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steps backward. The werewolves followed, grinning.
    Jinx turned and ran. He heard the werewolves running along behind him. He felt their hot breath on his neck. One of them struck him with its claws, playfully, digging deep into his skin. Jinx ran harder. The werewolves kept up easily.
    He wanted to scream for help, but he needed all his breath for running. He knew the werewolves could run faster than him, for longer than him. They were just amusing themselves until he dropped from exhaustion. Which would be soon. His lungs were sore from trying to gulp in enough air to keep running.
    Then he tripped and fell.
    He got up on his hands and knees and wondered why he wasn’t dead. He scrambled to his feet. He heard the sound of running claws scrabbling desperately over the forest floor. He turned and looked. An enormous yellow dragon was chasing the werewolves away.
    Jinx felt very lucky that the dragon had wanted werewolves for lunch instead of boys. Then something grabbed him from behind.
    “You idiot!” Simon turned him around and shook him. “I told you to stay with us! How many times did I tell you to stay with us?”
    Sophie grabbed Jinx away from Simon and hugged him like he was a baby, which he should have minded but didn’t. “Leave him alone, Simon! He’s had a terrible fright.”
    “So who hasn’t?” said Simon. His voice was all shaky, and Jinx, even though Simon wasn’t shaking him anymore, found himself still shaking. Especially his knees.
    Sophie reached out an arm for Simon. “It was a wonderful dragon, dear,” she said. “But why was it yellow? Oh no, the poor child is bleeding.”
    Jinx pulled away from her because being called a poor child was too much. “I’m all right.”
    Actually the werewolf scratches hurt quite a bit. Sophie tied her handkerchief around Jinx’s arm.
    They started home. Simon kept a firm grip on Jinx’s shoulder. Jinx didn’t mind much, because he kept expecting the forest to break out in werewolves at any moment.
    “Those were werewolves?” said Sophie, speaking her own language. “The pictures I’ve seen show them looking more like wolves.”
    “Some are more like wolves and some are more like people,” said Simon. “Magic has its uses, doesn’t it?”
    “I never said it didn’t—”
    “—not more than a thousand times, anyway—”
    “—I just said it ought to be studied as theory—”
    “If you just study magic as theory, you can’t conjure up a dragon illusion when you need one.”
    “Well, it was a lovely illusion, dear—”
    “Why didn’t you make us invisible?” Jinx said. “Like you did that time when—” And it was only because he was speaking Sophie’s language for the first time, and trying to get the words right, that he was able to stop himself in time. “That time with the trolls?”
    He’d almost said when the trolls took my stepfather . And that was something Sophie probably wasn’t supposed to know about.
    “Did Simon teach you to speak Samaran?” said Sophie, surprised.
    “No, of course I didn’t,” said Simon.
    “I just figured it out from listening,” said Jinx, putting his words in order carefully. Speaking it was a lot harder than listening to it. And he was still busy looking all around him for werewolves.
    “How clever of you, Jinx!”
    “Wouldn’t have worked,” said Simon. “The concealment spell just keeps things from noticing us. Those werewolves had already noticed you. I could have kept them from noticing Sophie and me. But not you.”
    “So that other time, you kept the trolls from noticing us,” said Jinx.
    Simon looked down at him hard, and Jinx looked back up, and they both knew that Jinx hadn’t added but not my stepfather .
    Sophie probably wouldn’t have approved of letting trolls eat Bergthold. After all, she’d never met him.
    Jinx wondered if he could learn to do magic. Simon was right: Magic was useful stuff. It could save you from trolls and werewolves.

5
The Forbidden Room
    N early