Wundersmith, The Calling of Morrigan Crow

by Jessica Townsend

  Squall gave her a look of mixed incredulity and pity. “Why would you ever want to do that?”

  Morrigan felt panic creep in. It had all felt so right, just a moment ago. She was holding Wunder in the palms of her hands, as if she was born to do exactly that. But a different sensation was stealing upon her, a sense that she was no longer holding Wunder. That it was, in fact, holding her.

  “Make it go away,” she said, her voice rising. “Make it stop.”

  But Squall did nothing. He stood staring at her, and as she watched him through the golden haze of gathering Wunder, her dread grew. He had tricked her. He wanted her dead. He was going to let Wunder destroy her.

  “Do something!” she demanded. “Make it stop!”

  But still, Squall did nothing.

  Acting on instinct, Morrigan shook her hands as if she was flinging mud from them. “No,” she shouted. “NO!” She didn’t know who she was talking to—herself, Squall, or Wunder itself.

  But it was the Wunder that listened. She felt it flee—no, charge away from her like she’d sent it on a mission. In one cataclysmic instant, the globe nearest Morrigan shattered, pouring out its snow-flecked water in a great wave. The sculpture inside was torn from its peaceful glass home and spilled across the marble floor in a tangle of wet limbs and hair.

  Morrigan stared at it, breathing hard, her brain still trying to catch up to what had just happened.

  A tangle of wet limbs and hair. It was the sculpture of the swimming woman, her body no longer floating with unblinking eyes to the sky but curled in on itself, dressed in a soaking-wet blue bathing suit and… and breathing. Or trying to. Heaving a long, rattling, watery breath that sounded like her lungs had already filled with half the sea. And then stopping.

  She wasn’t a sculpture at all.

  Morrigan ran to the woman’s side and shook her, turned her over, thumped her back. “Breathe!” she shouted, and she knew there was something she ought to do, that if Jupiter were here he would know just what it was, but she couldn’t do anything except panic, her mind at once racing ahead and miles behind. “BREATHE!”

  “You’re much too late.” Squall’s voice was barely audible over the sound of Morrigan’s own beating heart. Tears burned her eyes and blurred her vision. She didn’t understand. The woman was limp and heavy in her arms and she… she didn’t understand. “Years and years and years too late.”

  “What is this place?” Morrigan stared in horror at the globes lining the walls, filled not with sculptures, she now knew, but with people. Real, living people.

  “Here stands a Spectacle,” Squall announced, as if reciting from memory. “The Museum of Stolen Moments. Crafted by the Wundersmith Mathilde Lachance. Sponsored by the Honorable E. M. Saunders. A gift to the people of Nevermoor. Winter of One, Age of Thieves.”

  “A gift to the people of Nevermoor?” Morrigan whispered, looking down at the vacant, lifeless eyes of the drowned woman.

  “They thought it was, yes,” said Squall indifferently. “I suppose that’s why it was classified a Spectacle, rather than a Phenomenon. The good people of Nevermoor thought they’d been given an art exhibition. Lifelike works of Mathilde Lachance’s artistic genius. But dear Mathilde’s genius wasn’t creating falsehoods… it was capturing reality. Preserving it.” He crossed the wet floor in slow, deliberate steps and stood above Morrigan, gazing down at the woman’s empty face, his own its eerie, living twin—blank and unfeeling. “Mathilde wasn’t cruel. If anything, she was merciful. She only took her subjects as they reached the very cusp of death. I don’t know if it was death itself that fascinated her, or the idea of immortality. Either way, these lucky souls will never die.” He looked around the room, then shrugged. “Or they’ll die forever, every moment of every day. Whichever way you want to look at it.”

  Morrigan clenched her teeth, trying to make herself stop shivering. They both had it wrong, she thought—Squall, and the Committee for the Classification of Wundrous Acts. She had no idea what a Spectacle was, but this wasn’t one. It was a Monstrosity.

  She laid the woman down gently on the floor and struggled to stand on shaking legs.

  “Ready to try again?” Squall looked at her expectantly.

  Morrigan looked at each of the snow globes in turn, finally seeing what she’d missed. The young men in the motorcar weren’t leaning out of it; they were being thrown from it by the force of some unseen collision, their faces frozen not in glee, but in wide-eyed terror. Between the two men embracing beneath the gaslight, a glint of silver showed that one had a knife pressed to the other’s stomach. Now Morrigan could see the thin red stream bleeding out from beneath the second man’s coat.

  Even the shaggy wolfhound by the fire was near death, a closer look at his milky eyes and patchy, ragged fur betraying his advanced age. Morrigan wondered how many breaths the old dog had had left, before he’d been entombed in this glass prison.

  The illusion had shattered. Morrigan was suddenly overwhelmed by the dread and revulsion she should have been feeling all along.

  What was she doing here? She was all alone with a monster. Again. Standing in a museum of horrors, surrounded by living exhibits—real people, forever preserved in the moments of their death. Like vegetables pickled in jars.

  Not a museum at all. A mausoleum.

  Morrigan stumbled past Squall, disgust rising like bile at the back of her throat. She felt sick. She had to get out. She had to get back to Wunsoc, back to safety and normalcy.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he called calmly after her. She ignored him, focusing on putting one foot after the other. Get out. Get out of here. “So that’s that, is it? You’re just giving up?”

  Get out get out get out don’t listen don’t answer just GET OUT.

  “What are you so afraid of? That you might one day be as powerful as they suspect? Are you frightened of your own potential for greatness, little crowling? Are you really such a coward?”

  “I’m NOT a coward!” Morrigan shouted, whirling back around to face him. “And I’m not like you either. Or Mathilde Lachance. I’m not a monster.”

  “You are both.” He spoke in his usual soft, tightly controlled voice, but something simmered beneath the surface. “You are the most cowardly, monstrous, beastly, wrong child I have ever had the pleasure and misfortune to know. And I do know you, Miss Crow, make no mistake.” His dark eyes glittered in the lamplight as he walked toward her. “I know that you are vindictive and willful, and just a touch too clever. I know you can’t be bound by the same rules as those other children, because you are not those other children. You are a Wundersmith, Miss Crow. We are different. We are better and worse than all of them put together. Don’t you understand your place in the Society yet? Don’t you realize you could bring them all to their knees if only you would try?”

  Morrigan shook her head. She didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to hear that she was different. She’d been hearing it all her life, and she knew exactly what it meant. Different was dangerous. Different was a burden. “Stop. You don’t know anything about me.”

  “How about having a little motivation?” Squall roared. He looked desperate now, enraged even. “You have been given a gift, a gift people would kill for, a gift people have died for, and you are SQUANDERING IT.” His words bounced off the ceiling, echoing in an endless, angry chorus.

  Morrigan flinched. She gathered all her courage and spat back at him, “If people have died for it, it’s because YOU murdered them.”

  “Perhaps I should have murdered you too, you wretched disappointment,” he snarled, and for an instant his face was the foul mask of a man possessed, the black-eyed, black-mouthed Wundersmith of legend emerging in a moment of uncontrolled fury.

  Then it was gone. And the mild, perfectly contained man was back.

  Just like that.

  Morrigan felt chilled to her core, as if she’d swallowed a pint of icy water.

  Trembling and terrified, she ran from the Museum o
f Stolen Moments without looking back… through the doors, down the steps, into the cold embrace of a capricious and unknowable city.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  NOCTURNE

  A week later, Morrigan Crow no longer existed. As far as Francis and Mahir and the rest of her unit was concerned, she was a complete nonentity. They had stopped talking to her, stopped looking at her, stopped acknowledging she had ever been a member of Unit 919.

  Well… not all of them, obviously. Hawthorne was still Morrigan’s staunchest friend. And—bizarrely—Cadence seemed to like her even more since she’d caused the entire unit to fail their exam.

  Hawthorne had in fact been as disappointed as the rest of them when Morrigan’s inexplicable detour had cost them a pass. Exams at Wunsoc weren’t graded—they were strictly pass/fail. A pass meant that you had met the expectations of the course. A fail, on the other hand, meant very serious meetings for each of the scholars with their patron, teacher, and conductor. (Morrigan’s very serious meeting had been delayed indefinitely, as Jupiter was still away.) It meant the shame of every other unit in the school knowing they’d failed their exam and mocking them for it. Worst of all, it meant a long, looooong lecture from Ms. Dearborn about Unit 919’s shocking lack of commitment to their studies and how they’d all have to pull their socks up before she decided their socks would be taken from them altogether.

  Like the rest of Unit 919, Hawthorne was perfectly entitled to be annoyed with her. But as soon as Morrigan told him about Squall and the Bonesmen, his frustration had faded to gray-faced fright.

  “So… Squall saved you from the Bonesmen?”

  Morrigan grimaced at that thought. “I suppose so. Yeah.”

  “The Wundersmith saved you… from the Ghastly Market.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s… weird.”

  In the face of opposition from the rest of 919, Hawthorne was more aggressively loyal to his best friend than ever. He’d taken to flicking rolled-up bits of paper in the face of anyone who skipped over Morrigan when they were handing the polar bear biscuit jar around, or who made sniffy, passive-aggressive comments in her presence about people who don’t deserve to be in the Society.

  When she’d left the Museum of Stolen Moments that night it had been just before dawn, but by the time she’d figured out where in Nevermoor she was (back in Eldritch, as it turned out—way, way south of Old Town), she’d realized that getting back to Wunsoc before the sun rose was going to be an impossibility.

  Still, she had tried. She hadn’t given up. She’d run and run until her lungs and the muscles in her legs burned. All the way to the borough of Wick, when she finally realized there was no point in running anymore. The sun was in the sky. The streets were already bustling with morning commuters and newspaper sellers. With the burden of failure weighing heavy in her heart, Morrigan had finally accepted her defeat, jumped a Rush Line train, and dejectedly made her way back to the campus, where Mildmay and the rest of Unit 919 were waiting, their expressions ranging from disappointed to livid to definitely-plotting-murder.

  They’d all failed, because of her. Well, not because of her, obviously—because of the Bonesmen and Ezra Squall. But she couldn’t exactly tell them that. “Sorry I’m late—I’ve been hanging out with Ezra Squall, you know, the evil Wundersmith.”

  Morrigan decided to tell them part of the truth—that she’d been cornered by the Bonesmen—but was unable to describe exactly how she’d managed to get away from the Skeletal Legion, when hulking Alfie Swann and the legendary Paximus Luck had both been captured. The general conclusion among her unit, therefore, was that Morrigan was fibbing about the Bonesmen to get herself out of trouble.

  It wasn’t fair that a fail for one meant a fail for all, but really… nothing in the Wundrous Society was fair.

  She’d apologized profusely, of course, for days on end—but no apology could change the fact that there were eight very disappointed patrons, one anxious conductor, and two incensed Scholar Mistresses to deal with. She couldn’t really blame the other scholars for despising her.

  Morrigan should have cared about all that, she knew she should, but in truth she just felt a little… flat. She was tired of so desperately wanting the friendship and approval of her so-called brothers and sisters. (How that phrase made her cringe now. When she thought back to the person she was a year ago, that idiot who believed she’d have eight ready-made siblings if only she could pass the trials… as if anything were ever that simple.)

  No. None of that really mattered anymore.

  Morrigan had bigger fish to fry.

  She had summoned Wunder.

  “Morningtide’s child is merry and mild,” she sang softly to herself one morning, treading a twisted path through the Whingeing Woods—the only place she could be sure of total privacy (there were the trees themselves, of course, but she could ignore their cranky mutterings for the most part, and they didn’t seem to have the slightest interest in what she was doing. Too busy moaning about wood rot and the maddening overconfidence of squirrels). “Eventide’s child is wicked and wild.”

  Morrigan hummed a little, wiggled her fingers gently at her side.

  Come on, she urged, while some other part of her said, No, don’t do it.

  That second, sensible voice inside Morrigan’s head used to be much louder. It was growing more distant by the day.

  It had taken a few days to work up the courage to try calling Wunder again, and when she’d finally attempted it, it hadn’t come easy. Not at first, not like in the museum.

  Morrigan wondered if that was because she’d felt so guilty even trying. Perhaps Wunder could sense her feelings about it and was staying away.

  But in the week since her exam had been hijacked by Squall, since she’d first sung those words and summoned Wunder, Morrigan’s feelings about what she’d learned that evening had… changed.

  She’d left the Museum of Stolen Moments in a state of mingled fury and fear, freshly horror-struck by the reminder that she was a member of the Free State’s most exclusive and most hated club. They were their own little two-person society, she and Squall. The Wretched Society.

  But in a way, Morrigan’s unit had done her a favor by shunning her. It turned out there was something slightly contrary in her nature. They were so convinced of her guilt that she’d stopped feeling guilty at all, at least about failing the exam. Let them be angry at her, if that was what they wanted. Let them retreat from her. She could retreat even further, even faster.

  She had a refuge now. She had something that belonged to her. A secret.

  “Morningtide’s child arrives with the dawn.”

  There it was. The now-familiar tingle in her fingertips. The swarming, abundant feeling of contentment. And the edge of disquiet, like pressing gently on a shallow wound.

  Morrigan smiled to herself.

  Hello, you.

  It responded every time now. So easily, so quickly—she understood now what Jupiter had meant last year. Wunder really was waiting for her—gathering to her constantly, waiting patiently for her to learn how to command it. Squall might be evil, and he might be her enemy, but even so… he had taught her something priceless, something she’d never have learned without him. No one in Wunsoc wanted her to learn—not the Elders, or the Scholar Mistresses, or Professor Onstald. They wanted to control not just her power, but Morrigan herself.

  She was being careful, of course. She was only calling tiny bits of Wunder, and letting them disperse without building up. That was the trick, she’d figured out this past week. If she took care with it, she could hold on to that feeling of power without losing control. Morrigan knew now to pause between lines, and let it drift away. To never sing a second verse.

  “Eventide’s child brings gale and storm.”

  It was wonderful. This small, secret act of defiance. After months of feeling like she was in limbo, that she was in the Society but somehow still not a part of it, this was something that finally felt right. Morri
gan knew now how it must feel to be Hawthorne, riding on the back of a dragon. Doing the thing he was born for. Or Cadence—the rush of power she must feel with every seamless act of persuasion she committed.

  And yet… there was that voice in the back of her head. Distant, but still there. She heard it every time she crept away to practice her new trick, every time she let the song tumble from her mouth and felt Wunder respond to it.

  This is dangerous. You shouldn’t be doing this. It’s wrong.

  But how—how could it be wrong? She was born a Wundersmith, that wasn’t something she could help. Jupiter had said last year that it was her gift. Her calling.

  And you get to decide what that means, he’d told her. Nobody else.

  “Where are you going, o son of the morning?”

  Just because some Wundersmiths of old had used their talents for evil, it didn’t mean Morrigan would. You’re not Mathilde Lachance, she told herself repeatedly. You’re not Ezra Squall.

  “Up with the sun where the winds are warming.”

  Morrigan was a Wundersmith too. And she would decide what that meant. Nobody else.

  “Where are you going, o daughter of night?”

  A thread of light danced through her fingers. She smiled.

  “Deep down below where the pale things bite.”

  Morrigan left the Whingeing Woods for Proudfoot House at a pace that made Professor Onstald look like a cheetahwun. She was deeply reluctant to leave the solitude of her Nocturne practice, and especially to spend another Decoding Nevermoor lesson in the company of people who mostly resented her.

  She’d never actually skipped a class before. But in that moment, standing on the steps of Proudfoot House, all she wanted to do was turn and run again. Down the dead fireblossom-lined drive, out the gates, and all the way home to the Deucalion.

  In this imaginary scenario, nobody would question her early arrival home. Martha would be waiting with a tray of Morrigan’s favorite teatime treats. The Smoking Parlor would pour out her new favorite seasonal scent from its walls (clean cozy pullover: for maximum autumnal comfort and well-being). And most importantly, Jupiter would be there, back from his latest expedition after two weeks away. He would listen patiently to the news of Squall and the museum and Morrigan’s mastery of Nocturne and her exam failure, and he wouldn’t be cross or worried or disappointed at all, and everything would be fine.