Jinx

by Sage Blackwood

  He looked down at his completely visible feet, one starting to swell to match his ankle. He tried again. Concentrate!

  The werewolf was pawing now at the loose dirt where Jinx had buried his toes for listening. It was no good: Jinx couldn’t do the spell. He’d never been able to do it. In his head he heard Simon say, Of course you can’t if you think you can’t.

  Forget about can’t, then. He had to do it, or he’d be dinner. He concentrated harder. I’m not here, I’m not here. He reached for the power that Simon said was within him.

  And suddenly he found it. For the first time, he actually sensed the presence of power. He didn’t know where it came from, but it was there. He pulled it into the concealment spell as hard as he could.

  The werewolf’s ears perked up and swiveled in Jinx’s direction. It sniffed the air, then came straight toward Jinx. This one was closer to wolf-shape than to human-shape, and it moved on all fours. But its forelegs looked like arms, ending in hands with long yellow talons.

  The werewolf crept closer. It was just a few feet from Jinx. It came closer still. Jinx had never been nearer to death. The werewolf put its nose to the ground at Jinx’s feet and sniffed. It moved around him in a circle, sniffing and sniffing. Its nose almost touched Jinx’s foot.

  Then it sat up on its haunches and looked all around, confused. After what seemed like hours but was probably only a few seconds, it ran off with its tail between its legs.

  It took Jinx over an hour to limp home. It should have been terrifying, being in the Urwald, off the path, and unable to run. But it wasn’t. Jinx had power.

  “Jinx, what happened?” Simon came hurrying across the clearing, looking worried.

  “I did it!” Jinx told him. “I did a concealment spell.”

  “Knew you could.” Simon helped him into the house. “What did you have to hide from?”

  “A werewolf,” said Jinx. “He sniffed all around my feet and couldn’t tell I was there.”

  “Excellent.” Simon smiled and looked like the old Simon for a moment. But he wasn’t the old Simon, and Jinx wasn’t the old Jinx, and there was always something tight and brittle in the way they spoke to each other. “Now put your foot up on a chair, and I’ll get dinner.”

  While Simon cooked, Jinx tried to levitate a cat. No luck. It was as if he had no more power than he’d had before. But he knew he had more. He’d felt it. He’d done a concealment spell, and it had been a really strong one.

  Knowledge is power. He thought about the book. All right, so he knew he could levitate a cat, then. He looked at a cat and concentrated. The cat scowled disdainfully at him and did not rise.

  Later, when Simon was out milking the goats (for a change) and Jinx found he could walk around without his ankle hurting, Jinx went into Simon’s workroom and poked around a little on the shelves over the workbench.

  He saw the small leather-bound book called Knowledge Is Power.

  He took it off the shelf and flipped through it. Those stupid spells, if that was what they were. An object may be concealed in plain view. One who knows that the object is there will find it, and one who does not will not. That was like the opposite of Simon saying you can’t if you think you can’t. It was—

  Suddenly Jinx realized what the spell book meant.

  He listened. No sound of Simon. Jinx stepped out of the workroom and into the hallway. He listened again. Silence. Armed with the confidence he’d gained from doing a concealment spell, Jinx turned and faced the blank wall at the end of the hallway.

  Jinx had run his hands over the wall many times, feeling for a door, but his hands had encountered only smooth stone. Very well.

  He knew there was a door here.

  He put his hand out. It disappeared a few inches into the stone, which suddenly wasn’t really there. He touched wood. He ran his fingers over the rugged surface to where he figured—no, he knew—there was a latch. He touched an iron handle. He pressed down with his thumb. The latch grated and creaked as it lifted. He pulled the door toward him. He could see it now. He walked through the doorway.

  He was in a room lined with shelves and shelves of books—even more books than Simon had in his workroom. This room was not dusty—it had the feel of a room that was used often.

  Jinx felt drawn to the books (after all, they must all be books that Simon didn’t want him to read), but there was another door, and he wanted to find what lay beyond it.

  He opened the door and coughed. This room was full of dust, a thick layer covering the floor and everything else. There was a soft thing like a bed, only with a back and arms like a chair, which he guessed was for sitting on. There was a table, and a jar with long-dead flowers in it.

  There was a large, heavy door in the far wall, banded with iron. Whatever it kept in or out must be important. It would probably be locked. Jinx went to it and tried to lift the latch, but it wouldn’t move.

  There was no keyhole. Jinx searched for bolts going into the floor or the ceiling, but couldn’t find any. There seemed to be nothing special about the latch, so some kind of spell, probably. Jinx tried his levitation spell, hoping to lift the iron latch an inch, but he didn’t expect it to work and it didn’t.

  “Oh,” he said aloud.

  Of course! He knew the door would open.

  He reached out, lifted the latch, and opened the door.

  Instantly he closed his eyes against bright white sunlight. A blast of hot dry air hit him in the face. There was a smell of dust, but dust much drier and more free than the dust that made its way into the corners of Simon’s house. The smell of the hot air stirred a memory. Sophie had smelled of this place sometimes, when she would first arrive. Samara. Painfully Jinx tried to open his eyes, a sliver at a time. He expected every instant to feel Simon’s hand fall heavy on his shoulder, hauling him back into the house before he could go any farther.

  Finally he was able to open his eyes.

  He was not in the Urwald at all.

  He couldn’t see any trees. Only houses, the glaring yellow-white sky, and the yellow sandy earth.

  He looked all around him. Not a single tree anywhere. The sky was vast and empty, and there was nothing to protect him from it.

  He stepped out of the house. The sand was hot and uncomfortable on his feet, so he closed the door quickly and started walking fast. He wanted to find Sophie but, even more, he wanted to explore this new place and see if it held an answer to his missing magic.

  He walked between two rows of flat square houses all stuck together, yellow like the sand. He looked back the way he’d come and saw a row of doors painted different colors. The door to Simon’s house was blue-violet. He’d be able to find it again.

  He stepped into the shadow of a house to cool his feet.

  He was in a—all right, he had read the words for these things in books: a town. He was on a street.

  He turned a corner and met a man completely dressed in chickens. The chickens were hanging by their feet, flapping and squawking, tied to two poles that the man carried balanced on his shoulders. The man cast Jinx an incurious glance—probably with that much squawking going on around you, you didn’t notice other people much—but Jinx noticed the glance showed none of the fear with which strangers eyed each other in the Urwald. The man passed by in a ruffle of feathers and a whiff of chicken smell.

  There were more streets, more corners to turn, more square houses with brightly painted doors. Jinx thought he had turned six times now, or maybe seven. People passed by, dressed in bright colors.

  They didn’t look like Urwald people. Oh, they looked like them in some ways—that is, their hair and eyes were all the colors and shapes that such things come in, and their skin was every color from pale pink to dark brown. But they didn’t have the faces of Urwald people; they didn’t look as if they expected something to jump out and eat them at any moment.

  They also didn’t look like magicians.

  Jinx walked on. The houses around him were higher now, and there were f
lat stones underfoot, gritty with sand. He’d lost count of how many times he’d turned, and he wasn’t quite sure which direction Simon’s house was. It was hard to sense direction when there were no trees to use as landmarks. Sometimes people stepped on his feet. People here seemed used to bouncing off each other and moving on. Jinx was not. The presence of so many people was making him nervous, and the absence of trees didn’t help. The sound of voices rattled in his ears. Everyone was speaking at once, talking over each other and shouting each other down. Nothing seemed particularly magical at all.

  He came out into a huge stone-paved square. Still no trees, and no noticeable magic, but there was plenty to see. Blankets and rugs were spread out on the stones, and people had heaps of things displayed for sale. Jinx saw piles of strange spiny fruits, onions, barrels of rye and precious wheat. He smelled the rare spices that Simon had in his kitchen.

  A great yellow-stone building dominated the square. He’d seen a picture of something like this in a book, but he couldn’t remember the word for it. There were tall columns in front supporting a—portico, that was the word—at the top of wide stone steps. A temple, that’s what it was. Fascinated, Jinx made his way toward it, getting pushed and knocked around and his feet trodden on a few more times.

  There was a fence of high iron spears around the temple yard. The iron gate was open, and Jinx went through. Now he could see that on the portico were carved the words

  KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

  The words from the book of spells! And he’d heard Sophie say those words. He wondered if he would find her here. He hoped he would find out something about his magic. A few people were passing up or down the steps, in and out of the great open double doors of the temple. They were all dressed in robes like the one Sophie sometimes wore.

  He felt sure she must be here. He crossed the stone-flagged courtyard. He tried to move the way the robed people did, swiftly and purposefully, but calmly. Even without the magic that Simon had taken away from him, he could still feel the calm. He imagined if he could have seen it, it would have been lavender and thick.

  The fact that he could almost see the color of the feeling gave him new hope that he would find his magic here.

  He went up the steps. A woman gave him a brief curious glance but then moved on, intent on her own business. Jinx tried to look intent on his.

  Tall double doors stood wide open, and Jinx passed through. Inside the temple was a vast room. There were rows of long wooden workbenches and a hundred robed people sitting at them, writing. The only sound was the scratch of pens, and now and then the hem of a throat being cleared, gently so as not to disturb the calm.

  Nobody looked up as Jinx passed down the great hall. He peered along the rows—none of these people was Sophie. He tried to see what they were writing. Some had books in front of them and were taking notes. Others were writing away in blank books. A row of tall windows marched down the far wall of the room, but none of the scribes lifted their eyes to look out. And none of them looked at Jinx.

  Jinx wondered if these were the “them” he’d heard Simon and Sophie argue about. You think I’m as bad as them, Simon had said. And Sophie’d said, They think innocence is so charming when it’s on other people.

  There was a doorway at the other end of the temple, leading to sunlight and an open walkway beyond—Jinx could see more robes passing to and fro out there. He headed toward it, eager to find Sophie or someone who could tell him about his magic.

  “What are you doing here, little boy?”

  The voice rang through the stone silence like a dropped plate. The pens stopped scratching. A hundred pairs of eyes swiveled and fixed on Jinx.

  He looked up at the tall woman standing in front of him. For just a moment he thought she was Sophie, although she was too tall and had too much gray hair, and Sophie had never looked so stern and frightening.

  Jinx was not a little boy. Nonetheless, when he said, “I’m looking for Sophie,” he sounded to himself like a little boy.

  “Sophie who?” Her glare was making him feel little, and the hundred silent watchers didn’t help.

  The wizards mentioned in the magic books he’d read sometimes had two names. The second name was usually the same as Simon’s. Perhaps Sophie’s was too.

  “Sophie Magus,” he said.

  There was a single gasp from a hundred mouths. Only the woman standing over Jinx didn’t gasp.

  “If someone is called Magus, you would hardly expect to find them here,” she said.

  Incredibly, a few of the scholars tittered.

  Jinx was getting really annoyed with these people. He wondered how Sophie could stand them, actually. Jinx liked reading as much as the next person, but he liked knowing what was happening outside of books too. There was a whole bright fascinating world beyond the temple doors, and they were sitting in here with their backs to it! Jinx didn’t think they deserved Sophie.

  He also had to admit that nothing seemed the least bit magical about them. He thought of Sophie, who objected to magic even though she liked it. And Sophie came from this place, where KNOWLEDGE IS POWER was written over the door. But Knowledge Is Power was a book of spells. It didn’t make sense.

  There came the sound of raised voices from outside—shouts, argument, and then dozens of other voices joining in, loud and angry.

  “What’s that?” the woman demanded.

  “Some sort of fuss in the market, Preceptress.” A man stood up. “I’ll shut the doors.”

  None of them rose to look—a fuss in the market didn’t concern them. It wasn’t in books, Jinx thought, as he turned to look out the door. A full-scale fight was going on, a mass of punching and kicking bodies that spread outward as he watched. Even the man who had gotten up to close the doors seemed curious for a moment and paused after he had shut one door—just as what Jinx could have sworn was a familiar figure stalked out of the mob toward the temple.

  The man closed the other door, shutting in the calm quiet. He returned to his seat with a shake of his head for the futility of marketplace humanity.

  “Why do you think you might find somebody in the Temple of Knowledge with such a name as Magus?” asked the Preceptress.

  “Maybe that’s not her name,” said Jinx. He thought about what he had just seen moving out of the crowd. “Er, I should go.”

  Suddenly the double doors were thrown open with such force that they banged against the stone walls, making a louder noise than the hall had probably heard in a century. A hundred pairs of hands covered a hundred pairs of ears.

  Simon was furious. Jinx took an involuntary step backward. He heard a sudden intake of breath, which wasn’t quite a gasp, from the Preceptress, and she said sharply, “Go for the guards.”

  Jinx heard pattering feet behind him as two or three people took advantage of her order to get out of the room. Everyone else stayed seated.

  “I just want the boy,” said Simon.

  The Preceptress gripped Jinx’s shoulder, to his intense annoyance. Her hand felt like the claw of a large bird.

  “You just opened those doors with magic.” She made it sound dirty.

  “I didn’t break anything. Yet. Give me the boy.”

  “We certainly don’t intend to let you harm an innocent child.”

  Simon surged down the aisle. The scribes drew back and pulled the hems of their robes close about them as he passed. “He’s my boy.”

  He grabbed Jinx’s arm, not hard enough to hurt but quite tightly. The Preceptress’s fingers dug into Jinx’s shoulder, and that did hurt. Neither of them was looking at Jinx: they were both staring each other down, their foreheads wrinkled, their eyebrows lowered, their eyes boring into each other. Jinx had a feeling they might rip him in two without even remembering he was there.

  Jinx didn’t much like Simon coming in and claiming Jinx was his, but he definitely wasn’t the Preceptress’s. On the whole he thought he was his own.

  There was a heavy thud of footsteps from the covered walkway, and
half a dozen men with swords in their hands clattered into the hall and stopped. They looked from the Preceptress to Simon and didn’t seem to know what to do. Then expressions of alarm appeared on their faces, and Jinx realized Simon had frozen their clothes.

  “Your guards can’t hurt me,” said Simon. “Let go of the boy and I’ll take him and leave.”

  “You think you’ll be allowed to leave?”

  “If I don’t leave, many people will regret it.”

  Simon sounded really menacing. The Preceptress’s grip on Jinx’s shoulder slackened just enough that Jinx was able to shrug, duck, and wrench himself free. He and Simon started running at the same moment. The guards came to life behind them—the clothes-freezing spell worked only if you could see the people you were freezing. Jinx and Simon cascaded down the steps and across the courtyard into the marketplace, where the brawl now seemed to involve everybody.

  “Let go of me,” Jinx panted.

  Simon said nothing but ran around the edge of the crowd, and Jinx was yanked along after him, his feet managing to hit the ground about two steps out of every three. Shouts came from the edges of the fighting crowd—

  “Simon! Simon Magus! I told you I saw him!”

  “Faster!” said Simon.

  The pounding feet of the guards were right behind them. Out of the corner of his eye Jinx saw people from the crowd running toward him and Simon—and a lot of the crowd was ahead of them. In another moment they would be surrounded.

  Then Simon fell.

  Jinx was too dumbfounded to do anything at first. Simon falling was as unthinkable as a mighty tree falling. More. Simon was vanishing under a pile of guards, and Jinx stood there. Simon had let go of Jinx’s arm, but Jinx didn’t run away. He couldn’t, and leave Simon.

  “Get me out of here, Jinx!”

  The guards were in a helpless heap, their clothes frozen again, their hands struggling to control the swords that flopped in their unsupported hands. It was a waving mass of swords. Then one by one the swords dropped to the ground as the guards’ wrists gave out.

  “They’ve killed him!” someone in the crowd yelled. “The wizard’s dead!”