‘One of ours, two of theirs,’ said someone nearby, and Morrigan peeked over her shoulder to see a boy from Unit 918 – a catwun Minor, almost entirely human but for his fine whiskers and little pink nose.
‘What do you mean?’ his friend asked him.
‘The death toll,’ the catwun clarified gloomily. ‘It’s uneven now. One Wunimal, two humans. Now they think they have the moral high ground, don’t they?’
Morrigan heard Sofia’s voice in her head. We’re all on the same side.
Those words sounded even more hollow than they had before.
‘We know you are frightened!’ shouted Elder Quinn. Her voice was brittle, but it carried. ‘We know you want answers. But it is not useful or kind to think of the affected Wunimals as villains, as murderers. They are ill. They are the victims of a dreadful disease—’
‘We know who the real victims are!’ cried a woman clutching the iron bars of the gate. She was being propped up by people on either side. ‘My Robbie was only twenty-five years old! Had his whole life ahead of him.’ She shook the gate angrily. ‘Where’s the justice for my boy?’
Morrigan felt her heart sink. Robbie. That must have been the young man who’d been killed at the docks.
‘We are deeply sorry for your loss,’ said Elder Quinn. ‘We share your distress, and extend our condolences to you and your family—’
‘THEY EXTEND THEIR CONDOLENCES,’ shouted St James, to jeers from the protestors. ‘THEY’RE OH SO VERY SORRY. BUT NOT SORRY ENOUGH TO STOP PROTECTING MURDERERS.’
‘He came prepared, didn’t he?’ muttered a voice in Morrigan’s ear. She turned to see Hawthorne arriving with Mahir. ‘D’you reckon he carries that megaphone around with him everywhere, just in case he gets the chance to loudly bore someone?’
The noise from St James was joined by the clanging of the iron gates as the crowd took hold and shook them back and forth. Elder Quinn tried again to address them, holding her hands up in an appeasing gesture, but her words were drowned out.
‘They’re going nuts!’ said Mahir. ‘Look at them, they’re trying to break down the gates!’
He was right. The protest had become a mob – an actual, proper mob. The kind Morrigan had only ever read about in storybooks about long-lost villages with a witch living in the woods.
‘Did you just see that bloke with a pitchfork?’ Hawthorne’s voice had jumped up half an octave, his eyes grown wide. ‘Who even owns a pitchfork? I don’t even know what a pitchfork is for!’
‘That’s it,’ said Thaddea. ‘I’m going down there to help. The Elders won’t stand a chance holding that lot back on their own.’
Morrigan thought again of what Sofia had said to her that morning. We don’t use our knacks to tyrannise people. It’s not what the Wundrous Society is about. Was this different, though? This wasn’t storming parliament, after all, it was defending Wunsoc from being stormed.
‘Is it for … pitching or forking—’
‘Shut up, Swift. Who’s with me?’ Thaddea glared.
‘No.’ Lam dropped her basket, spilling its contents down the steps, and grasped Thaddea’s forearm with both hands. ‘No, Thaddea. Bad idea.’
‘Are you saying that as an oracle, or a scaredy-cat?’
Lam thought about it for half a second. ‘Both.’
But even the Elders seemed to have noticed the dangerous shift in mood. They’d finally given up their misguided mission of peace, left the mob behind at the gate, and were making their way quickly up the driveway towards Proudfoot House.
The crowd of scholars suddenly split down the middle as a group of teachers and conductors streamed out of Proudfoot House. They encircled the scholars and began pushing them backwards.
‘All of you inside, this instant!’ snapped Dearborn. ‘This is not a traffic accident for you to gawk at. Conductors, marshal your units!’
‘Oh no,’ whispered Lam, watching the Elders intently. ‘They’re moving too slowly.’ She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted to the Elders in a voice louder than any of them had ever heard her use. ‘Hurry up! Faster.’
Morrigan shivered; she was feeling a very particular kind of chill, one that she only seemed to get when Lam was having one of her moments. She looked at Cadence, and without needing to discuss it, both girls joined Lam in shouting at the Elders.
‘FASTER! RUN, HURRY UP!’
‘Girls! That’s quite enough of that,’ said Miss Cheery, gathering them all together. ‘Right, Unit 919, let’s go. Inside the house. Now.’
‘But Miss, look—’
‘I said now, Thaddea.’
‘No, Miss Cheery, LOOK!’
People were climbing over the walls. Somebody repeatedly smashed something against the lock on the gates – a stone or a brick or something – and there was a great deafening CLANG as they breached it. They poured into the grounds, shouting furiously as they began to march towards Proudfoot House. The Elders stopped halfway up the drive and turned back to face them, Elder Wong holding up his hands as if he might miraculously command them to stop.
Dearborn had given up herding the scholars inside. Everyone standing on the marble steps, young and old, gaped in horror at what was unfolding. More Society members emerged from Proudfoot House and from other corners of the campus, seeming to appear out of nowhere, as if some silent emergency alarm had gone off. They surged forward, marching down the drive to defend the Elders and the campus, even while the conductors still tried to hold back their junior scholars.
With a sickening pop-pop-pop-crrrunch, Dearborn warped into a snarling Murgatroyd, her face and hands frosting over, ready for a fight. Thaddea cracked her knuckles and made to duck under Miss Cheery’s arm, eager to join the adults.
In that moment, Morrigan’s uncertainty evaporated and she realised exactly where she stood. She agreed with Sofia. She trusted Lam.
‘Thaddea, stop,’ she said, grabbing hold of her cloak. ‘You’re only going to make it worse. This isn’t what the Society’s for.’
‘What? This is exactly what we’re—’
‘No,’ Morrigan insisted. ‘It’s not. Don’t you remember what you said? When we had that argument before the summer holidays? You were the one who was all about learning how to distract people. You’re the one who said how important it was. Containment and Distraction, that’s what the Society’s for. We’re meant to be helping people, not fighting them.’
Thaddea looked at her as if she was mad. ‘Oh, well I’m sorry I never learned how to distract an angry mob. What do you want me to do, JUMP OUT OF A BIRTHDAY CAKE?’
She yanked her cloak out of Morrigan’s hand and ran to join the Society members swarming down the drive.
‘Thaddea, come back!’ cried Anah.
Morrigan felt she was watching the scene in slow motion. The mob reached the Elders and, just as she’d feared, a tight, angry circle immediately formed around Elder Saga. She squeezed her hands into fists.
‘Look at yourselves!’ he shouted at them. ‘This is extraordinary behaviour, how dare you?’
The Concerned Citizens responded by swinging their wooden placards at him, acting as if he were a violent unnimal they were keeping at bay. Unfortunately, the bullwun lived up to their expectations by stamping his hooves furiously in defence, throwing his great horned head from side to side and bellowing loudly.
The Wunsoc crowd roared as they ran to protect Elder Saga, the two groups about to clash with no real sense of what came next, and suddenly it was all happening so fast and Morrigan found herself thinking of that tiny spark on the end of her fingertip, and the way it had grown from something so small into a roaring, uncontrollable fire.
A small hand grasped Morrigan’s wrist.
Lam.
‘Yes.’ She nodded fervently. ‘Do it. Now.’
Morrigan blinked. ‘What?’
‘Small sparks … big fires.’ Lam turned her gaze towards the drive, looking directly at one of the dead fireblossom trees, its black branches stretching
up into the sky, splayed like great spindly fingers.
Morrigan had a sudden, vivid memory of her second visit to Wunsoc, on the day of her first trial. Instantly, she understood. She slipped out of Lam’s grasp, sidestepped a distracted Miss Cheery, and ran straight for the tree.
It wasn’t like being in class. It felt more like the first time she’d ever breathed fire. She could taste ash at the back of her throat.
Except this time it wasn’t fuelled by fear, rage or panic.
All Morrigan felt in this moment was calm and certain.
And needed.
And without knowing exactly how, she knew what to do.
Morrigan pictured a flame burning steadily inside her rib cage. She exhaled steadily, watching the tiny sparks being carried away on her breath, and caught one in her hand.
She reached out and pressed her palm to the petrified fireblossom tree. Warmth spread from her chest, all the way down her arm, coursing inside her veins and out through the centre of her hand, bleeding life into the cold, black wood.
She closed her eyes. She felt dizzy and glorious. The whole world had shrunk to the size of her palm, to that feeling of her skin against the smooth bark of the tree. That rushing sensation of fiery energy meeting cold decay and pushing it back, forcing it into the abyss. Shucking it off like a snake sheds its skin; a violent awakening of what was so deeply asleep it might as well have been dead. A rebirth.
Squall’s voice spoke softly in her head.
One day, Miss Crow, you may begin to understand how much of Nevermoor lies dormant or dead, waiting patiently for you to nudge it back to life.
Morrigan opened her eyes and looked up into the outspread branches above her. Cool green fire flickered like leaves. Here and there, a lick of orange flame, a slight turning to yellow, a dapple of deeper brown. An early autumn explosion of bright burning light that mimicked the colours of the Whinging Woods.
One by one, down both sides of the drive from Proudfoot House to the gates of Wunsoc, dozens of long-dead trees roared into life. The flames arched overhead to form a canopy above the two clashing groups, who stilled and fell silent at the spectacle.
After more than one hundred years of extinction, the fireblossoms had returned.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
A New Threat to Nevermoor
‘They’re giving tours,’ said Jupiter, swanning into the lobby the morning after the riot. It was only eight o’clock on a Saturday and he’d spent the whole night patrolling the city for infected Wunimals. But somehow, he’d already picked up a copy of every newspaper in Nevermoor, attended a Hollowpox task force meeting, spoken with the Elders and brought coffee, pastries and fresh orange juice back to the Deucalion. Morrigan hadn’t seen him this energised in weeks. ‘Free tours, all weekend! Can you believe it?’
‘Who?’ asked Jack. ‘Tours of what?’
‘The Public Distraction Department. Tours of Wunsoc.’ Jupiter tossed him a brown paper bag with a delicious-smelling cinnamon roll inside, and another each to Morrigan and Kedgeree.
The three of them were hovering at the concierge desk, Jack and Morrigan still in pyjamas and Kedgeree in his usual pink tartan uniform with the gold-embroidered pocket square, despite the Deucalion having been closed for nearly a week. Jupiter had offered paid time off during the closure to anyone who wanted it, but some of the staff said they preferred to stay and keep busy, and others – like Kedgeree and Frank – lived at the Deucalion anyway, and had nowhere else to go. Kedgeree still had plenty of work to fill his days, though it was mostly taking messages for Jupiter and fielding complaints about the closure.
‘What, they’re letting people inside Proudfoot House?’ said Morrigan. She could immediately think of at least twelve reasons why that was a terrible idea. ‘Are they mad? There are dragons in there! And explosions. And … Hawthorne, sometimes.’
‘Goodness no, not inside the house. Just the grounds. Well, just the front drive, really. Can’t let people near the Whinging Woods – they’d be bored to death. But even so –’ (he paused for a mouthful of much-too-hot coffee, spat it into a potted plant, and stuck out his scalded tongue to frantically wave cool air over it) ‘– outfiderv in Wunfoc? Unhearb of! And looh ah thif!’
He pulled out a stack of newspapers from under his arm and triumphantly slapped them down, one by one, onto the desk. The headlines all said things like, FIREBLOSSOMS RETURN! and ARBOREAL MIRACLE OR ARSON MYSTERY? and BACK FROM THE DEAD: THE NATURAL WUNDERS WE THOUGHT WE’D LOST FOR GOOD.
‘Howwiday Wu if a – ’ang on.’ He paused to drink a cooling mouthful of orange juice. ‘Whew. Holliday Wu is a GENIUS. If anyone noticed your involvement, Mog – or should I say, your spectacular achievement – if any witnesses mentioned you to the papers, none of them are printing it. No mention of you or the Stealth in any of these, and I’ve read them all. Twice.’
Morrigan wasn’t totally surprised she’d managed to fly under the radar – after all, in the chaos, who among the protestors would have noticed a single scholar standing with her hand pressed to a tree, and who could have guessed at what she’d done?
But the Stealth? Even in those moments of shocked silence, no one could have failed to see the entire brigade of Stealth officers that materialised seemingly out of nowhere, swooping in to take control. They’d arrived just in time to take full advantage of the shift in energy, calmly rounding up the bewildered protestors and escorting them off the premises with minimum fuss.
Morrigan thought there was something unsettling about the Stealth. As the Wundrous Society’s own private law enforcement, they had a particular kind of mystery and presence. A slightly menacing aura that followed wherever they went. They gave Morrigan goosebumps, and she couldn’t understand why they hadn’t rated a mention in even one eyewitness account.
‘Even better,’ Jupiter went on, ‘have you noticed what else is missing from these front pages?’
Jack sorted through the stack. ‘No mention of the Hollowpox.’
‘No Hollowpox,’ his uncle echoed. ‘No Wunimals. The fireblossoms are all anyone wants to talk about. Nobody’s seen one burning in over a hundred years, not in all the Seven Pockets, and now – boom! All that noise from the so-called Concerned Citizens has been completely smothered by the tree mystery. The protest isn’t mentioned anywhere! Mog, you’ve no idea how glad the Elders are to have a bit of a reprieve. I think they’re secretly pleased your Wundrous Arts lessons have paid off in such a timely fashion.’
‘Secretly p-pleased?’ spluttered Jack, coughing as he swallowed a mouthful of pastry. ‘That’s big of them. Maybe next time someone saves them from being trampled by a dangerous mob, they’ll stretch to mildly tickled.’
Morrigan secretly felt a little bit pleased herself, at Jack’s indignation on her behalf. She picked up the Nevermoor Sentinel, whose front-page headline, above a full-colour picture of the fireblossoms, read: GREATEST ECOLOGICAL COMEBACK OF ALL TIME.
‘You think Holliday fixed it so that the protest— Ow!’ She winced as she felt a little itching prickle in one of the fingers on her left hand, like an insect bite. It’d been annoying her all morning. ‘So the protest got forgotten?’
‘That woman has the ear of every desk editor in Nevermoor,’ said Jupiter. ‘She spent hours last night talking to each of them personally, and I don’t know how those conversations went, but whatever stories they’d been planning to publish, in the end they all went with Holliday’s version. You should see Wunsoc this morning – people are lining up to see the trees!’ He shook his head, laughing in disbelief. ‘I bow to the Queen of Spin. Any messages while I was out, Kedge?’
Morrigan grinned at Jack, who raised a discreet eyebrow back at her. This was quite a change from the gloomy, fatigued Jupiter who’d been haunting the Deucalion recently. She knew which one she preferred.
‘Several.’ Kedgeree straightened up, flipping through a stack of handwritten notes. ‘Your accountant has asked for the third time this week how long you intend to kee
p paying a full staff while three-quarters of them are off on a jolly—’
‘They’re not on a jolly,’ said Jupiter.
‘Her words, not mine.’
‘For goodness’ sake, it’s barely been a week! And it’s not my employees’ fault the Deucalion’s closed. What am I going to do, let them starve?’
‘That’s what I told her you’d say,’ Kedgeree said calmly. ‘And she asked me to remind you that the Hotel Deucalion is not a charity, nor is it currently making money, and to gently suggest that a grand re-opening might—’
‘Not until we’ve contained the Hollowpox,’ Jupiter cut him off. ‘Or cured it.’
Morrigan sat up straight. She’d been waiting all night to tell Jupiter about Squall’s offer, but it wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have with an audience. Jupiter shot her a quizzical look, but she shook her head and mouthed, Later.
He turned back to Kedgeree. ‘Now, do we have a status update on the Grand Sulk?’
The Grand Sulk was what he had taken to calling the Deucalion’s current, rather strange state. Ever since they’d closed the place down, things in the hotel had started going a bit weird. Just little things at first; rooms you’d expect to find in one place would show up somewhere else entirely. Or some ornate wallpaper replaced with bare brick walls.
Then slowly, on the upper floors where the fanciest and most expensive suites lay empty, things started to sort of … go to sleep. The lights went out and wouldn’t come back. The heating turned off, the hearths were all extinguished and it became so cold you could see your breath clouding the air. Eventually the suite doors locked themselves and wouldn’t open for anyone, not even Jupiter.
Kedgeree, Frank and the rest of the staff were worried. They’d tried everything to coax the sleeping parts of the hotel awake again, even going so far as to stage a fake party one night, but the Deucalion was having none of it. It had continued slowly shutting down, room by room, floor by floor.
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