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The flames flickered in front of the baby as she giggled and stared, studying the ways they moved, eating up the logs they were on, swallowing pages of newspaper until they turned ashen and crumpled onto the base of the fire.
She clutched her rabbit and crawled closer, almost to the base of the pit before the absentee maid finally remembered her charge, and just stopped her from going right into the roaring fire.
She cried as she was taken away from it, beating her fists against the maid’s back, carried off to a bedroom where no one would check on her out of love, only necessity, and she would be left on her own until the morning.
But all she wanted to look at was the fire.
She never remembered her entire dreams, only snatches of things, snippets that couldn’t be pieced back together. Sudden heat spilling over her skin, something bright, in yellows and oranges with the faintest blue at the centre, licking at her skin, eating her away, consuming her as fuel.
But whenever she scrapped the letter drafts she had been forced to write to the people whose lives she had ruined or mildly inconvenienced through the small crime of existing in their proximity by throwing them in there, letting the flames do to them what they did to her in her dreams, watched the pieces of paper grey and collapse into ash as she smiled and as the flame in her chest grew to match the one in front of her.
An extinct tree burned her as she left her Book Trial, and even though Jupiter laughed as if she had been joking, his smile didn’t quite reach his eyes, and as he turned away from her, his smile faltered.
“What did you do, Miss Morrigan?” asked Martha as she helped her fold napkins to pass the time during the long, boring, so, so boring summer she was being forced to endure. She blushed, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”
“It’s okay,” Morrigan said. “I- erm. I breathed fire at someone,” she clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “And also set a part of Wunsoc on fire.”
She could tell that Martha was looking at her incredulously, and that she was trying very hard not to, at the same time. She shrugged, “I don’t know how I did it either. It’s probably part of the- the thing.”
The Deucalion staff, a few of them at least, knew that she was a wundersmith. Jupiter had sworn those who might need to know to secrecy before she started classes at the beginning of the year but that didn’t really mean she was still comfortable talking about it even in an enclosed room with pretty thick walls.
“Oh, Miss Morrigan,” Martha said, reaching up to pat her on the shoulder. She realised, from that, that she was shaking, even the memory of it making her angry, or upset, or something in the middle. It was so irritating that she couldn’t stop those emotions spilling into one another. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to.”
“I didn’t,” she said. “Doesn’t matter to the Elders though. Jupiter says Elder Quinn will come round.”
“I’m sure she will,” she said, so confidently that Morrigan felt as if she had to believe her, if only for the rest of the evening.
But she spent the time before she went to bed looking into her lit fireplace, and staring at her hands, and she didn’t understand anything about it.
“So it’s a wundersmith thing?” Jack asked, folding his hands together.
“I think we always knew that it was a ‘wundersmith thing’, as you’ve so delicately put it, Jackie,” his uncle sighed and picked up another card.
“I guess so,” Morrigan said.
“Well, I don’t know, do I? Neither of you like explaining anything,” he protested. “It could have been… some rare draconic disease or something that she’s picked up in Wunsoc.”
“She’s in the room, Jack.” Morrigan put another card down and they both sighed.
“Sorry, Morrigan.”
Jupiter chuckled, “Great minds think alike but fools rarely differ,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack’s one visible eye darted between the two of them.
“I asked basically the same thing right after I breathed fire, you know, at Heloise,” she scratched the back of her head.
Jupiter cackled, and chose that moment to go all in.
“So…” he said, rolling the word around in his mouth. “This is like… a general wundersmith thing? Breathing fire?”
“Yep,” she said, doing her best not to think about the one other wundersmith she knew. “Wundersmith thing. Breathing fire. It’s one of the… what’s it called? the Wretched Arts.”
“Fun name,” he went all in.
“Yeah,” she shrugged, and pushed some of her chips in too. “That one’s called Inferno.”
“How many are there?”
“Nine? I think. I’m not exactly sure.”
They showed their hands, and Morrigan cheered while the other two grumbled, and she collected her chips gleefully, despite how worthless they were in this game.
“Morrigan!” Jupiter said, returning home, and not taking off his coat. “Did you see-?”
“I did it,” she said, twisting her hands together. “Didn’t they tell you?”
His eyes bulged, “We were a bit busy with the Elders being accosted by the Concerned Bigots and well, all that. I didn’t think to ask. You- you-”
“Relit the fireblossoms, yeah,” she said, a little loudly. She spotted Kedgeree’s head pop around from the side of his desk where he had been fetching notes left for Jupiter, and Fenestra gaping from up the stairs. “No biggie.”
“That’s the spirit, Mog.” He sighed like he had suddenly aged ten years, “Bring back an extinct species. No big deal.” He scratched his chin. “How?”
“Small sparks make big fires,” she said, shrugging. “I don’t really-” she gesticulated vaguely. “It happened. I did it. I brought back one and the rest all caught,” her finger stung lightly, as if she had brushed it against some plant which her skin didn’t agree with, but it went away after a minute.
Jupiter made a vague sound, half surprise, half considering, before saying, “I’ll check what’s for dinner, and for pudding. I think you deserve some type of treat after that, Mog.”
“Cheers, Jupiter.”
She stared at the new imprint, flickering on the tip of her finger, always there in a way she couldn’t ignore, no matter if she tried to or not. Inferno, the first one she’d mastered, at least at some level. Eight more to go, but this was her first. Her most special. She had grown so much in her skill, in all the arts that she had learned, but especially this one.
The fire would keep her warm.