Jinx's Magic

by Sage Blackwood

  “Very good. Who was the seventeenth empress of the Perhatan City-State?”

  “Olabisi the Unavoidably Delayed.”

  People nearby were tilting their heads to hear the questions. Omar glanced sideways at them, and Jinx saw quite clearly that the man changed the questions every time. That was odd—Jinx wasn’t used to seeing thoughts as distinctly as he saw Omar’s.

  “And how, in that ancient empire, might one obtain permission to practice law?”

  “By sacrificing a sacred camel to the law gods,” said Jinx.

  The next question caught him by surprise.

  “What are the intelligent beings of the Urwald?”

  “Uh,” said Jinx.

  Now here was the thing. He could see in Omar’s mind that he wanted three answers. Jinx didn’t have the foggiest idea, however, which three creatures Omar wanted. Trolls? No, probably not. Vampires?

  “Humans, werewolves, and elves,” said Jinx.

  And saw immediately from Omar’s thoughts that he had gotten the question wrong.

  Omar kept smiling. “Divide 171 by 3, multiply by 40, and divide by 12.”

  Ouch. This was not Jinx’s kind of thing at all. But—there was the number, sitting right in front of Omar’s brain.

  “One hundred and ninety,” he said, relieved.

  Omar moved on to testing Jinx in languages. This was easy. Jinx talked to Omar in Samaran, Herwa, and Urwish. He would have kept going with more languages, but Omar stopped him.

  “Excellent.” Omar switched back to Samaran. “You pass. Welcome to the Temple of Knowledge. You are now a Lector. Your Urwish accent isn’t very good, I’m afraid, but you have quite an advanced vocabulary.”

  “Uh. Thanks,” said Jinx, taking the silver badge that Omar handed him. That was it? Wasn’t Omar going to ask him about the Cheese Wars, or what caused the revolt of the Gnatcatchers of Upper Gribslime? Jinx suddenly felt he remembered everything and that Omar was unfair not to ask him.

  Omar looked down at his list. “Satya!”

  Satya was a girl with golden skin, and black hair that swished around her shoulders when she walked. Jinx listened to her answering questions. She didn’t even need to stop and think. But she wasn’t nearly as good at languages as Jinx was.

  Jinx examined the badge in his hand. It was stamped with an image of a locked book.

  “Want me to put that on for you?”

  The girl named Satya took the badge from Jinx’s hand and pinned it to his collar.

  “You’re Yinks?” she said.

  “Actually it’s pronounced Jinx.”

  The girl frowned with concentration. “ZH-inks.”

  “That’s very close,” said Jinx.

  “You’re from Angara?”

  Apparently that was the sort of news that got around fast about a person. “Yes.”

  “Right in Agnopolis, or out in the country?”

  “Um, yeah. Agnopolis.”

  “Cool,” said Satya. “I spent six months in Agnopolis brushing up on my Herwa. Go Grapemen, eh?” She stuck her fist out.

  Gack! Jinx tried hard to hide his alarm. He stuck his fist out too and said, “Yes. Go. Exactly.”

  She smiled, and Jinx saw that she knew he’d never been anywhere near Agnopolis in his life. Oddly, this seemed to please her.

  “You did real well on the test,” she said.

  “Not as well as you,” said Jinx.

  She shrugged. “The only thing you got wrong was that question about the Urwald, and really, Urwald questions are tough.”

  “Yeah. Well. What are the three intelligent beings of the Urwald?”

  “Witches, wizards, and humans,” said Satya.

  “But—” Jinx stopped himself from saying witches and wizards were humans. “Oh, well. Now I know.”

  “Anyway, don’t worry,” said Satya. “The guy before you only got two questions right, and they let him in. I kind of think the most important question is ‘Have you got twenty aviots?’”

  Just then a woman in gatekeeper’s robes called “Yinks!”

  Jinx went over to her. She was peering down a list.

  “From Angara, are you?”

  “Yes,” said Jinx, defensively.

  “Might as well put you in with Wendell. He won’t object.” The woman handed him a key. “That’s for your room.”

  Jinx found room 411 on the fourth floor at the end of a long corridor. He knocked.

  The door banged open, and a boy stepped out into the hall. “Come in! I’m Wendell.” He looked around. “Help you carry your bags?”

  “I don’t have any bags,” said Jinx.

  “Well, come in! My room is your room. Obviously. I mean, well, you’re the new roommate, right?” The boy looked down at Jinx and scratched his head uncertainly.

  Wendell had yellow hair that stuck up like a brush, and a confused but amiable expression. And he was older than Jinx. About fifteen, Jinx guessed—about Reven’s age.

  Jinx stepped into the room. One side looked very lived in, with books and papers scattered around and stray socks under the bed. The other had a bed, and nothing else.

  “That’s your side,” said Wendell. “Well, unless you want this side. I can always move.”

  “You were here first,” said Jinx.

  “No, really, if you’d rather have this side, I can move. I don’t mind at all.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Jinx assured him quickly, because Wendell was already gathering up his socks preparatory to making the move. “This side’s great.”

  “Okay.” Wendell dropped the socks back on the floor. “Well, make yourself at home. Obviously. What’s your name?”

  “Jinx.”

  “Jinks,” Wendell repeated.

  “You said it right.”

  “Oh, well. Urwish, right? Languages are the only thing I don’t totally suck at,” said Wendell, with an embarrassed smile. He sat down on the bed. “I’m pretty lousy at everything else. But people expect that of you when you’re from Angara.”

  “Glup,” said Jinx.

  15

  The Mistletoe Alliance

  “So where are you from?” said Wendell.

  “Um—”

  “Oh, right! You must be the other guy from Angara. Someone said there was one.”

  “Go Grapemen,” said Jinx.

  “Really? Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, I guess.” Wendell had been leaning back on his elbows, but he rolled to his feet. “You want me to show you around?”

  “Sure.”

  From outside, the Temple of Knowledge had been huge. But inside, there was just a square, four stories high, containing bedrooms, a dining hall, classrooms—

  “Where’s the library?” said Jinx.

  “Right down here.” Wendell led the way down a hall that ended in double doors. He swept the doors open with a flourish.

  The library wasn’t small, exactly. It contained, altogether, maybe twice as many books as Simon owned.

  Well, it wouldn’t take long to find the Eldritch Tome, if it was here. Jinx walked along one wall, reading titles.

  “Er—where are the books about magic?”

  “There aren’t any,” said Wendell.

  “But—I came here to study magic.” He remembered what Sophie had said about studying magic at the Temple. “Magic in theory, I mean.”

  “Oh, you’ll do that when you go out into the main Temple,” said Wendell, gesturing vaguely eastward. “Here in the Hutch, we just study the basics. The Seven Truths, the Thirteen Fallacies, and the Nine Virtues.”

  “The Hutch?”

  “The Lectors’ Square. It’s where they keep the lectors who haven’t made scholar. If you make scholar, they let you into the main Temple. There’s tons of books and stuff there.” Wendell shrugged. “We’re not allowed in there, of course.”

  “But I have a friend in there that I have to see!”

  “You could probably go around and ask for him at the visitors’ entrance.”

 
; Jinx had to see Sophie soon. If he couldn’t get into the libraries, then he needed her to steal the Eldritch Tome. Of course, she might refuse. Sophie took a dim view of all things magical. But surely when she understood how important it was . . .

  Besides, he needed Sophie to explain to him about werewolves, elves, and Listeners.

  “How long does it take to make scholar?”

  “Varies,” said Wendell. “But only one in ten make it.”

  “One in ten?”

  “Well, yeah, but you’ll make it. I can tell you’re smart. Most of my roommates have been smart. In fact, all of my roommates have gotten through.” Wendell smiled like he didn’t mind this, and there was an orange puff of hurt that said he minded it very much.

  “All your roommates? How long have you been here?” said Jinx.

  “Four years.”

  “Four years? And you haven’t—” Jinx stopped himself, because the orange puff of hurt was starting to grow. “Er, are the Nine Virtues or whatever pretty hard to learn, then?”

  “For me they are,” said Wendell. “Because I kind of suck at that stuff. You have to argue your point of view, you know? And I’m not very good at that.”

  Suddenly Wendell kicked a bookcase. “I hate it here!”

  A book plopped out onto the floor. Wendell knelt down and dusted it off carefully, and checked it all over to make sure it hadn’t come to any harm.

  “Why do you stay, then?” said Jinx.

  “I’ve got no choice. My grandfather wanted me to be a scholar, and he left all this money for it. So far my family’s spent eighty aviots and I’m no closer to making scholar than I ever was. I’m stuck here till the money runs out.”

  “Just leave,” said Jinx. “What’s stopping you?”

  “My grandfather’s dead.”

  “So?” Jinx realized that had come out wrong. “I mean, that’s too bad, but—”

  “You don’t know much about Chemeans, do you?”

  Oops. Uh-oh. Jinx ran through Sojourn Among Savages in his head. The Chemeans were a tribe in northern Angara. There was something in there about—“Er, they dig their dead up and sit them down to dinner?”

  Wendell smiled. “We only do that once a year. And it’s not, I mean—well, it’s this big holiday, and we carry them around in a procession. It’s quite—well, weird, actually.”

  “You don’t eat dinner with them?”

  “Well, the dead don’t actually eat, just we do. I mean we don’t eat the—we eat regular food, obviously.”

  Jinx found this deeply disturbing. But he tried hard not to show it, because Wendell was watching him closely for just that kind of reaction, and the big orange blob of hurt was waiting to grow.

  “Um, so, like, they eat too?” said Jinx.

  “No, of course not. They’re dead. But they sit up at the table, or, well, we tie them to the chairs, kind of. But, see, once you’re dead, you’re a god, you know? I have to do what my grandfather said. There’s no way out.”

  Jinx was nonplussed. “I guess if that’s what you believe—”

  “It’s not,” said Wendell. “But the rest of my family believes it, enough to keep throwing away aviots till there’s nothing left. So I have to keep trying. What’s the word? Persevere.”

  Jinx thought of something Elfwyn had once said. “A girl I know says—”

  “You know a girl?”

  Jinx laughed. “Well, yeah.”

  “I wish I knew a girl. Sorry, go on. She says?”

  “There are plenty of girls here,” said Jinx. It was a thing he had noticed.

  “Yeah, but you can’t actually know people here,” said Wendell. “You’ll see what I mean. Everyone’s too busy trying to get ahead. Anyway, this girl, she said?”

  “She said sometimes you’re happier if you don’t persevere.”

  “Oh, she’s right about that.” Wendell sighed. “But like I told you, I’ve got no choice. Come on, it’s almost dinner.”

  “Hang on,” said Jinx. He wanted to find a really thick book about Angara.

  Jinx cursed Simon in his head. Jinx had only a one in ten chance of even getting into the Temple? And, meanwhile, he couldn’t learn anything about magic at all. Why had Simon neglected to mention this? Was he just getting rid of Jinx? Sticking him in Samara while Simon went off to get himself killed by the Bonemaster?

  What Jinx ought to do right now was walk out of this silly lector jail, walk straight through Samara and back to the Urwald.

  But first, he had to get the Eldritch Tome.

  He was going to have to ask Sophie to get it for him. The problem was, he hadn’t had a chance to find her yet. They never let him alone for a minute. There were classes all the time.

  It was like Wendell had said—a lot of talking about the Fallacies, Truths, and Virtues. Jinx couldn’t see what this had to do with real life—real life was stuff like having to worry about whether some guy was going to invade your country when the people who lived in it didn’t even know it was a country, and wondering if you had imagined talking to werewolves and elves, and if not, what should you do about it. During a discussion of the Fourth Fallacy (“You can believe what you see with your own eyes”) he asked:

  “What makes a country—well, a country?”

  Omar smiled at him. “Precisely!”

  Jinx waited for Omar to say more, but Omar did not. “Well, what does, then?”

  “How did Samara begin?” said Omar.

  Jinx remembered this from the stuff he’d crammed into his head at Simon’s house. “Three women poured out water from jugs, and the water from one of the jugs became the Crocodile River, and—”

  A girl named Bridget snickered. Several other lectors sneered.

  Omar smiled. “Seriously, Yinks.”

  Jinx was being serious. He’d read it in a book.

  “The warring river tribes signed a treaty to join together and fight the encroaching brigands from the inner desert tribes,” Satya supplied.

  Jinx turned to her. “How?”

  Satya frowned. “What do you mean, how?”

  “How did anybody get them to agree to work to-gether?” Jinx thought about the Urwald clearings that didn’t trust each other, and the magicians that didn’t want to get involved.

  “They did it because they had to, of course,” said Satya.

  “But what made them realize it?” said Jinx.

  The other lectors were looking at Jinx like he was stupid. But he had to know.

  “Because things were bad,” said Bridget scornfully. “People were attacking them, duh.”

  Omar clucked his tongue disapprovingly at her. She shrugged.

  “Why don’t you tell us how Angara became a nation, Yinks?” said Omar.

  Jinx froze. He didn’t remember this. He wasn’t sure the books he’d read had mentioned it at all. No, wait, there had been something about people being formed from rocks. Jinx started to say it and then realized it might just be a legend. And Bridget was already waiting to sneer.

  Wendell cleared his throat nervously, and Omar looked at him in surprise.

  “It was King Welmut,” said Wendell. “Well, he wasn’t king then, obviously, but he arrived and all the Chemeans and Murkians and stuff were just . . . well, hanging around, obviously, and he said all the land was his and started killing everybody so they made him king, and well, like . . . that was Angara, you know. . . .”

  “‘Obviously,’” said Bridget. It had taken Wendell a long time to get all this out, and people were rolling their eyes and squirming with impatience.

  So there were at least two ways to become a country, then. But which was more like the Urwald—Samara’s way, or Angara’s?

  Both, Jinx thought. If all the clearings unite, it’ll be like Samara. And if the Bonemaster gets us all under his control, or Reven conquers us, it’ll be like Angara.

  “How do you get other countries to . . . well, admit that you’ve got a country?” said Jinx. “Like, I mean, not just treat you like you�
��re a part of their country?”

  “You fight a war, duh,” said Bridget.

  Jinx tried to imagine Urwalders fighting a war. It didn’t work. For one thing, everything he’d read about wars suggested they had a lot of people on each side. You’d never get Urwalders to all fight on one side. Each clearing would be its own side.

  “So what’s the next question?” said Omar.

  “How do you get people to unite?” said Jinx. “I mean work together, when they really don’t even like each other much?”

  “Ah.” Omar folded his hands and rested his chin on them. “That, Yinks, is one of the great questions.”

  Jinx wished Omar would supply an answer or two.

  “You know, Yinks, it has often been said that a person must leave his own country in order to truly understand it.”

  Yeah, great. But how were you supposed to understand your own country when there was no one you could ask?

  There was one thing he did know about his country. It wasn’t going to unite under any king. Jinx remembered how the Keylanders had gathered eagerly around Reven, and looked at him with shining eyes. Witch Seymour was right; Urwalders would never do that.

  “I thought we were supposed to be discussing the Fourth Fallacy,” Bridget said.

  There was a heavy iron door between the Lector’s Square and the main Temple. Jinx tried it—it was locked. Without thinking, he did a door-opening spell, but it was no good. The door was locked with a plain old lock, not magic.

  A gatekeeper materialized at his side. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” said Jinx, putting his hands behind his back.

  “Are you under orders to try to get into the Temple?”

  Pretty much. “Orders?” Jinx tried to laugh. “No. Why? From who? I was just curious.”

  The gatekeeper glowed suspicion. “Curiosity isn’t wanted. Run along.”

  The next day a scholar summoned Jinx into an empty classroom.

  “I am Proctor Ling,” she said.

  “I’m Jinx.”

  “Yes, I know that. I am told by Docent Omar that you show an unusually quick understanding of the Truths, Virtues, and Fallacies.”

  “Thanks,” said Jinx. He didn’t say that he couldn’t make head nor tail of the Truths, Virtues, and Fallacies. He had already figured out that that was the point of them.