with the words LIMINAL HALL carved above it, glowing in the stone. It was the end of the line. (Morrigan tried her imprint on that door too – just in case – but again nothing happened.)
‘Will I have a room named after me here someday, do you think?’ Morrigan asked.
‘My understanding is that it happens when a Wundersmith turns one hundred years old. Or … erm, when they die. Whichever comes first,’ explained Sofia.
Morrigan tilted her head to the side. ‘Fingers crossed for option number one.’
‘Yes, quite,’ the foxwun agreed. ‘Now I’m afraid I must leave you here, Morrigan – I have a class to teach up on Sub-Six. Will you manage?’
‘Of course. I’ve visited ghostly hours on my own before.’
Sofia looked reassured. ‘Good. But please pace yourself. Don’t try to do everything at once. All right?’
‘Promise.’
When Sub-Nine had been occupied and properly cared for, Van Ophoven must have been one of the grandest chambers of all, Morrigan thought. In its current state, it had the spectral air of a cathedral fallen into ruin, all vast crumbling stone arches and staircases jostling with half-broken marble statues.
She found the tiny sliver of light in the air and nudged it open, slipping into the ghostly hour, and her suspicion was confirmed: the Van Ophoven of the past was strange and beautiful. A sprawling architectural landscape so exquisite it made Morrigan’s heart ache to think it no longer existed.
The Gossamer-Spun Garden.
It wasn’t so much a garden, as a thousand different gardens. Or a thousand different drawings of a garden, from a thousand different imaginations, rendered in three dimensions by a thousand different artists. There were trees that grew up to the ceiling, bearing fruit of silver and gold, and rainbow vines that moved like snakes. There was a meadow of wonky sunflowers that grew high above Morrigan’s head, and a fairy-sized garden with funny little red toadstools.
The lesson was led by Brilliance Amadeo, a master Weaver who had already become one of Morrigan’s favourite teachers. (It was probably quite strange, she realised, to have a favourite teacher you’d never met, who didn’t know your name and with whom you would never speak because they’d been dead for over a hundred years … but she tried not to ponder that too deeply.)
‘The Gossamer-Spun Garden is over seven hundred years old,’ Brilliance was saying when Morrigan arrived. She led her students down a path lined with fluffy, misshapen daisies that swayed in an imaginary breeze and gathered buzzing clouds of bright pink bumblebees. Morrigan tried to keep up, but she wanted to stop and look at everything. ‘Its plants and flowers and unnimals never die, its vines and trees never become overgrown or unmanageable. It’s entirely handmade, woven from the Gossamer threads of the world around us.’
‘Who made it?’ asked one of the students, a boy of maybe seven or eight.
Morrigan hadn’t quite got used to seeing children so young inside these ghostly hours. Nowadays you had to have turned eleven to join the Wundrous Society. But Sofia had explained to her that in the old days, whenever a Wundersmith died, an elite Wunsoc team was sent out to scour the whole realm for the child who’d been born to take their place. Sometimes it took days, sometimes months, sometimes years. But whenever they found the child, their family would gladly hand them over to be raised at Proudfoot House and trained by the other Wundersmiths. It was seen as the highest honour.
When she’d asked Sofia, Rook and Conall which Wundersmith she might have replaced, and who among the original nine was her predecessor, she was disappointed to find they couldn’t answer her. After Ezra’s generation, Conall said, Wunsoc stopped searching for those children. They weren’t keeping track any more.
Morrigan couldn’t help wondering – perhaps a little bitterly – what kind of Wundersmith she’d be by now, if she’d been studying the Wundrous Arts since she was small.
‘We all made it,’ Brilliance told the little boy. ‘Everyone who ever trained in the School of Wundrous Arts. You might think of it as a collaborative canvas, shared through the Ages. Wundersmiths have long practised the Wundrous Art of Weaving here in the glorious, cocoon-like safety of everyone else’s past mistakes,’ she said, her eyes twinkling. ‘Look over here – see this … I suppose one might call it a flower?’
The students laughed, and Morrigan could see why. The ‘flower’ resembled the floppy, misshapen ear of an elephant, all grey and leathery and tough-looking. It was like