Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,102
black-skied morning in the ghostly hour, and the autumn wind had a bite to it. But within moments she was surrounded by the fierce warmth of bright orange flames. She hadn’t had time to check the listing in The Book of Ghostly Hours and was surprised to see Gracious Goldberry again, wielding fire as if she’d invented it.
There was only one student this time – a Wundersmith older than Goldberry, Morrigan noticed, but still her inferior when it came to Inferno. Against a backdrop of thunderclouds and an occasional flash of lightning, the two Wundersmiths curled flames into flowers and shot jets of fire into the sky.
At one point Goldberry pressed her palms into the ground and sent flames spiralling outwards until, with one final pulse of light, the entire rooftop was set briefly, brightly ablaze. It reminded Morrigan of Saint Nicholas’s candle trick on Christmas Eve, but Goldberry’s work was even more precise and powerful – so powerful it momentarily lifted her and Bledworth several inches off the ground.
This was way past beginner level, she thought. They were practising skills she’d never seen before. That meant Rook had either made a mistake in her schedule, or she believed Morrigan was ready for a more advanced lesson.
Part of her felt bolstered by that thought. She had been making progress, and it was gratifying to know it hadn’t gone unnoticed by the Scholar Mistress.
On the other hand, Gracious Goldberry was the absolute last Wundersmith she wanted to see this morning. She felt furious and frightened and sick. She was worried for Sofia, and angry about Steed’s curfew and the thirty-eight arrests, and furious at the memory of Dearborn and Hester’s outburst at the last meeting … and now she had to spend a morning with an infamous opponent of Wunimal rights. Morrigan was tempted to leave and skip the lesson altogether.
But good grief, was Goldberry brilliant.
Morrigan remembered what Sofia had said about her the last time they’d stood on this rooftop: I decided that this extraordinary talent could not be wasted on this wretch of a woman … I would render it useful somehow.
And so, heart weighed down with spite and veins humming with righteous anger, Morrigan spent a long morning trying to render Goldberry’s talent useful. She imagined herself a thief, stealing every bit of information she could from the way Goldberry breathed, the way she carried herself lightly, the way she planted her feet, even the way she sometimes held her tongue against her teeth. In Goldberry’s hands, the fire shrank and grew and smouldered and roared. It danced like beads of water in a fountain. It burned all the way down to embers and then bloomed back into life like a mushroom cloud. She made patterns and shapes – a hand, a lion, a face – painting pictures in the air that reminded Morrigan of Saint Nicholas’s firebird.
Morrigan copied her every move – not flawlessly, by any means, but with greater success than she’d ever had before. She even breathed her own firebird into life – a crow with long, trailing wings of fire – and let loose a shout of triumph as she sent it flying into the sky, imperfect but hers. The lesson became a meditation, and time flew. Her connection to Inferno felt smoother, somehow. Faster. Almost seamless.
She even had a go at circular breathing (Dame Chanda had obligingly explained the concept to her), though not very successfully. The problem with ghostly hours was that she couldn’t simply put up her hand and ask a question. She had to rely on whoever had been present in the original lesson to ask, so unless they were much younger or much less experienced than she was, most of her questions went unanswered. Even if she remembered to ask Sofia or Conall or Rook afterwards, they could rarely help her with practical matters. They just weren’t Wundersmiths.
Goldberry spoke only once during the lesson. The older Wundersmith, Maurice Bledworth, had stopped to watch her, overawed and unable to keep up any longer.
‘How do you do that?’ he asked, gesturing to her hands. ‘I can’t seem to see where it’s coming from.’
‘Where what is coming from?’ asked Goldberry, looking annoyed at the interruption.
‘The flame,’ said Bledworth. ‘Even when it’s completely died, you seem to bring it back so quickly, so easily.’
The older Wundersmith – and Morrigan – watched closely as Goldberry made her entire forearm a torch, and then let it sizzle all the way down to the tips of