Jinx

by Sage Blackwood

  Jinx grabbed an immobilized guard and tried to haul him off of Simon. The man glared furiously at Jinx and tried to bite him. Hands in the pile tried to grab him. Jinx recognized Simon’s long, thin hand amid the bodies, grabbed it, and pulled.

  There was a lot of flailing, groaning, and kicking, and finally Jinx fell backward on the stones with Simon beside him. Simon was still staring at the guards, unblinking.

  “There’s people all around us, Simon,” Jinx said, getting to his feet.

  “They’d better stay back or I’ll turn them into lizards!”

  Simon lifted his head slightly so that his gaze included part of the crowd, and Jinx saw that their clothes had been frozen too. But he could hear the angry mutters of the people behind them, and when he turned around, he realized that Simon was dealing with only a quarter of the people surrounding them.

  Looking back toward the Temple, Jinx could see the red-robed people on the porch, watching.

  “Get ready to run,” Simon said in Urwish. He stood up slowly without breaking the gaze that held some of his enemies immobilized.

  Jinx had never been more ready to run in his life.

  He heard a clatter of hoofbeats, and in far less time than seemed possible after the sound, armored men on horses came pouring down a road into the square. The crowd scattered ahead of them. Simon grabbed Jinx’s arm and ran straight toward the onrushing army.

  Straight toward the horsemen? That was crazy! Jinx tried not to follow. He tried to drag his feet, but Simon kept pulling him onward, and Jinx didn’t dare fall down for fear of the horses trampling him to death. Then the horses were around him and Simon. There was no smell of horseflesh and nothing touched them.

  “Illusion,” Jinx said aloud.

  “Shut up and run,” Simon panted.

  They ran, and after a minute or two they heard running footsteps behind them. Simon’s illusion of the horsemen hadn’t lasted, or the crowd had realized it was an illusion. They turned down one street, and then another.

  Jinx didn’t recognize anything familiar about the street, but Simon ran up to a blue-violet door and opened it. Then they were inside, back in the dusty, unused sitting room, and Simon slammed the door shut and fell against it, and they both stood gasping for breath.

  11

  Matters of Life and Death

  Jinx recovered his breath first. “What was—”

  “You idiot!” Simon was still leaning against the door. “How did you—how did you—” He was too out of breath to continue.

  “I’m not an idiot,” said Jinx. “That was the place Sophie comes from. Samara. Where was it?”

  He knew it was through the door. But now they were back in Simon’s house, which was in the Urwald, which Samara most definitely was not.

  “Go. Into the house.” Simon spoke through clenched teeth.

  “Can I look at these books?”

  Simon didn’t answer, and Jinx decided not to press the point.

  He came to the blank wall, reached out for the door, and opened it.

  “How did you do that?” Simon demanded behind him. His tight-sounding voice scared Jinx.

  “I know it’s there,” said Jinx.

  Simon didn’t answer, and Jinx walked fast to the kitchen, wanting to get away. Simon hardly ever got really angry at Jinx, not like this. Usually he was just cranky.

  Out in the kitchen, Jinx was headed straight for the front door when Simon said, “Jinx, come here.”

  Something in his voice didn’t sound right. Jinx stopped and turned around. Simon was sitting on the stove steps.

  “Take a look at this and tell me how bad it is,” Simon said.

  Jinx had a sudden cold wave of dread, as if he’d just swallowed ice. There was a steady line of dark-red drips along the floor from the passageway to the step where Simon sat. Jinx went over to Simon, who was trying to point to a spot on his back just below his shoulder. Reluctantly, fearing what he would see, Jinx looked. There was a spreading stain on the back of Simon’s purple robe.

  “I—can’t tell. You’ll have to take it off,” said Jinx. His voice sounded as loud and strange as it had inside the Temple of Knowledge. Reality seemed to have been sucked out of the room.

  “Pull this sleeve for me.”

  Jinx pulled on the sleeve, helping Simon out of the top of his robe. The shirt he wore underneath it was drenched with blood.

  “I—I guess I should cut your shirt off,” said Jinx.

  “Press that sleeve against the wound first. See if you can stop the bleeding.”

  Jinx wadded up a sleeve of the purple robe and pressed it against where he thought the blood was coming from, right under Simon’s left shoulder blade. Jinx had seen pictures of the insides of people in one of Simon’s books. Did wizards have hearts in the same place as normal people?

  “Press harder,” said Simon.

  Jinx did. Blood was soaking through onto his hand. He wanted to go back to the beginning of today and start over and have it all go differently.

  “You said those guards couldn’t hurt you.”

  “Lied,” said Simon succinctly.

  “Simon!”

  Jinx was enormously glad to hear that voice.

  Sophie burst into the kitchen, a wave of fury. “What on earth were you thinking of, coming to Samara! Are you insane?”

  Her fists were clenched. She looked ready to hit somebody, and Jinx wasn’t about to tell her that Simon had gone to Samara looking for him.

  “Stirring up the Temple, stirring up the populace—it’s lucky no one was killed!”

  Sophie’s raging seemed to draw reality down into the room again. Jinx was relieved to have it back. Simon’s face was getting paler, and the look he was giving his wife was a funny one. Jinx had no idea what he was thinking.

  “I—I think Simon might’ve gotten killed,” Jinx said.

  “What?”

  “He’s—” Jinx nodded at his hand, which was still pressed as hard as he could against the seeping blood.

  Sophie pushed aside the bloody sleeve, Jinx’s hand, and Jinx with the same motion. “Get some dittany, Jinx. And boil some water.”

  Jinx ran to the workroom to find the herb. Then he pumped water into a kettle, swung it over the fire, and used the bellows to puff the fire to life. After that he ran for other things Sophie wanted—a white sheet, and more herbs, and then a needle and thread, which he was supposed to boil. Then he spread a blanket on the floor and helped Sophie help Simon to lie facedown on it.

  Sophie ripped the bloody shirt down the back. The blood had stopped pouring and was only welling up slowly now, from a jagged purple cut. Jinx felt sick.

  “Bring me more candles,” said Sophie. “And get these cats out of here.”

  Jinx found all the candles he could and set them burning around Simon, stuck into bottles and candlesticks. It looked too much like a funeral, especially since Simon’s eyes were closed and he’d stopped talking. Sophie was doing something with wet cloths and dittany, but Jinx couldn’t stand to look. He gathered up armloads of cats and dumped them in both wings of the house, closing the doors on them and locking the cat flaps.

  “What should I do now?” Jinx asked.

  “Go away,” said Sophie, not looking up.

  It had to be very bad for Sophie to speak to Jinx like that. He went, wanting to help but not knowing how.

  He went through the door into Simon’s part of the house. He looked at the wall that was really a door into Samara. Then he went into the workroom. The Knowledge Is Power book was lying open on the workbench. Jinx must have left it there. That was how Simon had known to follow him. Jinx slammed the book shut and stuck it among the other books on the shelf, shoving it as far back as he could. He wished he’d never seen it.

  Except that he was glad he’d been to Samara. Even though he hadn’t found his magic there, the world was much bigger now than it had been. He wanted to go back, to explore it some more. He walked back to the hidden door. There was a bloodst
ain on the floor, half covered by the stone wall. Jinx reached through the stone and touched the door.

  He went back into the workroom and started putting away the things he’d disturbed while he was fetching herbs for Sophie.

  The door to the kitchen creaked; there were footsteps in the hall. “Jinx?”

  Sophie came into the room.

  “Oh, there you are,” she said.

  Her hands were covered with dried blood. She looked exhausted. Jinx waited for her to tell him.

  “What happened, Jinx?”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No,” said Sophie. She went over to Simon’s stool and sat down. “No. If he has a heart, they missed it.”

  “So he’s going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know. There are”—she paused and shook her head—“a lot of things that can happen. If only we could take him back to Samara. There are physicians there—”

  “Can’t we bring them here?”

  “No,” said Sophie. Her voice shook, and Jinx had a horrible feeling that she was going to cry, which he wanted to see even less than he had wanted to see all that blood.

  “I’ll get you something to drink,” said Jinx, getting out of there.

  When he came back with a mug of cider and a wet towel for her hands, she had gotten control of herself. Jinx was relieved. She wiped her hands clean and drank the cider. After that she looked a little better.

  “What happened today?” Sophie asked again.

  “Oh. Er, what did Simon say happened?”

  “He didn’t say anything, Jinx. He’s unconscious.”

  “We—well, we went to the Temple and then the guards chased us, and he fell down and got stabbed, and then we ran back here.”

  “Why on earth would Simon take you to Samara?”

  “Well, he didn’t. I sort of went. Where is Samara?” he asked, to change the subject.

  “You answer my questions, and I may answer yours. How did you get to Samara?”

  Jinx was reminded that he had once been able to actually see the iron behind Sophie’s niceness. “I found the door. Knowledge is power.”

  “I see. Simon didn’t tell you how to get there?”

  “No, I found the book that tells how.”

  “And what did you do in Samara? Where did you go?”

  Jinx told her. He remembered the noise and chatter. He would’ve liked to talk to some of those people in the streets. They were all so unlike Urwald people, so much quicker and less frightened.

  “And Simon came straight to the University? He didn’t go anywhere else?”

  “No,” said Jinx. Actually, he realized, he didn’t know. “What is Knowledge Is Power? Is it a kind of magic?”

  “KnIP is Samaran magic.”

  Kanip? Oh … Knowledge Is Power. “But they don’t do it at that temple place, do they?” It hadn’t felt magical at all.

  “No, of course not. Magic is no longer permitted in Samara.”

  “Is that why those guards chased Simon?” Jinx asked.

  Sophie nodded.

  “But why is it not permitted?”

  “Because of the things people use magic for, of course. Wizards control people. They care more about power than about people. To them, people are just a way to get more power.” Sophie said this with considerable vigor, and Jinx could tell she really believed it.

  “We study magic in theory at the University,” she said. “Magic among many other things. But to actually do it—that’s against the law. The penalty is death.”

  “But you do it when you come through the door into the Urwald,” Jinx said.

  “I certainly don’t. I simply come through the door. It’s not my fault that the door happens to be magic.”

  “You have to use magic to work it,” said Jinx.

  “The KnIP spell was done when the door was created,” said Sophie. “Now it’s just a door.”

  Jinx was sure she was wrong about this. But the tired look on Sophie’s face stopped him from arguing.

  “There are still magicians in Samara,” Sophie added. “People who do KnIP. But they’re criminals. Every now and then the government catches one and makes an example of him. Or her.”

  Jinx would have liked to ask what they did to the magicians, but he looked at Sophie and decided that wouldn’t be a good idea.

  “Magic corrupts people,” said Sophie. “Look what it’s done to Simon.”

  “Wasn’t he always sort of like that, though?” said Jinx.

  Sophie looked surprised. “Like what?”

  Jinx couldn’t think how to answer this. “So you’re one of those people at that temple place? One of the scholars?”

  “Yes. I’m a professor of Urwald Studies.” She smiled. “I’d studied Urwish for years, but until Simon came along, I’d never met anyone who actually spoke it.”

  She got to her feet. “I’d better go check on him.”

  “But you’re not like them,” said Jinx.

  Sophie looked surprised. “Not like who?”

  “Those scholars, all sitting inside and studying their books and not really wanting to know anything.” He picked up the candle and followed her out.

  “They’re not all like that. They do want to know things, it’s just that it’s …” She turned and looked at the wall that hid Samara. The candle made a yellow circle of light on it. “I don’t want you to go back there, Jinx. Promise me.”

  “It’s just that it’s what?” said Jinx. “What were you going to say?”

  “It’s hard to learn anything when you already know everything.” Sophie smiled. “That’s the problem with the scholars. Some of them.”

  “Oh,” said Jinx. He turned to go into the kitchen, but Sophie caught his arm. “You didn’t promise.”

  Jinx wanted to ask why he had to promise. But she was looking at him so hard that he found all he could say was “Yeah.”

  “Say it, please,” said Sophie, with iron.

  “I promise,” said Jinx. And then, seeing that this still wasn’t good enough, “That I won’t go back into Samara.”

  It was like a door slamming shut on the wide world. He followed her into the kitchen, feeling trapped.

  Simon was still alive. Seeing him unconscious on top of the cold stove gave Jinx a funny feeling in his stomach, as if the world had been turned upside down. What if Simon died?

  “I’ll sit up with him,” said Sophie. “You’d better go to bed.”

  Jinx thought he ought to offer to sit up instead. But what if Simon started bleeding again? Or stopped breathing? Jinx wouldn’t know what to do. So he went up to his room, the one he never slept in, and sat down on the bed. A puff of dust rose from it. The stone walls reminded him of a tomb. Simon would die someday, even if it wasn’t today. Everybody dies. That’s the most unfair thing in the world. Jinx would die someday. The thought made him stand up and leave the room.

  He climbed up the winding stone steps to the Farseeing Window. The sky was getting light already. The view from the window sailed through a tangle of tree branches. Jinx saw a wolf skulking along the ground beneath.

  The thing was, he didn’t hate Simon. He couldn’t even really stay angry at him. He’d meant to, but Simon was … well, always there. It was hard to stay angry at someone who was always there. The truth was, he was actually sort of fond of Simon.

  Jinx imagined life without Simon. Would he be allowed to stay in Simon’s house? But he wouldn’t want to stay here, alone with the cats. And he didn’t think Sophie would come here to stay with him. Would she take Jinx back to Samara? Jinx wanted to see more of Samara, he really did. He was angry at Sophie for making him promise he wouldn’t try to go back. But to live there, with the hot sun and no proper trees? And, face it, no magic?

  The scene in the Farseeing Window shifted to a party of trolls, running along a wide path. The Troll-way—Jinx had heard Wanderers mention it. It led up into the Glass Mountains. Jinx had never seen mountains. There was a lot in the Urwald that he’d neve
r seen. Well, if he couldn’t go back to Samara, at least he could see more of the world.

  And maybe somewhere out there, there was a way to find out what Simon had done to him, what he’d taken away from him. What Dame Glammer had called mind-reading and deep Urwald magic.

  Somehow there must be a way to get it back. And if anyone besides Simon would know it, Jinx realized, it would probably be Dame Glammer. After all, Dame Glammer had sold Simon the roots.

  The scene moved again. Now it showed a girl walking along the Path. Jinx leaned forward. It was his girl, the one in the red cape and hood. She had a basket over her arm and a pack on her back. She was starting out on a journey. Jinx could tell from the way she walked that she was more excited than she was scared—that she couldn’t wait to discover the things that lay ahead of her.

  “I wish I could be walking in the Urwald with nothing to hold me back,” said Jinx.

  “You can if you want to,” said the girl, in his head.

  And he realized she was right.

  12

  A Quarrel

  Simon was alive, awake, and querulous. Jinx had scrubbed all the blood off the floor. He tried to stay out of the kitchen because Simon was making it seem a lot smaller these days. He went out into the Urwald, dug his toes into the ground, and listened.

  The thing the trees were afraid of was much closer than it had been. Jinx tried thinking a question—What is it? Is it the Bonemaster? But the trees didn’t answer.

  He went inside. Sophie was sitting on the stove, not too close to Simon. They were surrounded by books. One book was open to a drawing of what your insides looked like after a sword was stuck into them.

  “I ought to go back to Samara,” she said.

  “Please don’t,” said Simon.

  Jinx hoped she wouldn’t. He was planning to leave, not stay here taking care of Simon.

  “They’ll notice I’m missing, and how will that look?”

  “What do you care how it looks?” said Simon.

  Jinx looked at them looking at each other. Before the bottle spell, he would have known exactly how they felt. Now he didn’t, and it looked like they didn’t either.