trying to persuade me. Well, congratulations! You’ve finally offered me something I want more than I don’t want to be your apprentice.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘I want Sofia back!’ Morrigan cursed the break in her voice. Cursed him for hearing it. ‘I want to talk to her. I want Dame Chanda to get her friend back and be happy again. I want Brutilus Brown to go home to his family, and Colin to go back to the library, and every other Wunimal in this building to just … to be Wunimals again. This isn’t fair. It’s grotesque. They’re in cages, for goodness’ sake. It isn’t RIGHT.’ She put a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob. Squall stared at her, emotionless. ‘Just … just tell me how to f-fix it.’
‘You?’ He frowned, seeming genuinely confused. ‘You can’t fix it.’
‘I couldn’t destroy the Hollowpox either,’ she said. ‘But I did. I can do this too. Tell me the steps and I’ll follow them, just like in Courage Square.’
Squall chuckled as if she’d just told an excellent joke, then stopped abruptly. He made a strange little noise in the back of his throat – somewhere between pity and disgust – that made Morrigan feel approximately two feet tall.
‘Miss Crow, destroying the Hollowpox and curing its victims are two very different tasks, requiring vastly different skillsets. You are …’ He waved a hand up and down, casting her a disdainful look. ‘… a blunt instrument. Your performance in Courage Square was the equivalent of taking a hammer to a teacup. Destruction is easy. It didn’t really take much in the end, did it, for all that built-up frustration and anger inside you to explode outwards?
‘But this is different. Only an extremely skilled Wundersmith could restore those Wunimals to their former state, and I wouldn’t even describe you as a moderately skilled Wundersmith. At this point I’d hardly call you a Wundersmith at all.’
‘I have the Inferno imprint.’ She held up her left hand. ‘I’ve met the Kindling. I brought the fireblossoms back to life. I am a Wundersmith.’
‘Bravo,’ he said dryly, giving her a tiny two-fingered clap. ‘You can burn things.’
Morrigan gave an impatient huff. This wasn’t what he’d said in Courage Square. Where is the girl who brought down the Ghastly Market? Bring her back! What was it he’d said about not being small?
She tilted her chin upwards, determined to stand her ground. ‘Just tell me how—’
‘Set that bed on fire.’
‘I – what?’
‘The bed,’ he repeated. ‘Set. It. On. Fire.’
Morrigan glanced at the door, suddenly uneasy (someone would surely come running the instant her bed caught ablaze), but nonetheless she took a deep breath, and—
Nothing.
She tried again.
Nothing. Not even a spark.
‘You see,’ Squall said softly, his face twisted in disgust. ‘The “how” is irrelevant. Even if the task wasn’t far, far beyond your abilities, just … look at you. You’re a dead battery. Too depleted – two days later – to accomplish even the simplest task. Any Wundrous energy swarming around you now is very hard at work helping you to not die.’
Morrigan checked the clock on the wall. The brief window Anah had promised her was drawing nearer; she didn’t have time to argue. ‘Then how long will it take me to—’
‘You are not listening to me,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘It would take days of recuperation, years of study and practice. These Wunimals will waste away and die before you become the kind of Wundersmith who might be able to save their lives. You have neither the energy nor the skill—’
‘But you do,’ she said. ‘You have both.’
‘And?’
‘And … last year, you said I gave you a window into Nevermoor, that you were leaning on me through the Gossamer and that’s how I could do all those things that I’d never learned how to do. You said that once I started to learn the Wundrous Arts for myself, once I was using all the Wunder that gathers around me, there wouldn’t be enough of it to lean on any more. The window would shut.’ She took a deep breath, hardly believing what she was about to say. ‘But what if I wanted to open it?’
Morrigan kept to the shadows as much as she could, but it turned out shadows were hard to come by in a brightly lit hospital. ‘My friend is a hospital assistant; she told me we’ll have a window of maybe five minutes during the changeover. The quarantined wards are all kept locked, but there’s a key