Jinx's Fire

by Sage Blackwood

  The Princess put a finger to the corner of her perfect blue mouth. “If you traveled it, it was the Path of Fire.”

  “But I touched the ice!”

  “Touched it, perhaps. But if you want to travel the Path of Ice to its end, you must embrace the ice.”

  “What, you mean do deathforce magic or something? I’m not going to do that.”

  “What happened when you touched the ice?” she asked.

  Jinx looked down at the floor, which was tiled in alternating squares of jade and carnelian.

  “You’d rather not say. You humans like to think that evil is something outside of you, don’t you? But evil is right . . . here. . . .” She pointed.

  “In my stomach?” said Jinx.

  She flickered blue annoyance. “In your heart.”

  “That’s my stomach.”

  “Anyway,” said the Elf Princess. “Whatever happened when you touched the ice, you must embrace it, or you cannot walk the path. And that, dear human, is all the help I intend to give you. It’s far more than I’ve given most humans—”

  “Well, you kill most humans, right?” said Jinx. “If you meet them, I mean.”

  “Not always,” said the Princess. “In fact, before you go, there’s something you ought to see.”

  The Princess was burbling amusement. Jinx felt a sudden cold terror.

  They left the throne room and crossed an agate floor to a deep lake of green glass. Beside it was a crystal waterfall, icy and unmoving. On the shore, amid a thicket of beryls and sapphires, sat Simon.

  Jinx stared. “What are you doing here?”

  Simon scowled under a lavender cloud of embarrassment. “Ask her.”

  “You let yourself be captured by elves?” Jinx demanded.

  “You wait till it happens to you,” said Simon. “Then tell me how much ‘let’ there is about it.”

  But I haven’t lost my magic, Jinx thought. And you have. And now you can be captured by elves, just like . . . anybody. It was an awful thought.

  “I only just left you—” Jinx began, and stopped. Time was different down here. “I only just left you, and you’ve already gone and gotten yourself stolen by elves! You . . . you . . . you idiot!”

  “Don’t you call me names, boy!” Simon struggled to stand, and Jinx saw that the wizard’s feet were completely encased in the outcroppings of gems.

  Jinx looked closer. “Are you stuck to the floor or something? Hold on.” He started to feel his way into the spell.

  Only there wasn’t a spell. There was only rock. Jinx tried to send fire into the gems, and Simon yelped in pain.

  “Your magic won’t work,” said the Princess. “Not without damaging that person.”

  She was right. He couldn’t melt the rock without burning Simon’s legs off. Of all the— “I just can’t believe you went and got yourself captured again!” said Jinx. “As soon as I turn my back! You know what your problem is? You think you can do anything!”

  “I think I can do anything?” said Simon. “I’m not the one who thinks he can traipse up the Path of Ice into Bonesocket!”

  “I don’t walk out of the house and get myself captured by elves when people are counting on me!” said Jinx. “You—” There just wasn’t a word strong enough to express his frustration. Not in any language.

  “You care about him very much, don’t you?” The Elf Princess sounded merely curious.

  Jinx looked away, furious. Urwalders didn’t say things like that. “Let him go.”

  “When you embrace the ice,” said the Elf Princess, “you may like it.”

  “Let Simon go,” said Jinx.

  “If you found a way to embrace both fire and ice together—”

  “It’s not possible,” said Simon.

  “—then you would become very powerful. You would reign supreme. We don’t want that. Therefore, we engaged in a very crude, human sort of ploy.”

  “Jinx, just go,” said Simon. “Sophie and Elfwyn are at Bonesocket.”

  “But—”

  “And you have a chance to defeat him,” said Simon. “Just make sure that, if you touch the bottle, you’re embracing the ice when you do it. I’ve been thinking about that. It’s very important.”

  “How do I embrace the ice?” said Jinx.

  “What happened when you touched the ice?” said Simon.

  “I . . . It . . . I . . .” Jinx didn’t want to say.

  “You wanted to kill people,” said Simon.

  “It made me think that I did,” said Jinx. “I don’t really.”

  “Very admirable,” said Simon. “Get over it. To get to the Bonemaster’s dungeon, you’re going to have to want to kill him.”

  “And then,” said the Princess, “you will have ice and be within reach of fire. You could become all-powerful.”

  “That’s not true,” said Simon. “To embrace the ice, you’re going to have to let go of the fire.”

  Jinx shrugged. “Okay. All I want is to defeat the Bonemaster and—”

  “And seize his power?” said the Princess.

  “No!”

  “But the temptation will be there,” said the Princess. “It is the nature of organic beings to want more, when they already have enough. When I see that you have done as you say, and given up the power of ice, I will return this person to you.”

  Jinx turned to Simon. “I can come back here with an ax—”

  “Beneath the gems is adamantine,” said the Princess. “Unless you intend to chop off this person’s legs, it will avail you nothing.”

  “Just go,” said Simon. “Remember what I said. Let go of the fire. And hurry up! He’s got Sophie, Elfwyn, and the Crimson Grimoire. And who knows how long this little conversation has really lasted?”

  Oh. Right.

  “Okay. But don’t eat anything,” said Jinx anxiously. “And don’t drink anything. And—”

  “You think I don’t know that?” said Simon. “Go.”

  Right. Jinx stood on the path, and looked up a steep slope of ice. He felt as if he’d gazed at hundreds of these in the last few—days? Hours? Months? There was no way of knowing. He had more than enough fire in him to melt it, as he’d done the others.

  Instead, according to the Elf Princess, he had to embrace it.

  “All right,” he said. “I don’t want the Bonemaster to take up rose gardening or needlepoint. I don’t want him to develop other interests and get out of the skull-and-bones business.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “I want him to die.”

  And he began climbing.

  It was easy. His boots gripped the ice as if it had been granite.

  It seemed like only a few minutes later that he was staring up at the end of the Path of Ice.

  He could see the underside of the table that stood in the crypt under Bonesocket. And, weirdly, as if he were seeing two things at once, the table was both there and not there, and through it he could see the bottle.

  Ribbons of smoke writhed around the bottle, as if in pain.

  He couldn’t see if there was a cork in it.

  But he could see, lying under the table, a red hooded cloak . . . Elfwyn’s signal. She’d corked the bottle.

  Either that, or the Bonemaster had forced her to tell him what she was doing. In which case the signal was a trap.

  Jinx took from his pocket a red-and-blue-striped sock. He waved it around. He waved it up, he waved it down. He went on waving it, until it suddenly occurred to him that he had no idea how much time was passing for the people peering into the Farseeing Window. He had to assume that whoever was watching had seen the signal and relayed the message, and that the magicians had leapt through the new doorpath Jinx had made, onto Bonesocket Island, and were attacking.

  Jinx climbed up through the floor, and crawled out from under the table. He was standing now in the cavern under Bonesocket. It smelled of mold and graves. He looked up the corridor that was the other entrance to the chamber. It was lined with the bones of th
e Bonemaster’s victims.

  Remember that.

  Hundreds of victims. Maybe thousands. Over how many years, and in how many places?

  Anyway, enough to keep Jinx on the Path of Ice. He had to keep wanting the Bonemaster dead, or he wouldn’t be able to touch the bottle.

  He turned around and faced it.

  The ribbons twisting around it slithered and jerked like snakes in agony. They looped over and under each other; they squirmed. They flailed. They went round and round the bottle in a mad, wriggling orbit.

  He was just about to reach for the bottle when he heard the distant grate of stone on stone.

  He knew what it was. Someone was opening the trap door that led from Bonesocket to the crypt.

  Skeletons and Deathbindings

  There were footsteps in the distance, and then the creak of a door opening. Heavy, booted feet thudded down the skull-lined corridor. Jinx stood behind the table and braced himself. He wanted the Bonemaster dead.

  The Bonemaster strode into the chamber. “You! How did you get in here?”

  Before Jinx could answer, more running feet rang in the corridor. Jinx groaned inwardly as Elfwyn burst into the room.

  “Leave him to me!” Jinx yelled.

  Elfwyn flung a spell at the Bonemaster that was purple and flashed. Jinx ducked. The Bonemaster fell to the ground as the flash hit him. Then Elfwyn spread her arms, flapped them, and began running round and round the chamber clucking like a chicken.

  The Bonemaster picked himself up. “I did warn you, my dear.”

  “Bawk, bawk, bawk!” said Elfwyn, flapping madly. Her head bobbed back and forth as she ran.

  Jinx tried to set the Bonemaster on fire, but was too wrapped up in ice somehow to do it. He couldn’t find the fire.

  Then Sophie came running in, throwing things at the Bonemaster—Jinx saw a clay jar, a candlestick, and a hammer sail through the air. The Bonemaster dodged.

  Elfwyn stretched her neck out. “BAWWK! Buckbuckbuck bawk!”

  The Bonemaster cast a spell, and Sophie flew to the wall and stuck firmly, struggling like a fly in honey.

  “Jinx!” she cried. “Remember what it said in the Eldritch Tome!”

  “The Eldritch Tome you assured me didn’t exist?” the Bonemaster asked her. “What did it say?”

  Jinx tried again to summon fire to throw at the Bonemaster. But Simon had been right . . . the fire was impossibly out of reach now. The ice didn’t want fire; fire melted ice.

  He tried to think of a language the Bonemaster wouldn’t know—Herwa, maybe? “What did it say?” he demanded in Herwa.

  “‘Let death be bound in ice, ever circling. Fly free to the flame when the tie is undone,’” said Sophie, in Herwa, and, in Jinx’s opinion, unhelpfully.

  “It’s discourteous,” said the Bonemaster, in the same language, “to speak a language that everyone present doesn’t understand.” He raised a fist to cast a spell at Jinx. “I doubt Elfwyn knows Herwa.”

  “Anyway, I don’t know what you mean!” Jinx yelled, diving behind the table as the Bonemaster sent a flash of black lightning at him. The bottle on the table rocked dangerously. Jinx looked up at the circling ribbons.

  “Those are the deathbindings!” Sophie said. “As close to his life as possible! But no one can touch them and live!”

  “You mean—oh.” Jinx made sure he was still firmly fixed on the Path of Ice. “I think I—” No, there was no time to argue. Hopefully she was wrong about that last bit. He held his breath, and reached out and grabbed a ribbon as it sped past.

  He caught it, just for a moment, then it jerked and squirmed out of his grasp and went on circling the bottle. But in the second he’d touched it, an image of Simon came into his head—not a face, but the things that were really Simon, the jagged flashes of orange, the warm blue cloud.

  Sophie was right. Each ribbon was a deathbinding. One of them was Simon’s. One was probably his own. Elfwyn and Sophie were sure to have ribbons. Reven would have one . . .

  The Bonemaster, meanwhile, had been readying another spell. A green flash hit Jinx, a shock worse than touching ice-glass. It threw him across the room. Jinx hit the stone wall and everything went wavery and gray for a moment.

  He was surprised Sophie even knew the words she called the Bonemaster.

  “Don’t overestimate your value as a hostage,” the Bonemaster told her.

  Elfwyn charged at the Bonemaster, neck out, squawking rapidly.

  Jinx took advantage of the distraction to get up and stagger back to the table. He grabbed a ribbon and held on tight. Remembering that he wanted the Bonemaster dead—Path of Ice, Path of Ice—he wrenched the writhing, squiggling thing free of the mass.

  It leapt away from him, and for a moment they all watched it twist and spin in the air before it burst into blue flame and vanished.

  “That was Reven,” said Jinx. “I guess you bound his death to yours when you held us captive.”

  “I didn’t need that young fool anyway,” said the Bonemaster. “Rufus and Bluetooth will take care of him for me. You realize that—”

  “None of those kings would have been able to get so far into the Urwald if you hadn’t sealed the Paths of Fire and Ice,” said Jinx.

  “Precisely so,” said the Bonemaster.

  Jinx could feel Elfwyn frantically trying, between flaps and squawks, to undo the spell that held Sophie. She seemed to be doing the magic right, but couldn’t match the Bonemaster’s vast deathforce power, drawn from the Path of Ice. Jinx felt his way into the spell. But power was giving him trouble. He was used to fire, and it was still there, but it was hard to find it through the deathforce ice. And as for the fire inside him, it was barely there at all.

  Sophie let out a muffled gasp and began to turn purple. Jinx recognized the spell—the Bonemaster was shrinking her clothes, squeezing the breath out of her. Angrily Jinx reached into the spell and tried to reverse it. The trouble was he couldn’t get ahold of the lifeforce power, because he seemed to be stuck in the deathforce ice: The more the Bonemaster hurt Sophie, the more Jinx wanted him dead.

  So Jinx used deathforce and undid the squeezing spell.

  He was feeling his way into the stuck-to-the-wall spell when the Bonemaster spun around and cast a spell that sent Jinx flying through the air. Jinx hit the wall hard and slid to the floor. He lay there stunned, and watched Elfwyn free herself and Sophie. Jinx frantically tried to use KnIP to dig a hole under the Bonemaster’s feet, but it was too slow.

  “Bawkbawkbawkbawk!” cried Elfwyn warningly.

  There came a ripping, rending sound from the corridor. Jinx watched, transfixed, as the bones and skulls tore themselves free of the walls and moved toward the chamber, clanking and assembling themselves as they came.

  Then the chamber was full of skeletons, hundreds of skeletons, dancing and rattling, kicking and swinging. They were all coming at Jinx. Sophie, meanwhile, was stuck back to the wall.

  Elfwyn gave another squawk of warning. There was a swooshing sound, and the Bonemaster’s hired ghoul flew into the room, its tubular greenish-white mouth flexing, its huge eyes searching for victims. Ghouls sucked people’s brains out through their eyeballs. The ghoul swooped toward Sophie . . .

  “Set the ghoul on fire!” Jinx yelled. He couldn’t do it himself, he was nearly buried in skeletons and he couldn’t find the fire. They clawed at his eyes and encircled his throat with bony hands. Their horrible cold arms and legs battered at him. He punched and kicked, and they flew to pieces, but there were always more coming at him.

  Through the crowding skulls and vertebrae, he could see that the ghoul was aflame. Its low, moany wails filled the chamber. The Bonemaster was turned toward Sophie, ready to cast a spell, and Elfwyn was flapping and squawking and trying to summon a spell of her own.

  Jinx charged through the skeletons, sending bones flying everywhere, and grabbed the bottle from the table.

  It was like grabbing an armful of ice-cold electric eels. Jinx had to c
ling to the Path of Ice—plant his thoughts firmly on it—to keep the bottle from sending horrible shocks through his body, and at the same time he had to fight to keep the bottle from wriggling out of his arms.

  He kicked over the table. He could see the gaping hole in the floor that led to the Path of Ice. He just hoped the Bonemaster could see it too.

  “Hey, Bonemaster!” he yelled. “I’ve got your life!”

  He jumped down the hole.

  Jinx hit the ice and slid, clutching the bottle. He grabbed a ribbon of smoke and pulled it loose as he fell, set it free, and watched it flame. It was someone he didn’t recognize, a person with soft, bewildered purple thoughts.

  He pulled another ribbon loose—where was the Bonemaster? He was supposed to follow Jinx, not stay behind and keep attacking Elfwyn and Sophie—

  The ribbon floated free with shocking-pink splashes of joy. Another stranger. The ribbon flamed and vanished. The next ribbon—

  Something slammed into Jinx, almost knocking the bottle out of his grip. It was the Bonemaster. Jinx and the Bonemaster zipped down the slope, tumbling over and over as they wrestled for the bottle. They fought as if they weren’t magicians—they kicked and punched, and meanwhile Jinx managed to wrest another ribbon free with his teeth. This one was brown and blue, wreathed in silver—Sophie! So that was one less person he had to worry about. (If you didn’t count that he’d left her being attacked by skeletons and a burning ghoul.)

  Jinx managed to wrap himself around the bottle. The Bonemaster’s fists and feet hammered every part of Jinx that they could reach. Jinx was able to free two more ribbons—both strangers to him—as he kicked back.

  He tried to set the Bonemaster on fire. But it was impossible—not a flicker of flame came to his call. He was too firmly on the Path of Ice. And he didn’t dare leave it while he had the bottle in his hands.

  He felt a squeezing sensation—the Bonemaster was shrinking his clothes. Jinx undid the spell, and turned it back on the Bonemaster. The Bonemaster undid it, and slammed Jinx’s head against the wall.

  Jinx saw stars and black flashes. He could feel the Bonemaster tugging at the bottle. Jinx kneed him, hard, then kicked him away with both feet. The Bonemaster slid until he reached a flat space in the corridor.