Jinx

by Sage Blackwood

  “Which he certainly never drank. He wouldn’t. The Bonemaster’s not an easy wizard to fool.”

  Jinx tried to take the cup, but his hand didn’t want to do what he told it to. It flopped around and wouldn’t close. That scared him.

  “You’ll be fine when you wake up,” said Simon.

  He held the cup to Jinx’s lips.

  It could be anything, really. Simon wouldn’t poison him, not if he was telling the truth about what he wanted Jinx to do. But the potion could be something to put Jinx under Simon’s control, take away his power to choose—there were potions that could do that.

  Would Simon do that? Even now that Jinx had his magic back and could (sort of) read minds, he didn’t know. But on the whole he thought not—not right now, not when Simon was so relieved to see Jinx alive. Jinx examined all the clouds around Simon’s head. There was no guilt now. There was that warm blue cloud. And there was the wall, and everything that lay behind it.

  Jinx drank the potion. It didn’t taste bad at all.

  He burrowed into the warm blue cloud and fell asleep.

  24

  Reven’s Curse

  Jinx awoke in the first gray light of dawn. He went out to the kitchen. Elfwyn was sitting by the fire, surrounded by cats. When she saw Jinx, she jumped up and hugged him.

  “Where is everyone?” said Jinx.

  “Reven’s asleep, up in your tower. And Simon’s back there somewhere.” Elfwyn gestured toward the south wing. “He just got home last night.”

  “What do you mean? We all got back yesterday.” Jinx went to get some cider.

  “Simon and my grandmother left again, after we did the spell on you. They went to strengthen the wards Simon put around the Bonemaster’s island. They spent a couple days doing that. And then I guess my grandmother went home.”

  “A couple days? But—”

  “You were asleep for three days.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Nobody can be asleep for three days.”

  “You were.”

  Jinx didn’t believe her. “Was I really?”

  “Yes.” And since it was a question, it must be true.

  That explained why his mouth was so dry. He drank the cider down in one long gulp. “I thought your grandmother was friends with the Bonemaster.”

  “Of course she isn’t. Who could be?”

  Jinx didn’t argue the point. “So you didn’t go home with your grandmother?”

  “No, well, I’d already been to visit her,” said Elfwyn. She sat down at the table and scooped a cat up into her lap.

  “Yes, but—”

  “I told you, I don’t want to live with her. I like it here. It’s such a lovely clearing. And I milked the goats!”

  “Don’t you have goats in your clearing?”

  “No, we have stupid cows. And Simon’s really nice when you get used to him—”

  This was so patently untrue that Jinx had to laugh. “When I act like Simon, you say I’m not-nice.”

  “I never said you weren’t nice.”

  Jinx decided to let that go. “So are you going to go back to Butterwood Clearing, then?”

  “I don’t know. There are things I need to think about.” She did not elaborate.

  Jinx poured some more cider and got a piece of pumpkin pie from the cupboard. He ate it and then went outside to tell the trees that he was alive.

  Jinx wormed his feet into the warm soil of the Urwald. He had a feeling that since his death, he no longer needed to do this to listen. He was connected to the trees in a way he hadn’t been before his flight over the Urwald. But it was comforting to feel the dirt between his toes. The forest spoke of late summer and the way it made your leaves feel, of the pain at the edges of the Urwald, of the Terror lodged in Simon’s house.

  The Listener is alive, said the forest, after a while. He’s sprouted fresh greenery.

  Jinx had never heard the Urwald’s voice so clearly before. It wasn’t one tree speaking—things went from root to root, and the forest spoke. The Urwald couldn’t read Jinx’s mind, but he found that now, as he stood rooted into the soil, he could send messages. He told about his bottled life being restored to him.

  Wizard’s magic, said the forest.

  Wizard’s magic is different from Urwald magic, said Jinx.

  Wizard’s magic, witch’s magic, it’s all magic. It’s all of the Urwald.

  Then I can do wizard’s magic and still do Urwald magic? Jinx asked. I mean, the Urwald magic that is not wizard’s magic.

  You can, Listener. We don’t suppose anyone else can. But you, yes, probably, perhaps, maybe. There was some disagreement about this along the crisscrossing lines of roots.

  You’ve let me use your power.

  It’s your power.

  The power that comes from the trees, I mean, said Jinx. That comes from the Urwald.

  The trees thought this was funny. The trees aren’t the Urwald. Yes, the trees. No, not the trees. Not only the trees. The creatures that live in the Urwald. All the restless ones. Even the scheming humans. Even the wizards are the Urwald.

  Jinx had felt that when he flew over the Urwald.

  But the other wizards don’t use your power, he said. They can’t, can they?

  Can’t. Don’t listen. They’d misuse it, of course. You will too.

  No, I won’t.

  You will.

  Jinx decided not to argue this point. They’d see in time that he didn’t. Instead he said, About the Terror …

  Fear rippled through the roots.

  I’m going to take him out of the Urwald, Jinx said. I’ll travel with him to the edge of the forest and not let him hurt any trees on the way. But can you promise not to harm him while I do it? Don’t drop anything on him, don’t send any ogres, and let him get safely out? I will tell him never to come back.

  We will try. But we have no control over the Restless. The ogres, the werewolves, and vampires. The humans. Yes, we do. No, we don’t. We shall see what can be done.

  Thank you, said Jinx.

  Then he asked the trees if they knew who Reven was. But they didn’t, or not in the way Jinx meant—he was just the Terror.

  Reven was outside chopping firewood. Simon was in the kitchen kneading bread dough.

  “Can I help?” Elfwyn asked.

  “I do the cooking,” Simon snapped.

  “You could scrub the potatoes,” said Jinx. “He lets people do that.”

  “It can’t be messed up too badly,” said Simon.

  Jinx brought some potatoes from the bin and dumped them into a tub of water that Elfwyn pumped.

  “Did you decide about going back to Butterwood Clearing, then?” Jinx asked her.

  Elfwyn scrubbed hard at a potato. “Yes. I’d better not go back. They kind of got tired of me there. Because of my curse.”

  “You could stay here,” said Jinx.

  “Don’t mind me, I’m just the cook,” said Simon.

  Elfwyn looked at him. “About my curse—”

  “I can’t take your curse off you,” said Simon. “It’s not wizards’ magic.”

  “Because it was put on me by an evil fairy?” said Elfwyn.

  Simon frowned. “Who told you that?”

  “My mother.”

  “There’s no such thing as fairies,” said Simon. “Except in fairy tales.”

  Elfwyn pursed her lips and nodded. “I see. Then who put the curse on me?”

  “I have no way of knowing that,” said Simon. “But I doubt it was a wizard. It takes a huge amount of power to put a spell on a living person, and it’s hard to see the point of wasting that much power on you.”

  Elfwyn nodded again. “So there are no fairies, and a wizard wouldn’t bother. How about a witch?”

  “A witch can cast a spell on a person much more easily than a wizard can,” said Jinx, remembering this.

  “I don’t see why a witch would bother casting that spell on you either,” said Simon.

  “Because she didn’t lik
e little girls to tell lies,” said Elfwyn. “She came to visit us in Butterwood Clearing when I was two years old. I thought I remembered it, but my mother said I was wrong. And she told me that little girls shouldn’t tell lies, and then she put the curse on me.”

  “This would be your grandmother, I take it,” said Simon.

  Elfwyn nodded. “That’s probably why she never came to visit again. I think my mother was very angry at her. There was yelling.”

  “What was the lie you told?” said Jinx.

  Elfwyn looked embarrassed. “I ate all the strawberries we picked, and then when she asked, I told her I hadn’t.”

  “Don’t ask questions of a person who has to answer them, Jinx. It’s not polite,” said Simon.

  “You’re telling me what’s polite?”

  “Yes. Go get some more firewood.”

  Jinx went, in a huff. The idea of Simon telling anyone how to be polite was ludicrous.

  Reven was still out by the woodpile, splitting logs. Reven dearly loved splitting logs. The logs had all been as split as they could be and still be firewood. Now he was splitting them up into kindling.

  “Are you ready to go where you were going when I met you?” Jinx asked.

  A yellow line appeared fuzzily around Reven’s thoughts, and Reven turned away. Jinx thought the line might be Reven’s curse. He wondered if he could do anything with that yellow line now that he knew it was there.

  Elfwyn was coming toward them across the clearing.

  “I want you to leave the Urwald,” said Jinx. “Is that what you were planning to do anyway?”

  Reven smiled. “You want me to leave? I thought the Urwald had no king.”

  “It doesn’t,” said Jinx. “But, well, the trees want you to leave.”

  “You can’t tell me trees are like people.”

  “I know I can’t. That’s the problem.”

  “Maybe if he stayed longer, he’d understand,” said Elfwyn, coming to stand beside them.

  “The trees don’t want him to stay longer.” Jinx hated doing this. “You want to leave anyway, don’t you? It’s not like you belong here.”

  “’Tis a fascinating place to visit,” said Reven.

  “You were on your way somewhere when I met you,” said Jinx. “You were crossing the Urwald. You were going east.”

  The yellow line around Reven’s thoughts turned orange. This was getting closer to his curse.

  “Toward Butterwood Clearing,” said Elfwyn. “Toward King Bluetooth’s country.”

  “Orange,” said Jinx. Oops. He didn’t intend to tell anyone that he’d regained the power to see thoughts. Elfwyn had been right; it was the kind of thing that could make people want to kill Jinx. “Keyland, right? Were you going to Keyland?”

  “They want to cut down the trees,” said Elfwyn.

  “I guess they’re doing it,” said Jinx. “The trees say someone is.”

  “King Bluetooth is evil,” said Elfwyn. She was watching Reven carefully.

  “Aye, you speak sooth, lady.” Reven didn’t seem to have any trouble saying this, but the lines around his thoughts went orange again.

  “He killed your father,” said Elfwyn.

  Bright orange. Reven said nothing.

  “How do you know that?” said Jinx.

  “I suspected it ever since the Bonemaster said Reven was important. He’s just the right age to be the boy that King Bluetooth said he’d killed. And it fits in with all the things he can’t say.”

  Jinx didn’t understand. “What boy he killed?”

  “His nephew. King Bluetooth killed his own brother, who was the real king of Keyland, and he killed the boy and the stepmother. I told you that.”

  Reven looked embarrassed. He tossed the ax into the air and caught it left-handed.

  “But I guess what really happened was that your stepmother, the dead king’s new wife, took you and ran away to Bragwood,” said Elfwyn. “Or, no, that can’t be quite right, because you were a prisoner of King Rufus of Bragwood, weren’t you?”

  “No,” said Reven. “We were guests of a sort.”

  “But he killed your stepmother because she said who you were,” said Elfwyn.

  “Alas, my lady.” The lines were orange-red, and Jinx could see that Reven was feeling carefully for things his curse would let him say.

  “Why would he have done that?” Elfwyn wondered aloud. “Perhaps King Bluetooth was paying him to keep you there and keep your identity secret.”

  The lines around Reven’s curse went bright red. “I think that’s true,” said Jinx.

  “Once he found out that that was where you had taken refuge,” said Elfwyn, “he just told everyone that you’d been killed. He must have been paying an awful lot for King Rufus to be that desperate to guard the secret. To do what he did to your stepmother, I mean.”

  “King Rufus was ever ruthless, my lady. He enjoys that sort of thing.”

  “Yech,” said Elfwyn. “I’m glad we don’t have kings. But now you’re a king, I suppose.”

  Bright red again, Jinx saw. “It’s going to be hard to claim your throne when you can’t even tell people who you are.”

  “Many things in life are difficult,” said Reven, choosing his words carefully. “But to those who persevere, all things are possible.”

  “Sometimes people are happier if they don’t persevere,” said Elfwyn.

  “That may be true, my lady.”

  Jinx thought what lay ahead for Reven—trying to seize the throne of Keyland from evil King Bluetooth when Reven couldn’t even say that he was the rightful heir. It gave Jinx a headache. He was glad the Urwald didn’t have kings. But it could still be threatened by them.

  “Would you cut down the Urwald too, if you were king? Like King Bluetooth is doing?” he asked.

  Reven smiled. “How is it possible to cut down the Urwald? You see how vast it is.”

  Uh-huh. “I’m going to go with you to the edge of the Urwald,” Jinx told him. “I promised the forest I would.”

  Maybe, Jinx thought, he would even go on to Keyland. He remembered Tolliver the Wanderer saying that they killed magicians there, and since Jinx could do magic, they would certainly consider Jinx a magician. But then, Tolliver had also said that if you never went anywhere you’d always be stupid.

  “I shall be glad of your company, friend Jinx.”

  “I’ll come along,” said Elfwyn.

  She smiled at Reven, her thoughts pink and fluffy. If she’d liked Reven as a thief and a banished courtier, she didn’t like him any less as a deposed king. Jinx realized with a start that Reven wasn’t thinking any pink fluffy thoughts back at her. His thoughts were square and calculating.

  Jinx picked up an armload of the much-split logs and walked back to the house. He thought Elfwyn would stay with Reven, thinking her pink fluffy thoughts at him, but she ran to catch up with Jinx.

  “You got your mind-reading power back, didn’t you?” she whispered.

  Jinx started to lie and say no. But it didn’t seem fair, lying to Elfwyn when she couldn’t lie back. “Don’t tell anyone, please.”

  She gave him a look—of course, it was stupid asking Elfwyn to keep a secret. Jinx sighed.

  “I’ll really, really, try not to,” she said.

  “You’re going where?”

  “To take Reven to Keyland,” Jinx said. “I have to. I promised the trees that I would.”

  “Is this that nonsense about talking to the trees that you used to spout when you were little?”

  “You don’t think it’s nonsense,” said Jinx. “You never did.” He should have realized that before. But being deprived of his magic, and having to figure people out from the outside, made it much easier to understand their thinking now.

  “Were you going to ask my permission at all, or were you planning to dispense with that?”

  “You said I could go. You said I should get out and explore the world.”

  “Before. When I knew you had some protection, and th
at I could probably save you as long as you hadn’t actually been eaten. Now you haven’t got a bottled life anymore.” Simon frowned. “I suppose I could bottle it again before you go, but—”

  “No,” said Jinx.

  “You’re right. It’s too soon—the life hasn’t had time to recover its strength.”

  “I mean no, never,” said Jinx. “You’re not getting my life back. It was never just lost in the forest; it was mine.”

  Simon wasn’t surprised by this, Jinx could tell, but he acted surprised and looked at Jinx through narrowed eyes. “Lending your life to a wizard is the usual price of apprenticeship. Besides, it’s why you’re alive right now.”

  Jinx wasn’t going to lose his magic again. If only he’d been able to see the Bonemaster’s thoughts, he’d have known the wizard wasn’t going to take Elfwyn’s sleeping potion and Jinx probably wouldn’t have fallen off the cliff.

  “I brought your life back, and I’m going to put it back in you someday,” said Jinx. “And that’s the price of my apprenticeship. And I’ll work for you like I always have, clean up and stuff. That’s the price. Not my life.”

  “You make the rules around here, do you?”

  “It’s my life.”

  “And what if you end up not being able to do the spell at all? Or what if you run off on me?”

  “I won’t run off,” said Jinx. As for doing the spell—well, yes. Jinx was worried about that. He remembered how nervous Simon had been about doing it on Jinx—there were probably a lot of ways it could go wrong, all of them disastrous. At least Jinx had a lot of power to draw on. He had the Urwald.

  He wasn’t about to tell Simon that. Because the trees were right—other wizards would misuse the Urwald’s power, and Simon was “other wizards” with a capital OW.

  “You can’t stay away long,” said Simon. “You have to come back. There’s a lot to learn.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose I’ll have to send you to Samara to study.”

  Samara—Jinx definitely wanted to go back there. Then a dismal thought struck him. “I promised Sophie I wouldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t what?”

  “Go back to Samara.”

  “Was this a real promise, or was this one of those Sophie promises, where you didn’t actually have a choice?” said Simon.