Wundersmith, The Calling of Morrigan Crow

by Jessica Townsend

  But there wasn’t a single flicker of smugness or satisfaction to be seen. Everyone present wore an expression of deepest shock at Will’s impossible victory. If the blackmailers were here, they were the world’s greatest actors.

  While Will basked in a shower of cheers and applause, Thaddea jumped down from the ring and trudged straight past Morrigan.

  “Thaddea!” she called out. “Wait, I’m—”

  “Leave me alone,” Thaddea barked over her shoulder.

  “I just want to say—”

  “Just don’t.”

  Morrigan watched her go, feeling worse than ever.

  The second demand arrived that Friday afternoon at Station 919, stuck to Francis’s glossy blue door. He opened the note with a slightly trembling hand. His eyes narrowed as he read.

  “They want… cake.”

  “Cake?” repeated Hawthorne.

  “That’s what it says.”

  Morrigan screwed up her face in confusion. “Just… cake?”

  “JUST cake?” Francis looked up from the note in his hand to glare at her. “No, not JUST cake. READ it.”

  Francis John Fitzwilliam.

  You will bake and decorate a Grand Caledonian Coronation Crest and place it on Platform 919 by six o’clock tomorrow morning, and then return to your home immediately.

  If you do not follow these instructions exactly, we will reveal the secret of Unit 919.

  Remember:

  Tell no one.

  Or we will tell everyone.

  “What’s a”—Morrigan read from the note—“Grand Caledonian Coronation Crest?”

  “Only the most complicated and difficult cake I can think of,” huffed Francis. “Three tiers, each a different flavor and density, decorated with hundreds of sugar flowers painted in gold leaf, caramel spirals all over, and a lacework sugar crown on the top.”

  Hawthorne’s eyes widened. “Can you make extra?”

  “This is going to take me all night!” Francis snatched the note back from Morrigan, ignoring Hawthorne. “And I have four hours of knife skills tomorrow morning. I can’t do that on no sleep! I’ll lose a finger!”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday,” said Hawthorne.

  “I know tomorrow’s Saturday.” Francis glared at him. “Aunt Hester says my knife skills aren’t up to scratch so she’s making me take extra weekend lessons.”

  Hawthorne gasped. Morrigan had never seen him so affronted as he was by the idea of doing extra schoolwork on the weekend. He seemed to have temporarily lost the capacity for speech.

  “This is ridiculous,” she said, indicating the note. “Why would they want you to make them a cake?”

  Francis looked wounded. “Why wouldn’t someone want me to make them a cake? Have you tasted my cake?”

  “It is very good, Francis,” Hawthorne agreed. “If I were blackmailing you, I’d definitely get you to make me a cake. And some of those pastries with the custard inside that you did that time. And one of those—”

  “Shush, Hawthorne,” said Morrigan. “I just mean… these demands are… well, they’re silly.” She glanced at the black door that led to her bedroom. She’d been looking forward to an evening spent in the Music Salon (Frank had booked a new act who could whistle show tunes through his nostrils), but she knew the guilt of knowing Francis was up baking all night just to safeguard her secret would gnaw away at her insides. She sighed. “Look. I’ll come and help, okay? I’ll be your assistant. You don’t have to do it on your own. Or—oh, you could come to the kitchen at the Hotel Deucalion! I bet our chef could whip up a… a Grand Crusty Caledonia thing.”

  This was, apparently, the wrong thing to say. “I do NOT need help from some second-rate hotel fry cook!”

  And with that he was gone, slamming the blue door shut in Morrigan’s face.

  She shook her head in disbelief. “Fry cook? Chef Honeycutt’s been awarded THREE Royal Lightwing Spatulas.” She waved goodbye to Hawthorne and went through her black door, still muttering to herself. “Fry cook.”

  She sighed with relief as she swung open the door into her favorite room in the whole world. Her bed seemed to be celebrating the fact that it was at last Friday, and had turned into a giant bird’s nest full of soft woven fabrics in a dozen shades of green, with three huge egg-shaped pillows in the center. Morrigan held out her arms like a bird and fell backward into its cozy depths, landing with an appreciative oof.

  She lay there, staring at her ceiling, which had recently become an expanse of dark blue night sky, filled with friendly twinkling stars. It reminded her of the ceiling in Wunsoc’s Map Room, and she hoped it would stay that way.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about Thaddea. About the look on her face when she’d left the dojo, and the miserable silence she’d kept in the days since. Morrigan felt dreadful for her. She’d been so proud of her Combat Club record, so rightfully proud. And to lose to Will Gaudy, of all people. Morrigan was astonished and heartened that Thaddea had kept her word, and sacrificed something so important to her, all for the good of the unit.

  It was this last thought that galvanized Morrigan’s will. So, the fight had been a bust. She still didn’t know who the blackmailers were. But she wasn’t going to give up. If Thaddea was willing to lose to Will Gaudy, and if Francis could stay up all night long baking the world’s most ridiculous cake, then she could find out who was behind all this.

  It wasn’t like she had anything better to do.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE STEALTH

  He’s worried about something.”

  “About what?”

  “I think… money.”

  Jack and Morrigan stood by the rail of the spiral staircase, leaning over to observe the spectacle that was Saturday night in the Deucalion lobby. The whole enormous room had become a lagoon for the evening, and was filled not with its usual gilded velvet furniture and potted trees, but small gondolas and canoes. The vessels carried raucous, glamorous partygoers, all dressed in nautical attire as Frank’s invitation had instructed. The costumes were elaborate; so far Morrigan had spotted seven mermaids, four mermen, bands of sailors and pirates, a starfish, an oyster, and a violently purple, fully sequined octopus.

  “How can you tell?” Morrigan asked.

  Jack squinted both eyes. His eye patch was pulled to the side (another rare occasion), resting against his temple. “His fingers are green. Green fingers mean he’s itching to get hold of some money, or he just lost some.”

  Morrigan peered down at the man Jack was studying—a handsome, overconfident man in a tailored admiral’s uniform. As he stood at the head of a gondola, his eyes glided over the lobby as if he owned the place and all the people in it. “He looks rich,” she said. “Look at the jewels around his wife’s neck.”

  “Rich people worry about money too. Sometimes more than poor people. And that’s not his wife, it’s his mistress.”

  Morrigan gasped, equally scandalized and delighted. This was her new favorite game.

  Lately, weekends at the Deucalion were even livelier than usual. Frank was locked in battle with a pair of rival party planners at a new establishment that had opened nearby, the Hotel Aurianna. Every Saturday night he threw some lavishly themed party or dance or masked ball, sometimes closing off entire wings, sometimes taking the celebration to the rooftop so that it could be seen and heard for miles around. Then every Sunday morning, he would pace the lobby, waiting for the delivery of the Nevermoor Sentinel, the Morning Post, and the Looking Glass. When the papers arrived, he would turn immediately to the society pages, and the lobby would ring either with booming, triumphant laughter or with howls of rage, depending on which hotel had garnered more column inches that week. Frank won more often than not (his parties were legendary, and well attended by celebrities, the aristocracy, and occasionally even royalty), but his infrequent failures were dreaded by everyone at the Deucalion. They were usually followed by several days of dramatic moping, then a renewed frenzy to make the following Saturday’s re
velries “the best we’ve ever had!”

  All of this made Saturday nights at the Deucalion an excellent opportunity for people-watching, and Jack’s increasing confidence in his abilities as a Witness made people-watching much more fun.

  Fenestra—who hated water—was furious with Frank over his theme for the evening, and had already threatened to (a) call the Stink, (b) fill Frank’s bedroom with garlic bulbs, and (c) burn down the hotel. She had of course done none of those things, but was hanging threateningly from the black chandelier, hissing and baring her claws at any guests who dared float close enough.

  “What about them?” Morrigan pointed at a group of young women dressed as bright tropical fish, their dresses an array of fringe and feathers and beadwork, all terribly modern, and fabulously improper. They rowed rather haphazardly around the lobby, drinking pink champagne by the bottle and pestering Wilbur the pianist—stationed with his baby grand on a small sandy island—to play something “more upbeat.”

  Jack looked at them a minute, frowning in concentration. “That loud one dressed as a clown fish would much rather be at home. Or somewhere else, anyway. There’s a… it’s like a thread, or something. Silver thread. Keeps trying to pull her right out the front door.”

  Jupiter’s nephew had shown up that afternoon after his cello lesson for a weekend at home. Morrigan was surprised by how much his arrival had improved her day, after what had been a lousy beginning.

  Intending to catch the blackmailers red-handed on Station 919 and see who came to take Francis’s cake, she’d woken that morning to an alarm set for five minutes to six, quietly pushed open the mystery door, and crept through her walk-through Wunsoc wardrobe… only to find the whole plan scuppered, because her station door wouldn’t budge. There was something blocking it from the other side—the blackmailers were irritatingly clever. When the door finally opened, it was too late: The cake was gone, and there was no trace of anybody on the platform.

  Morrigan had knocked on Francis’s door to ask how he’d managed with the cake and if he’d seen anything in the station that might give them some clue about their blackmailers. But he’d merely glowered at her—covered in flour, icing, and sticky caramel—and slammed the door in her face yet again.

  Her day had gone further downhill when she’d found that Jupiter was still away, and the lobby was completely off-limits all day long while Frank set up for the party that evening.

  All in all, Morrigan had been so pleased to see Jack that she’d thus far resisted the urge to mock his posh uniform from the Graysmark School for Bright Young Men, and felt deeply virtuous in her restraint.

  “What about her?” She pointed at a woman in a hammerhead shark hat.

  “Furious that her younger brother just inherited the family fortune.”

  Morrigan looked at him in surprise. “That’s specific.”

  “Well… I think that’s right. She’s complicated. Green fingers—that’s money problems. Black cross over her heart, that’s a recent bereavement. She has a second, smaller shadow—problem with a younger sibling, I’m guessing a brother. And her whole body is glowing a deep wine red; that’s the color of well-nourished anger. She’s sad, but she’s livid.”

  Morrigan watched the woman and fancied she could see a bit of sadness in her, even though she was throwing back Green Lagoon cocktails and flirting with the pretty blond starfish sharing her canoe.

  “What about him?” Morrigan asked, nodding toward a baboonwun gentleman in full pirate regalia carrying a large, brightly colored parrot on his shoulder.

  Jack snorted. “Desperate for someone to ask about his bird. Annoyed nobody seems interested.”

  “You know, you could make a fortune doing this! We could tell people you’re clairvoyant. I’ll take twenty percent.”

  Jack rolled his eyes, smirking. Morrigan knew he didn’t like to take his patch off very often. She and Jack had never discussed it, but Jupiter told her that it had taken him years and years of training as a Witness to be able to “make sense of the madness,” as he called it—to learn to understand the layers and threads, to sift out the important things and ignore the rest—and that Jack wasn’t quite there yet. He’d said that for now, Jack’s eye patch acted as a sort of filter, disrupting his vision so that he didn’t have to see all those things, all the time. So that his strange talent wouldn’t drive him to insanity.

  “What about you?” Jack said unexpectedly, turning to face her. He held one hand up to shade his eyes as if against a bright light, squinting to see past the glowing Wunder Morrigan knew must be gathering to her even now. She felt her face grow warm. Jack was looking at her the way Jupiter sometimes did, as if he knew something she didn’t. As if he perhaps knew lots of things she didn’t. It was annoying enough when Jupiter did it, but when Jack did it, she wanted to poke him right in the eye.

  She scowled. “What about me?”

  “Black cloud,” Jack said, nodding at her left shoulder. “Following you around. Problems at school?”

  Morrigan hesitated, then said, “Something like that.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Where to even start, she wondered. Could she tell him about the blackmail? Jack already knew she was a Wundersmith, so it wasn’t as if she’d be breaking her promise to the Elders.

  Morrigan took a deep breath and, throwing caution to the wind, told him everything: about the three notes they’d received so far, and the vote her unit took, and how at least half of them resented her. Once she got going, she found she couldn’t stop. She told him about Professor Onstald, and An Abridged History of the Wundrous Acts Spectrum, and about Heloise and the Charlton Five. She told him that Jupiter had been on endless top secret missions, which she suspected were something to do with the missing people. She spoke in a circular ramble, and Jack listened quietly without asking questions, and once she’d said every single thing that was on her mind, Morrigan felt… lighter, somehow.

  “Is the cloud gone?” she asked finally, trying to look over her left shoulder, though she knew she couldn’t see it whether it was there or not.

  Jack shrugged. “It’s smaller.”

  “Good.”

  He nodded and didn’t pry any further. That was one good thing about Jack; he hated people asking him nosy questions, so he didn’t tend to ask any himself.

  “Speaking of blackmail,” he said, reaching into a concealed inner coat pocket, “I’ve been meaning to give you this.” He handed her a folded paper square. It was a dark silvery black, as thin as a dried leaf, but soft and supple. “If you ever need me—a proper emergency, I mean, not just some nonsense—if you’re in trouble and you need help, write down an address, or a landmark, on the paper. Somewhere I can come and find you. Then say my full name—John Arjuna Korrapati—three times, and burn the paper. It’s bonded to me, so no matter where you are, it’ll show up in my hand.”

  Morrigan raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t certain she believed him. “How does that work?”

  “I have absolutely no idea. It’s a system my mate Tommy invented so he could cheat on tests, although why he needs to cheat on tests when he’s clever enough to invent stuff like this, I’ll never know.” Jack shrugged. “His mum’s a witch, she must have helped him. Anyway, it’s called the Black Mail. We used to use it to send messages to other dormitories after lights-out, until we started running out of blackpapers. Tommy’s not allowed to make any more of them because he was caught cheating and got himself suspended, the idiot. I’ve only got a few of my blackpapers left, but with Jupiter away so much, and everything that’s… well. I think it’s best if you can reach me, that’s all,” he finished, looking awkward.

  “Okay.” Morrigan pocketed the paper, smiling. “Um, thanks.”

  “Proper emergencies only,” Jack said again, turning back to lean over the stairs.

  “I know, I know.” She propped her elbows up on the rail, scanning the lobby for their next subject. “What about… him?”

  The man she’d pointed to had
just entered and was making his way across the lobby, leaping from rowboat to canoe to gondola as if they were stepping-stones in a pond. Guests called out to him in greeting, applauding and shrieking with laughter when he nearly overturned a vessel. His own face remained somber. He ran a hand through his waves of ginger hair.

  “Jupiter!” Morrigan called out to him. He looked up and spotted her and Jack on the staircase, smiling grimly as he gave them a small wave. He held up two fingers and mouthed the words two minutes. Then, finally making it to the half-submerged concierge desk, he sat on top of it and began sifting through the large stack of messages Kedgeree handed to him.

  Jack’s eyes darted over the space around his uncle. “He’s searching for something. That’s why he keeps going on all these expeditions. Whatever it is, he can’t find it anywhere.”

  “What does that look like?”

  “Like a gray fog, all around his head,” murmured Jack. “And dim, flickering lights just out of his reach.”

  They didn’t notice that Fenestra had abandoned her hostile chandelier-swinging until her enormous shadow suddenly darkened their view, and her low, scathing voice came from behind them. “What are they doing here?”

  Morrigan jumped, clutching her chest as she looked up into the Magnificat’s menacing glare. “Can’t you wear a bell or something?” she asked, her heart racing. “What are who doing here?”

  “The Stink,” said Fen, pointing one paw toward a small group of black-coated men and women who had commandeered a rowboat and were steering it determinedly toward the concierge desk.

  Morrigan blinked in surprise. “Fen! You didn’t actually call the police on Frank, did you? What a rotten thing to—”

  “Do I look like a grass to you?” growled Fen. “Course I didn’t call them. Snitches get stitches.”