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Squall wasn’t there when they had agreed to meet up for their lesson that week. Morrigan deflated, surprised at how disappointed she felt about that, but went back home anyway, more confused than anything else. But she didn’t think about it for too long since Chef Honeycutt had made leg of lamb for dinner that night, and she had smelled it in the kitchens earlier and wanted to get to that than she wanted to worry about if Squall had been pulled into a meeting or something.
It was fine, she justified to herself. He was a busy man, and he couldn’t always make it. Jupiter did the same thing all the time. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t show up next week.
But he didn’t. And then he didn’t again, the next week.
And that was when Morrigan really began to worry.
Not worry about Squall. Not really. She didn’t pretend like she liked the man now, even if she was his apprentice. She needed something from him, that was all, and unfortunately for her, she was limited on other options on how to become a proper wundersmith.
Once or twice, she could brush off, but three times in a row with nothing? She felt a little justified in wondering what was going on.
“Morrigan?” Jupiter poked his head into her room, pushing the open door a little farther, knocking on the outside frame. “Are you busy?”
“No,” she frowned, looking at her attempt at making a sword. It wasn’t anything close to a sword, more like a heap of dried solder. “Do you need something?”
“Not really,” he said, coming in. “Just… I wanted to tell you something, let you know and all that, before any one else could tell you. Forewarned is forearmed, and all that.”
She frowned, “Is this a wundersmith thing? If Holliday Wu is downstairs, then I’m staying here until she leaves.”
He grimaced, “No, nothing to do with that. It’s more… I mean, I don’t know if you’d call it personal but anyway-”
“What is it?” she asked, trying not to sound brusque. Jupiter had a wonderful talent for talking circles around everyone, tying them in absolute knots. Sometimes the only way to get to the point was to cut through it. She grimaced at her sword-failure on her table again. “Sorry, but could you just tell me, please?”
“Your father lost his election. He’s not going to be Chancellor of Great Wolfacre any more.”
She blinked, “Oh. Why? Do you know?” She wasn’t particularly invested in the job prospects of her father, but when she had lived with him, she had been his biggest weakness in elections, the blight on his reputation, all that. When she had… left, it seemed to her that all his political problems had been solved in one evening.
He shrugged, “Sea change of incumbents being kicked out of office, mainly. Going theory is that it’s to do with inaction over the recent energy crisis-”
“Another one?” she cut right across him. “Last time, wasn’t it because of Squall trying to break through the wunderground?” And the cursed children. She didn’t like to bring up the second point. Jupiter had always obfuscated over those details. She knew what that meant. She probably had always had a sense but when she had been eleven and fresh into the world of the Free State, just about to join the Wundrous Society, she really hadn’t wanted to know about it.
“Yes,” he said, frowning at her.
“Do you know why?”
“No,” he said, biting his lip in that way he always did when he knew something, but didn’t want to tell her. She used to say couldn’t along with that statement, but he was always physically capable of it. He just chose not to some of the time.
He left her with the newspaper so he could rush off here and there and everywhere, solving each and every problem as it appeared, answering any summons delivered to his doorstep. She thought it was the League this time.
She stared at the photo in the paper for a long time. It was her father, his face mostly shadowed by his hat, waving as he stepped into his carriage, Lowry at the reins. It wasn’t front page news. It wasn’t even fourth page news. The photo was smaller than her palm. She breathed fire onto it, and let it curl, blacken, and crumble right into her hands.
She didn’t think of him when she left the hotel to go for a walk, to try to clear her head. She was thinking of another man in the Republic, and where in the Unnamed Realm he could possibly be right now.
The garden belt was a good place to clear one’s head. Morrigan had never been to the countryside proper, but she thought that this place, with the sounds of birds constantly twittering and hooting and whooping in the background, and the way the air smelled cleaner the second she stepped through the gates, might be an approximation to it.
Some of the parks in the garden belt were gorgeously kept ornamental things, with every blade of grass snipped to just the right length, every single bloom and leaf perfect and untouched. She admired the work put into those places, but she didn’t enjoy them. They didn’t feel real. They felt like they were paintings she had stepped into, or museum pieces she wasn’t allowed to touch.
She found herself in one of the wilder spaces now. Overgrown rhododendrons painted the ground with red and purple flowers, their branches cascading in beautiful canopies. Ivy climbed and choked out majestic beeches. Yews stood firm where they must have been three hundred years ago, stout and sticky with sap.
She picked up one of the yew berries, crushing it in her hand. Francis had once made a tart covered in them, and he said that since the seeds were poisonous, and the whole plant was, that it was entirely too much work to ever bother with again any time soon. She had enjoyed it, but she also did massively prefer what he did with strawberries and plums to a slightly hallucinogenic plant.
She dropped the berry onto the ground, wiping her hand off on the bark. She didn’t hear the sound of hoof beats behind her, or hear the hunter’s horn until it was too late.
The hunter grabbed her by the back of her collar and pulled her in front of him on his horse before she had a second to even process what was happening.
Morrigan could feel her pulse in her head, in her neck, and her hands, but she tightened her muscles, willing herself not to fall off and be trampled under the horde.
“What’s happening?” she tried to ask, but she couldn’t look back at the hunter. She could never look back at them in this way. And they never responded anyway. Not verbally, at least. “What’s going on? What does he want?”
She was sure that she must have been heard at the last question because they halted. So suddenly, in fact, that the horse reared at the force, and she had to grip as far around its neck to keep her balance.
“Is this it?” she asked, when the horse returned all four of its hooves to the ground, huffing and snorting in a way that wasn’t like any other horse Morrigan had seen, but like a poor copy of it. “Are we here?” She turned around as far as she could to try to look at the hunter, but his face was still covered. “Where is Squall?”
The hunter just nodded at her to get off, but she wasn’t going to let them just dump her wherever without an explanation of anything. She had had that before, and she had no interest in making a repeat journey to Crow Manor/Morriganland. Every other time, Squall had offered her at least a bare semblance of an explanation beforehand. She expected nothing else now.
“Tell me,” she said, noticing her breath suddenly coming out in a foggy cloud. Had it suddenly gotten that much colder? Where had she been taken? What was happening?
The hunter touched her on the shoulder. There was something familiar about the gesture. A little over-familiar, a little friendly. She had a memory of it but she couldn’t place it now.
“Who are you?” she asked. “Do I know you?”
Did she? Were the Hunters real people? Had they been people once? Who were they? What were they?
Something guided her arm that wasn’t her. Or, it wasn’t her consciously. Some instinct driving her.
Her fingers shook as she reached up, grasping the rough material of the hood covering the hunters face, pulling it back. Somewhere, far away from her mind at the minute, her spine ached at the angle but she kept going.
His hair was shorter than- than what? Her mind clutched at straws, trying to understand what she was recognising here. Whom. Who was this? Whom did her memory want to connect to so badly? It was sweaty, and slightly matted. It reminded her of one of the stray dogs she had once seen in Jackalfax with her grandmother. The driver had literally stopped, just to kick it off of the road, while her grandmother had muttered about vermin and putting things down since it’s far past its expiration date.
Morrigan had kept her mouth shut then. She kept it shut now, grimacing as she reached for the moth-eaten mask on his face.
Pieces flew together in her head as she stared at the person she had once known. As she stared at the skull of Henry Mildmay. His skin was translucent, clinging to the skull. He had no nose, the shape of his ears collapsed where they should have become more cartilaged.
“What did he do?” she asked. She could see now why the Hunters didn’t talk. She could see why they couldn’t. It wasn’t just noses they were missing. In the space where there should have been lips, a space showing teeth and tongue, there was nothing at all. A patch of discoloured skin pasted over the space, thicker than anything else she could see, hiding the mouth from sight. Silencing them.
A speckle of blood was dried on the edge of his cheekbone, still as sharp as it had been when he had taught 919 about Tricksy Lanes, or when she and Hawthorne had confronted him outside the Museum of Stolen Moments. It looked… not exactly fresh. But not years old. She thought she knew where it had come from. She thought she might know from whom.
“What did you do to him?” she asked suddenly, cold fear settling in her stomach. She wanted to move now. Wanted to get off of this horse, and away from the Hunt. If they had done to Squall what she thought they might have, then what would they do to her? To the other wundersmith, his apprentice?
She remembered the pile of ash she had left on her bedroom floor before she had run out, struggling to breathe. She wished now that she had cleaned it up in some way. She didn’t want everyone’s last memory of her to be of her leaving a mess for them all to deal with.
She couldn’t move though. Her legs were frozen to the saddle. Her breath trembled in her throat and not another word emerged. Not a plea, or a whisper. She had already said everything she was ever going to say.
Not-Mildmay nodded at her, and pressed his fingers - bony and burningly cold - against her, wrenching his mask from her. He pulled it on, and replaced his hood. Becoming another Hunter again. One of a hundred. Identical. Cloned.
He jumped from the horse first, with far more grace than her Decoding Nevermoor teacher ever had, and offered her his hand.
She couldn’t move it. She was still stuck. She was back in her history class with Onstald and he had just frozen the room and she couldn’t move at all. She couldn’t get herself off of this horse.
So he moved her instead, lifting her down.
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked, surprised that she was actually able to say it.
His head shook, ever so slightly. A movement to the left, then to the right. Almost imperceptible. Anyone might have missed it. She almost did, except this might be the most important moment in her life. She was still sure it might be the last.
One of the dogs howled, then another, then a choir of hunting dogs. The sound was undercut by a repeated thudding, of hunter after hunter dropping to the ground. Onto their feet, then their knees. Genuflecting. At something. At Not-Mildmay?
She turned around to look at him again, but he was kneeling too. Even the horses pawed at the ground, their necks bent. They were all looking at her. Kneeling to her.
Was she in charge of them now? Were they her Hunt of Smoke and Shadow like they had been Squall’s? And where in the name of the Divine Thing were they?
“Do you-” her voice trembled and she reinforced it with iron. “Do you take orders from me now?”
Not-Mildmay’s bent head lifted, and he nodded at her.
“Right,” she said, taking one deep breath in. Then another. A third. “Okay. My first one then. I want you to take me back to the Hotel Deucalion. We can- we can go from there.”