Chapter Text
Her new room was very white and very clean. She could only smell smoke when she closed her eyes or when she breathed through her nose too much and it started making whistling noises.
Her hands weren’t sooty though she kept looking down at them to check. Her hair was clean, her skin wasn’t burned even though she knew she had put them in fire at some point. It hadn’t hurt her. Her skin hurt later, but they had fixed it. Small scars from where her new skin had come from, where it had been put in by her new guardian, as he stitched together glowing light until it had made new dermal layers and nerve endings in front of her.
She spent a lot of time in her room. Her old room was high up, in a quiet place. The little town, where she couldn’t go back now. Her new room was even higher up. A penthouse, almost all to herself. Glass walls, and a big bed, and it was just her.
And her new guardian. He had told her his name but it floated out of her head every time.
Smoke floated above the fire when she closed her eyes. Soot clung to her fingers.
She rubbed them again, standing up, touching the parts of her body which were new. The new skin was good. It was nicer than what she had seen at the last minute, her hands in agony, almost melted, like a candle burned to the last stub. She had thought that that had been funny for some reason. She couldn’t understand it now. But the new skin was like a shirt slightly too pinched at the armpits. It was too shiny, too new.
Her guardian said that dwelling on the past was a waste of time. All she ought to do was look forward.
Morrigan lived in the past these days.
Her new schedule was better than her old one. No more meeting with cursed child specialists. No more letter writing about things she could hardly affect, things she had never affected in the first place, apparently. She hadn’t caused the rat infestation in the primary school - that had just been a case of “waste mismanagement” - and the office block being hit with lightning was just “the weather”.
She learned things now. Wunder wove between her fingers on instinct, she hardly ever had to think about it. It did what she wanted it to, charmed like a rat to a piper whenever she sang the only song she had ever learned.
Her guardian had his own song, which was the second song she had learned, but he mostly hummed it. She was still “getting a solid grounding of the basics”, but if she worked hard enough, and was obedient to him, she might get close to where he was with it.
She loved wunder. Wunder loved her. It hated her too, he said. It would rip her to shreds if she abandoned it. Burn her up from inside out.
He had looked like he wasn’t even in the room when he had told her that. She didn’t even think that he had been in this century.
There was one thing she didn’t like to do when she was practising. And it was the thing she was best at. Fire came up like bile from her throat, unnatural and repugnant. There had been more than a few occasions when she had tried - really, she had - to breathe it, and had thrown up right after.
“Are you here to meet my guardian?” she asked, her eyebrows narrowed at the strangely dressed man in the front room. “Or Mr Jones,” she added, remembering his public alter-ego, after the first time she had met him.
She had been half in shock, worn out from crying and from what she had just done, but she remembered it as clear as day.
The journey from Jackalfax to Yvlastad had been long, even with the direct road, and lack of traffic, since it was the middle of the night.
She should have been knocked out. Between the inhalation of smoke, and the painkillers she had been put on, it was strange to her that she was awake, but even when she tried to close her eyes, and escape this waking nightmare, she couldn’t fall asleep.
“Hello, Miss Crow,” the man next to her said, when she got bored enough with a half waking haze, and opened her eyes. “Please don’t sit up, your wounds might rip open again.”
“They’re burns,” she said. “They’re fine.”
“Still,” he said. He had a gentle voice, with feathery brown hair, and was smartly dressed. He had the sort of voice she might have heard on the news. “Would you mind staying down?”
She didn’t have the energy to sit up anyway, so she went along with it, “Who are you?”
“I am… well for the time being, you can call me Mr Jones.”
“But that’s not your name?”
“No, Miss Crow,” he said. “Only, I’ll tell you later. When we’re not somewhere so… public.”
She blinked, feeling how they were moving, “This is too fast to be a car, isn’t it? Are we on a train?”
“Yes,” he said. “Your nurses and doctor are nearby. I just wanted to speak to you for a moment.”
“Why?” she said.
“I am very sorry to inform you that you were the only survivor. Your care has been given up to Ezra Squall.”
She managed to ignore the second part entirely, “It was my fault.”
“Fault is secondary, Miss Crow. An investigation is underway, however. I believe they will find something like faulty wiring or something like that.”
“But I breathed fire,” she said. “The curtains caught, and then-” she blinked a few times, not able to wipe the tears away from her eyes. “It was my fault.”
“You can’t do anything about that now,” he stood over her. “Did you, ahem, hear the second part?”
“About Ezra Squall?” she eyes him. “Who’s that?”
“Well,” he sighed, pocketing his glasses. Somehow, his face looked entirely different without them. “That would be me.”
“You’re… my new guardian? But you said your name was Mr Jones.”
“I did, I protect my privacy very closely, Miss Crow.”
“I killed my family,” she said.
He didn’t correct her. They sat in silence for the rest of the route.
When they had arrived in Yvlastad, he had sat her down, and explained things to her more fully. She had been so sure that she was going to be sent to prison, or something would happen to her because of what she had done.
Mr Squall put a pen in her hand, and presented her with a contract, his signature sitting in the place that said Master, hers was to go on the one that said Apprentice.
“Sign here,” he said. “And you’ll never be unhappy again.”
“I’m not going to prison?” she asked, not trusting him. She checked the paper again to see if it was actually a confession, but it was still the contract.
He laughed, “No. As far from it as you can get.”
“But why do you want me to be your apprentice?” she rolled the pen between her fingers. “I don’t understand.”
“I,” Mr Squall began, slowly, “am the only person in the Republic able to control wunder. That has ensured the rise and strength of Squall Industries through the years. I should really say, was the only person in the Republic, if I’m being technically correct about it.”
She blinked at him, “Are you a ghost? Are you dead?”
“No,” he chuckled lightly. “No, not dead. Quite the opposite. But what I mean, Miss Crow, is that you can do all of that too. Or you will learn to, rather.”
“In a manner of speaking,” the man said, removing his top hat to show an absolute shock of red hair. He looked… it was strange to say but she could have sworn he looked relieved. His shoulders had the tension fall out of them the second he had seen her. “Are you Mr Squall’s ward?”
“I am,” she nodded. She wasn’t sure he had meant to have guests in the flat, but this man had made it past the front door so clearly he was allowed to be here, she supposed. “Miss Crow.”
He nodded at her, saying quite seriously, “Are you well?”
“Yes,” she said, trying to smile genuinely, but more just making the approximations of the right expressions.
“Good,” he said, nodding. “That’s good. I- think I must have had a miscommunication. I will have to reschedule with your guardian, Miss Crow, but if you would be so kind as to… not mention that I was here. I think I got the day wrong, and I’m horribly embarrassed, you see.”
If he really was embarrassed, he was handing it quite well, she thought but she agreed and showed him to the door, opening it for him.
When she looked down the street to see where he’d walked off to, drawn by sheer boredom, and a desire not to return to her inferno practice as soon as she might have to otherwise, fully expecting to see him still walking down the street in the direction she’d seen him go, she blinked.
There wasn’t a single person on the street. He had disappeared right into thin air.
“What are you doing?” Morrigan jumped, turning around.
Her guardian was standing in the doorway, his hands crossed across his chest. There were a pair of wire-rimmed glasses on his nose.
“You wear glasses?”
He took them off, “For reading.”
“What?” she tried not to laugh. “You’re the second most powerful man in the Republic, but you can’t get your eyes fixed?”
“I don’t trust doctors.”
“But you can use Weaving, surely?”
“It’s a waste of time,” he removed them and slid them in his top pocket. “And you’re avoiding my question.”
“I’m practising Inferno,” she said, showing the unlit candle to him. “Like you told me to.”
He made a noise at the back of his throat. She couldn’t tell if it was positive or not, “It’s not lit.”
She rolled her eyes, “Hence practising. I’m not very good yet, that’s all.”
“You’re perfectly capable. You always were,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow, “I’m sorry?”
“You’re just afraid,” he said. “Because of that little… incident.”
“My whole family died, and all the other people in Crow Manor.”
He shrugged, “It was only one building.”
She imagined him being torn to pieces by his stupid dogs, his limbs being pulled in separate directions by the horses with their hunters, like a form of mediaeval execution. It was comforting, in part.
“Stop thinking about my painful death,” he snapped.
She blinked, “How did you know I was thinking about that?”
“Your face goes completely dreamy.”
She straightened up, “Why are you here?” bothering me. “Don’t you have… an empire to run, supplying every dream and wish and luxury to the people of the Republic and so on?”
It was one of the things he had told her when she had been brought here, before she had even had the smoke washed off of her, or the burned skin replaced on her hands and arms.
He had sat her down, and asked her to be his apprentice, told her that he was a wundersmith, and that she was one too, and they should work together, because if he taught her, they could do great things. She would be his heir. Everything she had done before would never matter any more. She would be able to control everyone, save a few, if she studied hard and worked well.
And she had agreed, and signed. She had no… he had called it an imprint, but hadn’t really explained what it was, so she had to sign with a pen, but that wasn’t “genuinely binding”. He hadn’t explained to her what would make it binding. She didn’t know if she wanted to know.
She didn’t tell him about his “guest”, although, on reflection she did think it was strange. But the man had been in the house for… no more than ten minutes. She couldn’t think of any real damage he could have done while talking to her in the front room.
“Don’t you have anything intelligent to say?” he asked, glaring at the unlit candle. “How’s the inferno coming along?” he shifted, looking at her face carefully. Studying her for any sign of weakness. She faltered, moving her hands to behind her back so that he couldn’t see them twisting about, or the faint sheen of sweat she could feel. Using wunder in other ways meant that inferno didn’t build up in her in the same way it had for so many years, in the way it had shot out of her, far beyond any control.
“If you’re a hundred and fifty, why do you not look old?” she tried to change the subject instead.
“That’s wunder,” her guardian said, looking up at her. “It’s a preserver, of sorts. It keeps the vessel young for much longer than it would in a normal scenario.”
This was the strangest way Morrigan had ever heard any of that be referred to in semi-casual conversation, “Will I live that long?”
“Possibly,” he said. “You could also choke on a grape tomorrow. We’ll see.”
“How long can you - we - live?”
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Wundersmiths rarely die of so-called “natural causes; all the centenarians of my generation died by violence.” His eye twitched slightly. “And the others whom I know of died in similar ways. I’ve really never heard of a wundersmith living past the age of one hundred, who then died due to ‘old age’. Perhaps it’s happened, but not according to any history text I’ve read.”
Morrigan didn’t know what to think about that. Potentially living forever? It was better than choking on a grape, but how much of the world she lived in had been born in the last century? A hundred years ago the Wintersea Republic didn’t exist, and people here knew about the Free State. What would be the case a hundred years from now? Two hundred? Three? It was such a big concept she could barely conceptualise it, stretching out beyond her. She hated it. She thought it might be interesting to see how life might change over the times, read books that no other person born in the time she was would live to read, listen to songs that none of them would have had the chance to hear.
But living forever was too vague. Too nebulous, and frightening for her to want to think about at the minute. She put it to the side for the time being, and brought her hands forward to show her guardian the pride of lions she had made from shadow, tracking a gazelle through the savannah. One of the lionesses landed on it, and snapped its neck.
“Improvement in your fluidity,” he said.
“They were supposed to be cats,” she complained.
“Shadows are shadows, Miss Crow. They like to be dark.”
He’d said that to her before, but she barely knew what he meant by that. In her first attempt of shadowmaking, she had wanted to make a dog to remind her of Camembert Crow, who’d used to put his head in her lap when she came to the kennels to see the dogs.
She had made a wolf instead, a wild thing which would have torn through her if her guardian hadn’t destroyed it first, its jaws gnashing. “You must have control,” he had said too. “You are the master, not the puppet. You pull their strings. You beat them into submission. Do you understand?”
She stretched out another shadow now, and crushed the lioness under it, compressing it until it was nothing at all.
He stared at her until she completed it all, and there was nothing left but a suggestion of ash on the floor, “Progress, Miss Crow. Perhaps we will continue your studies in Ruination soon. You are still woefully behind I’m afraid.”
“I’ve been here for two weeks,” she complained. “You said that it would take years.”
“That I did. It is only-” he cut himself off, shutting his mouth so quickly that the sound of his teeth clacking together made her flinch. “It is time for us to go.”
“Already?” she stood up, brushing herself off, trying not to feel too afraid about what was about to happen. He said she ought to be calm.
“Yes,” he said shortly. “Go and clean up.”
“Hello, Morrigan, it’s very nice to meet you,” President Wintersea smiled at her like she was trying to put her at ease. Morrigan relaxed immediately.
She looked exactly like the portrait that she had seen in her father’s study and other official rooms she had been dragged along to, her makeup and wig sitting perfectly, if not looking a little odd because of how different she looked to everything else in the room. Like the colour had been sucked out of her, and she was left in complete black and white, except for the chain of office draped around her neck.
“Hello,” she said, bowing a little.
“Oh, don’t worry about formalities when it’s just us,” she said. “Though you were taught to mind your P’s and Q’s very well.”
“Thank you?”
“I also wanted to express my condolences for your family. I met your father, and stepmother a few times, and your mother too, when she was alive. Your father was a loyal and obedient servant of the Republic, and we all shall honour his loss.”
Her guard slammed back up. “It’s been… quite difficult.” It was easier not to lie. But also to dance around the truth. Not to give away absolutely every detail she was thinking or what she cared about. “I was very lucky.”
“You were, weren’t you? And your new guardian is another loyal servant of the Republic. I hope you’ll be one, one day, too.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” she dipped again, her social script faltering. She had run out of appropriate things to say.
“When you meet President Wintersea,” her guardian’s nostrils flared when he had said this. “You will be polite. You will bow. You will call her President Wintersea the first time, and thereafter address her as “ma’am” if you speak to her directly. Do you understand?”
She stopped twisting her hands together in her lap and laid them - a little sweaty now - on the arms of her chair, “I think so.” Her voice cracked a little and she flinched. She had not slept well. Her mind had been stuffed full of running away and the Free State and the things her guardians had been teaching her about it and the visit from that man and what the Gossamer was and if she could use it and- there had been so much that she had been hearing the birds outside her window before her eyes felt heavy or her muscles finally relaxed on her irritatingly perfect mattress or her head finally rested against her pillow instead of just being held atop it.
Those sorts of things made last minute etiquette lessons fly out the window. Along with any level of common sense she might have thought she had, “Do you think the Wintersea Republic will ever open up talks with the Free State again?”
The President blinked but she recovered quite quickly even if Morrigan had caught her off guard for a second. She looked at her more carefully, and she had to force herself not to shrink back.
“The President will take any weakness you show her, and use it against you for the rest of your life,” Squall had said. “Make yourself a stone wall. Don’t give her anything to work with.”
“What makes you ask that?” she asked. “You have an interest in politics.”
“Idle curiosity,” she said. “My father was a politician but I never heard him mention it once. My grandmother was old enough to have heard about it as a child, but I only found out about its existence a few weeks ago.”
Her mouth twitched at the edge. “From your guardian?”
Morrigan nodded. She might as well let her think that. It was safest, after all.
“He does like to talk, doesn’t he? What do you think of him?”
“He takes care of me,” she said. She found herself recounting all the points she had made to Captain North, except her stomach twisted less here. She didn’t feel like she had to tell the truth.
“That’s good,” the President said. “It saddens me that too many children in this union of nations are brought up in families who might not… necessarily want them.”
Morrigan tensed like someone had punched her in the stomach, “It is a shame,” she said. “Shameful, I mean.”
“To whom?”
“The families, I suppose.”
“But not the people who allow the children to remain with those families.”
“If- if there are any failures within the system to identify which families do not care for their children as they ought,” she said slowly. “Then that is shameful too, I would say.”
She didn’t like the look on the President’s face. She was like a cat with a mouse right in her corner, and her claws were out, “Would you?”
She nodded, trying to appear stronger than she felt. Her guardian’s voice whispered in her mind create the illusion. Believe in it. Her back straightened. Her fingers stopped clenching together. She could do this.
“Well,” the President said. “You seem like a very good girl, Miss Crow. I look forward to hearing more, and seeing more of you soon.” She nodded once, and just like that, Morrigan was dismissed.
“That was good,” her guardian said.
“You weren’t in the room,” she half-asked.
“No,” he said. “But I know. Well done.” He steered her into the motorcar, in the passenger seat. He didn’t seem to keep a driver, unlike her father who had had a motorcar driver, carriage drivers, as well as the people who drove the strange and wonderful vehicles which the Wintersea Party sent for him. Had sent, she supposed, a stone dropping into her stomach at that though. How could she have forgotten? How had that fact slipped her mind so quickly?
Desperate to change the subject, she asked him why he didn’t have a driver.
“Mr Jones doesn’t need one,” he said, turning on the ignition. “And I don’t need people listening in on me when I can drive myself perfectly well.”
“Will you teach me how to drive?” she asked, feeling a little bold, still trying to shove the guilt and horror deeper and deeper in her body, as far from her as possible.
He rolled his eyes, “Not now. When you’re older perhaps.”
“Who taught you? Or are you old enough to have driven the first ever car.”
“Must you always speak so?”
They didn’t go back to the flat like she had expected after leaving Wintersea’s personal offices. Instead, they went to the factory, which the flat was attached to, except their entrances were as far from one another as was likely possible.
She had only been to the factory a handful of times beforehand, so she was still holding a map to find her way around, but it still amazed her, full of churning wunder, and all the machines he used to distribute it, and the uniformed employees all churning and pulling at levers and wheels, although she was still yet to understand how they worked.
He was drawn away by his foreman and she was left to walk around, aimless, collecting wunder on her hands, humming with her eyes almost shut the whole time.
“Hello,” the man said, and she jumped out of her skin.
“Are you here to meet my guardian again?” she frowned. “You never said who you were before.”
He blinked, “My name is Jupiter North, of the Wundrous Society. And as for my name, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I must apologise. It slipped my mind.”
Her guardian had mentioned something about a society like that, in the Free State. She had half wondered if he had made it up - with perpetually burning trees and a climate bubble and nine subterranean floors - and half thought that she had seen so many strange things in her life so far, that hearing about something else wasn’t really about to do her in at this point.
But this was weird. Not just because he had outright said he was from the place her guardian had only mentioned in snatches, but there was something unreal about the man. No, not unreal, more real than anyone she’d met here, other than maybe her guardian, and President Wintersea.
Biting her lip, she grabbed her map and tossed it in his direction, aiming for his face.
She had been hoping that it would catch him off guard so she could run, shout for help, or something, but it sailed right through him. She stopped. “Are you dead? Are you a ghost?”
“What a question to ask!” He didn’t seem offended though, patting himself down, theatrically checking for a pulse on his neck, and then on his wrist. “No, I’m not.”
“What are you?”
“Oh, many things. A captain in the League of Explorers, the owner and proprietor of a nine star hotel near the centre of the city of Nevermoor, chairman of the Charitable Trust for Decommissioned Robot Butlers. I’m a jack of all trades, you might say,” he winked even though here was absolutely nothing funny about what he was saying.
“You’re not real,” she decided. “This isn’t real. Why are you here anyway?”
He bit his lip, “In a way, I was looking for you.”
“Why?” her guard was already all the way up but she managed to add some steel doors and reinforced layers to it. A few deadbolts here and there.
“Your house in Jackalfax burned down,” he said. “You were declared dead. There was never a body.”
“That’s a different Morrigan Crow,” her palms were sweating. Why were they sweating? Why were there even sweat glands there? It seemed like a stupid place to put them. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Her guardian kept saying she needed to become a better liar, and for the first time she could see why. Absolutely none of that was persuasive.
“In another way I was having a look around the factory.”
“Are you a spy? Is this like… some technology so you can see things without having to touch them? And get away quickly?”
His eyebrows - red - shot all the way up into the brim of his hat. She couldn’t see his hair except for a few wisps but she remembered the bright shade it had been when he had taken his hat off in the previous visit “You’ve hit the nail precisely, Morrigan Crow. Right on the head.”
“I- what? You are a spy?”
“Not on purpose,” he admitted. “But sometimes my job comes into that area, unfortunately. But I was looking for you. People have been worried.”
She scoffed. No one in her whole life in Jackalfax had been worried if she lived or died, and now they were all probably quite relieved she had. No way that she could cause their milk to curdle or their dogs to get cancer because she looked at them weirdly. Their milk could go bad on its own, like it always had, and the selective process of breeding could continue to produce dogs with a particular look and an unfortunate genetic predisposition towards cancer.
Some part of her brain still couldn’t completely compute that she wasn’t a cursed child. No matter how many times her guardian said it, some part of her brain thought he was lying. Always and always and always. It was a habit, really, and it was too hard to drop immediately, after a lifetime of seeing bad news, and knowing it was about her, that she was to blame.
And for all those things, it hadn’t been her fault. She could accept that now, but all the same, she had done something much worse than ruin dinners and stain the tablecloths by being three metres next to the maid while she was pouring the gravy. She had killed them all. And it wasn’t as if inferno could be written off as a curse which didn’t really exist. That was all her. And she was completely and utterly to blame for all of it.
“You should get out while you can,” she said, not sure why she was choosing to trust the man who had sort of stalked her here, but if her guardian saw him there would be hell to pay.
“You should get out,” he said softly. “Have you met President Wintersea yet?”
She folded her arms, “Earlier this afternoon. Why?”
“Stay away from her if you can,” he said. “I would say the same for your guardian except… well you live with him. But the second you want to get out, and come somewhere you can be free, contact me.”
“How?”
He frowned, stroking his beard, “I didn’t think you would actually agree.” To be fair, she hadn’t either, not until she had actually heard the words leave her mouth. “I don’t think- can you get out of your flat at all?”
“I can find out?” she offered. She hadn’t actually left without her guardian before, but also, he had never said whether she could go out alone or not. She might as well try, she supposed.
“You’re so far behind where you ought to be,” he said, rolling his eyes at another twisted attempt at Weaving sitting on the floor that evening. She hadn’t asked yet, but she had wanted to impress him first, before doing so. Apparently it hadn’t quite worked as well as she wanted it too.
“Who was supposed to teach me?” she asked. “It’s not my fault I found out that I was a wundersmith a fortnight ago.”
His face twisted, “Nevermind that, you might as well turn this into a Ruination exercise, even if you’ll be as incompetent with that as you seem to be with Weaving.”
She opened her mouth and closed it again, trying to not lose control of her emotions. She needed to keep that anger close to her heart, nurtured like the flame of Inferno. It could keep her warm. “Fine. Show me what to do.”
He bundled a string of wunder between his fingers like a cat’s cradle or a garotte, “Ruination is not just an act of destruction, it is an act of un-making.” The words didn’t sound like his. She wondered which one of the older wundersmiths he had been taught by had said it to him first. Maybe it had been her predecessor. Maybe her predecessor had sat in on the same class, next to the boy who would one day kill them, and then all their successors, only to end up doing the same things over and over, powerful, but alone. For as long as he could hope to live.
Hundreds of first classes. Hundreds of wundersmiths learning things for the first time. And she was probably the oldest to have heard of this, or learned what to do with it. By the time any of the other lives that had preceded hers had been as old as she was, they would have considered this “baby stuff” probably.
“You must,” he said, separating out layers of the ugly flower, making it smaller and smaller each time. “Take it piece by piece. Break it into sections, and so on, and so on.”
“But if everything is halved,” she said. “How can it stop existing?”
“Wunder will eat what is offered up to it,” he said. “If it is possible for the thing to be consumed, that is.”
She wrinkled her nose. It didn’t seem possible, according to physics, but she had, sort of, made the flower out of nothing, thanks to wunder. Surely then, she could do the opposite? “Can I try?”
It didn’t go well, but she didn’t blow up the plant while trying to separate out its atoms, so she considered it a success. Her guardian probably considered it a workout for his ocular muscles. A spiteful part of her hoped he sprained it at some point. It would serve him right.
When she was finally done with the lesson, she sat on the floor for a very long time. She wanted to get up, and go have a lovely long bath, or collapse into bed for a week, but whatever she thought, her leg muscles just would not engage.
Her guardian sighed when he returned to the room with a steaming mug of something. She had assumed it was tea, but when it came closer to her, she realised that it was soup.
“Eat this,” he pressed it into her hands, surprisingly gently. “You need to pace yourself, apparently.”
This was her chance, she realised. When he was feeling… gentle, and kind. Not nice, he wasn’t familiar with it, she supposed, but kind was better than nice.
“May I go out?” she asked. “Sometimes, just to go for walks, and stuff,” she shrank under each and every word, losing confidence the more and more she spoke.
“Of course,” he blinked. “I was never going to stop you leaving. Be back before… ten every night, and not before seven in the morning, and don’t use it as an excuse to slack off from your lessons, but yes.”
“Thank you,” she wanted to get up and- what? Hug him? Fat chance of that. Do something. But her legs still weren’t working.
“Eat up,” he said, and left her alone on the floor.