Free Inkspell by Cornelia Funke Page A

knew a great many things.
    “Please!” Farid was still looking at her. “You will try, won’t you?” Meggie looked out of the window. She couldn’t help thinking of the empty fairies’ nests, the glass men who had vanished, and something Dustfinger had said to her long ago: Sometimes, when you went to the well to wash early in the morning, those tiny fairies would be whirring above the water, hardly bigger than the dragonflies you have here, and blue as violets .. they weren’t very friendly, but by night they shone like glow-worms.
    “All right,” she said, and it was almost as if someone else were answering Farid. “All right, I’ll try.
    But your feet must get better first. The world my mother talks about isn’t a place where you’d want to be lame.”
    “Nonsense, my feet are fine!” Farid walked up and down on the soft carpet as if to prove it. “You can try right away as far as I’m concerned!”
    But Meggie shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. “I must learn to read it fluently first. That’s not going to be easy, given his handwriting – and it’s smeared in several places, so I’ll probably copy it out. This man Orpheus wasn’t lying. He did write something about you, but I’m not quite sure that it will do. And if I try it,” she went on, trying to sound very casual, “if I try it, then I want to come with you.”
    “What?”
    “Yes, why not?” Meggie couldn’t keep her voice from showing how hurt she felt by his horrified look.
    Farid did not reply.
    Didn’t he understand that she wanted to see it for herself? She wanted to see everything that Dustfinger and her mother had told her about, Dustfinger in a voice soft with longing: the fairies swarming above the grass, trees so high that you thought they would catch the clouds in their branches, the Wayless Wood, the strolling players, the Laughing Prince’s castle, the silver towers of the Castle of Night, the Ombra market, the fire that danced for him, the whispering pool where the water-nymphs’ faces looked up at you . .
    No, Farid didn’t understand. He had probably never felt that yearning for a completely different world, any more than he felt the homesickness that had broken Dustfinger’s heart. Farid wanted just one thing: He wanted to find Dustfinger, warn him of Basta’s knife, and be back with him again. He was Dustfinger’s shadow. That was the part he wanted to play, never mind what story they were in.
    “Forget it! You can’t come, too.” Without looking at Meggie he limped back to the chair she had given him, sat down, and pulled off the bandages that Resa had so carefully put on his toes.
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    “People can’t read themselves into a book. Even Orpheus can’t! He told Dustfinger so himself: He’s tried it several times, he said, and it just won’t work.”
    “Oh no?” Meggie tried to sound more sure of herself than she felt. “You said yourself that I read better than he does. So perhaps I can make it work!” Even if I can’t write as well as he does , she added to herself.
    Farid cast her an uneasy glance as he put the bandages in his trouser pocket. “But it’s dangerous there,” he said. “Particularly for a g –” He didn’t finish the word. Instead he began inspecting his bloodstained toes intently.
    Idiot. Meggie’s anger tasted bitter on her tongue. Who did he think she was? She probably knew more about the world she’d be reading him into than he did. “I know it’s dangerous,” she said, piqued. “Either I go with you or I don’t read aloud from this sheet of paper. You must make up your mind. And now you’d better leave me alone. I have to think.”
    Farid cast a final glance at the piece of paper with Orpheus’s words on it before he went to the door. “When will you try?” he asked before he went back out into the corridor. “Tomorrow?”
    “Perhaps,” was all Meggie would say.
    Then she closed the door behind him and was alone with the words that Orpheus had