Wundersmith, The Calling of Morrigan Crow

by Jessica Townsend

  Heloise didn’t say anything. She still looked shaken.

  “Come on, Morrigan.” The conductor took her arm and turned away. “Hometrain.”

  Morrigan stumbled alongside her in a daze, trying not to look back at the scene of what felt very much like a crime.

  “What happened?” Miss Cheery whispered, her eyes widened in distress.

  “They pinned me to a tree and tried to make me tell them my knack by throwing stars at my head!” Morrigan’s voice had reached a pitch that surely only dogs could hear, but Miss Cheery was following her every word, biting down hard on her lip. “And then… and then, I don’t know what happened. I felt this weird rush of… something.”

  She described in a frantic whisper the way each of the older scholars had grabbed one of the sharp little weapons as if compelled by some unseen force and turned it on themselves. “But I wasn’t trying to… I didn’t do it deliberately, miss, I swear,” she finished, gulping air into her lungs at last, as they finally stepped inside the carriage. Her hands were shaking.

  “I know you didn’t.” Miss Cheery’s voice was unwavering, but Morrigan could tell that she was worried too.

  “How do you know?” She felt her breath catch in her throat. “You only met me a few weeks ago.” Her mind flicked to Jupiter, the person who knew her best. She felt a pang of sadness when she remembered that he was away again and wouldn’t be there to talk to when she got home. Miss Cheery was nice, but it wasn’t the same.

  “I know a good sort when I see one,” said the conductor, smiling.

  Morrigan didn’t return her smile. In that moment, she wanted to confess everything—about the note left on their platform, and how it had burned up in Thaddea’s hand, how her chest had seared and she’d tasted ash at the back of her throat. About the rush of fury she’d felt just before Heloise’s stars had turned on their owner. The thrill of power that coursed through her in that moment, that sent agreeable little jolts of aftershock through her even now.

  She couldn’t. The words wouldn’t come.

  Morrigan swallowed, looking down at her shoes. Was she really a good sort, she wondered? Maybe you didn’t do it deliberately… but some part of you enjoyed it.

  But wasn’t that normal? Wouldn’t anyone feel that way, if they’d just been attacked and had pointy objects thrown at their head?

  Or was it just her corrupt Wundersmith nature coming through?

  “And I know a bad sort,” continued Miss Cheery. “The Charlton Five—they’re bad sorts.”

  Morrigan glanced up. “The what?”

  The conductor rolled her eyes. “That’s what they call themselves. They’re all Baz Charlton’s lot. He’s been collecting candidates for Ages, and he seems to get at least one in every unit. Toby’s got two of them in his.”

  The Charlton Five. Now it made sense—what had Heloise said to her? You’re an illegal. Smuggled in from the Republic. Baz must have told them. He wasn’t just mad about the fact that Morrigan was a Wundersmith; he was still fuming that she’d made it into the untouchable safety of the Wundrous Society at all. Especially since he believed she’d taken the rightful place of one of his other candidates in the trials.

  “Five of them in the junior school alone… well,” Miss Cheery continued thoughtfully, “six now, I suppose. With Cadence. Ugh, I hope they don’t get into her ear. They’re a nasty little gang. Sometimes it seems like they’re more loyal to each other than to their own units. I must remember to warn Cadence to keep away. And you—you steer clear of them too, okay?”

  Morrigan nodded. She had no desire to encounter Heloise, her gang, or her throwing stars ever again.

  Of course, she couldn’t speak for Cadence. Nobody could speak for Cadence. Cadence was entirely her own person: strange, impenetrable, unpredictable.

  And if the mesmerist wanted to turn the Charlton Five into the Charlton Six, Morrigan didn’t like Miss Cheery’s chances of talking her out of it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  DEMANDS AND DRAGONS

  Summer of Two

  By the time the early warmth of summer had arrived in Nevermoor, inside the walls of the Wundrous Society they were already enjoying long days of blazing sunshine and still, baking heat.

  Unit 919 had settled into the strange, somewhat choppy rhythm of life at Wunsoc. No longer awed by the depth and breadth of Proudfoot House, they navigated its subterranean halls with increasing confidence. They were also learning to navigate the changeable nature of the dual-sided Scholar Mistresses, and the unpredictability of their weekly timetables. Aside from Morrigan, of course, whose timetable remained predictably sparse.

  Morrigan’s schedule ought to have given her plenty of time to spend outside, enjoying the glorious Wunsoc weather, but in reality, she was busy looking over her shoulder and trying to avoid another encounter with the Charlton Five. Hawthorne had been incensed when he found out about the star-throwing. He’d marched into Hometrain the next morning with a ten-item revenge list that Morrigan and Miss Cheery only just managed to talk him out of (although Morrigan was rather tempted to let him carry on with item number six: toilet-papering Heloise’s Hometrain).

  She’d decided against sharing the incident with Jupiter, whose trips away had become shorter but more frequent. Each time he came home, barely a day or two would pass before another message arrived from the Wundrous Society or the League of Explorers, and occasionally even other organizations Morrigan hadn’t heard of, like the Celestial Observation Group. Then he’d be off again, following another lead on Cassiel or Paximus Luck or the Magnificub. He was still insisting the disappearances were unrelated, but Morrigan thought he sounded less and less certain. He seemed increasingly dejected every time he came home from a dead-ended investigation, which made Morrigan hesitant to pile on with her own worries about school bullies and mysterious blackmail notes.

  And then the first demand arrived.

  “What’s this?” Thaddea asked one afternoon, after Miss Cheery had dropped them all back at Station 919. She was staring at her door, which had a piece of folded blue paper stuck to it.

  Morrigan paused at her own door with a sigh. She’d spent a long and miserable day in Onstald’s grassy, humid classroom, researching and writing an essay titled “Wundersmith Blunders of the Avian Age and Their Effects on Air Travel.” All she wanted in the world was to walk through that black door and collapse onto her bed.

  Thaddea’s face dropped as she read the note. “No. No way.” She gave a ferocious shake of her head. “NO. WAY.”

  Cadence snatched the note, and Morrigan and the others crowded around to read it over her shoulder.

  Thaddea Millicent Macleod.

  You have a fight scheduled in tomorrow afternoon’s Combat Club, against an unknown opponent.

  You will throw the fight.

  If you do not deliberately lose, we will reveal the secret of Unit 919.

  Remember:

  Tell no one.

  Or we will tell everyone.

  “I’ve never lost a fight in my life,” Thaddea said, folding her arms across her chest. “And I’m not going to start now.”

  “Even if it means getting us all kicked out of the Society?” snapped Cadence.

  Thaddea was silent.

  Morrigan read through the note again. Why would someone want Thaddea to—Oh, she thought suddenly. Oh! “Thaddea, who will you be fighting?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Because,” she said, trying to keep the impatience out of her voice, “if we know who it is, we might be able to figure out who wrote this! Maybe the person you’re supposed to fight is the one who—”

  “It’s random,” Thaddea interrupted flatly. “Opponents are picked out of a hat just before you step in the ring. It could be anyone, in any unit, from any combat class.” Her face was growing stormier by the second. “Whoever it is, they don’t want someone else to win. They just want me to lose. But I’m not doing it.”

  “I can’t get expelled,” said Fra
ncis. He looked like he might cry. “Thaddea, please. I just can’t. My aunt will—”

  “Oh, my aunt, my aunt,” said Thaddea in a mocking voice. “Be quiet about your aunt for once. What about my dad? He’d probably die of shame if he knew I’d deliberately lost a fight. This is a matter of principle! Macleods don’t throw fights.”

  Hawthorne scowled. “What about the principle of being loyal to your—”

  “Oh, shut up, Swift.”

  “ENOUGH,” shouted Cadence. “We’ll put it to a vote. All in favor of ignoring the notes and allowing whoever this is to let the cat out of the bag?”

  Thaddea stuck her hand in the air, staring bullishly at Cadence. Anah followed suit, as did Mahir. Arch’s hand crept into the air too, but he at least had the decency to look embarrassed about it.

  “All opposed to the betrayal of our fellow unit member and flagrant display of contempt for the morals and principles that make up the very foundation of this Society?” said Hawthorne, glaring at Thaddea as he shoved his hand in the air.

  Cadence, Francis, and Lambeth raised their hands too, although Morrigan wasn’t sure Lambeth was really paying attention to the conversation.

  “Morrigan,” Hawthorne said in a fierce whisper, looking at her significantly.

  “Oh! Right.”

  Morrigan raised her hand.

  Thaddea kicked the wall.

  “All right, Swift, now pull back! Easy now… he wants to go into a dive, but don’t let him. Pull back, check his balance. Remember you’re in charge. Stay aloft. Stay aloft. There now—good. Chin up, head back. Your head, Swift, not the dragon’s. A bit sharper on that left shoulder dip next time, please.”

  Hawthorne’s Tuesday-morning dragonriding coach was a rather battered-looking man called Fingers Magee who had, during his forty years of professional dragonriding, lost five of his fingers (two on one hand, three on the other).

  In the absence of anything better to do, Morrigan had been spending much of her spare time—and she had an awful lot of it—in the dragonriding arena on Sub-Five, watching Hawthorne’s training sessions.

  It was odd. On one hand, it gave Morrigan a genuine thrill to see her friend so in his element. Dragonriding brought out a side of Hawthorne she rarely got to see, and the transformation was extraordinary. Gone was the excitable rascal with the short attention span. In his place was a serious, capable boy who was focused on the task at hand, attentive to his coach and committed to improving his skill set.

  And the dragons themselves were just… something else. Morrigan felt privileged just to be in the same space as these ancient reptiles—creatures so exquisitely beautiful, and at the same time so frighteningly powerful and intelligent, that it felt like being in the presence of true magic.

  But on the other hand, it was a mild form of self-inflicted torture being here.

  This was what she had expected the Society to be like. Just like the rest of Unit 919, Hawthorne’s class schedule was exciting and robust. Today he had training in the arena followed by an afternoon orienteering lesson in the Whingeing Woods. Tomorrow—Wrangling Hostile Creatures in the morning, and a lecture called “Achieving Immortality: Is It Possible?” after lunch.

  She was trying to bring the howling wolf of her envy to heel, she really was.

  Today, the wolf was quiet. But only because Morrigan couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened at the station the day before.

  She gazed up into the cavernous arena ceiling. Her eyes tracked Hawthorne and the dragon as they performed a tight loop-the-loop (to a shout of approval from Fingers Magee), but she wasn’t really seeing them. She was seeing Thaddea’s twisted scowl. Francis’s tearful horror at the threat of expulsion. The timid, guilty way Arch raised his hand, voting to let Morrigan’s secret be exposed.

  She’d been so close. So close. She wondered if whoever was sending these stupid notes realized how fully they had torpedoed her burgeoning hopes for a happy life at Wunsoc. Perhaps whoever was blackmailing them hated her so much they’d constructed this perfect way to split her unit in half.

  But who was it? And how had they discovered her so-called knack? Morrigan had been turning those two questions over in her mind all morning.

  “All right, now bring him down slow,” Fingers called up to Hawthorne. “I want a soft landing, none of your kangaroo-hop nonsense. That’s the way. Easy now.”

  Today Hawthorne was riding a Dappled Lanternscale, a midsized dragon (roughly the size of two elephants) whose scaly turquoise skin shimmered and rippled like lantern light on water. When he brought it smoothly to the ground, the impact through the dragon’s muscular hind legs sent gentle, luminous waves skittering across its body.

  During his break, while another rider took to the arena, Hawthorne climbed into the stands two steps at a time and flopped down in the seat next to Morrigan. He was sweaty, red-faced, and exhausted—but the satisfying kind of exhaustion that comes from having worked hard at something you love.

  “That flip thing you did at the end,” she said, handing him his water flask. “That was brilliant. How’d you not fall out of the saddle?”

  “Thanks!” He flicked his curly brown hair out of his face. “It’s just about engaging the right leg muscles and hoping the dragon doesn’t do anything stupid. He’s a good one, though. Reliable.”

  “What’s his name again?”

  Hawthorne rolled his eyes as he took a swig of water. “Depends who you ask. His official, tournament-registered name is Glides Through the Air Like a Hot Knife Through Lard, but I call him Paul.”

  “Mmm,” Morrigan said distractedly.

  “You thinking about those notes?” Hawthorne propped his feet up on the back of the chair in front and started to untie his leather shin guards. “Who do you reckon is sending them?”

  “Well… I’ve been wondering. What if it’s that Heloise and her gang? The Charlton Five?”

  Hawthorne frowned. “Yeah. She seems the type. But how could she know you’re a”—he looked around to make sure nobody was sitting nearby, then whispered—“ Wundersmith. Do you think Baz told them?”

  “I don’t know,” she said truthfully. They sat in silence while Hawthorne fiddled with the strap on his wrist guard. A strange, squirming guilt bubbled away inside Morrigan like poison. “Thaddea will never forgive me.”

  “Forgive you?” sputtered Hawthorne. “For what? It’s not your fault!”

  “It’s my secret she’s protecting.”

  “No, it’s our secret,” he insisted. “Whoever is sending the notes is threatening all of us—we’re in it together.”

  Fingers called Hawthorne’s name and he began gathering his discarded gear. “Listen,” he said quietly. “What’s the point in worrying about this when we have no way of knowing who it is? Let’s just wait and see what the next note says.”

  But as Morrigan watched him descend the steps to the arena, she was struck by a fresh determination. She couldn’t simply wait around for the next note, wondering if this demand would be the one to make her entire unit turn against her.

  There was a way of figuring this out, there had to be. She was going to find it.

  And she knew exactly where to start.

  In the biggest dojo on Sub-Five, Thaddea had already entered the ring. Combat Club was a weekly event in which all the different combat disciplines at Wunsoc came together for a series of one-on-one challenges. It was a chaotic, absurdly unfair, all-ages free-for-all in which a barefoot kickboxer might find herself fighting a swordsmith in chain mail, and it was—inexplicably—Thaddea’s favorite thing in the world. She liked to recap her matches to the rest of her unit each week, in violent and unflinching detail. Despite being the youngest fighter, she was Combat Club’s undefeated champion.

  Until today.

  “Right. Who’s taking on Macleod?” shouted a burly, muscular woman with wiry gray curls, holding a hat in the air. She pulled out a name and chuckled as she read it. “Will Gaudy! Up you come, lad. Good grief, this’l
l be quick,” she added in a low mutter, and the audience responded with groans and jeers of laughter. Brutilus Brown covered his face with one paw.

  Will Gaudy was a mouthy boy from Unit 916 who liked to tell nonsense stories in which he starred as the biggest, baddest, and toughest hero in town—usually beating up whole gangs of bullies without breaking a sweat. Everyone knew they were nonsense, because Gaudy didn’t have any real fighting prowess. His knack wasn’t even anything to do with combat; he was a talented composer, but insisted on taking combat classes so that he could tell people outside the Society that he was really a boxer. Morrigan knew Thaddea couldn’t stand him.

  Thaddea’s face fell as she watched him enter the ring. Of all the fighters in the dojo, to record her first-ever loss against Will Gaudy, the mouthy shrimp… this was going to be humiliating in the extreme. If Will won this fight, he would never, ever, ever let her hear the end of it.

  Was this rigged, Morrigan wondered? Had their blackmailers planned for Will’s name to be drawn from the hat somehow? The only way she could see this being true was if the blackmailer was the burly woman drawing out the names, and somehow Morrigan doubted it.

  It surely wasn’t Will himself—who, despite his bravado, was looking positively queasy at the thought of fighting Thaddea.

  Morrigan almost couldn’t bear to watch. Part of her wondered if Thaddea was going to change her mind and refuse to throw the fight. Part of her thought she ought to.

  But she didn’t. In the first round—in the first minute—Thaddea allowed herself to be overwhelmed by Will’s ridiculous footwork and weak, ineffectual jabs. She didn’t even try to make it believable. The first time Will’s fist connected with her face (because she basically served it up to him on a platter), she hit the floor and was out for the count.

  The audience couldn’t believe it. Morrigan could scarcely believe it herself, and she’d been expecting it.

  But she had to shake off her shock, because this was the moment she’d come for. If the blackmailers wanted Thaddea to lose this fight, surely they’d be here to watch it. She scoured the crowd, examining each and every face in the room, looking for someone to betray some hint of… something.