Wundersmith, The Calling of Morrigan Crow

by Jessica Townsend

  But all of that was imaginary.

  Her lesson in the Map Room was real, and she was running late for it. Heaving a sigh and straightening her shoulders, Morrigan cast one last longing look back down the drive toward the campus gates, toward escape…

  … and she saw him.

  Jupiter North, running up the drive as if she’d conjured him there by magic. Ginger hair flying behind him, a smile lighting up his whole face. He stopped and bent forward to catch his breath, clutching his brolly and waving it at her. She beamed and waved back.

  “Mog!” he bellowed from a distance. “I’ve come to bust you out!”

  Morrigan watched his broad grin fade to confusion as his eyes dropped to her other hand, where she was absent-mindedly—and expertly—lacing a golden thread of Wunder through her fingertips.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  SOMETHING WONDERFUL

  Jupiter didn’t ask a single question. He didn’t have to. The whole story came tumbling out of Morrigan’s mouth in rushed, fragmented pieces before he could even say a word. She told him all about the gang of Bonesmen and the hunter on horseback, the Museum of Stolen Moments and Squall’s surprise visit. About her secret new skill and the drowned woman and the snow globes of death. (She even managed to slip in—very briefly—the part where they all failed their Decoding Nevermoor exam, but unsurprisingly, it wasn’t the thing that caught Jupiter’s attention.)

  “Squall?” Jupiter said in a choked voice. “You—he… he was here, in Nevermoor? Again? Why didn’t you tell—”

  “You weren’t here to tell!” Morrigan jumped in, and it was difficult to keep the accusation out of her voice. Jupiter flinched.

  “But you should have told somebody.” He led her down the tree-lined drive toward the gates. “You’ve been calling Wunder for a whole week because Ezra Squall taught you how? You can’t keep something like that to yourself, Mog, it’s dangerous.”

  “Shhh,” she hissed, looking around to make sure nobody could overhear them. “Who else could I have told? I can’t tell the Elders, or Miss Cheery, or anybody here. If they knew Squall came to see me, that he spoke to me… just imagine what—”

  “Fenestra!” Jupiter interrupted her. “You could have told Fen. Or Jack!”

  Morrigan opened her mouth to retort, then closed it. “I… er, yeah. Well, I didn’t think of that.”

  “And where was this—this museum of—what was it?”

  “Stolen Moments,” said Morrigan. “Somewhere near Eldritch, I think. I ran for ages before I knew where I was. But anyway, aren’t you pleased? I can call Wunder.” She smiled, her eyes wide in joyful disbelief. “I can really do it! And Jupiter, I’m good at it.”

  “I have absolutely no doubt of that.” A smile crept into the corner of his mouth, as if against his better judgment. He glanced at her sideways. “I told you, didn’t I? Wundersmiths can be a force for good. And I know you’re going to be a very good Wundersmith. Onstald has it all wrong.”

  Morrigan’s happiness faltered a little. “No. Onstald is right,” she said, as they walked through the gates and toward the Brolly Rail stop. Jupiter waved cheerfully at the security guard, who was glowering at Morrigan. Junior scholars weren’t supposed to leave campus during school hours, but there wasn’t much anyone could say about it with Jupiter by her side. “Weren’t you listening about Mathilde Lachance? The Museum of Stolen Moments—”

  “—is just one Wundrous Act.” He lifted his umbrella, poised to leap when the rail came whizzing by, and indicated that Morrigan should do the same. “And Mathilde Lachance was just one Wundersmith.”

  “What about Squall?” she said, pulling out her own black oilskin brolly. She gave its silver filigree handle a quick polish with her cloak. “And all the others in Onstald’s book? What about Tyr Magnusson and Odbuoy Jemmity and—”

  “Ah!” shouted Jupiter triumphantly as the rail approached. “Glad you mentioned him. That’s why I’ve come. Now, ready—JUMP!”

  It was virtually impossible to hold a conversation while whizzing through the air at high speed. When Morrigan reached for the lever to release her brolly from the steel loop at their usual stop, Jupiter shooed her hand away before she could pull it.

  “Wait for my signal,” he yelled over the sound of the wind streaming past Morrigan’s ears. It seemed they weren’t going home just yet.

  They rode on for quite some time, and Morrigan’s arms were beginning to ache from clutching so tightly to her umbrella. When her muscles felt like they were on fire and she thought she might just have to let go and hope for the best, Jupiter nudged her and pointed at a soft bit of ground at the corner of a park.

  “There!”

  Leaping from the rail as it looped past the green space, Morrigan landed a bit clumsily, but at least upright. Jupiter stumbled and skidded along the grass on his knees.

  “Nice landing,” came an amused voice from behind them. “Ten out of ten.”

  Morrigan turned around in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, hello, Jack,” said Jack, emerging from the shadow of a tree. “Haven’t seen you since the summer hols, how’s life? Excellent, thanks for asking, Morrigan, so kind of you. I do hope you’re also well.”

  “Hello, Jack,” she said, rolling her eyes. “How’s life?”

  “Oh, stop fussing, you’ll embarrass me.” He smirked and tilted back on his heels, hands in pockets. It was a very Jupiterian gesture, Morrigan thought.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I wanted him to meet us,” said Jupiter. “He’s been helping me, the clever chap. We’ve got something to show you.” He dusted his knees off, striding into the park. Morrigan and Jack followed.

  “What sort of something?”

  “Something very important,” Jupiter called back to her. As was usual when Jupiter had a bee in his bonnet, she had to jog to keep up with his long legs. “Something I promised you months ago. Something wonderful.”

  Morrigan turned to Jack, who raised his eyebrows. He was positively brimming with self-satisfaction.

  The park was… well, you couldn’t really call it a park. It was dense and junglelike, and the grass looked like it hadn’t been cut in at least a year, but she saw the top of a bench peeking out from the undergrowth. Probably it had once been a proper park, Morrigan thought, but then nobody was looking after it so nature decided to take back over and run the place.

  Jupiter pushed his way into a thick copse of trees, pulling aside tangles of creepers and branches and trying to make a path for Morrigan and Jack behind him. “Jack and I have been talking about what you told us, Mog. About Onstald’s book, and the things he wrote about Wundersmiths. I promised you I’d find proof, didn’t I? Well, we’ve been looking for months, and we’ve found it. Right here.” He turned back to smile at her. “In Jemmity Park.”

  The trees cleared, and they came to a high stone wall covered in thick vines of climbing ivy. Jupiter pointed up. Towering high above them, Morrigan spied the mast of a pirate ship, the top of a Ferris wheel, and a huge, looping roller coaster track.

  “Oh! Wait, no—this is Jemmity Park? Seriously?” She peered along the seemingly impenetrable stone wall and felt a swooping disappointment. “So it’s… it’s really locked?”

  “Yes,” said Jupiter. “Brilliant, isn’t it?”

  Morrigan looked at him blankly. “Not really.”

  “No, it is brilliant,” Jack enthused. “We figured it out.” For someone who was standing outside a fantastical secret playground he’d never be able to get into, he certainly looked like all his Christmases had come at once. “Tell us again what the book said about this place. Can you remember?”

  Morrigan sighed. Of course she could remember. Onstald had made her write a three-thousand-word essay on the topic, and then build a diorama of it—including tiny little diorama children with devastated faces, standing outside the locked gates. That thing had taken three days, and now that Morrigan was standing outside the
closed walls of Jemmity Park herself, she could keenly understand their disappointment.

  “Odbuoy Jemmity was asked by a local businessman to build a magical adventure park with a carousel and a roller coaster and water slides and everything. So he did. On the opening day, people came from all over Nevermoor to see it, but Jemmity himself never showed up. When the man who’d commissioned the park tried to open it, he couldn’t. The park wouldn’t let anyone in—nobody could get over, under, or through the gates. So all the sad children and their sad parents went home, and Jemmity Park remains untouched to this day. But they planted all these trees and hedges around it so people wouldn’t have to look at it and get annoyed and—Jupiter, what are you doing? I don’t think you should be doing that.”

  Jupiter was battling against the hedgerow and the climbing vines, ripping out handfuls of leaves and tossing them over his shoulders, trying to clear away the foliage to show her something—which was difficult, as the foliage kept regrowing itself, almost as fast as he could strip it back.

  “You’re probably right,” he said.

  “You’re still doing it.”

  “Right again! Okay, quick,” puffed Jupiter, holding off a particularly eager creeper that kept trying to spiral up his arm. “Look.”

  It was a small stone podium, with a purple diamond-shaped plaque on top that read:

  Here stands a Spectacle.

  Crafted by the Wundersmith Odbuoy Jemmity

  Sponsored by Hadrian Canter, CEO of Canter Finance

  A gift to the children of Gresham

  Winter of Seven, Age of the East Winds

  “A gift to the children of—”

  “Gresham, yeah,” said Jack excitedly, swatting away a vine that was tickling his face. “That’s the name of this borough. Weird place for an adventure park, isn’t it?”

  “Why?”

  “Look around! It’s the poorest borough in Nevermoor, it always has been. I mean, there’s virtually nothing here. The Wunderground doesn’t even come here. And yet for some reason there’s an enormous, locked secret playground hidden in the middle of the neighborhood’s only green space?”

  “I suppose,” Morrigan conceded. “But—”

  “Shh. Listen,” said Jupiter, holding a finger to his lips. Morrigan and Jack fell silent. At first all Morrigan could hear was birdsong, and the faint rustle of wind through the trees, but then…

  “Someone’s in there!” There were voices. Children’s voices. A scream, followed by peals of laughter. And… “Is that music?”

  “Carousel music, I think,” said Jupiter.

  Morrigan was confused. “So… it’s not locked, then?”

  “Not exactly,” said Jack. “Not to everyone.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “My friend Sam from the Graysmark School told me about it. He grew up in Gresham, and he said there was this amazing park that he used to play in as a kid, but now he’s too old so he’s not allowed inside it anymore—the park just won’t let him in. None of the other boys believed him. But I remembered what Jupiter said—what you told him about Jemmity Park—and I made Sam bring me here. It’s all true. The park only lets you in if you’re twelve or younger—”

  Morrigan gasped, standing up ramrod straight. “That means I could—”

  “—and only if you’re a resident of Gresham.”

  “Oh.” She slumped again. How disappointing. “So, what are we doing here?”

  “Don’t you get it?” Jack said, exasperated. “Tell her, Uncle Jove.”

  Jupiter slapped his hand emphatically against the purple plaque. “Onstald was wrong, Morrigan. He was wrong about Jemmity Park. Odbuoy wasn’t some cruel trickster, building a land of wonders and then never allowing anyone inside. He didn’t create a Fiasco. He created something wonderful—for a small, deserving group of people. For the children of Gresham, who’d never had anything like this before. Right here in the middle of Nevermoor’s poorest neighborhood. He gave them something that was just theirs and nobody else’s.”

  “And I’ve been digging into the Gresham council records. This land we’re standing on? Originally, it was a block of flats. Until Hadrian Canter—an extremely wealthy man—bought the land, back in the Age of the East Winds. He kicked hundreds of people out of their homes, and demolished the whole lot so that he could build an adventure park, which he planned to charge people an arm and a leg to visit. It would have meant nobody who lived around here could even afford to enjoy it. I guess Odbuoy Jemmity didn’t think that was very fair. So he built the park just as requested, but he… added a couple of extra rules.” Jupiter laughed. “Which I’m sure made Hadrian Canter really happy.”

  “I’m sure,” Morrigan agreed, grinning.

  They all fell quiet, listening to the faint sounds of music and laughter. It was the happiest Morrigan had ever felt to be excluded.

  The afternoon turned to chilly, gray twilight, and a cold wind bit at Morrigan’s face, but she didn’t care a bit. Black hair flying, eyes streaming, and with a lightness inside that she hadn’t felt since the night of her inauguration, she sailed with Jupiter and Jack on the Brolly Rail through Nevermoor’s SBD (Serious Business District), waiting for the signal to jump.

  “Onstald was wrong,” she shouted over the wind. Just saying those words made her feel euphoric. “And if he was wrong about Odbuoy Jemmity, then maybe…”

  She wasn’t quite sure how to finish that sentence. If he was wrong about Odbuoy Jemmity, then maybe what? Maybe he was wrong about Wundersmiths? Or at least about some Wundersmiths?

  Morrigan tightened her grip on her umbrella.

  Maybe he’s wrong about me.

  “We’re not done yet, Mog,” Jupiter shouted back. He pointed to an empty patch of sidewalk. “There! By the solicitors’ office.”

  They landed triumphantly in front of an office building signposted MAHONEY, MORTON & MCCULLOUGH FAMILY SOLICITORS. Jupiter led them down a little farther to an unnamed side street, at the end of which was a gate to a dark, narrow underpass, after which they emerged in a small cobbled courtyard, then another little underpass, another gate, two more courtyards, a dirty alley that smelled of wet dog, and then a teensy-tiny cobbled walkway with a sign on the wall that read:

  WAVERLEY WALK BEWARE!

  BY ORDER OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL ODDITIES SQUADRON AND THE NEVERMOOR COUNCIL, THIS STREET HAS BEEN DECLARED A RED ALERT TRICKSY LANE

  (HIGH-DANGER TRICKERY AND LIKELIHOOD OF DAMAGE TO PERSON ON ENTRY)

  ENTER AT OWN RISK

  Morrigan was surprised. “Jupiter, you said no more Tricksy Lanes.”

  “Rules were made to be broken, Mog.” He raised one eyebrow. “But just this once, understand? Only because you’re with me, and only because I know exactly what this Tricksy Lane is hiding.”

  “Something wonderful?” asked Morrigan, grinning.

  “Something unbelievable,” said Jack.

  Waverley Walk’s trick was an unpleasant one. It got skinnier and skinnier the farther down it they went, until Morrigan found she was being compressed between two brick walls (“Keep going, you two!” Jupiter had squeaked from up ahead, looking so uncomfortable she thought his head might pop like a water balloon), and then quite abruptly—

  “Cascade Towers!” Jupiter shouted over the roaring, rushing sound of a waterfall as they lunged out from between the alley walls, gasping for breath.

  Not just a waterfall, though—a dozen waterfalls, maybe more. Some were vast, impenetrable white-water curtains that crashed spectacularly to the ground; others delicate and crystalline with a sound like tinkling glass chimes. It was a symphony of water, falling from nowhere and disappearing into nothing, arranged in the three-dimensional form of a glorious, glittering skyscraper.

  Morrigan’s shoulders dropped and she swayed a little on the spot. Decima Kokoro’s creation was not at all what she’d expected. She felt utterly thunderstruck. A street back, she’d never have known any of this was here. There’d been no sound of water, no
change in the air to hint that behind these gloomy buildings there might be a structure of such deafening, magnificent beauty.

  And it really was beautiful.

  She shook her head, disbelieving. “He called it a Fiasco,” she yelled over the rushing water. Suddenly she was past shock, moving swiftly to anger. “Onstald, he said it was a Fiasco bordering on a Monstrosity. But it’s… it’s…”

  “Yeah,” shouted Jupiter. “It’s… yeah. Exactly.” He and Jack were gazing up at Cascade Towers with expressions of dazed, idiotic awe that Morrigan felt mirrored in her own face. “Shall we go inside?”

  He opened his umbrella, and Jack and Morrigan followed suit, and together they stepped through the gentlest section of waterfall they could see. It was as simple as that. Onstald’s book had described the great difficulty of trying to get inside Decima Kokoro’s building without being soaked to the skin or washed away or drowned. But the three of them emerged on the other side of the water wall, shook the water from their brollies, and were perfectly dry. The deafening noise disappeared.

  Morrigan had expected it to be dark, damp and cavelike inside Cascade Towers, but instead she found a bright and pleasant space. Cool green light filtered through the sheets of water and cast rippling patterns across the floor. The building was huge and empty. Silent. Like a cathedral made of sea glass.

  “Why doesn’t anybody use it? Don’t they know it’s here?” she asked in a hushed voice. It felt as if they’d entered a sacred, magical place, and she didn’t want to break the spell.

  “I don’t know. Not sure who owns it. I’m still trying to find out.” Jupiter trailed his fingertips along a wall of calm, glassy water.