Jinx by Sage Blackwood

Author:Sage Blackwood [Blackwood, Sage]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-01-08T06:00:00+00:00

The next morning Jinx walked around the clearing, which was bright with sunlight and raindrops. People gathered in clumps to stare at him. Word of the flying ladle had gotten around. He saw people he recognized, some of whom he had never thought of once in the years he’d been gone. There must be people missing, because of the werewolves and the winter plague that Simon had mentioned, but Jinx couldn’t tell who they were.

Nobody seemed to recognize him. He spoke to a few people who should have. They didn’t remember him. Most of them shied away from Jinx and his companions, though, suspicious of strangers and of anything that came out of the Urwald.

He had hoped—well, maybe hoped was too strong a word, but somewhere in the back of his mind had been the idea that since he had first had the magic of seeing people’s thoughts in Gooseberry Clearing, maybe it would come back to him here. It did not.

“Everything must seem smaller to you, eh?” said Reven, walking beside him. “I’ve heard that happens when you go back to where you were little.”

“Yeah,” said Jinx. Actually, everything seemed dingier, poorer, drabber, sadder. He wanted to get away from the place.

A girl a little older than Jinx was standing beside a hut, watching them.

Reven smiled at the girl and she stared back blankly.

“Inga,” Jinx remembered. “You’re Inga, right?”

“How do you know my name, wizard boy?” the girl asked, suspicious.

“You—” Jinx stopped. Inga used to hit him, and had once held his face down in the mud in a pigsty. Jinx decided not to mention this in front of his new friends. “I remember you from when I was little.”

“Do you know the way to Dame Glammer’s house?” asked Elfwyn.

“Dame Glammer … you mean a witch?” said Inga.

“Yes.” Elfwyn seemed to sense that it wouldn’t be a good idea to say the witch was her grandmother. “We’re on our way there, but we got lost.”

“You shouldn’t go to a witch’s house,” said Inga. “You should stay home in your own clearing. It’s dangerous to go places.”

“Even if you stick to the path,” Jinx said.

He was being sarcastic. It made him sad that Inga nodded in agreement. He couldn’t believe that he’d once let himself be held facedown in a pigsty by a girl who was afraid to leave Gooseberry Clearing.

Anyway, she wouldn’t be able to do it to him now—she was taller than him, but he bet he was stronger.

Except maybe he wouldn’t have been strong if he’d been stuck here, subsisting on toad porridge and cabbage soup. And he wouldn’t even be able to read! It was unthinkable. If he’d stayed here, he wouldn’t be himself.

Anyway, they hadn’t wanted him. They’d made him leave the path.

And I never even thanked them, Jinx thought.

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