‘Sofia!’ she cried, running to her friend. The foxwun cowered at the back of a small cage, making squeaky little chattering noises and scratching at the metal grille as if frantic to get away from her. ‘Sofia, it’s me. It’s Morrigan, you know me!’
‘She’s still in there,’ said Squall. ‘They all are. I can feel them … teetering right on the edge of something. You can feel it, can’t you?’
Morrigan nodded tearfully. She knew exactly what he meant. There was something buried deep inside Sofia’s consciousness – so deep she doubted Jupiter would have been able to sense it, even with his skill – a tiny familiar spark. Her friend was in there somewhere. She was standing before an abyss, ready to fall in at any moment, but she was still there.
‘We can reel them back in,’ Squall murmured. ‘But are you certain we should? Are you certain it’s what they’d want?’
Morrigan turned around, ready to snap at him about playing mind games, but the words died in her throat. He was staring at Sofia, a crease between his eyes.
‘What is there for them here, after all?’ he continued. ‘A world that doesn’t understand them, a society that barely tolerates their existence? We could give them a little nudge into the void. Doubt they’d feel a thing. We might be doing them a favour.’
Morrigan looked back at her small, terrified friend. She reached her fingers through the bars of the cage, and gave the order. Clearly and unequivocally.
‘Bring them back.’
It was slow, complex, difficult work that Morrigan barely understood. It was bizarre to watch her own hands move in ways that seemed mechanically impossible, to listen to her own voice speaking in tones and languages she’d never heard before. She watched him thread and rethread endless strands of golden-white Wunder through and around each individual Wunimal, rebuilding them from the inside out, restoring everything they’d lost, everything that made them Wunimals.
Squall wasn’t just Weaving something new, it wasn’t like applying some kind of magical sticking plaster over a gaping wound. He was doing precisely what he’d said he would do: unmaking what he had made. Undoing what the Hollowpox had done. The slow way. Piece by painstaking piece. Like the little crystal palace Griselda Polaris had turned to sand, he was applying the Wundrous Art of Ruin to his own work – unravelling it from the inside. It was unspeakably delicate, and agonisingly complex, and Morrigan absorbed every second of it with breathless wonder.
When each one had been cured, they remained still and calm, in an almost trance-like state. But Morrigan knew it had worked. One by one she felt their minds return, the comforting weight of their consciousness settling upon the room.
She left every cage door open as they went.
‘Will they remember who they were before?’ Morrigan asked Squall at one point.
‘They’ll remember, because Wunder remembers,’ he told her. ‘Wunder has an excellent memory.’
They saved Sofia for last. Morrigan watched, heart in throat. When Squall had finally finished he looked back upon his work, and then turned to her. ‘Ready?’
Morrigan could feel the Wunder in the room. It was standing on a precipice, awaiting its final instruction. ‘Yes.’
And just like that the foxwun looked up, blinking to bring her into focus.
‘Morrigan,’ Sofia said at last in a small, curious voice. ‘Hello.’
With those two words, the world was made right again.
All along the quarantine wing, one after another, the Wunimals came back to themselves as gently as waves returning to the shore.
Squall draped Morrigan in a veil of shadows, and they left.
As they made their way back through the teaching hospital, Morrigan could feel the bridge between her and Squall collapsing, bit by bit. The veil he’d created began to slowly disappear, but that didn’t particularly matter – nobody was paying attention to her. The noise of the Wunimals waking up had sent the staff running to the quarantine ward.
Morrigan paused in the middle of an empty hallway, holding up a hand to stop Squall.
‘What happens now?’ she asked wearily. Now that his power wasn’t propping her up through the Gossamer, her brain and body felt impossibly sluggish, and she had to fight not to fall to the ground.
‘Ah,’ said Squall. ‘Of course.’
He gave a low whistle and the wolf pack slunk out from the shadows, eyes burning. They surrounded the two of them, moving in a circle, swirling faster and faster until all Morrigan could see was a blur of black smoke and shadow and streaks of red light and then nothing, only darkness.
And as quickly as they appeared, the wolves were gone. The light returned. And Morrigan held a piece of paper, balanced lightly on her upturned palms.
‘What’s this?’
‘Read it.’
This is a Wundrous Arts apprenticeship agreement between the Wundersmith Ezra Squall and the Wundersmith Morrigan Crow.
Arrangement to end either by mutual accord, or when the apprentice has mastered nine Wundrous Arts – including pilgrimage to the appropriate Divinities and acquisition of their respective seals.
Underneath were two blank spaces for their signatures, labelled ‘Master’ and ‘Apprentice’.
Morrigan stared at it, blinking repeatedly. It felt like nothing – it could have been made of air. When she squinted, the space around it shimmered with energy, and sure enough when she moved her hands away, the contract stayed exactly where it was, hovering in the space between them.
‘It lives in the Gossamer,’ said Squall. ‘Neither here nor there.’
Morrigan frowned. She’d assumed wrongly. When they’d joined hands earlier … that had nothing to do with beginning the apprenticeship. It wasn’t some ritualistic seal that bound them together, it had only granted Squall the necessary access to cure the Wunimals. Which meant (one thought came tumbling after the other) – which meant that he’d fulfilled his part of the bargain without any binding agreement in place. This was the agreement.
The full picture resolved in Morrigan’s head, giddy disbelief rising inside her.
She needn’t sign this contract at all! Squall had already cured the Wunimals, and it wasn’t as if he could undo it without her cooperation. She could simply walk away, having got exactly what she wanted and given him nothing in return.
In the silence, he reached out through the Gossamer, touched his Inferno imprint to the contract and swiped it across the page. The scorched trail he left behind curled itself into a signature – small, black and calligraphic.
‘I’ve no interest in teaching a disinterested student, Miss Crow. Nor one who is merely fulfilling an obligation. I don’t want a dead weight. I want an heir.
‘You’ve witnessed the possibilities now. You’ve met the Wundersmith you could become. Opened a window into a future that could be yours. But if you are not enthusiastically, fanatically eager to climb through the window and seize that future for yourself, then … close it.’ Squall’s voice was barely a whisper. He gave a shrug that was almost practised in its nonchalance, but the black intensity of his gaze betrayed him; he didn’t look away, and neither did she. ‘I won’t hold you to our agreement.’
Morrigan could almost have believed he was bluffing, except beneath the veneer of resolute calm he looked so … frightened. As if he’d fully accepted that she might do exactly as he suggested. Close the window. Walk away.
But of course, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
Someday far in the future, Morrigan would think back to this moment and tell herself she’d acted according to some unwritten code of honour, obeyed some chivalrous little voice in her head that sang, you promised. She’d given her word, after all, and decency demanded that she keep it.
But in that moment – in the stretch of her hand to the paper, and the burning of her name upon it – Morrigan wasn’t thinking of honour. She was thinking of how it had felt to have a universe inside her. The universe was gone now, but the space it had occupied was still there. Cavernous an
d wanting, filled with a hunger like nothing she’d known.
And her hunger said, ‘More.’
Back on the ward, the snoring and the wheezing continued in peaceful oblivion.
Morrigan stood alone beside her bed. She picked up Emmett and hugged him to her chest. That simple action alone took so much will and effort. She wanted desperately to sleep in her own bed, to be cocooned in the safety and warmth of the Deucalion. She wanted to go home.
Morrigan didn’t know how long it took her to get out of the hospital, up three floors of Proudfoot House and all the way down to the train station in her slippers, pyjamas and cloak. Hours, almost certainly. She felt as if she were dragging herself there, and she didn’t know if it was her exhausted body pulling her exhausted brain behind it, or vice versa. She simply knew she had to keep going – one shuffling, tiny step and then another. It was dark on the path through the Whinging Woods, and the trees muttered low and deep, and somewhere in the forest something howled and she knew, distantly, that she ought to be frightened. That on any other day, walking the path through the Whinging Woods in the pitch-dark night, on her own, would have terrified her.
But Morrigan was too tired to be frightened.
And even back inside her own frail self, without the scaffolding of Ezra Squall’s borrowed power, she could still remember what it felt like to truly be a Wundersmith, and she carried the memory with her like a talisman. Like the worn old rabbit held tight in the crook of her elbow. She would cling to that memory by the skin of her fingertips, for as long as she possibly could.
It would get her to the station, and then into a brass railpod, and then all the way to Station 919. It would see her through the black door, through the wardrobe, into the gently rocking waterbed her room had kindly provided, and at last into the deepest, warmest sleep she had ever slept. Home safe in the Deucalion, surrounded by her family.
Acknowledgements
My first and most important thank you goes to you, splendid reader, for coming this far on Morrigan’s adventures with me. You’ve been patient, enthusiastic and endlessly supportive, and I hope Hollowpox was worth the wait.
Speaking of patient, enthusiastic and endlessly supportive … Ruth Alltimes, what a queen. It is truly the greatest stroke of fortune to have you as my editor, and I’m so thankful for your sharp eye and good heart.
I am incredibly lucky and forever grateful to work with the dream team of Alvina Ling, Suzanne O’Sullivan, Rachel Wade, Samantha Swinnerton and Ruqayyah Daud. Thank you for the expertise, talent, creativity and resourcefulness you bring to publishing this series.
Across Hachette Children’s Group, Hachette Australia, Hachette New Zealand, and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, every member of Team Nevermoor brings so much passion, skill and hard work to the table, and I can’t thank you all enough: Dom Kingston, Nicola Goode, Fiona Evans, Katy Cattell, Tania Mackenzie-Cooke, Katharine McAnarney, Louise Sherwin-Stark, Hilary Murray Hill, Megan Tingley, Mel Winder, Fiona Hazard, Jeanmarie Morosin, Helen Hughes, Tash Whearity, Dido O’Reilly, Katherine Fox, Jemimah James, Andrew Cohen, Chris Sims, Daniel Pilkington, Isabel Staas, Kate Flood, Sarah Holmes, Sean Cotcher, Sophie Mayfield, Caz Feeney, Jenny Topham, Cassy Nacard, Suzy Maddox-Kane, Alison Shucksmith, Sacha Beguely, Emilie Polster, Bill Grace, Savannah Kennelly, Victoria Stapleton, Michelle Campbell, Jen Graham, and Virginia Lawther.
Thank you to the very talented Jim Madsen and Hannah Peck for the amazing artwork, and to Alison Padley, Sasha Illingworth, Christa Moffitt and Angelie Yap for the brilliant cover designs. You have made Hollowpox so beautiful.
Big thanks as always to Jenny Bent, Molly Ker Hawn, Amelia Hodgson, Victoria Cappello and the entire, most excellent Bent Agency, and to the dreamy authors who make up Team Cooper. Publishing can be a strange, confusing world; it is indescribably nice to be on a little life raft full of people who support and cheer each other on. You are all doing such extraordinary things and you inspire me constantly.
Thank you to Catherine Doyle for the gift that is De Flimsé. (Told you it was going in book three.) I can’t quite recall the origin story any more … a freezing train station after Cheltenham Lit Fest? A weird mishearing? I DON’T KNOW but it definitely made me laugh.
Thank you to Gemma Whelan, the voice (the many, many voices) of the Nevermoor audiobooks. I can’t tell you how much joy it gives me to hear you bring this world and these characters to life in such funny, moving and surprising ways. It’s honestly quite rude of you to be so talented, but please do carry on.
Thank you to the publishers and translators putting my books into children’s hands all over the world in forty languages. I’ve been lucky to spend time with some of you already, and your care, skill and attention to detail leaves me speechless. Thank you so much.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to the booksellers, librarians, teachers, bloggers, bookstagrammers and booktubers who have shown such love for Nevermoor and Wundersmith, and passed on that enthusiasm to others. Your championing of children’s books makes the world a warmer, nicer, more magical place.
To my family and friends, thank you for the bottomless barrel of love and support. Shout-out to Sherri Gordon-Harris, who occupies both categories and on whose various couches, kitchen tables and spare beds so much of this series has been written over the years, and also to The Chloe Musgrove for answering my (excessively specific) theatre questions.
My agent and my friend, Gemma Cooper – you are a lioness, a deep well of common sense and good cheer, the greatest advocate and the coolest accomplice I could have asked for. FIVE BRILLIANT YEARS we’ve been on this caper together, and I can’t imagine doing any of it without you. Thank you for always having my back.
And finally, cheers to me old pal Sal (the genius behind ‘What’s That Smell?’, which made us both wheeze with laughter in a deeply undignified fashion, but what’s new) and to my splendid Ma, a nine-star human, the Deucalion of mothers.
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Copyright
A Lothian Children’s Book
Published in Australia and New Zealand in 2020
by Hachette Australia
(an imprint of Hachette Australia Pty Limited)
Level 17, 207 Kent Street, Sydney NSW 2000
www.hachettechildrens.com.au
Copyright © Jessica Townsend 2020
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be stored or reproduced by any process without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
ISBN 978 0 7344 1970 5 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7344 1824 1 (paperback)
978 0 7344 1825 8 (ebook edition)
Cover design by Christabella Designs
Author photograph courtesy Emma Nayler
Paperback cover illustration by Jim Madsen
Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow: Nevermoor 3 Page 41
