At their worst, they were dangerous despots who used their powers to tyrannize others and to keep themselves in positions of wealth and prestige. Despots like Ezra Squall, of course, but also like Gracious Goldberry a hundred years before him, who’d called for the imprisonment of Wunimals both Major and Minor before eventually being assassinated by a scorpionwun. Or like Frey Henriksson, who’d started the Great Fire of Nevermoor six hundred years ago that had wiped out half the city and killed thousands.
Jupiter had it wrong, Morrigan now realized. An unpleasant, heavy feeling was settling in the space behind her ribs. How had he got it all so wrong?
Wundersmiths really were horrible. Every last one of them.
After three miserable hours, Onstald returned, tottering back to his desk at a snail’s pace. Morrigan was already finished reading her assigned chapters and had spent the last twenty minutes staring at the front of the classroom. Brooding.
“Tell me… what… you have learned.”
Morrigan summarized what she remembered of the three chapters in a dull, despondent voice. The centuries of Wundersmith cruelty and carelessness. The many wrongs that had never been righted. When she finished, she sighed deeply and stared down at her hands.
Professor Onstald was silent for a long time. When he finally spoke, it was in a voice so tired—so ancient and grim—that he could have been rising from the dead.
“And why do you… think… I have chosen… to teach you this?”
Morrigan looked up. She thought about it for a minute. “So that I know the dangers of being a Wundersmith?” Professor Onstald said nothing. Something clicked in Morrigan’s head. “So that I can avoid them! So that I don’t make the same mistakes as all those other…”
But she trailed off, catching the shrewd, cold look in Onstald’s beady eyes. He shuffled off his chair and began walking slowly toward her. “You think that I… expect… better… from you?”
Morrigan was confused. Better than being one of the worst people in the realm? Surely. “Well—”
“Better from you… more from you… than these”—he leaned over her desk and tapped the cover of An Abridged History of the Wundrous Acts Spectrum—“these monsters?” he rasped.
“Well—well, yes,” said Morrigan. “I mean… don’t you? Surely you don’t want me to be like—”
“You are like them… already,” said Professor Onstald, his voice rising. His heaving breaths became faster and more labored. Little flecks of spittle flew from his withered mouth. “You are a… monster… already. My duty is not… to save you… from yourself. It is to show you… that you are… beyond saving. All of your… kind… is beyond—”
But Morrigan didn’t hear the rest. She leapt from her seat and fled the classroom, a furious sort of unhappiness building inside her. She ran through the tangled corridors without a clue where she was going, but finally, somehow, she made it out of Proudfoot House, down the woodland path, and back to Proudfoot Station.
She slumped onto a wooden bench and, through a haze of tears, looked up at the clock. Hometrain wouldn’t be there for hours.
Fine, she thought. No Hometrain.
It didn’t matter. She had two legs and a heartbeat.
Moments later, Morrigan was bolting down the tree-lined drive, through the gates, and straight for the Brolly Rail platform, umbrella in hand. Jupiter’s note popped into her mind, like a little prickling of her conscience. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES are you to travel anywhere outside of Wunsoc by yourself. I mean it. I’m trusting you.
He could mean it all he wanted, Morrigan thought bitterly as she launched herself at the approaching rail, catching her brolly handle on a loop. She didn’t care anymore. She just wanted to go home.
Of course, it wasn’t until Morrigan was halfway to the Deucalion—adrenaline and recklessness fading, common sense returning from its brief holiday—that she realized what a dreadful idea this was. If she showed up at home now, hours before she was due, she’d face a barrage of questions from Fenestra, Kedgeree, and Martha. They would surely tell Jupiter what she’d done, and he’d never trust her again.
In a slight state of panic, Morrigan jumped off at the very next stop—the Docks—and took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to return to Wunsoc now. She couldn’t bear it. There was only one thing to do: She’d just have to kill time until she could stroll into the Deucalion lobby at a less suspicious hour.
It was cold down here on the River Juro, and the place smelled strongly of fish. But it was nice, in a way, to roam by herself among the boats and listen to the companionable sounds of fishing crews hauling in their nets and blaring music on the radio. A group of noisy children, much younger than she was, were boiling mud crabs in a metal drum full of river water and taking turns to stoke the fire around its base.
The closer Morrigan got to the Juro’s muddy edge, the colder she felt. But the squawking of seagulls and the lapping of water was soothing, and she soon felt her tearful upset simmer down to the slightly more manageable feeling of bitter, seething resentment.
Everything was rubbish.
She kicked a pebble along the shore as she walked. “Onstald is rubbish, Wundersmith history is rubbish, Wundersmiths are rubbish. Dearborn is rubbish. The Wundrous Society is rubbish.”
Miss Cheery’s all right, said the sensible part of her brain. And Hometrain.
“Oh, do shut up,” she told it.
Occupied with her sulking, Morrigan failed to notice she’d walked much farther than she meant to. The air was cooler and, looking back, she was struck by how much higher the water had risen up the riverbank. She turned to go but was stopped suddenly by a noise that didn’t belong.
Crrrreeeeeeak. Click-clack. Click-clack.
She didn’t want to look. There were some things in Nevermoor you really didn’t want to see, Morrigan knew that better than anyone. But she couldn’t help herself.
Crrrrrreeeeeeeak. Click-clack. Click-click-click-click.
And turning her head slowly to the side, she witnessed perhaps the strangest, most grotesque thing she had ever seen. Rising from the muddy banks of the River Juro was a figure made of bones—not a skeleton, exactly, as that suggested some sense of order and anatomy.
There was no order to this… this person? This creature? It was barely a caricature of a human being. Even stranger, it was growing—drawing together—before Morrigan’s eyes, out of what was presumably the bones and debris of many Ages buried in the sludge.
The most frightening thing of all was the way that it was looking at Morrigan.
There were no eyes in its skull, and yet she was certain. It was looking at her.
As if it wanted something from her. Perhaps her bones.
Morrigan didn’t wait to find out. Heart racing, she ran and ran, squelching all the way back along the shore—the water lapping closer to her ankles now—up the concrete steps and across the docks, panting as she made a beeline for the Brolly Rail platform.
“You wanna be careful, miss,” a gruff fisherman called to her from the deck of his boat. He cast a nervous glance back the way she’d come. “You get some dangerous sorts hanging round here. Off home with you now, that’s the way.”
Morrigan was disinclined to argue. She should never have come. Jupiter had told her not to leave Wunsoc on her own for a reason. He’d trusted her, and she’d broken the rules and been repaid for her stupidity with the fright of her life. She could never tell her patron about this.
If she was lucky, Morrigan thought, she could make it back to Proudfoot Station in time to catch Hometrain, and nobody need ever know she’d left. She reached out for a passing Brolly Rail loop and was carried off at high speed, shivering uncontrollably all the long and dismal ride back to Wunsoc.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A PINKY PROMISE
When Morrigan entered the Deucalion’s lobby through the glossy black double doors from the service entrance on Friday evening, she was cold, tired, wet, miserable, and starving.
It h
ad been the worst ending to the worst week of her life.
A week of increasingly wretched lessons with Professor Onstald, every single day. A week of watching her unit compare timetables to see where their classes overlapped and differed, of watching them puzzle out exactly where in the nine subterranean floors of Proudfoot House their next fascinating lesson would take them.
A week of listening to Thaddea sing the praises of her wrestling coach, a bearwun called Brutilus Brown who’d won twenty-seven consecutive Interpocket Wrestling Championships. Of hearing the hilarious exploits of Arch’s lessons in theoretic larceny, including a heist master class with Henrik von Heider, the greatest art thief in history. A week of bearing up under a barrage of excitement from her unit about their classes in zombie dialects and surveillance techniques and river surfing and hot-air ballooning and the care of venomous snakes and dozens of other skills that Morrigan wanted so desperately to be learning too.
But the worst thing of all was how jealous she felt of her own best friend.
Hawthorne had been just as appalled as Morrigan about her one disappointing subject. It felt wrong and uncharitable to have any ill feeling toward him, when she knew it wasn’t his fault.
On Wednesday afternoon, he’d invited her to watch his dragonriding lesson on Sub-Five, thinking it might cheer her up. But it had the opposite effect. Watching her friend zoom around the underground arena on dragonback with a look of pure joy on his face, a look that said he was doing what he was made for, that he was exactly where he ought to be…
Morrigan knew she ought to be happy for Hawthorne, and she was, really. But her envy was a beast. A hungry wolf she couldn’t control. And it had been howling, deep in her heart, all week long.
Then, to top off the worst week ever, in Professor Onstald’s class that day he had made her write a three-thousand-word essay titled “The Immediate Impact and Aftermath of Jemmity Park, a Fiasco by the Wundersmith Odbuoy Jemmity,” and wouldn’t let her leave the classroom until she’d finished the whole thing. Naturally it had taken hours, so she’d missed lunch, and then Hometrain.
Morrigan had waited at the platform a long time for Miss Cheery to return, her panic growing as the station emptied out, as the sun went down and the Whingeing Woods grew worryingly dark. She knew she’d be breaking Jupiter’s trust twice in one week, but she couldn’t just stand around on her own, waiting for things to get even creepier. When it started to rain, she finally gave up on Miss Cheery and made her own way home via the Brolly Rail and the Wunderground.
She just had to hope that nobody at the Deucalion would tell Jupiter. Perhaps, by the time he’d got back, they’d have forgotten all about it. At least that was one good thing about him being gone all the time.
A note had arrived on Monday from the League of Explorers to say he’d be away “indefinitely.” (Just “indefinitely”! No further explanation required, apparently.) So it had also been a week of coming home every night and hoping against hope that her patron would be there for her to talk to… only to be disappointed each time she ran to the concierge desk and Kedgeree shook his head apologetically.
All the long, rain-soaked journey home, she had dreamed of her favorite dishes from the Hotel Deucalion kitchen: steaming bowls full of chicken dumpling soup, gooey baked cheese and crusty bread still warm from the oven, spiced rice pudding with honey-fried pears, blueberry buttermilk pancakes stacked a foot high and smothered with syrup… and scones! What she wouldn’t give for a single, perfect Deucalion scone.
Stomach rumbling, face stormy, Morrigan pushed through the black doors of the hotel into the vibrant foyer with its black-and-white checkerboard marble floor, potted trees, luxurious furniture upholstered in pink velvet… and of course her favorite thing: the enormous, iridescent black chandelier in the shape of a bird. As always, its outstretched wings moved slowly, gently up and down in a slow-motion flight to nowhere.
“Miss Morrigan, you’re home!” Martha’s voice cut across the lobby. The maid enveloped her in a warm hug, and Kedgeree rushed out from behind his desk, clapping his hands as if Morrigan were a hero returned from the war. She sighed, relieved there was still a place in the world where nobody thought she was evil. (Not yet, at least.)
“There you are, lass! Your conductor just left a minute ago. She said she went back to Proudfoot House to fetch you and couldn’t find you anywhere. The poor wee thing’s in a terrible state.”
Martha gasped. “Oh, Kedgeree, quick—send someone after her, tell her Morrigan’s safe.”
“Right you are, Martha.” Kedgeree ran across the lobby himself, straight out the front door into the rain.
“There she is!” said Charlie the chauffeur, jumping down the last of the spiral steps and bouncing over to them excitedly. “I told them you were clever enough to make your own way home, but they wouldn’t listen. Bet you’re glad it’s the weekend, aren’t you? Frank’s hosting a staircase mattress-sliding race tonight. You’re just in time to register, shall I put your name down?”
“Definitely,” said Morrigan with a grin. A mattress-sliding race was the best thing she’d heard all day. Her terrible first week at Wunsoc began fading to memory. She was home.
“Your little hands are frozen stiff!” Martha cried, fussing as she removed Morrigan’s black coat. “Oh, and you’re soaked to the skin, poor dear! I’ll draw you a nice hot bath. Would you like green mossflower bubbles that tingle your skin? Or—ooh! I’ve got champagne bubbles that play classical music.”
“Now wait a moment, Martha,” said Kedgeree, as he returned from running after Miss Cheery. He brushed the rain off his smart pink jacket. “She can’t—”
“They’re nonalcoholic,” she assured him.
“It’s not that. The girl’s wanted elsewhere.” He handed Morrigan a folded slip of paper, which read:
Meet me in my study right away.
–J.N.
“He’s home?” Morrigan asked. Relief and happiness surged through her, quickly chased by the lingering memory of Jupiter’s irritating, inconvenient absence during the worst week of her life. He was definitely going to hear about it.
“Just got in ten minutes ago,” said Kedgeree. “Looked about as miserable as you do. Seems you’ve both had a rough week.”
She chewed on her lip, suddenly worried. “Did, er… did he speak to Miss Cheery too, or…?”
“No, and thank goodness you arrived when you did; I was worried for a moment I’d have to tell him you were a missing person! He might have thrown me from the rooftop.”
Morrigan exhaled her relief in a low whoooosh. Relaxing a little, she peered down the hall that led to the kitchens. “Right. Okay. I’ll just grab—”
Kedgeree handed her a second note.
I have food.
–J.N.
“You’re here!” Morrigan and Jupiter shouted simultaneously as the study door flew open. They laughed and hugged briefly before Morrigan made a beeline for the little table by the fire. It held a delectable tray laid out with tea, milk, and sugar cubes; butter and thickly cut bread; fat pork sausages with fried onions and horseradish; a slab of chocolate broken into shards; and, most heavenly of all—
“Scones!” groaned Morrigan, dropping into a leather armchair and breathing them in—warm, golden brown, perfectly baked. They were surrounded by little dishes of clotted cream, comb honey, lemon curd, and two different types of jam. Morrigan could have composed a ballad about the miracle of this tea tray, if she hadn’t been immediately occupied with its demolition.
Fenestra was laid out on the rug in front of the hearth, snoring softly and taking up half the room. Jupiter’s study was one of her favorite spots to nap, although she also seemed to favor the long table in the staff dining room and the roof of the range in the kitchens. Morrigan kicked off her boots and stuck out her cold, damp-sock-covered feet to dry by the fire. She felt a strong temptation, just for a moment, to rest them on Fen’s soft, furry back. But almost as if the Magnificat could read minds, one large ambe
r eye opened to glare at her.
“Don’t even think about it,” Fen grumbled. Then she stretched, clawed at the rug, and rolled over into sleep once more, the tip of her pink tongue sticking out between her teeth.
“So?” Jupiter said as he took the second armchair. “How was your first week?”
“Horrible,” Morrigan replied, liberally slathering one half of a scone with blackberry jam, which dripped oozily down the side of her hand. She licked it off, too hungry for minding manners. “Really horrible. Where have you been?”
“I’m so sorry, Mog. I was leading an expedition.” He sighed and rubbed both hands over his face. He did look sorry. And tired. “A failed expedition. It wasn’t meant to take so long, but… well, I’m sorry.”
“What sort of expedition?”
“The top secret sort.”
Morrigan scowled, but her mouth was too full of scone to properly voice her disapproval.
“I wish I’d been here for your horrible week,” Jupiter said, and even though she knew he was changing the subject, she allowed it.
“Why didn’t you tell me how horrible it would be?” she demanded.
“Very remiss of me,” he agreed, pouring her tea. “What sort of horrible are we talking about? Just so I’m clear.”
“Vehworfkime,” Morrigan said through another delicious mouthful, and then, swallowing, repeated, “the worst kind. No—all different kinds.”
“I’m listening.”
If she was going to tell him about her frightening encounter down at the docks, now was the time. But… there were just so many other things she wanted to say. And she was so happy to have him home, it didn’t seem right to spoil things by breaking the news that she’d betrayed his trust.
Wundersmith, The Calling of Morrigan Crow Page 9