Chapter Text
His head hurt and there was a terrifying man glaring at him. He said something, and Owain was sure that he should be able to understand him, the shapes his mouth was making were familiar, and the sounds coming out were too, but there was some gap his synapses couldn’t quite bridge and he was suffering for it. There was a… floating eye on the outside of whatever they were in, but that might have been a hallucination. He blinked again and he could hear howling somewhere nearby. Hooves on cobblestones. His head pounded.
The man said something else, and the world went sideways, then black. The next thing he saw were some very shiny boots, and his own reflection on them. His hair was completely wrecked out of shape, eyes bloodshot and bruised. Was it even him? Or was he looking at some sickly dopplegänger instead? Was his skin grey? His nose was certainly broken. When had that happened? Even if he attributed it somewhat to the bending of the leather around the toe of the boots, he looked so much different than he remembered his appearance being the last time he looked in a mirror.
At least language was working again. The scary man with the red hair was talking to him.“Who are you? Who sent you?”
He tried to open his mouth to reply, but all that came out was weak gurgling sounds, a choking at the back of his throat, his dry tongue like sandpaper against his palate and the backs of his teeth.
“You need water? Nod for yes, shake for no. With your head, I mean,” the man said.
He nodded, and put his hands on the floor, trying at least to push himself up to sitting height.
That was when he realised that he wasn’t the only person in the… whatever this thing was. Motorcars were growing ever stranger each time he looked, but this thing had eight legs, and he truly didn’t know what to think about it. Could it be some airship contraption? Could he have a concussion or some other head injury and was hehallucinating the strange board of levers at the pilot chair, and the little girl strapped into one of the seats, staring at him with big black eyes?
Something soft padded against his shoulder, and when he looked back, he realised it was the man. He had violent hair, now that Owain thought about it. Truly, the Kindling would be envious, although it wasn’t difficult to do, to be fair. It was all messed up like he had been running, a trickle of sweat down one of his temples, where grey was beginning to threaten the alarming colour everywhere else.
“Up you come,” he said. It wasn’t a friendly tone, not exactly, but it wasn’t sharp either. Just… cautious. “You can have some water, and then I’ll ask the questions.”
“Right,” he said. “Okay.”
“Jupiter,” the girl said. Owain jumped. Either she was really there, or his head injury had expanded to auditory hallucination. “Who is that? Your friend didn’t know him.”
“I have no idea,” he said, his bright eyes sparkling. Owain flinched away. It reminded him of someone, something, and he might not know what, but he did know that he didn’t like it. “Phil and I can talk about it later, but,” he turned back to Owain, still steadying him with a hand. “Can we have a name please? Any for now.”
He opened his mouth and cracked out, “Owain.”
“Owain,” the apparent “Jupiter” said quite carefully. “I am Captain Jupiter North of the League of Explorers. I hope it is nice to meet you,” he offered his hand, and Owain shook it once, firmly, turning his hand to the side and spotting something on the index finger.
“You’re from the Wundrous Society,” he said. His throat was still dry, and North’s eyes widened.
“You’re still parched.”
“It’s fine,” he said.
“Morrigan, would you mind passing that bottle next to you?”
It sailed through the air, and he caught it with one hand, “That’s a nice arm on you,” he said to her, before offering the bottle to him.
“How do I know it’s not poisoned?”
He frowned, but unscrewed the cap and took a few sips himself, “See?”
“You could have already immunised yourself to it,” he pointed out, but took it anyway. He only drank a little, but it was enough. He didn’t necessarily trust it, but he needed it to concentrate. He could weave himself some more later.
“So,” the captain said. “You’re a wun too.”
“If you mean that I’m in the Wundrous Society, then, yes,” he said. “I’m not familiar with that term though.”
“Oh?” his brow wrinkled, before he glanced down at his watch. “Blast it! We’re going to be late, this will have to happen another time, I suppose.”
“Late for what?” he asked, noticing that the strange not-motorcar contraption had been guiding itself through streets he almost knew. Some young men were singing drunkenly in the grey-scale he recognised as pre-dawn. Three of them were scolding the other for being out of tune with a song he knew quite well. “It’s Morningtide?”
“Indeed,” North said. “The Third Age of the Aristocrats is dawning, and we shall see ourselves by its light. Now, come on. You can’t miss this.”
He parked hurriedly, and helped Morrigan out of their vehicle. He was now sure she was real, which was a relief, but he wasn’t quite sure exactly what was wrong with his head then.
Now that he was outside of it, Owain saw that it was some kind of spider. It was the sort of thing Elodie or Odbuoy would have loved to build. That park of Odbuoy’s in Gresham had a mechanical elephant for children to ride around on. Or it did.
“This is Nevermoor?”
“Yes,” North said. “Are you feeling alright?”
He grimaced, “It’s fine. Just… I don’t think I’ve been back here in a while. A couple of things have changed apparently.” The eastern horizon was beginning to lighten, and they all rushed from the garage down an alley. They were just outside of Oldtown, he realised. There were a few of their… little projects around here. Or there had been. He couldn’t be sure exactly how long it had been since he slipped through whatever rip in reality, but long enough for everything to just look a little… off.
Like the time he, Ezra and Elodie had moved everything in Brilliance’s office a couple of centimetres to the left and she had been annoyed by bumping into her desk for weeks until she worked out what they had done.
Everything was in the right places, but none of it was right. Every look he took around gave him the same feeling as when he was on the brink of falling asleep, already half-dreaming and he would slip and wake up with a swooping stomach, and would have to begin all over again.
The party was in full swing by the time they arrived, but they had still managed to beat dawn. Just about. He pressed his fingers to his head, weaving blood vessels back together, pressing them into the correct places, making the swelling go down until he only felt half as bad as he had.
Elodie looked back at him from where she was standing in the party, and then he blinked and it was the girl, Morrigan. He shook his head, trying to clear it, trying to act a little more normal than he was currently being. But he knew what this girl was, and maybe it was the head injury talking, or wishful thinking, but he thought he might know who she was too.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“My name is Owain Binks,” he said. He had been trying not to stare, mostly because that would have been rude and also creepy, but it was killing him not to say anything, tell her what she was, tell her who he was, and what it all meant.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she stuck out her hand, and he shook it gently. “Is your head alright?”
“It’s fine,” he assured her. “Superficial wound.”
Wunder was a great preserver after all. It took a little more than that to do one of them in. If a wundersmith were to die of natural causes, it was almost certainly on purpose. He must have been very young when Odbuoy’s predecessor died but she had been… over a hundred at least. She had been tired, and he had more than once heard conversations, usually between Griselda and Rastaban, afterwards, about her “letting go”. It didn’t take a genius to know what had happened.
He tuned back into Jupiter’s speech, letting the words wash over him. A new age. An old tradition. There was a borrowed brolly pressed into his hand but he knew what to do now. This was familiar, even if the crowd was new. This must be what they did now.
“Step boldly,” he muttered, and let his feet leave the edge of the roof as he drifted down… down… down… onto the forecourt, where he bent his knees to stop them aching as he landed.
The girl, Morrigan, was smiling, her eyes shiny as she looked around. She caught his eye for a second, and he smiled at her before turning away.
He hummed a few out of tune notes to himself, before letting them evolve into words, “list’ to the curlew crying, oh, faintly the echoes dying oh. Even the birdies and beasties are sleeping. But my bonnie bairn lies weeping, weeping.”
Wunder lit up around them like a firework, expanding outwards. Closest around him, but that was the nature of the wundersmith. Wunder clung to them like infants to a parent. Or maggots to a corpse. He couldn’t be too sure now.
Morrigan was looking around now, her mouth hanging open as she glanced at the faces of people around them. He knew what she was thinking. Could they all see it too? Was this just a part of the wonderful morning? Was this Morningtide?
It could be. For people like them. But only them. Only the wundersmiths.
He looked around again, looking for the Captain, but his hand was on his arm, and he was slightly grim faced, despite what day it was.
“Did you know-” he started, but a hand appeared over his mouth before he could finish speaking.
“Not here,” he said. “It’s not- Just- we’ll talk later alright? I promise I’ll tell you, and her, everything, but not out in the open. Please,” his hands were open, eyes wide.
Ezra’s hands had been like that, before Owain tripped over- before he had fallen. His eyes had been just as wide.
But North’s eyes were blue, and they weren’t in the central square. He wondered idly if the fountain had been repaired or if Griselda was still trapped underneath it. Something was being pressed into his hands - a paper bag - and they were being raised to his mouth.
For a few minutes all he could hear was the crinkle of the bag, and see it expand and contract in front of his nose. He had been led away from the forecourt at some point, feet stumbling one after the other, but he didn’t know when he had ended up in this… office. Study?
There was an unlit fire, freshly swept by the looks of things, and piles of papers on the desk, a pen next to a half empty pot of ink, books on the shelves behind the desk, photographs of North as a young man, and a few other people. No one he recognised.
“We’ll talk in the- well it’s the morning now, but after all of us have slept,” North said, putting his hand up to block Owain. “None of us are in a fit state to have this conversation. Morrigan’s already been sent to bed besides.”
He nodded stiffly.
“I’m having a room made up for you already, but if you would feel better not-” he coughed lightly. “Being alone, you can take the chaise-lounge over there. There’s blankets and a pillow underneath it.”
“Thank you,” he found himself saying, rubbing his face lightly. His beard needed trimming at some point soon. “I- thank you.”
“It’s no problem,” he said, fiddling with a switch of some kind until the light turned on at his desk, “I have a few things to look at and then I’ll be turning in myself.”
“I- I don’t want to take your bed,” he said.
“You’re not,” he said. “It’s a chaise-lounge. And I’m giving it to you, for the night - well, morning, really - and then we can talk later.”
Owain wanted to argue more, but sleep demanded more from him, and he was ready to just give into it at this point.
“What happened?” he demanded as soon as he spotted North beginning to shift and yawn from his desk-cum-half bed. “Why did you bring a wundersmith to Nevermoor so late? Does she know yet? Why couldn’t anyone find her before?”
“You seem alright now,” he said, looking him over, still yawning excessively. “I mean, you definitely had a concussion earlier, but now you seem fine, really. How’s that?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he rubbed his head, concussion long gone thanks to his trick with weaving earlier, but headache still raging away inside his skull “It’s fine now, that’s all.”
“Hm,” he said. “So why are you using wunder to fix it?”
Summoner and smith. He squinted at North, but none of his activated wunder clambered towards him. This man wasn’t a wundersmith. “What are you?”
“Oh, many things. A Captain in the League of Explorers, a member of Unit 895,” he tapped the W pin at his lapel, smiling at him. “The owner and proprietor of this hotel, and a few more things but if I listed them all we might be here until the next Eventide.”
“Let me rephrase,” he said. “What’s your knack?”
His eyes narrowed, but his smile stayed, “I’m a Witness.”
“Ah,” he said. “Then you know what I am already?”
“I do,” he said. “Just not who. How long were you in that other place?”
“What place?”
“There’s,” he waved his hand. “The spit of a pocket dimension all over you. Not just that, but you’ve not aged a day, and yet I can see things from the past century all over you.”
“Observant,” he said, trying to think of anything intelligent to say but coming up short.
“I often am, yes.”
“Spit?”
“It’s a figure of speech,” he said. “Anyway, who are you, Owain?”
He smirked, “Owain Binks, Wundersmith.”
“Really?”
“Is it so hard to believe?” He wasn’t sure if this man even knew who he was. He wasn’t about to take offence for that in the way that some others (Rastaban) might, but he was a little surprised.
“No one’s seen a wundersmith in Nevermoor since the Age of the East Winds,” he said. “That’s all, until today, really.” He said the last part with the cadence of a joke, but clearly Owain was too slow this morning to get it.
“Do you mean… the girl, what’s her name, Morrigan?”
“I might do,” he said, a little cagily. Owain thought about strangling him.
“But not,” he paused, trying to find the way to make the words go together. “Not any others.”
He sobered, “No.”
“Are you serious?”
“Deathly,” he said.
“But,” he shook his head. “How?”
“That’s a complicated question,” he rubbed his temples in little circles. It was a thing Rastaban had often done when Elodie and Ezra had been pushing his limits in lessons and Owain hadn’t quite managed to rein them in, “What’s the last thing you remember from being in Nevermoor, Owain Binks?”
He blinked, trying to push the sleep from his eyes, before giving up on the slightly more dignified method and just using his hands. He thought about asking him if he’d slept at all but that might have been too forward considering he had met the man less than a day ago and was already sleeping in his study, “I remember Ez- Squall screaming. And Elodie’s skull being split open by one of his… creatures,” he shuddered. “I remember slipping,” he said. “On… something. I didn’t look. I didn’t want to check.” He had spent a long time at the party on the rooftop staring at his brogues. They were completely clean. No trace of anything he might have slid on. Water, vomit, blood, or anything else. “I thought it was something E- something Squall might have done to make sure I was out of commission, but everything is difficult to parse from there.”
“Difficult?” he craned his neck to one side and then the other, and Owain flinched when he heard the light cracking and popping sounds of air being forced out of joints. Ezra had loved to make those horrible sounds with his knuckles, bending them this way and that next to Owain, just to bother him.
“Like a dream,” he said. “Not like what people mean when they say something is dreamy or some such rubbish, but when nothing makes sense. Time lasted forever and everything happened at the same time. Things happened out of order. I was there for… I don’t know how long, I was going to ask you that, and assuming I was in a place where time flowed the same as it did here, which I doubt, to be honest. My eyesight came and went. My hearing faded and now it’s back and I can hear clocks ticking in the next building and a cat yowling in Caddisfly Alley. I can hear your heart processing blood. I can hear my lungs converting oxygen to carbon dioxide.”
“That’s intense.”
“You’re telling me,” He scratched his beard. “But you’re in the League of Explorers, you don’t know any realm like that?”
“Too many,” he sat down again, one of his legs draped over the arm of his chair. “Were you ever with anyone?”
“I couldn’t say,” he shrugged. It was a juvenile habit that he had never quite managed to kick, and it quite fitted the moment. He wanted to be a child now. He was ignorant as one, at least. “It was very confusing. The whole time. I don’t know what was real and what wasn’t. I feel like I died there, and someone rebuilt me, but they managed to scramble some part of my brain in the process.” He cleared his throat, “It’s not that important. How many years has it been?”
“What makes you think it’s been years?”
“Any rebuilding efforts seem to have been long completed. Including this self-same hotel. Squall tore it to its bare components before we caught up with him in the middle of Old Town.” Bricks and mortar.
“That’s observant,” he said, scratching his beard. “Owain, there’s no easy way to say this-”
He wanted to laugh. It couldn’t get that much worse now.
“It’s been over a century since… well we call it the Courage Square Massacre.”
“Catchy. Am I to assume the main square was renamed to that?”
“Quite. It was to honour the wundersmiths’ bravery and sacrifice.”
“It sounds so noble. It wasn’t, if you were wondering.”
“These things rarely are.” He moistened his lips. “There is also the other matter.”
“Of what?”
He blew air out from between his lips, making a rushing noise. The cat in Caddisfly Alley caught its rat and killed it with a swipe of its paw against the weakest part of its neck. “Because of what Squall did, the legacy of wundersmiths changed. All of them.”
“The wundersmiths died trying to stop Squall.”
“They did,” he nodded. “But people like to forget that it was wundersmiths who died there.”
“Who did they honour with their bloody square then?”
North sighed, “The popular story is, the one in most books and so on, is that Squall blotted them out so completely that no one knows. That so many people died due to him, identifying exactly who died in other attacks and who died in the initial assault in Courage Square is too difficult and too long ago to really know. Wundersmiths are not,” he paused. “Popular, these days. I would, if I were you, exercise caution when telling people, if you don’t mind me saying.”
Owain swore violently and so loudly that he missed the door being pushed open.
“Sorry, should I come back later?”
“Morrigan!” North jumped out of his chair and glared at Owain out of the corner of his eye, “No, now is fine. Don’t mind us. I was just about to order breakfast, what were you thinking about?”
“Right,” she said slowly. “For breakfast?”
He nodded too quickly, shooting Owain a look. Don't say anything.
He wrinkled his nose but saw down, brushing his hair back, and smoothing his clothes. There wasn't a speck of blood on them, like they had only just come from the tailor, except for the ripped hem on his left trouser leg, which he assumed had happened after he had fallen into a spider vehicle and developed a concussion.
“I don't want to be any bother,” she said.
“Nonsense.” North clapped his hands. “Do you like waffles? I'm having a craving.”
She picked at her cuticles. “If it's not too much bother.”
“Blueberry syrup? Raspberry? Maple? Golden? Chocolate sauce?” He clearly caught sight of Morrigan's slightly alarmed face, and shrugged. “I'll order them all. We can decide when we get here. What would you like, Owain?”
“Plain,” he said.
“If you like,” North said, dancing around from foot to foot as if he had already consumed the hotel's entire supply of syrup and sugar. “That's no fun, but I'm not one to judge.”
He did his best not to smile.
The tray came with all those syrups, and more, and bowls of steaming thick porridge, drop scones with dods of melting butter on top, peppery scrambled eggs, soup, sandwiches and more food than three people could eat in a week. Owain opted for a bowl of porridge, and a glass of water, while North took three waffles and doused them in lemon juice and a few teaspoons of sugar.
He let them talk while he tuned out the conversation, staring at the walls. “That's my nephew, Jack.” North pointed at a photograph.
“It says here that his name's John Arjuna Korrapati,” Morrigan said, peering at the names listed underneath what was clearly a school picture, uniformed boys standing in three rows.
“Jack for short,” said North. “He left this morning, otherwise I would have introduced you to him,” he said to her.
Owain stayed in the study while North took Morrigan on a tour of the hotel. He grew bored of the walls and piles of books quickly, but even though his body was exhausted, his mind was too awake, too scared to sleep again.
A hundred years he had been gone for. Squall was not in charge - how had he been thwarted? - and he didn't even know if he was alive. They were all dead except for him. And Morrigan, even though she didn't know what she was yet. Who she was.
He stood up again, ignoring how his knees whined at him. He needed to get to Proudfoot House. He opened the door, determined to look for North, only to almost barrel into a woman in a maid's uniform.
“Sorry!” he stepped back, rubbing his nose.
“I'm so sorry, sir,” she said. “I was just coming to look for you, Captain North said you would be in here, you see, and your room's all ready now.”
“Oh,” he said. “Where is Captain North? I wanted to speak to him about something.”
Her lips thinned. “You've just missed him an hour back, I'm afraid. He’s always running somewhere or other, really. Never any rest for that man.”
“Ah,” he said. “Do you know when he'll be back?”
She nodded at the corridor, and he followed her down the hall while she spoke, “I really couldn't say, sir, I'm afraid. I don't think he'll be gone longer than… a day, since this is just talking to the Nevermoor Transport Authority, but I can't make any promises, you understand.”
“Of course,” he nodded.
He had Room 89, on a floor that looked like it wasn’t where regular guests stayed. “It might seem a little plain,” the maid said. “But it’ll warm up to you over time.”
“Oh, I know how this works, thank you.” He patted the wall affectionately. “I've stayed here before.”
“Have you? I don't think I saw you last time.”
“It was… a while ago,” he admitted. “I'm so sorry, I never asked your name, I don't think.”
She blushed. “Martha, sir.”
“Owain,” he said in response. “Thank you.”
She curtseyed and left him to it. Just him and this empty room. It was fairly spartan, just a bed, wardrobe, set of drawers and a lightly coloured wooden desk. He rapped it with a knuckle. “Pine?”
One of the curtains, white, over his tiny square window swirled in a non-existent breeze, “How’ve you been doing, old girl?” he asked, brushing his hand against the wall. It was painted eggshell. The colour of absolutely nothing.
A car honked outside but when he looked down into the forecourt, it was completely empty. A bird twittered at its fellows, far away from him. Miles off. He sank onto the bed, clutching his head, covering over his ears, but all that meant was that he could hear the pump of his own blood through his arteries, its slow sludge through his veins as it trudged back to his heart, ready to be reprocessed and sent back out to do its duty.
His head hit the pillow, but sleep would not come. How could it? He had only woken two hours ago, even if he had spent the last century in some state of wakeful dreaming or dreamlike waking. He was awake now. This was real.
His hands gripped the soft, cotton duvet, his jaw clenched and aching. It was real, and he was alone here. He was the only wundersmith around, except for an eleven year old girl who had no idea what she was or what she could do, and wouldn’t be finding out if Jupiter North had anything to do with it apparently.
What had happened to the society when they had been gone? With no wundersmiths to help, what had become of their mission? He pressed himself up, gently, and tried to breathe slowly. It wasn’t easy when he could hear the shee-sooh of his alveoli taking in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide, but after a minute, or five, he could stand up.
“Come on, Owain,” Elodie said, her eyes sparkling. She was twelve, her hair in twin pleats down her back. She was twenty-two, in an evening suit, a coffee stain dying on her white bow-tie and down onto her shirt. She was thirty, and dead on his floor. She was still talking to him.
He didn’t hear a word of it. He dashed out of the room, still dressed in the clothes he’d been in for a hundred years already, and charging down the stairs, through the foyer, out the forecourt, and into a street which had been cobbled in his day, but at some point had been tarmacked over, a handful of potholes giving away what still lay beneath the surface as he sprinted in the direction of Old Town, as best as he remembered.
He ran out of breath somewhere after passing the boundary of the gate into the oldest borough proper, his hands on his knees as he heaved, pressing himself into a stone wall, blocking out sound as much as he could. He wasn’t too far from Proudfoot House now. He could certainly walk the rest of the way there.
The security guards had frowned at him until he showed them his imprint, and then he was striding up the long drive, himself scowling at the extinguished fireblossoms. They were unrecognisable to how they had been when he had been a boy. Or even as an adult. To him, last week their flames had been happily green and red, blowing this way and that in the wind, absolute specimens of the endangered genus.
No time for whatever that was now. He flounced up the steps, past senior scholars with their heads buried in their books, despite today being a holiday, and people whom he assumed were other visiting members of the society, passing by them until he spotted the way to the railpods. He brushed by an old lady, who had been standing among a crowd, including a rather tall bullwun, and a bald man completely decorated in tattoos, apologising slightly, but continuing on. He didn’t hear the intakes of breath, or the hissing sounds, or the clip-clop sounds of smart shoes following him deeper into the building. He didn’t hear the questions about who he was, or how dare he? He had ears for nothing except the sound of the railpods zooming into the boarding area, and zipping out again, and the sounds of his feet as they made their way towards sub-nine, where he needed to be now.
He wove through the crowd of people until he reached the line and joined the back, not paying attention to where his feet were until someone striding up the line caught on them, and began to pitch forward.
“Watch where you’re going!” growled out a voice he unfortunately recognised very well. Yellow teeth. White hair. Sunken eyes. It was her all right. And judging from the intake of breath from her, she had just realised who he was too.
“Who-” He stormed past Murgatroyd, heading right for the railpods. “Binks?”
Elder Quinn, puffing and panting finally caught up with him. “Young man, I do not know who you are! You cannot simply storm in here and-”
He waved his index finger at her, “Can’t I?”
Her eyes widened and she took a step back. “Perhaps we should speak in the Elders’ Hall.”
He vaguely noticed the crowd gathering around him. He could hear the whispers well enough. “Perhaps. But why not out here?”
She straightened herself. He could see well enough that this woman had been wrought from iron. There was a reason she had been elected Elder, even if she had only held that position for a few weeks so far.
“Who are you?” she asked. “How can you be here; how can you have an imprint if none of us know who you are?”
“I know who he is,” gargled Murgatroyd, her neck beginning to crackle and pop. He restrained himself from shuddering, hoping for one scholar mistress from this transformation rather than the other.
“Mrs Murgatroyd,” Elder Quinn gasped. “Please would you enlighten us?”
“He’s Owain Binks,” she said, her voice changing, deepening. He breathed a sigh, as everyone around them cringed away from the transformation until Rook stood in front of them.
“Who?” asked someone from the crowd, but Elder Quinn’s mouth opened ever so slightly. She knew who he was. At least what he was.
“Am I to assume that you are that Owain Binks?” she asked carefully.
“As in the Wundersmith?” he said. “I suppose so.”
The room exploded. He was shoved back into a railpod, his arms pushing forward, away, away, away. He could do something about this, couldn’t he? Control something about the situation? Freeze it? Use Tempus, use wunder .
But his brain wouldn’t engage, and someone’s arms were around him and they were moving so quickly he didn’t know what to do. He was being taken somewhere against his will, and he had just told a group of people that he was a wundersmith.
When they had spent a hundred years hating wundersmiths. Was he stupid? Jupiter had said that he shouldn’t say it, but something about being there had made him cocky. Why shouldn’t he have been cocky? He was a wundersmith. He deserved to be there. The society had been made for them. Everyone else was secondary.
Or that had been how things had been before. Before Ezra had done a coup d’etat and killed everyone they had known. Before he had helped the Wintersea party solidify its power everywhere else in the realm except for the Seven Pockets. Before he had done whatever it was that stopped there being any new wundersmiths, except for a girl alone in the Hotel Deucalion.
Everything went back to Ezra.
“Stop moving,” Rook hissed. “I’m trying to help you.”
Her nose was swollen and there was a nasty red mark on her face that was about the shape and size of his palm. He felt his blood trickle to the soles of his feet. “Rook I’m so-”
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said brusquely. “What’s done is done, and you didn’t mean to hurt me. Although, you should learn better self defence than that, perhaps.”
He bristled, “I was caught off guard.”
“That was rather the point.”
“I assume you’re not here to hurt me,” he said. “You- pulled me in here?”
“Yes,” she said. “The situation was escalating. Taking you out of the equation would de-escalate it. It’s simple mathematics.”
“Right,” he breathed. “Right. Why did I do that?”
“I have no clue. You were a smart boy, Owain. I remember that much.”
“Past tense very much operational.”
She didn’t say anything to that. Rook had always been a person of few words. He had liked that about her. She never felt the need to fill empty space with meaningless chatter and waffle.
“Where are we going?” The railpod took a sharp left and he clutched one of the barriers to keep his balance.
“You’re out of practice,” she said.
“It’s been a hundred years.”
“Hm.”
He took a breath and bent his knees to absorb the next swooping drop, “Is it sub-nine? The School of Wundrous Arts?”
As if on cue, their railpod juddered to a halt, and the doors slid open. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough, his feet almost sliding against the ground of the quiet platform. Rook was a lot more graceful about it. Her every movement was controlled. She was completely at ease with herself in her body.
As they approached the school, the sign lit up, like it always had when he had been the first to arrive at their lessons. That had usually been the case anyway. Elodie always needed to be enticed out of bed, especially in winter when she piled on so many blankets and quilts, Owain was convinced that she would have been suffocated one day, and Ezra had been too busy talking to Brilliance or Rastaban about something or other, and Odbuoy would be stalking the First Year scholars, trying to get the jump on them with Veil or Masquerade.
“Who did that?”
Rook’s forehead wrinkled up, “Some vandal, I would assume. It is not that important.”
“Isn’t it?” he sighed. He looked at the crossings out and attempted erasure of Wundrous, and its replacement Wretched, and waved a hand, wiping it away until it looked like it had when he had first seen it. Ageless as anything else down here. Immortal.
Rook’s lips twitched a little, but she didn’t say anything, just walked ahead of him into the school proper. He followed.