“That is quite enough!” spluttered Corvus, rising from his chair. It was one thing for a man to arrive unannounced at Crow Manor on Eventide, but quite another to bring the notion of physical affection with him. “You are nobody’s patron. Leave my house immediately, before I call for the town guard.”
Jupiter smiled as if tickled by the threat. “I am somebody’s patron, Chancellor Crow. I am the patron of this slow-moving but otherwise delightful child. It’s all legal and aboveboard, I can assure you. She signed the contract. I have it right here.”
He whipped out a wrinkled, fold-creased, shabby piece of paper that Morrigan recognized. Jupiter pointed at her signature, complete with the tiny black crow covering the accidental ink smudge.
But that was impossible.
“I don’t understand,” said Morrigan, shaking her head. “I watched it burn to ashes.”
“Oh, it’s a Wundrous contract.” He waved it around without care. “It creates identical copies of the original as soon as you sign it. That does explain the singed edges, though.”
“I never signed that,” said Corvus.
Jupiter shrugged. “I never asked you to.”
“I’m her father! That contract requires my signature.”
“Actually, it only requires the signature of an adult guardian, and—”
“Wundrous contracts are illegal,” said Grandmother, at last finding her voice, “under the Misuse of Wunder Act. We ought to have you arrested.”
“Well, you’d best do it quickly, I’ve only got a few minutes,” said Jupiter, sounding bored. He checked his watch. “Morrigan, we really must go. Time is running out.”
“I know time is running out,” said Morrigan. “You’ve made a mistake, Mr. North. You can’t be my patron. Today’s my birthday.”
“Of course! Happy birthday.” He was distracted, moving to the windows to peek through the curtains. “Mind if we celebrate later, though? It’s getting quite late and—”
“No, you don’t understand,” she interrupted. The words felt heavy and dry in her mouth, but she forced them out. “I’m on the Cursed Children’s Register. Tonight is Eventide. I’m going to die at midnight.”
“My, aren’t you a Negative Nelly.”
“That’s why I burned the contract. It’s worthless. I’m sorry.”
Jupiter was gazing anxiously out the window now, a frown creasing his forehead. “You did actually sign the contract before you burned it, though,” he said without looking at her. “And who says you’re going to die? You don’t have to die if you don’t want to.”
Corvus slammed his fist on the table. “This is intolerable! Who do you think you are, waltzing into my home and upsetting my family with this nonsense?”
“I told you who I am.” Jupiter spoke patiently, as if to a senseless child. “My name is Jupiter North.”
“And I am Corvus Crow, the state chancellor of Great Wolfacre and a ranked member of the Wintersea Party,” said Corvus, puffing up his chest. He was on a roll now. “I demand that you go at once, and allow me to mourn the death of my daughter in peace.”
“Mourn the death of your daughter?” echoed Jupiter. He took two deliberate steps toward Corvus and paused, his eyes glittering. The hairs on Morrigan’s arms stood up. Jupiter’s voice dropped an entire octave, and he spoke with a cold, quiet anger that was terrible to behold. “Can you possibly mean the daughter standing right in front of you? The one who is demonstrably, superbly, brilliantly alive?”
Corvus sputtered and pointed to the clock on the wall, his hand shaking with outrage. “Well, give it a few hours!”
Morrigan felt something squeeze in her chest, and she wasn’t sure why. She’d always known she was going to die on Eventide. Her father and grandmother had never kept it secret. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that Corvus was so resigned to her fate, but Morrigan suddenly realized that to him, she might as well be dead already. Perhaps in his heart she’d been dead for years.
“Morrigan,” said Jupiter, in a voice very different from the one he’d just used on her father, “don’t you want to live?”
Morrigan flinched. What sort of a question was that? “It doesn’t matter what I want.”
“It does,” he insisted. “It matters so very, very much. Right now it’s the only thing that matters.”
Her eyes flicked from her father to her grandmother to her stepmother. They all watched her intently, uneasily, as if seeing her properly for the first time.
“Of course I want to live,” she said quietly. It was the first time she’d ever spoken the words aloud. The tightness in her chest eased a little.
“Good choice.” Jupiter smiled; the cloud disappeared from his face as quickly as it had arrived. He turned back to the window. “Death is boring. Life is much more fun. Things happen in life all the time. Unexpected things. Things you couldn’t possibly expect because they’re so very… unexpected.” He stepped backward, inching away from the window and reaching blindly for Morrigan, fumbling to take her hand. “For instance, I bet you didn’t expect your so-called death to arrive three hours early.”
Morrigan felt something powdery land on her face. Wiping it away, she looked up to see the light fixtures shaking and cracks appearing in the plaster. The lightbulbs stuttered and buzzed. The windows began to rattle. There was a faint smell of burning.
“What’s that?” She squeezed his hand automatically. “What’s happening?”
Jupiter leaned down to whisper in her ear. “Do you trust me?”
She answered without thinking. “Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“All right.” He looked her in the eye. The floor trembled beneath their feet. “I’m going to take that curtain down in a moment. But whatever you see out there, you mustn’t be afraid. They can tell when you’re afraid.”
Morrigan swallowed. “They?”
“Just follow my lead and you’ll be fine. Yes? No fear.”
“No fear,” repeated Morrigan. Meanwhile, fear had set up camp in her stomach and was having a festival. A Ferris wheel of fear spun idly in her abdomen. Dancing circus elephants of fear somersaulted through her intestinal tract.
“What the devil are you talking about over there?” said Grandmother. “What’s he saying to you, Morrigan? I demand to—”
In a rush of sudden movement Jupiter pulled a handful of silver dust from his pocket and blew it toward Corvus, Ivy, and Grandmother like a cloudy, starry kiss, then leapt up to the window and ripped down the curtain, dropping it in a crumpled, messy pile in the middle of the floor.
He stood back to gaze at his handiwork and shook his head slowly, mournfully. “I am so sorry. How tragic to have lost her so young.”
Corvus frowned and blinked, looking unsure. His eyes were glassy. “Tragic?”
“Mmm,” said Jupiter. He threw an arm around Corvus’s shoulders and led him closer to the pile of fabric. “Dear, dear Morrigan. So full of life. So much to share with the world. But taken! Taken too soon.”
“Too soon.” Corvus nodded in shell-shocked agreement. “Much too soon.”
Jupiter put his other arm around Ivy and drew her into his chest. “You mustn’t blame yourselves. Although you could a bit, if you wanted to.” He winked at Morrigan, who felt a small, hysterical laugh working its way up out of her throat. Did they really believe that curtain was her, lying dead on the floor? She was standing right in front of them!
“She looks so small.” Ivy sniffed and drew her sleeve across her nose. “So small and thin.”
“Yes,” said Jupiter. “Almost as if she were… made of fabric.”
Morrigan snorted, but the Crows made no sign that they’d heard her.
“I’ll leave you to make the necessary arrangements. You’ll need to prepare a statement for the press, Chancellor. But before I go, may I suggest a closed casket for the funeral? Open caskets are so tacky.”
“Yes,” said Grandmother, gazing down at curtain-Morrigan. “Ind
eed. Quite tacky.”
“What did you do?” Morrigan whispered to Jupiter. “What was that silver stuff?”
“Highly illegal. Pretend you didn’t see it.”
The light fixture swung violently, casting shadows across the room. An unmistakable smell of woodsmoke filled the air. The floor began to shake again, and in the distance Morrigan heard something like heavy rain or rolling thunder or—was it—hoofbeats?
She turned to the window and felt a hot, prickling fear all the way down her spine. Panic rose like bile in her throat.
She could see it. She could see her death coming.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE HUNT OF SMOKE AND SHADOW
Through the sparse woodland and over the crest of the hill, a dark and shapeless form approached Crow Manor.
To Morrigan it looked like a swarm of locusts or a cloud of bats, but it was too low and loud to be either. The sound of hooves became deafening as the dark mass grew closer. Among the black were hundreds of specks of fiery red light, getting brighter by the second.
The amorphous figure began to take shape. Heads and faces and legs grew out of the swarm, and Morrigan felt her stomach drop; the glowing red lights weren’t lights at all. They were eyes. The eyes of men, the eyes of horses, and the eyes of hounds.
Not individuals made of flesh. More like a single living shadow. They were darkness—a pure absence of light. And they moved with purpose.
They were hunting.
Morrigan couldn’t breathe. Her chest heaved in and out as she tried to take in enough air to fill her lungs properly. “What are they?”
“Not now,” said Jupiter. “We have to run.”
But Morrigan’s feet felt stuck to the floor. She couldn’t turn away from the window. Jupiter grasped her shoulders and looked straight into her eyes.
“No fear. Remember?” he said, giving her a little shake. “Save it for later.”
Jupiter led Morrigan away, into the hall. She paused at the door.
“Wait! What about them?” she said, looking back toward the Crows. They were still gathered around the curtain on the floor, oblivious to the sound and sight of a hundred ghostly hunters barreling toward the house. “We can’t just leave—”
“They’ll be fine. The Hunt can’t touch them. I promise. Come on.”
“But—”
Jupiter pulled her onward. “It’s you they’re hunting, Morrigan. You want to help your family? You need to get yourself far, far away from this house.”
“Then why are we going upstairs?”
Jupiter didn’t answer. When they reached the third floor he ran to the nearest window and flung it wide open, sticking his head out. “This’ll do. Ready? We’re aiming for the skylight.”
Morrigan looked out the window at the strangest machine she’d ever seen.
As state chancellor, her father had been fetched from Crow Manor in all sorts of vehicles over the years. Corvus still favored his old-fashioned horse-drawn carriage for daily use, but sometimes the Wintersea Party would send expensive dark-windowed coaches with rumbling mechanical engines, and once even a small piloted airship that needed a special permit to land on the roof. Neighbors had gathered to gawk at it and take pictures.
But Corvus had never, to her knowledge, traveled in a gleaming brass pod standing two stories high on eight spindly legs like an enormous metallic spider. What would the neighbors think of THIS? wondered Morrigan, her eyes like saucers.
“I didn’t park close enough,” said Jupiter. “We’ll have to push off a bit when we jump.”
Jump? Surely he didn’t expect her to jump out of a third-story window?
Jupiter climbed onto the sill and levered his body so that he was mostly out of the window, then held out a hand to Morrigan. “On the count of three, okay?”
“No.” She shook her head, backing away from the window. “Not okay. The opposite of okay.”
“Morrigan, I admire your instinct for self-preservation. I really do. But I think if you look over your shoulder, your instinct might tell you to jump out the window.”
Morrigan looked.
Perilously close to the top of the staircase was a wolflike hound with glowing red eyes, its teeth bared in a low snarl. Its pack crept slowly up the last of the stairs behind him. At least a dozen, maybe more. They jostled for position, snapping their ferocious jaws and growling as they stalked Morrigan, frozen at the window.
“N-no fear,” she whispered, and every cell in her body replied, Yes fear.
“Count of three.” Jupiter took Morrigan’s hand to guide her up onto the ledge. “One…”
The hound was joined on the landing by a second pack member, then a third, all with the same sharp yellow teeth and fiery eyes and the swirling, smoky fur as black as pitch. Their growls vibrated all the way to Morrigan’s toes.
“Two…”
She stepped backward and scrambled for Jupiter’s support as her foot touched nothing but air. He wrapped his arms around her chest and she felt him lean back, pulling her with him. The hounds launched themselves at Morrigan.
“Three!”
Cold, sharp air whipped around her ears as she fell. There was an almighty shattering of glass and then they landed hard—Jupiter’s arms wrapped tightly around Morrigan, his body cushioning her fall—on the floor inside the body of the giant brass spider. Above them, the hounds disappeared from the window.
“Ow,” Jupiter moaned. “I’ll regret that tomorrow. Off you get.”
He rolled Morrigan onto the floor. She winced as a stray piece of glass embedded itself in the heel of her palm.
“Where did they go?”
“Dunno. But they won’t be gone for long. Hold on to something,” said Jupiter. He ran to a control deck at the front of the vehicle and began pulling levers. The engine roared to life and the spider lurched forward, pitching Morrigan face-first into a wall. She felt nausea rising in her stomach. “The first bit’s always bumpy. And the last bit. But don’t worry; the middle bit’s as smooth as silk. Sometimes. Depends, really.”
Morrigan stumbled into the cramped cockpit and held on to the back of an old leather chair, where Jupiter sat at the controls. She picked the piece of glass out of her hand and threw it away, wiping the blood on her dress. “What were they?”
“The Hunt of Smoke and Shadow.” Jupiter looked darkly over his shoulder as the spider lumbered away from the house.
“The Hunt of…” Morrigan clamped a hand over her mouth, trying not to bring up her dinner all over Jupiter’s panel of shiny buttons and levers—or worse, the back of his head. She felt like she was in a small boat on a choppy sea. “What do they want with me?”
But Jupiter was distracted, trying to steer and change gears and stay upright at the same time. “Strap yourself into the passenger seat,” he said, jerking his head toward the battered-looking chair on his left. Morrigan pulled herself over to it with some difficulty and clicked the seat belt into place across her chest. “Ready? Hold tight.”
The spider climbed over the gates of Crow Manor in great staggering strides. The woods loomed ahead, but Jupiter steered in another direction, toward the center of Jackalfax. On the smooth road, the movements of the mechanical spider evened out as it picked up downhill speed.
Jackalfax was awash with the light and noise of the early fireworks show, and a crowd had gathered to see the night ablaze with color. Morrigan had never seen Empire Road so full of people.
The eight-legged machine scurried through the town center, skirting the edges of the crowd. Jupiter couldn’t have timed it more perfectly—the spectacle in the sky was a brilliant cover for their escape from the Hunt of Smoke and Shadow. Everyone was looking up, their ears filled with whistles and bangs.
“Shouldn’t we be heading out of town, not into it?” asked Morrigan.
“We’re taking a shortcut,” said Jupiter.
He was steering them straight toward Town Hall. The vehicle stood to full height with a grinding of its metal joints and ste
pped delicately through the crowd, looking for all the world as if it were walking on tiptoes.
“What is this thing?” Morrigan asked. “This spider thing?”
“This ‘spider thing,’ as you’ve indelicately baptized it,” said Jupiter, giving her a pointed look, “is called an arachnipod, and it is the most exquisite machine ever built.”
A particularly loud firecracker shattered the night sky, leaving a trail of flower-shaped smoke in its wake, the ghost of an explosion. The crowd made noises of delight.
“Beautiful, isn’t she? Her name’s Octavia. One of only two arachnipods ever built. I knew the inventor. Pull that blue lever for me, will you? No, the other one. That’s it.”
The arachnipod juddered to a halt. Jupiter frowned. He stood up and ran to the back of the pod, looking anxiously out of the domed glass walls.
“Is something wrong?”
“Interesting machines like this are out of fashion now, of course,” he continued, as if nothing had happened. “But I’ll never let go of old Occy. She’s too reliable. Hoverships and automobiles, they’re all very modern and flashy, but like I always say—you can’t roll over a mountain, and you can’t hover underwater. Octavia can go almost anywhere. Which is useful in moments like this. We appear to be rather cornered.”
He returned to the control deck, reached up to the ceiling, and pulled down a screen with four split images. Each showed a different view from the arachnipod.
The Hunt of Smoke and Shadow had caught up with them. They were surrounded on all sides by the huntsmen on horseback and their slavering hounds.
“How is any of that helpful in moments like this?” Morrigan’s heart raced. This is it, she thought. We’re trapped. This is the end. “I don’t see any mountains or water!”
“No mountains, no,” mused Jupiter. “But there is…that.”
She followed his gaze to the top of the clock tower.
“The really excellent thing about spiders,” he said, strapping himself into the driver’s seat, “is the way they crawl. Fasten your seat belt, Morrigan Crow. And whatever you do, don’t close your eyes.”
The Trials of Morrigan Crow Page 5