Jinx

by Sage Blackwood

  It didn’t matter if Reven was the Terror; Jinx couldn’t let him be eaten. Jinx ran forward in the dark, trying to think. He didn’t know any magic that would do any good.

  “Aroint thee, foul dastard!” cried Reven.

  There was the thwok of an ax hitting wood. Then grunts, flesh hitting flesh, sounds of struggle.

  “Reven!” Elfwyn called.

  The sound of blows and grunts came from above—a squawk of pain.

  Elfwyn turned to Jinx. “Light a fire!”

  There was the loud thud of something falling. Then more fighting, down on the ground. Reven’s voice, yelling.

  Elfwyn thrust a stick into Jinx’s hands. “Light that so we can see!”

  He lit it. They could see a crouched, horned figure raising a claw to strike at Reven, pinned underneath it. Jinx did the only thing he could think of. He used magic to set the creature on fire.

  It roared. Reven screamed. Instantly Jinx pulled the fire out of existence. He hadn’t meant to burn Reven.

  The creature got to its hind legs and turned to face Jinx. It was completely covered in singed, curly fur—but then there were the horns and a mouthful of tusks. It took a step toward Jinx and Elfwyn.

  There was a nasty sound of an ax hitting something soft. The creature screamed. Jinx and Elfwyn jumped out of the way as it fell. Behind it, Reven stood holding the ax.

  “Set it on fire now!” said Reven.

  “No, don’t!” said Elfwyn.

  The thing swiped out a paw and grabbed her ankle. Elfwyn yelled as it pulled her to the ground. Reven fell on the creature, swinging his ax. Jinx grabbed Elfwyn and hauled her away. He concentrated on looking to make sure her leg wasn’t hurt so that he could ignore the chopping sounds in the dark. Elfwyn got to her feet, shakily.

  “Reven, stop,” she said. “Please. I’m sure it’s dead.”

  She moved forward with the torch to have a look.

  “It’s a werebear, isn’t it,” she said. “I wonder if it’s Urson.”

  “Why does it have horns, then?” said Reven. “Do bears have horns?”

  “No—maybe it’s an ogre. Jinx, come see.”

  “No,” said Jinx. He felt sick. “I think we should leave.”

  “But it’s safe now,” said Reven. “The tree house—”

  “You can stay in it if you want,” said Jinx. “But we’re leaving.”

  “I’m not leaving unless Reven does.”

  “Very well,” said Reven. “Let me get our things.” He looked at the bloody ax, smiled, then handed it to Jinx. “I think I’m getting the feel of this thing.”

  They walked along the path in the dark. Jinx made the torch glow brightly enough that they could see the edges of the path, and he hoped the light would keep wolves and bears away.

  “Why did you follow us?” said Jinx.

  “To talk you two out of going to the Bonemaster’s house,” said Elfwyn.

  “It’s not easy to talk me out of things, fair lady,” said Reven.

  Jinx thought of the chopping sounds and how they had gone on long after the werebear—or whatever it had been—was already dead. No, Reven might be friendly and unfailingly cheerful, but it wouldn’t be easy to talk him out of anything.

  “I just think—” Elfwyn paused. “You saw how my grandmother is. She likes to … amuse herself with people. I think she’s sending you off to the Bonemaster to see what he does to you. Which personally I don’t think is very amusing.”

  “She’s not sending me,” said Reven. “I’m going.”

  “I just want to find out what he can tell me about my magic,” said Jinx.

  “He might not be able to tell you anything. You can’t trust my grandmother. And Simon told you to stay away from him.”

  “That’s because Simon knows the Bonemaster can tell me what he’s done to me.”

  “If you believe my grandmother!” said Elfwyn. “He’ll suck out your soul with a straw and make a necklace of your eyeballs. There were two men from Butterwood Clearing who went to his house to sell him butter, and they never came back. He sneaks into clearings at night and steals babies from their cradles.”

  “And his thoughts are full of bloody knives,” said Reven.

  “They’re what?” said Elfwyn.

  “Jinx can see people’s thoughts.”

  “You can?” said Elfwyn.

  “No,” said Jinx. Reven was just as bad as Elfwyn, blabbing about whatever you told him.

  Uncomfortably, Jinx remembered some of the things he’d blabbed to Sophie during his fight with Simon.

  “I used to be able to.”

  He told Elfwyn about being able to see the color of people’s thoughts.

  She stopped walking. “You mean you really could read people’s minds? No wonder he took it away from you! He probably saved your life.”

  Jinx shook his head—she didn’t understand. “No, he didn’t. It was horrible. It was like being killed.”

  “If you could read people’s minds, they would want to kill you. You were a menace to society. Trust me, I know about this sort of thing.” Elfwyn seemed to think for a moment. “Although I suppose you would have been very hard to kill.”

  “It wasn’t reading people’s minds. It was like what was going on inside their heads would make a sort of cloud around them, and it would have a sort of color.”

  They started walking again. A wind had come up, and the flames of the torch blew sideways. Branches creaked overhead.

  “How’d he take the power away from you?” Elfwyn asked.

  “He did a spell and put it in a bottle.”

  “Perhaps you could take it out of the bottle,” said Reven.

  “He hid it somewhere. And even if I found it, what would I do? Uncork it and drink?”

  “Well, can’t you just learn the magic again? I mean it’s your magic, right?” said Elfwyn.

  “Maybe,” said Jinx. “It’s not like something you learn, though. It’s more like a sense.”

  He thought about the power that he’d newly discovered, that he could draw from the Urwald. No wonder he hadn’t been able to do much magic in Simon’s house—thick stone walls had blocked him off from the Urwald. But out here, he could sense its enormous presence. He felt he could levitate a house—he could make a fire as big as the sky.

  But he also felt that he couldn’t. Because it was the Urwald’s power. And he wasn’t sure the Urwald would like him levitating a house, and he knew it wasn’t interested in big fires.

  “Does your grandmother not expect you to return, my lady?” Reven asked.

  “No. I told her I was going back to Butterwood Clearing,” said Elfwyn.

  “I thought you were going to live with her,” said Jinx.

  “Well, yes. That was the idea. But I didn’t tell her that. I sort of don’t entirely like her very much.”

  There was a sudden loud crack overhead. Elfwyn and Jinx lunged forward, but Reven didn’t know to run. An enormous tree branch crashed down on the path.

  “Reven?” Elfwyn called.

  They ran back. Jinx made the torchlight brighter. A branch lay in the path. Standing just in front of it was Reven.

  “Forsooth, you told me not to cut limbs off trees,” said Reven. “And here they are throwing them at me.”

  “It’s awfully windy,” said Elfwyn. “Maybe we should go back to the tree house.”

  “We’ve come too far,” said Jinx. “And we probably couldn’t find it in the dark anyway.”

  They hurried on. The wind was picking up. The torch blew out, and Jinx didn’t want to waste time lighting it again. The trees groaned and lashed their branches overhead.

  When the next tree branch cracked overhead, Reven ran. He was faster than Jinx and Elfwyn. Ahead along the path Jinx heard another branch break, and Reven yelled, “Ow!”

  “Are you all right, Reven? Jinx, light a fire!”

  A big dead branch filled the path. Jinx relit the torch. Reven was sitting beside the branch holding his ar
m.

  Elfwyn knelt down beside him. “Where did it hit you?”

  “My arm. ’Tis nothing, my lady.”

  “It might be broken,” said Elfwyn.

  A fierce gust of wind tore through the trees, which swayed and rasped horribly.

  Reven got to his feet, wincing. “We’d better keep moving.”

  Before the Urwald decides to drop a whole tree on you, Jinx thought. He grabbed Reven’s good arm.

  Reven’s face flickered amusement in the torchlight. “I can walk unassisted, good Jinx.”

  “The Urwald,” said Jinx, “doesn’t want to kill me.”

  He felt quite sure of this. He was the Listener, and the Urwald didn’t want him dead. Why it wanted Reven dead he didn’t know—but none of those three branches had come near him or Elfwyn.

  “It’s windy, that’s all,” said Reven.

  The torch blew out again.

  Jinx couldn’t remember ever being out in such wind before. Branches fell all around—no, only behind them, Jinx realized. And on the path. And the wind howled and blew at their backs, urging them along the path.

  “When we get to that canyon the good Dame mentioned,” said Reven, “there won’t be any more of these terrible trees.”

  “You’re not going into the Canyon of Bones, are you?” said Elfwyn.

  “We have to, to reach the Bonemaster’s house,” said Reven. “And to escape this storm.”

  “Maybe the wind will die down before we get there,” said Jinx.

  But somehow he didn’t think it would.

  The wind did not let up. They walked all night. In the early afternoon they reached a place where the path turned sharply to the right and zigzagged.

  “Switchbacks,” said Reven. “We’re coming down into the canyon.”

  Elfwyn cast a nervous glance back at the forest, as if she were going to suggest stopping. A furious smack of wind tore through the trees and pushed them onward, forcing them down the switchbacks.

  They came out at the top of a steep bank. They heard rushing water below.

  They climbed down, using the exposed roots of a tree for a ladder. As Jinx grabbed the tree roots in his hands, he heard the Urwald mumbling that the enemy was trapped.

  The river had cut its way deep into solid bedrock, and Jinx couldn’t see the bottom through the rushing water. In front of them the water crested into a wave, and water zipped over the crest faster than Jinx could run.

  “We can’t cross that,” said Reven. “The current would grind our bones to powder.”

  There were no trees around them now, and they couldn’t feel the wind down here. Jinx looked up and saw that the trees were barely stirring in the wind now.

  “We could go back,” said Elfwyn. “It looks like the wind’s died down.”

  “It will die back up again if we do,” said Jinx.

  Elfwyn nodded.

  “Dame Glammer said that we go up the canyon from here,” said Reven.

  “Only if we want to find the Bonemaster,” said Elfwyn.

  Jinx was undecided. He wanted to go close enough to talk to the Bonemaster, yes. But down here in the canyon, away from any trees, he felt exposed and helpless. It didn’t seem like such a good idea.

  But Reven started walking, and Jinx and Elfwyn went with him.

  They walked along the flat rock lip a few inches above the foaming river. To their right, hemlocks hooked down from the cliff with half their roots reaching out into the air like hands imploring Jinx and his companions not to go any farther.

  Jinx took hold of a root, but the tree spoke only of trying to get a living from the solid rock. It wasn’t concerned about the Bonemaster or about Jinx’s problems.

  The chasm walls grew higher on either side of them, steep and sheer. Jinx had never walked so far without trees around him, not even in Samara. The feeling was strange and cold, and he kept looking up to make sure the Urwald was still there, just visible at the cliff tops on both sides.

  “It’s so beautiful,” said Elfwyn.

  “What is?” said Jinx.

  “This place.” She gestured around at the river, the rocks, the multicolored cliff face. Jinx didn’t think it was beautiful.

  He couldn’t feel the Urwald’s lifeforce anymore, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to draw on it.

  They stopped after a while to rest and eat, and Reven went to get some driftwood for a fire. He brought it back and set it down in a rattling heap, with a funny expression on his face.

  “Those are bones,” said Elfwyn.

  Jinx picked one up. It was smooth and cold in his hand. A leg bone, maybe—of what? He thought a fire into it. It was much harder to do magic down here away from the trees, even though the fire was inside him. When the bone was aflame, he set it down amid the other bones in the heap.

  “Jinx, put that out,” said Elfwyn. “It’s not right.”

  Jinx sucked the flame away with a thought. “They might be animal bones.” But he could see her point.

  “We don’t really need a fire,” said Reven.

  While the other two unpacked the food, Jinx wandered over to look at the rest of the bones. They had all been washed up in a heap, jumbled together. He didn’t see any skulls. With skulls you could tell right away that they weren’t human—unless they were, of course.

  He heard footsteps on pebbles behind him. He spun around. It was only Reven.

  “They’re not human,” said Reven. He sounded uncertain too.

  Jinx poked around in the pile, looking for a hoof or a fang or something to tell him these weren’t human bones.

  “I think we should turn back,” he said.

  Elfwyn came up beside them. “So do I.”

  “Well, at least we’ll go look,” said Reven. “Or I will.”

  Elfwyn and Jinx looked at each other. They weren’t turning back if Reven wasn’t.

  None of them felt much like eating. They put the food away in their packs and walked on.

  “There, that’s the fork up ahead, where the good dame said we’d find him,” said Reven.

  It was a high gray bluff, a tall stone island splitting the canyon into a Y. The river came rushing down from the left-hand side of the Y. From the right-hand side it came too, but much more quietly. On the top of the island was a castle.

  “I guess that’s the Bonemaster’s house,” said Elfwyn.

  “Yup,” said Jinx. “I always heard it was made of bones, though.”

  “Maybe you misheard,” said Reven. “Bone, stone.”

  Jinx had a cold feeling in his stomach. He wished Reven or Elfwyn would suggest turning back.

  “See, there’s a bridge sort of thing,” said Elfwyn. “I guess that’s how you get up.”

  Jinx looked where she pointed, up the right-hand fork. It looked more like a rope ladder than a bridge. It started on their side of the stream and climbed upward toward the top of the island. It sagged.

  “It doesn’t look like such a bad climb,” said Reven.

  “I think it looks horrible,” said Elfwyn. “What if you fell off onto the rocks below?”

  They walked up the right-hand fork of the Y and drew closer to the bridge. There were two long ropes strung on either side of the bridge, as railings, with short ropes every few feet to affix them to the bridge. The deck of the bridge was supported on two more ropes and was made of—

  “Those aren’t bones, are they?” said Elfwyn.

  “It could be an illusion,” said Jinx. “In fact, it probably is. This is the Urwald. Wood is a lot easier to get than bones.”

  “Hmm. Perhaps for you, my boy. It depends where you look.”

  The voice came from behind Jinx.

  He turned around and looked up at the Bonemaster.

  18

  Bonesocket

  The Bonemaster smiled. It was a warm smile, and his blue eyes were kind.

  “Well, well. Look at this. Visitors—I do love to have visitors. Please come upstairs.”

  “We—we’d rather not,
” said Elfwyn. “Thank you.”

  “And who are you, young lady?”

  “Elfwyn of Butterwood Clearing,” said Elfwyn, looking miserable.

  “And your friends—ah!” The Bonemaster beamed at Jinx. “I recognize you. Simon’s boy. Now wait, it’ll come to me—Jinx! Well, that settles it, you must come upstairs.”

  Jinx looked at Elfwyn and Reven in despair. Clearly Elfwyn hadn’t been fooled by the Bonemaster’s warm greeting. Jinx might have been if he didn’t have the memory of those bloody daggers. Reven looked fascinated.

  “Perhaps you didn’t hear me,” said the Bonemaster, the knife blades creeping into his voice. “I said you must come upstairs.”

  He gripped Jinx and Reven each by a shoulder and dragged them toward the bridge. Jinx tried to struggle free, but the grip became much tighter and more painful. Reven wasn’t struggling at all. Huh. Why had Reven insisted on coming here, knowing they’d follow?

  “You’d best go ahead of us, young lady,” said the Bonemaster. “Otherwise you might try to run away. And that could make something very nasty happen to your friends.”

  “Run away, Elfwyn!” said Jinx.

  “You want to die so soon, Jinx?” said the Bonemaster. “Start climbing, Elfwyn.”

  Elfwyn stepped forward, gripped the two rope railings in both hands, and took her first step onto the bones.

  “Careful—they’re a little slippery underfoot,” she said, and began to climb.

  The Bonemaster gave Jinx a hard shove, so that he stumbled forward onto the bridge, shaking it and making Elfwyn rock and slide and nearly fall off. She said nothing, though, and kept climbing. Jinx followed.

  If the bones were an illusion, they were a very good one. You could see through the wide cracks if you looked down, to the river and the ground swaying sickly below. Jinx swallowed and looked resolutely upward, at the stone castle. He clutched the ropes so tightly, he could feel little hempen splinters working their way into his hands. He wondered if the bones would break under his feet.

  Behind him, he heard Reven and the Bonemaster begin to climb. The bridge rocked more and more. Could it actually hold the weight of four people?

  Jinx leaned too hard on one of the rope railings and felt a horrible pitching sensation as he swooped out over empty space. Reven grabbed him and pulled him back.