again.
Jack called out to her, ‘Morrigan, hurry up and get out here! This is so much fun! It’s a very good lake.’
She wasn’t so sure. She’d never ice-skated before. Growing up as a registered cursed child, she’d learned to avoid any activities that had even the smallest chance of ending in catastrophe. Ice-skating had most definitely been off the list.
‘Mog!’ shouted Jupiter. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘I don’t know how to ice-skate.’
‘What?’
‘I DON’T KNOW HOW TO ICE-SKATE!’ she shouted.
‘Nor do I,’ said Jack, taking off to the other side of the lake with an uncanny grace.
‘No, nor do I,’ echoed Jupiter.
Morrigan rolled her eyes. ‘Oh yeah, I can see that. That quadruple spin thing you just did looked really amateurish.’
Her patron soared over to where she stood at the edge of the lake and came to a neat stop, breathing heavily but smiling all over his stupid ginger-bearded face.
So annoying, thought Morrigan.
‘No, Mog, really,’ Jupiter said. ‘I’ve always been rubbish at ice-skating. I’ve got no idea what I’m doing. Just try it, all right? It really is a very good lake.’
She hesitated, looking down at the skates still in her hand.
‘Do you trust me?’ he asked.
She looked up. He’d asked her that once before, when there’d been much higher stakes than just an awkward fall on the ice, and her answer then had been an unequivocal yes.
It was still a yes.
Morrigan gathered her nerve, laced up her skates, lurched dubiously out onto the ice and took a few wobbly steps, certain she was going to fall flat on her face at any moment …
… then launched into a series of perfect pirouettes, followed swiftly by an arabesque spin and ending with a neat little axel jump. Jack and Jupiter burst into applause. A surprised laugh tumbled out of Morrigan’s mouth and skipped across the frozen landscape.
They skated for hours, and it was the most extraordinary sensation. It felt as if the ice and her feet were connected, like they were communicating somehow without her even having to think about it. She felt cushioned and weightless. There was no risk of falling. No risk, in fact, of anything bad happening while she was on this lake.
It was a very good lake.
Lunch was held in the fancy dining room for the paying Deucalion guests as normal, but this year Jupiter had set up a long table in his private parlour for the staff (and Jack and Morrigan) to share the meal as a family. They enjoyed five delicious, meandering courses, ending with a plum pudding that Morrigan set alight with a triumphant whoosh of Inferno, to thunderous applause from all.
Several hours later there they still were, everyone full of food and good cheer, and nobody yet willing to call an end to the festivities. Martha and Charlie were working on a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle together, sitting closer than was strictly necessary, whispering and giggling an awful lot. Frank and Kedgeree had briefly fallen out over a passionate argument about how they would rank the top five hotels in Nevermoor, but then reconciled over their shared belief that the Deucalion was definitely number one, and that their chief rival, the Hotel Aurianna, didn’t even make the list.
Dame Chanda had a pile of newspapers and was scouring the cultural sections for reviews of her Christmas pantomime performance at the Nevermoor Opera House, reading the best bits aloud to the room. Morrigan, Jack and Jupiter were sitting by the fire playing round after round of an old game called Tax Collector, while Fenestra snored loudly on the rug beside them. (Jupiter won every round by exploiting various mysterious loopholes in the rulebook, but Jack was determined to beat him. Morrigan enjoyed the bit where you set the other players’ villages on fire if they couldn’t pay their taxes. She’d already melted two playing pieces and singed a hole in the middle of the board.)
At one point there was a sudden, dramatic gasp from Dame Chanda.
‘Jupiter!’ she cried, beckoning him over to look at her newspaper. ‘Did you see this?’
Jupiter stood and crossed the room to read over Dame Chanda’s shoulder. His forehead wrinkled as his eyes flitted across the page.
‘Oh dear,’ he murmured. ‘How awful.’
‘Poor, sweet Juvela.’ Dame Chanda turned her mournful face up to Jupiter’s and grasped his arm. ‘Darling, we must send flowers. No – we must take flowers immediately. A whole carriage full of them. It’s De Flimsé.’
‘Quite right,’ Jupiter agreed, nodding.
‘What’s De Flimsé?’ Morrigan asked.
‘Oh, you’ve heard of De Flimsé, darling,’