Decima Kokoro, ʘwain Binks, Elodie Bauer
An advanced lesson in the Wundrous Art of Weaving, given by Kokoro to Binks and Bauer
Age of Endings, Ninth Friday, Spring of Twelve
12:15–12:53
The next day, Morrigan skipped lunch to stay on Sub-Nine and visit the first hour on her secret list. She wasn’t disappointed.
The sprawling, spidering chambers of Sub-Nine echoed inside the ghostly hour with shrieks of laughter and great, crashing waves of water as Decima Kokoro Weaved a river like a ribbon, in and out of the many archways of the School of Wundrous Arts.
It was extraordinary and beautiful and terrifying. Morrigan felt a tightening in her chest as she remembered the waves in the Tricksy Lane endlessly crashing over her. But she pushed it deep down somewhere, focusing instead on the teenage boy running through the halls after Decima, laughing with his friends as they followed in her wake, trying (and it must be said, mostly failing) to imitate what she was doing.
This Ezra Squall was of senior scholar age – perhaps seventeen or so – and beginning to resemble the striking young man he would later become. The ash-brown hair was a little unrulier than it was in the picture Dame Chanda showed her the Christmas before last, and there was no scar through his eyebrow yet. But the angular features, the smooth pale skin … it was all familiar, yet somehow off. Seventeen-year-old Squall was carefree and boisterous, delighting both in the company of his friends and the insanity of seeing a river run through his school.
Beyond the physical resemblance, Morrigan barely recognised him.
LʘCATIʘN
PARTICIPANTS & EVENTS
DATE & TIME
Wundrous Society Campus, far-west corner of the Whinging Woods, underneath the oldest tree
Rastaban Tarazed, ʘwain Binks, Elodie Bauer
A beginner’s lesson in the Wundrous Art of Weaving
Age of Endings, Tenth Monday, Spring of Eight
07:30–08:22
The oldest tree in the far-west corner of the Whinging Woods was predictably grumpy when Morrigan came stomping around in the undergrowth the following Monday morning.
‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ it grumbled as she tripped over its outspread roots, looking for a tiny sliver of light hanging in the air. The gnarly old wood-grain face in its trunk curled into a sneer. ‘Don’t let my ancient roots bother you, they’re only anchored deep in the ground in this fixed position. I’ll just hop out of your way in a sprightly fashion, shall I? Hoppity hop hop.’
‘Sorry, I’m just looking for – never mind! Found it.’
Morrigan widened the gap and slipped through time to a lesson that had taken place four years earlier than Decima’s subterranean river.
Squall was there again, and he was her own age, and he was making funny faces at Elodie while Rastaban held an outstretched hand to the tree and talked very earnestly about communing with nature in order to understand and unravel its threads.
‘Ezra, stop that,’ hissed Owain, closing his eyes and pressing his palm against the tree trunk. ‘Some of us are trying to listen to the trees.’
Morrigan was briefly distracted wondering why they needed to use the Wundrous Arts just to talk to a tree in the Whinging Woods; in her experience they were always quite eager to broadcast their complaints. But on closer inspection of the old oak she noticed there was no gnarly face in its trunk, nor in fact on any of the surrounding trees. In this ghostly hour, the Whinging Woods weren’t the Whinging Woods. Not as she knew them. How curious.
‘Some of us are trying to listen to the trees,’ Ezra mouthed dramatically at Elodie behind Owain’s back, and they both dissolved into giggles.
Morrigan walked right up to Ezra, frowning as she leaned in close to examine his bright, merry face. For a brief alarming moment, his eyes locked with hers, as if he knew she was there. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Then his gaze slid away as if it had never happened.
LʘCATIʘN
PARTICIPANTS & EVENTS
DATE & TIME
School of Wundrous Arts, Sub-Nine of Proudfoot House, Corcoran
Brilliance Amadeo
An intermediate lesson in the Wundrous Art of Veil
Age of Endings, Tenth Wednesday, Spring of Nine
14:21–14:38
This one was a long shot, since Owain and Elodie weren’t named in the listing. But Morrigan had a strong feeling that Brilliance wasn’t going to be alone in a room teaching herself the Wundrous Art of Veil. So strong, in fact, that she skipped her Wednesday afternoon Undead Dialects lecture to find out. (It was only one class, she told herself, and it wasn’t as if her presence would be missed in the audience of a darkened lecture theatre.)
This ghostly hour was seventeen minutes long, and one of the few looping ones she’d seen. Morrigan didn’t think it could be called a ‘lesson’ as such. Ezra laid his hand on a wooden desk and stared at it in silence, concentrating hard, until his skin transformed, chameleon-like, to almost perfectly resemble the wood grain.
He and Brilliance both remained silent until the very end, when she smiled at him and said softly, ‘Well done, dear. You’re making progress. I’m proud of you.’
Ezra beamed back at her, his cheeks colouring slightly, clearly thrilled to have earned the praise.
Morrigan watched from the corner, trying to figure out why this particular moment had been dredged up from the annals of history. There wasn’t a lot of instructional value in watching two people sit in a quiet room for seventeen minutes. Perhaps whoever made this ghostly hour was simply as fascinated by the young Ezra Squall as she was.
How had this mild, happy, studious boy grown up into such a monster? Morrigan was certain that one day, if she watched him closely enough, his mask would slip. She’d see a shadow of the man he would become. He was in there somewhere.
And yet, she’d already begun to think of them as two different people. Ezra the boy and Squall the monster.
The looping ghostly hour would play forever instead of dissolving around her, so Morrigan had to find the tiny gap in the air and step back out again. When she emerged on the other side, she found a small, furry face looking up at her.
‘Hello, Morrigan,’ said Sofia pleasantly. ‘Shouldn’t you be in a lecture theatre on Sub-Six?’
‘I, er … yes.’ Morrigan had thought briefly about making up some lie, but then realised it was pointless. She gathered up a bit of boldness, opened her notebook and thrust it under Sofia’s nose, showing her the ghostly hours she’d copied down. ‘I’ve been looking for Ezra Squall.’
The foxwun didn’t blink or look away. ‘Yes, I thought as much. Conall said you’ve been spending a lot of extra time down here.’
‘You – oh.’ Morrigan felt all her defiance melt away, apparently unneeded. ‘Sorry.’
‘No need to be sorry.’ Sofia turned to leave Corcoran, motioning for Morrigan to follow her into the hallway. ‘This is your school, Morrigan. The rest of us – Conall, me, the Sub-Nine Academic Group, even Rook – we’re all just guests here. The School of Wundrous Arts belongs to Wundersmiths. It belongs to you, and so do the ghostly hours. They’re here to educate you, after all. We just don’t want you to wear yourself too thin.’
‘Why didn’t anyone tell me about Squall?’
‘We discussed it before you came, the three of us,’ Sofia admitted. ‘Conall had the measure of you much better than I did – he said you could handle it. But I thought it might be too frightening or distracting, if you realised there was so much of Squall still down here.’
‘So you took his name out?’
‘Heavens, no!’ said Sofia, scandalised. ‘We’d never deface The Book of Ghostly Hours. Professor Onstald deliberately omitted Squall from the book to protect it from scrutiny. He didn’t want the Elders to confiscate his life’s work … or worse, to destroy it. Everything Squall’s name touches turns to ashes.’
‘But the Elders must realise that Squall would be in some of the ghostly hou
rs?’
‘You didn’t, until you saw him,’ Sofia pointed out. ‘I don’t think they want to know, really. It’s like Conall said: they ask us no questions and we tell them no lies.’
They walked for a bit in companionable silence towards the Sub-Nine entrance, before Sofia asked, ‘You really don’t find it spooky? Being in a room with him?’
Morrigan shrugged. ‘It’s not really like being in a room with him. He’s not much like the real Squall. Um, from what I’ve read,’ she finished, catching herself in time. She hadn’t told Sofia, Rook or Conall that she’d met Squall several times, and wasn’t clear whether she ought to. She suspected Rook must know, since Murgatroyd did. But it was rather an awkward thing to bring up in conversation.
‘You’re much more stalwart than I am, Morrigan. I try to avoid the ghostly hours from his generation. It’s unsettling, seeing him with the other Wundersmiths, even when he was a child.’ Sofia shook her head, speaking softly. ‘They were his friends. His family – the only family he ever had, really, since his parents must have given him up to the Wundrous Society when he was young. It’s astonishing to think he managed to hide his true nature, all that hatred, so successfully and for so long.’
‘It doesn’t seem like he hated them, though,’ said Morrigan. ‘He always looks so happy.’
They’d reached the end of the hallway and Sofia stopped, ready to leave Morrigan at the entrance and return to the study chamber.
‘Yes, I suppose that’s what’s heartbreaking,’ she mused. ‘Seeing them in the same room, so happy together, knowing how it all ended.’
‘How did it all end?’
Sofia gave her a quizzical look. ‘Morrigan … have you not heard of the Courage Square Massacre?’
‘Yes,’ she said, reaching back into her memory. ‘Winter of Nine, Age of the East Winds. Squall tried to conquer Nevermoor with his army of monsters. Some people confronted him in Courage Square, trying to stop him, and he—’
She broke off. Pieces of information were knitting together in her head, suddenly making sickening sense.
‘He killed them all,’ she finished quietly. ‘The other Wundersmiths. He didn’t lead them in a rebellion. They tried to stop him, and … and he murdered them.’
‘Yes.’ Sofia nodded.
‘Even Elodie?’
‘All of them.’
To her sudden shame, Morrigan realised she’d never really wondered who they were, the people who died in the Courage Square Massacre. In her head they’d been faceless, nameless – an anonymous crowd. It had never occurred to her that Squall might have known them personally.
‘If they tried to stop him,’ she said slowly, ‘if those brave people everyone talks about were Wundersmiths themselves … why does everyone hate Wundersmiths so much? Why do they act like Ezra Squall was the only one, just because he was the worst one?’
Sofia’s ears twitched. ‘It happened so long ago—’
‘One hundred years isn’t that long!’
‘—and the history books were so thoroughly scoured, it’s hard to know exactly how it happened. But we believe that after …’ She paused, searching for the right words. ‘After what happened in Courage Square, when there were no more Wundersmiths to protect people against Squall and his monstrous army … there was a brief, very dark period when it seemed he had won. That he’d conquered Nevermoor. And in that time, Wundersmith became synonymous with Ezra Squall, who had himself become synonymous with evil. A Wundersmith became a monstrous thing – something to be feared instead of loved and admired.
‘When the ancient magic of the city rose up to protect its people, and exiled Squall for good, the Wundrous Society was the first place people went to for answers and retribution and revenge – the place that had raised him up in the first place and put him on a pedestal. If the Wundrous Society wanted to survive as an institution in a city that had come to hate the idea of the Wundersmith, then they had to hate it even more. They had to hate it the most.
‘So Wunsoc gave itself a makeover, and made over history while they were at it. Locked up Sub-Nine, destroyed and discredited and buried over a thousand years of Wundrous Acts.’
Morrigan was silent for a minute while she processed this new information.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sofia finally. She stood on her hind legs and gently touched her paw to Morrigan’s wrist. ‘I didn’t know this would upset you so much. I thought you knew who they were. Who he murdered.’
Morrigan nearly laughed at that, except none of this was funny. How could she possibly know? The ghostly hours were perfectly fine tools for learning the Wundrous Arts, but they taught her precisely nothing about who these people really were.
Sofia and Conall knew their Sub-Nine history, but could they show her what Owain and Elodie’s faces looked like in the moment they’d realised their friend had betrayed them? Could they tell her what kind, motherly Brilliance had said to Ezra before he murdered her, or what Griselda had done to fight him in her final moments?
And who could tell her what the High Council of Elders in that time had been thinking, how they’d possibly justified to themselves their decision to vilify eight innocent people and erase Wundersmith history?
‘I suppose it should have been obvious,’ she said finally, and felt her breath catch in her throat. An image came to her of Elodie and Ezra giggling beneath the oldest tree in the woods. ‘Who would ever try to stop a Wundersmith except another Wundersmith?’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Daylight Robbery
Summer of Three
Armed with Sofia’s explicit permission, Morrigan continued to feast on The Book of Ghostly Hours, adding more and more listings to her notebook until it seemed she was spending more time in the past than the present.
Her once-treasured mornings on Hometrain drinking tea with Miss Cheery and the rest of Unit 919 were becoming almost an inconvenience, a thing she had to get through before she could rush down to Sub-Nine. Soon she was skipping Hometrain altogether, coming in early every morning and staying late every afternoon.
She supposed some might have found it strange, spending so much time with people you couldn’t talk to, people who didn’t even know you were there. But far from feeling lonely, Morrigan had come to relish the gentle, undemanding company of Brilliance Amadeo and Li Zhang and Griselda Polaris. Of Elodie and Owain and Odbuoy. It was as though they were becoming her … friends.
Even – and it made her itchy with guilt to realise it – Ezra.
That was the weirdest thing of all. Ever since she’d learned the truth about the Courage Square Massacre, about how he’d turned on his friends so viciously, she’d expected to find herself seething with hatred every time she saw him in the ghostly hours. But instead she was finding it increasingly hard to believe that Ezra the boy and Squall the murderer were even the same person.
Ezra was just so … normal. Every time he teased Owain or Elodie, or called the venerable Griselda Polaris ‘ma’am’, or laughed at one of his own jokes, or made a mistake in class and got frustrated with himself, it just made him seem more normal. More human. He could have been anyone in her unit. He could have been her.
When she told Hawthorne and Cadence about Squall’s regular presence in her school day, they reacted just as she expected them to – Hawthorne with alarm and curiosity, Cadence with a feigned indifference that didn’t altogether mask her alarm and curiosity.
‘What was he doing? What’d he look like? Did he see you? He can’t see you in those ghostly hours, can he? He can’t get out of them, can he? He can’t travel through them?’ Hawthorne finally stopped to breathe.
‘It’s not a time machine, Hawthorne, you idiot.’ Cadence rolled her eyes. ‘It’s just, like, an historical record or something, right? Morrigan? That’s right, isn’t it?’
She looked from Hawthorne’s wide eyes to Cadence’s furrowed brow, and instantly felt bad for telling them. Perhaps now wasn’t the time to be troubling her friends with the idea of Ezra
Squall’s presence in Nevermoor, historical record or not. Between Unit 919’s inclusion in C&D and the ongoing Hollowpox problem there was already so much to worry about.
The virus had begun to infect every part of their lives. Hawthorne’s mum had had to pull Baby Dave out of nursery after her teacher, a usually very lovely llamawun, attacked a group of parents at pick-up time. Cadence’s next-door neighbour, a frogwun Minor, had disappeared for three days and been found floating, comatose but thankfully still alive, in the duck pond of their local park. The llamawun and frogwun were now both in the Wunsoc Teaching Hospital.
‘That’s right,’ Morrigan agreed, smiling at her friends in what she hoped was a reassuring way. ‘It’s not the real Squall. Just an historical record.’
‘Like watching a film?’ Hawthorne asked optimistically.
Morrigan wanted to tell him how very unlike watching a film it had been that morning, when she’d seen seven-year-old Ezra cry because he couldn’t breathe fire as well as Owain. He was so upset she’d almost wanted to reach out and hug him.
‘Yeah,’ she said instead. ‘Something like that.’
Unit 919’s next workshop in distraction, What’s That Behind You?, was a practical lesson out in the city. Their teacher split them into groups of three and left them on Grand Boulevard with simple instructions:
1. Cause a distraction.
2. Steal something.
3. Don’t get caught.
Anah – who’d been raised by an order of nuns called the Sisters of Serenity – immediately panicked and started asking forgiveness from the Divine Thing in advance. As the teams peeled off in opposite directions, Morrigan heard Cadence say, ‘We’ll give it back later, Anah. Stop your moaning.’
Morrigan was in a group with Thaddea and Francis, and Thaddea immediately took charge.
‘Right.’ She beckoned them closer, speaking in a low voice. ‘We need to steal something impressive, because we’re already at a disadvantage over the other two groups.’
Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow: Nevermoor 3 Page 18
