Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,69
Conall that she’d met Squall several times, and wasn’t clear whether she ought to. She suspected Rook must know, since Murgatroyd did. But it was rather an awkward thing to bring up in conversation.
‘You’re much more stalwart than I am, Morrigan. I try to avoid the ghostly hours from his generation. It’s unsettling, seeing him with the other Wundersmiths, even when he was a child.’ Sofia shook her head, speaking softly. ‘They were his friends. His family – the only family he ever had, really, since his parents must have given him up to the Wundrous Society when he was young. It’s astonishing to think he managed to hide his true nature, all that hatred, so successfully and for so long.’
‘It doesn’t seem like he hated them, though,’ said Morrigan. ‘He always looks so happy.’
They’d reached the end of the hallway and Sofia stopped, ready to leave Morrigan at the entrance and return to the study chamber.
‘Yes, I suppose that’s what’s heartbreaking,’ she mused. ‘Seeing them in the same room, so happy together, knowing how it all ended.’
‘How did it all end?’
Sofia gave her a quizzical look. ‘Morrigan … have you not heard of the Courage Square Massacre?’
‘Yes,’ she said, reaching back into her memory. ‘Winter of Nine, Age of the East Winds. Squall tried to conquer Nevermoor with his army of monsters. Some people confronted him in Courage Square, trying to stop him, and he—’
She broke off. Pieces of information were knitting together in her head, suddenly making sickening sense.
‘He killed them all,’ she finished quietly. ‘The other Wundersmiths. He didn’t lead them in a rebellion. They tried to stop him, and … and he murdered them.’
‘Yes.’ Sofia nodded.
‘Even Elodie?’
‘All of them.’
To her sudden shame, Morrigan realised she’d never really wondered who they were, the people who died in the Courage Square Massacre. In her head they’d been faceless, nameless – an anonymous crowd. It had never occurred to her that Squall might have known them personally.
‘If they tried to stop him,’ she said slowly, ‘if those brave people everyone talks about were Wundersmiths themselves … why does everyone hate Wundersmiths so much? Why do they act like Ezra Squall was the only one, just because he was the worst one?’
Sofia’s ears twitched. ‘It happened so long ago—’
‘One hundred years isn’t that long!’
‘—and the history books were so thoroughly scoured, it’s hard to know exactly how it happened. But we believe that after …’ She paused, searching for the right words. ‘After what happened in Courage Square, when there were no more Wundersmiths to protect people against Squall and his monstrous army … there was a brief, very dark period when it seemed he had won. That he’d conquered Nevermoor. And in that time, Wundersmith became synonymous with Ezra Squall, who had himself become synonymous with evil. A Wundersmith became a monstrous thing – something to be feared instead of loved and admired.
‘When the ancient magic of the city rose up to protect its people, and exiled Squall for good, the Wundrous Society was the first place people went to for answers and retribution and revenge – the place that had raised him up in the first place and put him on a pedestal. If the Wundrous Society wanted to survive as an institution in a city that had come to hate the idea of the Wundersmith, then they had to hate it even more. They had to hate it the most.
‘So Wunsoc gave itself a makeover, and made over history while they were at it. Locked up Sub-Nine, destroyed and discredited and buried over a thousand years of Wundrous Acts.’
Morrigan was silent for a minute while she processed this new information.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sofia finally. She stood on her hind legs and gently touched her paw to Morrigan’s wrist. ‘I didn’t know this would upset you so much. I thought you knew who they were. Who he murdered.’
Morrigan nearly laughed at that, except none of this was funny. How could she possibly know? The ghostly hours were perfectly fine tools for learning the Wundrous Arts, but they taught her precisely nothing about who these people really were.
Sofia and Conall knew their Sub-Nine history, but could they show her what Owain and Elodie’s faces looked like in the moment they’d realised their friend had betrayed them? Could they tell her what kind, motherly Brilliance had said to Ezra before he murdered her, or what Griselda had done to fight him in her final moments?