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She hadn’t been left alone since they had made it home. The Smoking Parlour had been turned to a calming lavender smoke, cups of tea and mugs of hot chocolate were put in her hands, and she drank them without tasting them. With barely feeling their heat through the ceramic or the china. A blanket had been draped over her at some point, but she had no idea when.
Jupiter was saying something, had been saying things for a while, but her brain barely registered the words. Her brain couldn’t register on anything, except for their faces. Except for the screaming song. No rest. No rest. No rest. It echoed around her head even now.
And that feeling. That feeling, the horror that had sunk into her bones the second she had seen them, that had built with every second until the beacon had been pulled from her hand, had not left. It hadn’t even dissipated.
The fright she had felt at the protesters, at Laurent St James and the child screaming in her face with their stupid word play, was nothing to this. It wasn’t anything. It was a speck of dust in her eyeline and the Unresting was a rampaging boar, ready to burn down her whole life, drag her down with their chains and vines. Bury her in her shame and guilt.
She looked up at Jupiter, and she knew she must have been an absolute sight to him, all dead eyed and miserable. So miserable. So sad she didn’t feel anything else. So scared that she couldn’t, “I broke the rules. I let them know I could see them.”
“It was unideal circumstances,” he said, which was a very nice way of agreeing with her, she thought.
He closed the book he had been reading. Reading to her? She wasn’t even sure. The noises had helped a bit, she supposed. In a way they had brought her back down to earth. Back down to where she could rest.
They couldn’t. They could never. What even were they? Who were the Unresting? Morrigan had a horrific idea of what. She thought she might have recognised some of them, and she thought she knew from where.
Would she join them some day? Would someone else lead her soul down Lightwing Parade in a sombre queue to that final end?
It didn’t bear thinking about. That didn’t mean the thoughts would leave her though.
“What are you reading?”
Jupiter looked at the cover, “It’s some poetry my aunt gifted to me when I was a child. Didn’t care for it much then, but I grew into it. Here,” he passed it over, placing it in her hands, making sure to put her empty mug down. She hadn’t realised that she had still been holding it.
Morrigan’s fingers traced the bird on the cover. She thought it might have been a raven. A corvid of some sort, at least. It made her think of the black bird chandelier in the hotel lobby. It was worn at the edges, the once shiny cover tattered. The spine had been broken a hundred times, veins showing where the cover had been bent this way and that. The beady eye of the bird looked at her. She stared back.
“Will it ever stop?” she asked. “St James… Never more… is it ever going to go away, Jupiter?”
Being a Cursed Child had been bad. But no one had ever screamed at her in public. Likely in part because they were afraid of the curse, but still. It amounted to the same thing at the end of the day. Morrigan being left alone.
This was so much worse. There were times, in the hotel, when she caught guests looking at her. There were days where she just walked out of the Smoking Parlour, without taking her face out of her book, because she knew they were looking at her. Talking about her.
Jupiter’s nine star rating had fallen to a seven star rating, although that decline had been corrected once the Federation of Nevermoorian Hoteliers had cracked down on people who hadn’t even been to stay at the Deucalion leaving reviews.
She hadn’t seen them. But she knew what they would say.
No rest. Never more. No rest. Never more.
He inhaled, his fists clenching. She knew that expression. She knew that the look on his face was him deciding whether to tell the truth and let her suffer in honesty, or tell her a comforting lie.
Her eyes closed, “I know. You don’t know.”
“I wish I could, Mog,” he said. “I promise that I wish that I could say that it would go away in a week or a month. I’m sorry, but time will tell. Right now they’re acting with poison, and with drama. I want to be able to tell you that it’ll disappear, given time and space,” his jaw clenched. “I don’t want to promise you something I can’t give. Not again.”
“Thank you,” she said, finding she meant it. She wanted to go in with her eyes wide open. She wanted to be taken seriously.
Even if earlier she might have preferred to be one of the “mere children” who didn’t know, she did. Maybe if she hadn’t had a clue about it, lying would have helped. But regardless of what Jupiter, or the society, or anyone told her, Laurent St James and his lackeys weren’t going away any time soon, and she might well have to live with that. For the rest of her life, maybe.
She tapped the cover of the book, “Do you have a favourite? Poem, I mean.”
“I do,” he said. “May I?”
She passed it back and he thumbed it, falling to a well worn page, “Apparently it’s based off the pet bird of the poet’s friend, who was also a writer in the same era, actually,” he scanned the page, his eyebrows rising until he looked back up at her and they fell back into their usual position. “Maybe this might give you a better association with the term “never more” too.”
She hoped so.