Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,159
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.