By now Elinor knew everything about the world of Inkheart. Meggie's mother had needed a great deal of paper to write down her memories of it. Every evening Meggie asked her to tell more stories, and then they sat together while Teresa wrote and Meggie read the words and sometimes even tried to paint pictures of what her mother described.
The days went by, and Elinor's shelves filled up with wonderful new books. Some of them were in poor condition, and Darius, who had begun to draw up a catalog of Elinor's printed treasures, kept interrupting his own work to watch Mo at his. He sat there wide-eyed as Mo freed a badly worn book from its old cover, fixed loose pages back, glued the spines in place, and did whatever else was necessary to preserve the books for many more years to come.
Long after all this, Meggie couldn't have said exactly when they had decided to stay on with Elinor. Perhaps not for many weeks, or perhaps they had known from the first day they were back. Meggie was given the room with the bed that was much too big for her, and which still had her book box standing under it. She would have loved to read aloud to her mother from her own favorite books, but of course she understood why Mo very seldom did so, even now. And one night when she couldn't get to sleep, because she thought she saw Basta's face out in the dark, she sat down at the desk in front of her window and began to write, while the fairies played in Elinor's garden and the trolls rustled in the bushes. For Meggie had a plan: She wanted to learn to make up stories like Fenoglio. She wanted to learn to fish for words so that she could read aloud to her mother without worrying about who might come out of the stories and look at her with homesick eyes. So Meggie decided words would be her trade.
And where better could she learn that trade than in a house full of magical creatures, where fairies built their nests in the garden and books whispered on the shelves by night? As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.