Inkspell by Cornelia Funke Read Free Book Online Page A

recognized the notebook as soon as Resa put it on her lap. It was the one that Mo had taken. “I found it lying outside your door,” said her mother’s hands.
    Meggie stroked the patterned binding. So Mo had brought it back. Why hadn’t he come in?
    Because he was still too angry, or because he was sorry?
    “He wants me to put them away in the attic. At least for a while.” Meggie suddenly felt so 26
     
    small. And at the same time so old. “He said, ‘Perhaps I ought to turn into a glass man or dye my skin blue, since my wife and daughter obviously think more of fairies and glass men than of me.’”
    Resa smiled and stroked Meggie’s nose with her forefinger. “Yes, I know, of course he doesn’t really think that! But he always gets so angry when he sees me with the notebooks…”
    Resa looked out through the open window. Elinor’s garden was so large that you couldn’t see where it began or ended, you just saw tall trees and rhododendron shrubs so old that they surrounded Elinor’s house like an evergreen wood. Right under Meggie’s window was a lawn with a narrow gravel path around it. A garden seat stood to one side of the lawn. Meggie still remembered the night when she had sat there watching Dustfinger breathe fire. Elinor’s ever-grumpy gardener had swept the dead leaves off the lawn only that afternoon. You could still see the bare patch in the middle where Capricorn’s men had burned Elinor’s best books. The gardener kept trying to persuade Elinor to plant something in that space, or sow more grass seed there, but Elinor just shook her head energetically. “Who grows grass on a grave?” she had snapped the last time he suggested it, and she told him to leave the yarrow alone, too. It had grown luxuriantly around the sides of the blackened patch ever since the fire, as if to make its flat flower heads a reminder of the night when Elinor’s printed children were swallowed up by the flames.
    The sun was setting behind the nearby mountains, so red that it was as if it, too, wanted to remind them of that long-extinguished fire, and a cool wind blew from the hills, making Resa shiver. Meggie closed the window. The wind blew a few faded rose petals against the pane; they stuck to the glass, pale yellow and translucent. “I don’t want to quarrel with him,” she whispered. “I never used to quarrel with Mo. Well, almost never . .”
    “Perhaps he’s right.” Her mother pushed back her hair. It was just as long as Meggie’s, but darker, as if a shadow had fallen on it. Resa usually held it back with combs. Meggie often wore her hair like that, too, and sometimes when she looked at her reflection in the mirror of her wardrobe she seemed to be seeing not herself but a younger version of her mother. “Another year and she’ll be towering over you,” Mo sometimes said when he wanted to tease Resa, and the short-sighted Darius had confused Meggie with her mother several times already.
    Resa ran her forefinger over the windowpane as if tracing the rose petals that clung to it. Then her hands began speaking again, hesitantly, just as lips can sometimes hesitate. “I do understand your father, Meggie,” she said. “Sometimes I myself think the two of us talk about that other world too often. Even I don’t understand why I keep coming back to the subject. And I’m always telling you about what was beautiful there, not the other things: being shut up, Mortola’s punishments, how my hands and knees hurt so much from all the work that I couldn’t sleep .. all the cruelty I saw there. Did I tell you about the maid who died of fright because a NightMare stole into our bedroom?”
    “Yes, you did.” Meggie moved very close to her mother, but Resa’s hands fell silent. They were still roughened from all her years of toil as a maid, working first for Mortola and then for Capricorn. “You’ve told me about everything,” said Meggie. “The bad things, too, even if Mo won’t believe