she said. ‘He died saving my life, after all.’
‘And that was a very noble thing to do,’ said Conall. ‘But it was his choice. Nobody could have persuaded Hemingway Q. Onstald to do something he didn’t want to. Believe me.’
With that declaration, Conall picked up his walking stick.
‘Enough of this maudlin chatter,’ he said. ‘Morrigan has Wundersmiths to meet.’
CHAPTER TEN
Golders Night
The next few weeks were unlike anything Morrigan had experienced in her time at the Wundrous Society. It felt like she was standing in a sweet shop, taking her pick of whatever she pleased. The Book of Ghostly Hours was a feast, when for so long she had been in famine.
Even so, Rook was strict about Morrigan sticking to the timetable she, Sofia and Conall had created for her, and warned her against dropping into any old ghostly hours she pleased. They’d selected each lesson carefully, the Scholar Mistress said, to build on the last and provide a bridge to the next. So far, they had only focused on two of the Wundrous Arts: Inferno and Weaving.
‘Weaving is a good skill to pick up early – the art of making and remaking the world,’ Rook had explained. ‘Of taking energy and matter from one source, or many different sources, and adjusting or transforming it completely. Most Wundersmiths seemed to consider Weaving the most versatile of the Wundrous Arts, though of course not everyone would agree with that.’
Morrigan would have spent all day, every day on Sub-Nine if they’d let her. She was having the time of her life. She’d already learned greater control over Inferno (and in one particularly memorable lesson, how to breathe fire in a whole rainbow of colours), and in her Weaving lessons she was working on moving furniture across the room without touching it.
Weaving didn’t come as naturally to Morrigan as Inferno had. It was hideously difficult to understand and even harder to perform. Moving a chair seemed like it should have been easy, but in fact she wasn’t just moving a chair. She was creating a world in which the chair had moved. Or … she was convincing Wunder to create a world in which the chair had moved.
Or something like that. She was still fuzzy on the physics of it.
Either way, when Morrigan had finally made the chair fall on its side, she and Sofia had whooped in delight.
Conall had taken Morrigan to watch some more advanced lessons, too, so she wouldn’t get disheartened while learning the basics. The things the old Wundersmiths could Weave were extraordinary. She’d watched one grow a tree from a table leg. Another had turned his own tears into diamonds.
Morrigan knew full well that she was miles away from diamond tears territory. But with every scrap of skill gained, every fragment of wisdom gleaned from one of her predecessors, her confidence grew and – even more surprisingly – spilled over into the rest of her life at Wunsoc. She still heard the occasional savage whisper in the halls of Proudfoot House, but now they seemed to bounce off her like rubber. She still had to keep up appearances as a whitesleeve, but her bizarre timetable of Arcane classes began to interest her again, rather than annoy her.
For the first time ever, Wunsoc made sense, and Morrigan made sense in it.
One Tuesday afternoon following their workshop in Obscure Unnimal Languages, Morrigan and Mahir packed up some sandwiches from the dining hall and took them down to the dragonriding arena on Sub-Five.
With some extra help from Unit 919’s accomplished linguist, Hawthorne’s Dragontongue was slowly improving (very slowly, according to Mahir), and he’d recently become determined to use it. Previously uninterested in learning a single word, after a year of lessons Hawthorne had become convinced that speaking directly to the dragons he trained with was the only way to achieve his ambition of one day becoming the world’s greatest dragonrider.
Morrigan and Mahir observed his attempts at small talk from up in the stands, wincing every time Burns With the Fire of a Thousand Wood-Burning Stoves snorted steam from his nose or twitched his enormous tail with irritation. Eventually the dragon turned his back on Hawthorne quite pointedly and closed his eyes, apparently settling down in the middle of the arena for a nap.
‘Awkward,’ murmured Mahir.
‘The thing they don’t tell you in Dragontongue class,’ said Hawthorne when he’d finally joined them, still glaring at the taciturn Burns With, ‘is that you can be as fluent as you like, but if the big stupid