At the end of her final lesson she asked Hawthorne to tell Miss Cheery she’d get herself home, then raced back down to Sub-Nine, clutching a scrap of paper on which she’d copied down the details of a promising ghostly hour.
LʘCATIʘN
PARTICIPANTS & EVENTS
DATE & TIME
School of Wundrous Arts, Sub-Nine of Proudfoot House, Kingston
Griselda Polaris, Decima Kokoro, Rastaban Tarazed, Mathilde Lachance, Brilliance Amadeo, ʘwain Binks, Elodie Bauer
Griselda Polaris demonstrates the Wundrous Art of Ruination
Age of Endings, Ninth Thursday, Spring of Nine
15:25–16:42
It was a glorious lesson, one of the best Morrigan had had so far, featuring a Wundrous Art she’d not yet heard of let alone witnessed and a Wundersmith – Griselda Polaris – more gifted than any of the others she’d seen.
But none of that, it turned out, was what would make this ghostly hour her most memorable yet.
Morrigan stood among the other Wundersmiths watching Griselda as she demonstrated an act of exquisite destruction. She was so ancient she could have been mistaken for Elder Quinn’s great-grandmother, but she moved with surprising grace and agility.
Ruination was the opposite of Weaving and, unexpectedly, it seemed to take nearly as much precision and care to properly Ruin something as it did to Weave it in the first place. Griselda began the lesson with the extraordinary feat of Weaving a building from scratch – a small, perfect conservatory made of hundreds of glass panels so that it resembled a little crystal palace, reflecting and refracting light all around the enormous chamber. She was much faster and more precise than Brilliance Amadeo, who until now had been Morrigan’s gold standard in the Wundrous Art of Weaving.
‘Anyone can throw a rock at a window,’ Griselda told the group, and then she did exactly that: lobbed a fist-sized stone at one of the panes of glass, shattering it into pieces.
‘But the art of Ruination is not about using external brute force. It’s about unravelling a thing from the inside, separating all its constituent parts, then breaking down those parts, and on and on, until you have transformed the thing, made it unrecognisable to itself. The truest, purest act of Ruination is an act of transformation.’
By the end of the lesson, Griselda and her students had broken down the glass structure again and again, until it was transformed into a pile of fine white sand.
Like Brilliance, she was an excellent teacher – watchful and patient, generous with praise but quick to correct. Morrigan got so caught up in the hour that she was utterly unprepared for its sucker-punch ending, and when the teenage boy standing next to her put his hand up to ask a question, she barely even registered his words.
She was instead watching Griselda, who turned to the boy with a warm smile and said, ‘Excellent question, Mr Squall.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ezra, the Boy
He wasn’t listed in any of the hours. Not one.
Morrigan felt unbelievably stupid for not thinking of it herself, for not even imagining that as she dived into the well of Wundersmith history on Sub-Nine, she might one day meet a past incarnation of the Wundersmith they called the evillest man who ever lived. The man who had tried to lead his fellow Wundersmiths in a rebellion. Who had built an army of monsters and committed a massacre in Courage Square. Who had sent his Hunt of Smoke and Shadow to kill all cursed children in the Wintersea Republic but had decided to spare Morrigan’s life for his own mysterious, deranged reasons.
The man who had once looked her in the eye and said, ‘I see you, Morrigan Crow. There is black ice at the heart of you.’
But his name wasn’t anywhere in The Book of Ghostly Hours.
It had been deliberately left out.
Morrigan stayed on Sub-Nine until it was so late she thought Martha or Kedgeree might send out a search party. She skimmed as much of the ledger as she could. She looked for listings during the Ages she knew he lived in Nevermoor, just over a hundred years ago – the Age of Endings, and the Age of the East Winds. She looked for the names of Wundersmiths who must have been around at the same time as Squall, the likes of Brilliance, Owain and Decima. She flipped to the listing for her first ever lesson in the Gossamer-Spun Garden and ran her finger down the page until she found the names in the ‘Particpants & Events’ column: Brilliance Amadeo, Owain Binks, Elodie Bauer.
But there had been one girl and two boys in that