Silence. And then—
“Ha!” Noelle exploded with laughter, followed by her friend and all the other candidates surrounding her. As they fell over themselves laughing, Morrigan realized how utterly unterrifying she had become. She didn’t know if she was pleased or disappointed.
The laughter died down. Noelle glared at Morrigan. Anah, meanwhile, had taken the opportunity as a divine reprieve and disappeared. You’re welcome, Morrigan thought, feeling a tiny bit resentful.
“It’s rude to eavesdrop.” Noelle put her hands on her hips. “But I wouldn’t expect good manners from an illegal.”
“A what?”
“My patron says your patron smuggled you into the Free State. He says nobody’s ever heard of you before, so you must be from the Republic. Do you know that’s against the law? You belong in jail.”
Morrigan frowned. Was she in the Free State illegally? She wasn’t stupid… she knew Jupiter had done something funny at border control, that holding up a chocolate wrapper and a used tissue as their “papers” definitely wasn’t normal procedure.
But did that mean he’d smuggled her in? Were they criminals?
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Morrigan said, arranging her face into a convincing sneer. “And your patron is an odious man.”
Noelle faltered, blinking momentarily. “Is that your knack? Using big words? I thought it must be wearing horrible clothes or being as ugly as a gutter rat. You’re obviously very good at those two—ugh!”
An enormous green gelatin sculpture had fallen from the sky and plopped straight down onto Noelle’s head. The sticky green ooze trickled down her face and hair and sparkly dress. She looked like she’d been dunked in radioactive sewage.
“Want some dessert, Noelle?” called a voice from above. There was a boy dangling from a window by one hand. He held an empty platter in the other and waved it at the children below, grinning happily.
Noelle shook with anger. Her chest heaved in great gasping breaths.
“You—I’m—you’ll never—you are in so much—ugh! Mr. Charlton!” She stormed down the front steps in search of her patron, the other children close behind, her friend with the braided hair still giggling.
The boy landed with a thud next to Morrigan. He flicked his head back, pushing a mop of thick brown curls out of his eyes, and adjusted his oversized pullover—a huge blue knitted thing with a glittery cat picture on the front. The cat had a pink ribbon sewn onto its head and a jingling silver bell attached to the collar. Morrigan wondered what in the world had possessed him to wear it.
“I liked that thing you did too. You know, ‘consider your next words carefully’ and all that,” he said, mimicking her low, angry voice. “But I reckon the only language some people understand is the language of the surprise dessert attack.”
She didn’t know how to respond to this unusual advice. The boy nodded sagely and they stood in silence for a few moments. Morrigan couldn’t stop staring at his sweater.
“D’you like it?” he said, looking down at his chest. “My mom bet me I wouldn’t wear it today. She bought it from a catalog. She gets loads of them for me, it’s called the Ugly Sweater Company. She’s pretty funny.”
“What do you get?”
“For what?”
“For winning the bet.”
“I get to wear the sweater.” He frowned, looking genuinely confused for a moment until his face lit up with some new idea. “Hey—could you help me with something?”
Twenty minutes later they returned to the garden party, deep in conversation and carrying a heavy wooden barrel between them. They’d dragged it from an empty corner of the grounds all the way around Proudfoot House to the back lawn.
The boy was pretty strong for somebody so gangly, Morrigan thought. Despite his knobbly legs and skinny arms, he was carrying most of the weight.
“It’s nice, yeah,” he puffed. “All the flowers and statues and stuff. But I’m telling you—massive vermin problem. My patron knows the groundskeeper. Reckons they get all sorts. Mice, rats, even snakes. They’ve just had a toad infestation. Only so many the Sorcery Department can use in one week, the groundskeeper says.”
“I don’t care,” said Morrigan, puffing with the effort of dragging the barrel up the steps, past the bemused players in the string quartet. “Proudfoot House is still the nicest place I’ve ever seen. Except for the Deucalion.”
“You’ve got to let me visit,” he said enthusiastically. He’d been excited to learn that Morrigan actually lived in a hotel. “Do you order room service every day? I would order room service every single day. Lobster for breakfast and cake for dinner. Do they leave chocolates on your pillow? My dad says all the fancy hotels leave chocolates on your pillow. Does it really have its own smoking parlor? And a dwarf vampire?”
“Vampire dwarf,” she corrected.
“Wow. Do you think I could come this weekend?”
“I’ll ask Jupiter. What’s in this, by the way? It’s so heavy.”
They’d reached the top of the steps and dropped the barrel at its final destination—the balcony railing.
The boy flicked his hair out of his eyes and grinned. He opened the barrel and, without a word, tipped it over the balcony. Dozens of slimy brown toads poured out like a disgusting waterfall and spilled in a wide arc across the pavement, croaking and leaping madly around the feet of the now-screaming party guests.
“Told you. Massive vermin problem.”
Morrigan’s eyes widened. She’d just helped to smuggle toads into a garden party. A slightly hysterical laugh escaped her; this probably wasn’t the sort of first impression Dame Chanda had in mind.
The garden below was in chaos. People were falling over each other in their desperation to get away from the toads. Somebody shouted for a servant. A table was knocked over and a punch bowl shattered on the ground, the purple liquid spilling out and splashing Elder Wong.
Morrigan and the boy sidled away from the crime scene, then broke into a run. They made it down the balcony steps and around the side of Proudfoot House before doubling over, breathless with laughter.
“That”—Morrigan panted and pressed one hand to a stitch in her side—“that was—”
“Outstanding. I know. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Morrigan,” she said, holding her hand out. “What’s—”
“Enjoying yourselves?” Jupiter wandered over with a placid smile, ignoring the stream of servants rushing past with nets and brooms.
Morrigan chewed the side of her mouth guiltily. “A bit.”
Nan Dawson ran up behind him. “Captain North, have you seen—” She stopped short at the sight of Morrigan’s new friend giggling helplessly. Her face turned red. “Hawthorne Swift!”
The boy gave his patron a sheepish grin.
“Sorry, Nan.” He did not sound remotely sorry. “Couldn’t waste a perfectly good barrel of toads.”
They took a carriage home, and there was silence for most of the journey. Finally, as they turned onto Humdinger Avenue, Jupiter spoke.
“You made a friend.”
“I think so.”
“Anything else of interest?”
Morrigan thought for a moment. “I think I made an enemy too.”
“I didn’t make my first proper enemy until I was twelve.” He sounded impressed.
“Maybe that’s my knack?”
Jupiter chuckled.
Instead of taking them to the Hotel Deucalion’s grand forecourt, the carriage stopped at the entrance to Caddisfly Alley. Jupiter paid the driver, and he and Morrigan made their way through the twisting narrow backstreet to the modest wooden door of the service entrance. Before he could open it, she put a hand on his arm.
“I’m here illegally, aren’t I?”
Jupiter chewed the side of his mouth. “A bit.”
“So… I don’t have a visa.”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly, or not at all?”
&
nbsp; “Not at all.”
“Oh.” Morrigan thought about that for a moment, trying to find the best way to ask her next question. “If I don’t… if they don’t let me in, you know, to the—to the Society…”
“Yes?” he prompted.
She drew in a deep breath. “Can I stay anyway? Here at the Deucalion, with you?” When Jupiter said nothing, she rushed ahead. “Not as a guest! I meant you could give me a job. You wouldn’t even have to pay me or anything. I could run errands for Kedgeree, or dust the silverware for Fen—”
Jupiter laughed loudly at that idea, pushing through the arched wooden door into the gaslit hallway with its faint smell of damp. “Oh, I’m sure you’d love working for cranky old Fen. But I suspect the Federation of Nevermoorian Hoteliers frowns on child labor.”
“Promise you’ll think about it?”
“Only if you promise you’ll stop thinking about not getting into the Society.”
“But if I don’t get in—”
“We’ll blow up that bridge when we come to it.”
Morrigan sighed. Just give me a straight answer, she thought. But she said no more.
Jupiter ushered Morrigan down the hall ahead of him. “Now. Tell me more about your resourceful new friend. Where in the Seven Pockets did he find a barrel full of toads?”
CHAPTER TEN
ILLEGAL
Room 85 on the fourth floor was slowly becoming Morrigan’s bedroom. Every few days she noticed something new and brilliant, something she loved instantly. Like the mermaid bookends that showed up on her shelf one day, or the black leather armchair shaped like an octopus that curled its tentacles around her while she read.
One night several weeks earlier, the bed had changed from a plain white headboard to an ornate wrought-iron frame while she slept in it. The Deucalion obviously thought it had made a mistake, though, because two days later she woke up swinging in a hammock.
Her favorite thing of all was a small framed painting of a bright green molded gelatin sculpture, which hung above the toilet.
At first she thought it was Jupiter or Fen changing things in secret, testing her gullibility. Until once, in the middle of the night, she stepped into her bathroom for a drink of water only to see the bathtub growing four talon-shaped silver feet before her eyes.
Strangest of all, the size and shape of the room were changing. Where once there was a single square window, she now had three arched ones. One day her bathroom was the size of a ballroom and had a tub like a swimming pool. The next day it was no bigger than a closet.
Soon there were window boxes full of red flowers, a skeleton hat stand wearing a gray fedora in her size, and thick vines of ivy twisting halfway up a stone fireplace—and for the first time ever, Morrigan Crow felt that she was in exactly the right place.
Midway through spring, a man in a mud-brown uniform came to the Hotel Deucalion. His moustache curled all the way to his cheekbones, and the light glinted off a silver badge on his chest. He stood at the concierge desk, his hands stiffly behind his back, appraising the hotel foyer with undisguised contempt.
Kedgeree had fetched Jupiter and Morrigan from the Smoking Parlor, where they sat in a cloud of forest-green vapor (rosemary smoke: “for sharpening the mind”), playing a game of cards. Neither was certain of the rules, but Frank whispered advice in Morrigan’s ear, and Dame Chanda did the same for Jupiter, and every now and then someone would yell “Huzzah!” and the others would scowl or throw something, and all things considered, Morrigan thought it was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
They both felt a bit put out when Kedgeree insisted they hurry to the foyer, and Morrigan was even more annoyed when she saw the moustachioed man sneer disapprovingly at the small, misshapen chandelier, which was still regrowing.
Rude, she thought. It’s not ready yet!
The chandelier was creeping back to health day by day, but it still had a long way to go. At this stage it was impossible to see what form it would take. Fenestra had opened a betting pool. Frank swore up and down it would be a magnificent peacock, but Morrigan was still hopeful it might come back as the same pink sailing ship Jupiter had loved.
“What’s the Stink doing here?” Jupiter murmured to Kedgeree, who shrugged as he scooted off behind the concierge desk.
“Who’s the Stink?” whispered Morrigan.
“Ooh—ah, I meant the Nevermoor City Police Force,” Jupiter said under his breath. “We, er—probably shouldn’t call it the Stink. Not to his face. Actually, just let me do the talking.”
Jupiter approached the man and shook his hand amiably. “Good afternoon, Officer. Welcome to the Hotel Deucalion. Checking in?”
The man scoffed. “Not likely. You’re the proprietor, correct?”
“Jupiter North. How do you do?”
“Captain Jupiter Amantius North,” said the man, consulting a notebook. “Esteemed member of the Wundrous Society, the League of Explorers, and the Federation of Nevermoorian Hoteliers. Secretary of the Wunimal Rights Commission, volunteer bookfighter for the Gobleian Library, and chairman of the Charitable Trust for Decommissioned Robot Butlers. Discoverer of seventeen previously undocumented realms and Snazzy Man Magazine’s Snazzy Man of the Year four years running. Very impressive, Captain. Anything I’ve missed?”
“I also give tap-dancing lessons to underprivileged hoodlums, and I’m on the judging panel for the annual blackberry pie bake-off at the Nevermoor Maximum Security Rehabilitation Center for the Criminally Insane.”
Morrigan laughed out loud at that, although she wasn’t sure whether Jupiter was joking.
“Well, aren’t you just a saint?”
“I’m only in it for the pie.” He winked at Morrigan.
The officer sneered. “Think you’re funny?”
“I often do think that, yes. Is there something I can help you with, Inspector?” Morrigan followed Jupiter’s gaze to the man’s badge, which read INSPECTOR HAROLD FLINTLOCK.
Inspector Flintlock sucked in his paunch and tried to look down his nose at Jupiter, which was difficult, as Jupiter was several inches taller than him. “I’m here acting on an anonymous tip. One of your Wundrous pals has turned you in, North, for harboring an illegal refugee. That’s big trouble, that is.”
Jupiter smiled serenely. “It certainly would be big trouble, if it were true.”
“You’re entering a candidate for the Wundrous Society trials this year, is that correct?”
“Correct.”
“And this is the candidate, is it?”
“Her name is Morrigan Crow.”
Inspector Flintlock narrowed his eyes at Morrigan and brought his face down close to hers. “And where exactly are you from, Morrigan Crow?”
“Nunya,” replied Morrigan.
Jupiter tried to turn his snort of laughter into a cough. “She meant to say she’s from the Seventh Pocket of the Free State, Inspector. She just… pronounces it funny.”
Morrigan glanced at her patron. He had the same cool, confident air as when he’d spoken to the border control guard on her first day in Nevermoor.
Inspector Flintlock slapped his notebook in the palm of his hand. “Now, listen here, North. The Free State has strict border laws, and if you’re harboring an illegal refugee, you’re breaking about twenty-eight of them. You’re in a lot of trouble here, sonny. Illegals are a plague, and it’s my solemn duty to guard the borders of Nevermoor and protect its true citizens from Republic scum trying to weasel their way into the Free State.”
Jupiter turned serious. “A noble and valiant cause, I’m sure,” he said quietly. “Protecting the Free State from those most in need of its help.”
Flintlock scoffed, smoothing his oily moustache. “I know your type. You bleeding hearts, you’d let anything in here if we gave you half a chance. But I think you might find this scummy illegal of yours is more trouble than she’s worth.”
Jupiter looked him dead in the eye. “Don’t call her that.”
A chill crept up Morrig
an’s spine. She recognized the cold wrath in Jupiter’s voice, the ice in his hard blue eyes. Flintlock, however, wasn’t so quick to catch on.
“I’ll call her what she is, which is a dirty, stinking, rotten illegal. You can’t fool me, North. Either hand over her papers—her legitimate citizenship papers—or hand yourself over for arrest, and this filthy illegal for immediate deportation!”
The inspector’s words echoed in the lobby, bouncing off the high ceilings. A few of the staff wandered in, drawn by Flintlock’s raised voice.
“Everything all right here, Captain North?” asked Kedgeree, leaving the concierge desk to stand beside them with Martha.
“What a terrible ruckus,” said Dame Chanda. She put her arm around Morrigan and glared at Flintlock.
“Did somebody call for security?” Fenestra said from the staircase, where she sat casually cleaning her enormous claws as if preparing for a meal.
“Shall I bite his kneecaps, Jove?” asked Frank the vampire dwarf, sticking his head through Jupiter’s legs.
“That won’t be necessary. Everything’s fine, thank you. You can all go.” They all reluctantly left, except for Fen, who stayed just where she was. Jupiter was silent for some time, while Flintlock shot nervous looks in the Magnificat’s direction.
When Jupiter finally spoke, it was in a quiet, measured voice. “You have no right to demand the papers of someone who falls under the jurisdiction of the Wundrous Society, Flintlock. We deal with our own lawbreakers.”
“She’s not in the Society—”
“You need to brush up on your Wun Law handbook, Flinty. Article ninety-seven, clause F: ‘A child who is participating in the entrance trials for the Wundrous Society shall for all legal purposes be considered a member of the Wundrous Society for the duration of said trials or until he or she is removed from the trial process.’ All legal purposes. That means she’s already ours.”
A feeling of righteous relief coursed through Morrigan. Already ours. She glared up at Flintlock, emboldened by the knowledge that Wundrous Society law was on her side.
The Trials of Morrigan Crow Page 12