what he was doing in Simon’s workroom—something involving the cats, possibly. But he couldn’t open his mouth to speak—there were wasps crawling on it.

  “It’s human nature to explore,” said Sophie. “You can’t fault him for that.”

  “Actually, I can. And if you want to keep sticking your nose into my business, perhaps you should come and live here.”

  “I don’t want to live here,” said Sophie. “It’s too cold. And don’t make fun of my nose.”

  A wasp crept down Jinx’s neck and into the stiffened collar of his shirt.

  “I did not say anything about your nose.”

  “You did, you said—”

  “That was just an expression!”

  There was a wasp on Jinx’s nose now. It was the one that had been looking him in the eye—it had marched across his cheek, and now he was staring at it cross-eyed. The one that had crawled into his shirt was stalking across his collarbone, each footstep sharp with the anticipation of another sting. The stings he’d already gotten throbbed. Earnestly Jinx willed Sophie to stop bickering with Simon and remember Jinx—he was pretty sure Simon would never unfreeze Jinx if Sophie didn’t make him.

  “Simon, would you please unfreeze that child,” said Sophie.

  There was a pause that felt something like a shrug.

  “Seeing as you ask nicely,” said Simon.

  Jinx’s clothes hung limp on him again. He stayed in exactly the same position as before. No point in upsetting the wasps.

  “He’s still not moving,” said Sophie. She came toward him. “Jinx, are you all r—Ow! Simon, this child is covered with wasps!”

  “He must have opened the wasp jar,” said Simon.

  “You keep wasps in a jar?”

  “Not exactly,” said Simon, in an it’s-too-complicated-to-explain tone.

  “Take these wasps off this child at once!”

  There was another pause, and Jinx felt Simon giving his wife a long, slow stare, with rage boiling out of it.

  “All right, please take the wasps off the child,” said Sophie. “Would you please.”

  The wasps flew up off Jinx—even the one in his shirt came buzzing out—and then they vanished.

  “Why did you open this jar, Jinx?” Sophie asked, stooping to pick it up. “It says ‘Danger.’”

  “That’s just human nature,” Simon said.

  “I didn’t hear it say anything,” said Jinx.

  “You didn’t what?” Sophie held up the jar and shook it at Jinx. “It says ‘Danger’ right on it in red letters.” She turned to Simon. “Are you telling me this child can’t read?”

  Jinx was taken aback by the white-hot flame of anger she sent at Simon.

  “People don’t read in the Urwald,” said Simon.

  “You’re as bad as the rest of them! Hiding knowledge! And this isn’t exactly the Urwald!”

  “Of course it’s the Urwald,” said Simon bitterly. “You think I would have been allowed to put my house anywhere else?”

  “Wizards read,” said Sophie. “You could read before you ever came to Samara, looking for all your magical answers. Knowledge is power.” She threw the three words at him like a challenge, and they hung in the air between them, hovering on an updraft of fury.

  The room rippled with anger, and even though none of it was directed at Jinx now, it still made his stomach hurt. The words knowledge is power stood out at the front of both of their minds, and Jinx sensed that those words were prickly and too hot to touch.

  “You think I’m as bad as them,” said Simon at last. “And they think I’m worse.”

  “Of course I don’t,” said Sophie. Her voice was all shaky. “But if you don’t teach the boy to read—well, that’s just what they would do. They think innocence is so charming when it’s on other people.”

  Jinx didn’t know anything about this reading stuff. He wished Sophie would tell Simon to teach him magic instead. But there was no way she’d do that. She barely approved of Simon knowing magic.

  “You owe him something. You brought him here, you took him from his people—”

  “They were going to kill him,” said Simon.

  “They what?”

  “Were going to kill him.”

  Sophie turned to Jinx. “Is that true, Jinx?”
>
  Jinx still hadn’t moved. He felt as if he had wasps on him. He would probably feel for weeks as if he had wasps on him. Probably forever.

  “What did you do to him? He can’t talk!”

  “He can talk. Answer her, Jinx.”

  Jinx had been stunned by Simon’s words. They were going to kill him. The people in his clearing hadn’t tried to kill him! Nobody had threatened him with an ax or a knife. And it was only Bergthold who had taken him out into the woods to abandon him—it wasn’t all the people in Jinx’s clearing. But … nobody had tried to stop Bergthold from doing it, had they? And, face it, it was generally understood that when people were taken into the Urwald to be abandoned, nobody ever heard anything about them again.

  “Yes,” said Jinx. He’d never thought about it that way before.

  “Why would anyone want to kill such a sweet little child?” said Sophie.

  Jinx cringed inwardly at being called a sweet little child. It was like having wasps crawling inside your skull.

  “Probably because he was snooping around in people’s private workrooms, messing with their stuff,” said Simon.

  “Then—then that was a really good thing you did,” said Sophie. “Taking him in, I mean. Buying him.”

  “Try not to sound so surprised,” said Simon.

  “You saved his life.”

  “Even us evil wizards have our good days.”

  The anger in the room was drawing back now, toward the walls, and a peaceful, warm, blue feeling was coming into the room. Jinx finally moved. He felt stiff and achy from the wasp stings.

  “You are going to teach him to read, aren’t you?” said Sophie.

  “Will you teach me magic, too?” Jinx blurted.

  There was a silence that was filled with Sophie’s orange-green annoyance and a bright blue bottle-shaped blob of surprise from the wizard. It was clear he’d never thought of that before.

  “Simon, you can’t—”

  “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” Simon said. “He’s my boy. I found him.”

  That sounded fairly close to yes.

  6

  A Journey in the Snow

  Jinx learned to read quickly, which was fortunate because Simon was not a particularly patient teacher. He didn’t get angry when Jinx had trouble understanding things—instead, he assumed that Jinx was too stupid to understand and gave up. But it didn’t take long for Jinx to figure out that the letters and sounds that Simon was teaching him were actually a sort of obstacle that you had to get around in order to listen to what the book was saying. After that, reading was easy. And fascinating—Jinx read about magic and about strange lands beyond the Urwald.

  The door to Simon’s rooms was no longer locked, and now Jinx was allowed in—and had to sweep and dust those rooms as well. Jinx suspected that before, Simon had kept them swept and dusted by magic. Now he expected Jinx to do it, by broom and brush.

  But Jinx didn’t mind, because he got to watch Simon do magic—mix potions, burn dry twisty things that made purple smoke, and leaf endlessly through a red leather-bound book muttering to himself. The wizard spent a lot of time trying different spells and, it seemed to Jinx, inventing new ones. Sometimes he wouldn’t remember to tell Jinx to go to bed till nearly midnight.

  The stone wall that Jinx had heard Simon and Sophie walk through remained a stone wall. Jinx thought of asking Simon if he wanted Jinx to clean the rooms behind it—but he didn’t dare. There was something in Simon that was like a stone wall too, and you couldn’t ask the questions that led beyond it.

  “Don’t touch any of the things on the shelves,” Simon said. “They might kill you.”

  Jinx knew now that most of the jars said DANGER on them, and some said it in larger, firmer letters than the wasp jar did.

  A lot of the time Simon just sat on a high stool, boringly writing away in a book. Jinx sat on the floor beside the skull and read whatever books Simon would let him. Sometimes when he reached for a book, Simon would glance up briefly and say, “Not that one.”

  And sometimes, if Simon said that, Jinx waited till another time when the wizard wasn’t paying quite so much attention.

  If Simon said nothing, Jinx would take the book, open it very cautiously in case it burst into flames, and read. Some of the books were in neither Urwish nor Samaran, but in some other language. This didn’t matter as long as you listened to the books, he realized. He wondered how many languages there were in the world, and how many places besides the Urwald.

  When Sophie was visiting, she always asked Jinx about his reading. Sometimes she talked to him using the languages he’d only read in books. Jinx listened carefully—the words weren’t pronounced quite the way he’d expected—before answering her.

  “Simon, the boy’s taught himself four languages,” Sophie said.

  “Mm,” said Simon.

  Some of the books they discussed were in Samaran. A lot of these were about magic, and Jinx supposed Samara must be a very magical place. But when Jinx asked Sophie questions about Samara, she frowned.

  “Samara’s not important, Jinx. Read about the Urwald.”

  “It must be important,” said Jinx. “You live there, don’t you?”

  Sophie thought flip-floppy blue-and-silver thoughts, like she was nervous. “Jinx, Urwalders don’t belong in Samara.”

  “Why not?” They were speaking Samaran, and Jinx had just read a Samaran book, something about elephants, a magical beast he thought he would very much like to see.

  “Because we’re not wanted there,” Simon snapped, not looking up from his writing. “Go sweep out the loft, Jinx.”

  Mostly Simon just left Jinx to read, except when he wanted to give him orders.

  “Hand me Calvin,” said Simon one day.

  “Er, who?” said Jinx. There was no one else in the room but the skull. It grinned conspiratorially.

  Simon snapped his fingers impatiently. Jinx got up and took the skull to Simon.

  “Its, er, his name was Calvin?”

  “It is now. Calvin’s an old enemy.”

  “Oh,” said Jinx. “Er, did you kill him by magic?”

  “It is very, very difficult to take someone’s life by magic.”

  “Oh,” said Jinx.

  “I don’t go around killing people,” said Simon, with one of those little purple laughing-at-Jinx flashes.

  “Well, then what happened to him?”

  Simon tossed the skull up in the air and set it spinning on one finger. “Much less than he deserved.”

  He didn’t seem to mind the question, but he wasn’t going to answer it.

  “Oh,” said Jinx. “The barbarians drink wine out of the skulls of their enemies.”

  “Really? I use Calvin for a paperweight.” Simon set Calvin down on a scroll he had just unrolled. “Where do these barbarians live?”

  “In the Blacksmiths’ Clearing,” said Jinx. “Actually, anyone who lives in another clearing is a barbarian.”

  This memory had just come to him. His clearing seemed a long time ago now, and he didn’t really remember what it looked like. He wondered what exactly Calvin had done to annoy Simon.

  “I’m not sure how people drink out of skulls,” Jinx added. Calvin had too many holes in him to make a good cup.

  “Like this,” said Simon. He flipped Calvin over. “You just cut around the top, here, and you see you have a nice bowl. Then you add three legs to make it stand upright, and there you go.”

  “Oh,” said Jinx, putting his hands to the top of his own head. “Right.”

  The magic lessons did not go well. There did not seem to be any way to listen to magic, at least not that Jinx could figure out. He could listen to Simon, but that didn’t help much.

  “Potion and power come from the same word in Old Urwish,” Simon said, holding a glass phial steady over a candle flame with a metal clamp. “All magic requires two things.”

  He paused, waiting until Jinx said, “Power and concentration.”

 
“Right. And some kinds of magic require much more power than others. For example, magic done on a living person would require a hundred times as much power as magic done on that rock you keep failing to levitate.”

  Jinx looked at the pebble on the workbench with dislike. He’d spent weeks not being able to levitate it and was beginning to suspect Simon had done something to it to make it unlevitatable.

  “And some power sources are?”

  “Fire,” Jinx said. “And words. Chants and stuff. Um, magic drawings with chalk. And herbs and stuff and like potions.”

  “A potion enables a wizard or witch to pass magical power on to another person,” said Simon. “If I gave you a levitation potion, you would be able to levitate that rock. Although you could do it anyway if you’d only concentrate properly.”

  Jinx glared at the pebble as hard as he could. Spells were much easier to do if you could keep your eyes on the object you were bespelling, according to Simon.

  “Why can’t I have a power source?” If he could draw on power from a chant or a chalk drawing, Jinx thought, he’d be able to raise the pebble.

  “A simple spell like that shouldn’t require one.” Simon jiggled the phial over the flame, agitating the dark green contents. “If you can’t do that, you’ll certainly never be able to do the concealment spell to protect you in the forest. Which you need if you’re going to keep running around off the path like you do.”

  “I want to learn it so I can go places,” said Jinx.

  “Well, you never will at this rate. You’ll be stuck right here like a lump of lichen.”

  “Sophie says you should be more patient when you’re teaching me.”

  Simon frowned. “Nonsense! I’m extremely patient. You’ve taken weeks to learn this simple spell, and—”

  “—you keep calling me an idiot,” said Jinx.

  “I have certainly never called you an idiot.” Simon took a tiny bird made of gold from his pocket and let a drop of the potion fall on it.

  The bird glowed brightly for an instant. Simon blew on it, then picked it up and handed it to Jinx. “There.”