Inkspell by Cornelia Funke Read Free Book Online

but words.
    Elinor, however, could not reconcile herself to this idea. Defiantly, desperately, she had driven back to Capricorn’s village – only to find the streets empty, the houses burned down, and not a living soul in sight. “You know, Elinor,” Mo had said when she came back with her face tearstained, “I was afraid of something like this. I couldn’t really believe there were words to bring back the dead. And besides – if you’re honest with yourself you must admit they didn’t fit into this world.”
    “Nor do I!” was all Elinor had replied.
    Over the next few weeks, Meggie often heard sobbing from Elinor’s room when she slipped into the library one last time in the evening to find a book. Many months had passed since then – they had all been living together in Elinor’s big house for nearly a year, and Meggie had a feeling that Elinor was glad not to be alone with her books anymore. She had given them the best rooms; 25
     
    Elinor’s old schoolbooks and a few writers she no longer much liked had been banished to the attic to make more space. Meggie’s room had a view of snow-topped mountains, and from her parents’ bedroom you could see the distant lake with its gleaming water, which had so often tempted the fairies to fly in that direction.
    Mo had never simply gone off like that before. Without a word of good-bye. Without making up the quarrel. .
    Perhaps I should go down and help Darius in the library, thought Meggie as she sat there wiping the tears from her face. She never cried while she was quarrelling with Mo; the tears didn’t come until later . . and he always looked terribly guilty when he saw her red eyes. She was sure that yet again everyone had heard them quarrelling! Darius was probably making the hot milk and honey already, and as soon as she put her head around the kitchen door Elinor would begin calling Mo, and men in general, names. No, she’d better stay in her own room.
    Oh, Mo. He had snatched the notebook she was reading out of her hand and taken it with him!
    And that one was the book where she had collected ideas for stories of her own: beginnings that had never gotten any further, opening words, crossed-out sentences, all her failed attempts ..
    How could he just take it away from her? She didn’t want Mo to read it; she didn’t want him seeing how she tried in vain to fit the words together on paper, words that came to her tongue so easily and with such power when she read aloud. Meggie could write down what Resa described to her; she could fill pages and pages with the stories her mother told her. But as soon as she tried to make something new of them, a story with a life of its own, her mind went blank.
    The words seemed to fly out of her head – like snowflakes leaving only a damp patch on your skin when you put out your hand to catch them. Someone knocked on Meggie’s door.
    “Come in!” she snuffled, looking in her trouser pockets for one of the old-fashioned handkerchiefs that Elinor had given her. (“They belonged to my sister. Her name began with an M, like yours. Embroidered in the corner there, see? I thought it would 30 be better for you to have them than let the moths eat holes in them.”)
    Her mother put her head around the door.
    Meggie tried a smile, but it was a miserable failure.
    “Can I come in?” Resa’s fingers traced the words in the air faster than Darius could have said them aloud. Meggie nodded. By now she understood her mother’s sign language almost as easily as the letters of the alphabet – she knew it better than Mo and much better than Elinor, who often called for Meggie in desperation when Resa’s fingers went too fast for her.
    Resa closed the door behind her and sat down on the windowsill with her daughter. Meggie always called her mother by her first name, perhaps because she hadn’t had a mother for ten years, or perhaps because, for the same inexplicable reason, she had always called her father just Mo.
    Meggie