Elinor did a great deal of buying over the next few weeks. She bought books. She traveled all over Europe in search of them. Darius was always with her, and sometimes Mo went with them, too. But Meggie stayed in the big house with her mother. They would sit together at a window looking out at the garden where the fairies were building themselves nests, gently glowing globes that hung among the branches of the trees. The glass men and women settled into Elinor's attic, and the trolls dug caves among the big old trees that grew in abundance in Elinor's garden. She told them all that they should never leave her property, warning them urgently of the dangers of the world beyond the hedges that enclosed it, but soon the fairies were flying down to the lake by night, the trolls were walking along its banks and stealing into the sleeping villages, and the little glass people would disappear into the tall grass that covered the slopes of the mountains around the lake.
"Don't worry too much, " said Mo, whenever Elinor bewailed their stupidity. "After all, the world they came from wasn't without its dangers. "
"But it was different!" cried Elinor. "There were no cars – suppose the fairies fly into a windshield? And there were no hunters with rifles shooting at anything that moves, just for the fun of it."
By now Elinor knew everything about the world of Inkheart. Meggie's mother had needed a great deal of paper to write down her memories of it. Every evening Meggie asked her to tell more stories, and then they sat together while Teresa wrote and Meggie read the words and sometimes even tried to paint pictures of what her mother described.
The days went by, and Elinor's shelves filled up with wonderful new books. Some of them were in poor condition, and Darius, who had begun to draw up a catalog of Elinor's printed treasures, kept interrupting his own work to watch Mo at his. He sat there wide-eyed as Mo freed a badly worn book from its old cover, fixed loose pages back, glued the spines in place, and did whatever else was necessary to preserve the books for many more years to come.
Long after all this, Meggie couldn't have said exactly when they had decided to stay on with Elinor. Perhaps not for many weeks, or perhaps they had known from the first day they were back. Meggie was given the room with the bed that was much too big for her, and which still had her book box standing under it. She would have loved to read aloud to her mother from her own favorite books, but of course she understood why Mo very seldom did so, even now. And one night when she couldn't get to sleep, because she thought she saw Basta's face out in the dark, she sat down at the desk in front of her window and began to write, while the fairies played in Elinor's garden and the trolls rustled in the bushes. For Meggie had a plan: She wanted to learn to make up stories like Fenoglio. She wanted to learn to fish for words so that she could read aloud to her mother without worrying about who might come out of the stories and look at her with homesick eyes. So Meggie decided words would be her trade.
And where better could she learn that trade than in a house full of magical creatures, where fairies built their nests in the garden and books whispered on the shelves by night? As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.
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Inkheart ti-1 Page 44
