Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow Read online

  Morrigan thought about it as she watched her skewered marshmallow sizzle in the flames, turning it over to blacken all the sides. (The Swift family’s Christmas Eve tradition of sitting by the fire and toasting absolutely any item of food that could be pierced on the end of a stick was one she could really get on board with.)

  “I liked the firebird,” she said at last.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about that firebird, actually. How had he done it? Now that she knew exactly what was involved in the act of bending fire to one’s will—in making it appear seemingly from nowhere—she found this signature move of Saint Nick’s even more mystifying than she had last Christmas.

  His mastery of fire was just too precise—had he somehow learned the Wretched Art of Inferno? Was that how he could be so utterly in control of it? Or was this just some elaborate trickery? An act of complicated illusion wrought by many hands, taking practice, precision, and planning?

  Or… could Saint Nick, perhaps, be a Wundersmith too?

  Was that such a ridiculous idea? There used to always be nine, after all—that was what Elder Quinn had said. Could there be seven others out there somewhere? Could one of them be the jolly man in a red suit who brought presents at Christmastime?

  Morrigan smiled a tiny, secret smile. The thought that there might have been another living Wundersmith standing in front of her gave her the strangest thrill of… hope.

  But it was a crazy idea. A fantasy.

  “Full credit to the Yule Queen, though,” Dave was saying when Morrigan emerged from her daydream. “That snow dragon was brilliant. Baby Dave said she wants one as a pet, so that’s her next birthday sorted. Ha!”

  “I’ll have a dragon one day. A real one,” said Hawthorne matter-of-factly, licking toasted marshmallow from his fingers. Helena scoffed, and Homer rolled his eyes heartily, giving a sarcastic thumbs-up. “No, I will. I will, Nan said so! She said if I keep going the way I am and training hard, and if I do well in the annual tournaments in the next few years, when I graduate from junior to senior scholar she’ll see about getting me a dragon youngling of my own, to raise up and train to respond only to me. My own dragon, that nobody else can ride! It’s true, Homer, stop laughing.”

  Morrigan looked up in surprise at the silent Homer, to find he had indeed written Ha ha ha on his blackboard. As a student of the Conservatory of Thought, Homer had taken a vow of silence for all but one day of the year, so the blackboard went everywhere with him. He had not, however, taken any kind of vow against mockery, sarcasm, or scorn, and she liked that about him.

  “Hawthorne-in-My-Side,” said Helena as she poked a chunk of cheese onto the end of her skewer. “Why are dragon names so stupid?”

  Hawthorne screwed up his face. “What? Shut up, they are not.”

  “Yes, they are,” she insisted. “They’ve all got those long, pompous names like On a Glorious Flight to Valor and Victory, or Defeats His Enemies with Fire and Fury, or whatever.”

  “Oh, those are tournament names,” Hawthorne replied with a shrug. He paused to take a noisy sip of hot chocolate. “Every dragon entered into a tournament has to have a unique name to log in the record books. It can’t be too close to a name that any other dragon has had in the history of the tournament, and that goes back about four hundred years. So they’ve had to get creative.”

  “They’re not creative, they’re narcissistic,” said Helena. “Like that one who got gold in the Melee last year—Look How Big His Talons Are? I mean, honestly. Everyone knows that whatever name a rider gives their dragon, they’re really talking about themselves. They should just be more honest about it, that’s all. If you do get a dragon, Hawthorne, you should call it something true about yourself, like… I don’t know. Tries His Best But Is Mostly an Idiot?” she finished with a grin.

  The Swifts all laughed at that, even Hawthorne.

  “Needs to be more specific,” said Cat, her eyes twinkling. “How about… Practices Posing Heroically in Front of the Mirror?”

  “Nice one, Mum,” said Hawthorne, reaching over to steal a marshmallow from the end of her skewer. “If you had one we could call it Doesn’t Realize How Loud She Snores.”

  “HA!” Cat threw her head back in a booming laugh. She tossed a piece of popcorn at him in retaliation, but he caught it in his mouth and cheered.

  “What would Dad’s be, then?” Helena continued, grinning slyly at Dave. “How about—”

  “Farts Like a Draft Horse,” said Cat in a stage whisper. Morrigan and Hawthorne went into fits of giggles at this, while Helena groaned, “Ugh, Mum! Gross.”

  “Oi—careful, Catriona Swift, or yours’ll be Makes All Her Own Cups of Tea from Now On,” Dave replied indignantly, though he was trying not to laugh.

  Hawthorne’s eyes lit up. “What about Homer?”

  There was a moment’s silence. Morrigan looked from Hawthorne to Helena to Cat to Dave. She could practically see the gears in their brains turning as each tried to come up with the best zinger. But Homer was too quick—he’d already scrawled out a name on his blackboard, and he held it up for them to see.

  Hopes He’s Adopted.

  There was an eruption of laughter as they all applauded the clear winner of the unofficial dragon-naming competition. Homer speared the last marshmallow, looking quietly pleased with himself.

  It was a cheerful ending to a brilliant Christmas Eve. But when Fenestra showed up to take her home, Morrigan was surprised to realize she felt a certain amount of relief.

  She adored Hawthorne’s family. She really did. She loved the way Cat and Dave teased each other. Homer made her laugh all the time, and even though she’d only just met Helena, she liked her already. She didn’t even mind being tyrannized by Baby Dave. And Hawthorne, well… he was her best friend.

  But, although she would never have let it show, being around the Swifts all together like this made Morrigan feel a tiny bit… what was it? Not jealous, exactly. Just…

  Well, yes. Jealous. If she was being honest with herself.

  She couldn’t even articulate precisely what she was jealous of. It was something about their ease with each other, the natural way they all just seemed to… fit. They were a puzzle with no missing parts.

  Morrigan’s family—her father, stepmother, grandmother, and twin half brothers—lived far away in the Wintersea Republic, and they didn’t have any missing parts either. They used to have an unwanted spare part, but now she lived in Nevermoor at the Hotel Deucalion.

  It was just a small ache, coming from some deep and probably unimportant place inside, almost imperceptible if she didn’t pay too much attention to her feelings. (And Morrigan tried not to make a habit of paying too much attention to her feelings.)

  But it was there, and she didn’t like it. The Swifts were good people. They were always kind to her, always made her feel welcome. It seemed ungrateful, somehow, to nurse this small resentment.

  And yet on the way home, when Fenestra muttered, “Very obnoxious, that family,” Morrigan felt a mean little laugh bubble up out of her chest before she could stop it.

  Then the sting of instant regret. She dug her fingernails into her palms, leaving tiny red marks in the shape of crescent moons.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DE FLIMSÉ

  Morrigan slept with her curtains open that night so that she would wake to the sight of a winter wonderland outside her windows, and when morning arrived she wasn’t disappointed. It looked as if the snow hadn’t stopped all night long, and it was impossible to see much of anything through the flurries of white still falling thick and fast.

  Blinking groggily, she propped herself up in her bed. It had transformed while she was sleeping from a four-poster into something resembling an enormous replica of Saint Nick’s sleigh, filled with dozens of plump velvet cushions and soft woolen blankets.

  “Very nice,” Morrigan said to her bedroom, in a voice still croaky from sleep. She’d recently decided to be more complimentary when it did something she really like
d. A few weeks earlier she’d made a vague noise of distaste at a very modern, abstract painting that had shown up on her wall, and she swore it must have hurt the room’s feelings or something, because the next three nights her bed had turned into a dog kennel, then a hamster cage, then a large terra-cotta pot full of cactus plants. She’d been extra cautious ever since.

  Saint Nicholas had once again delivered; a plump, overfilled stocking hung from the mantelpiece. Even more inviting, a pile of gifts sat on the end of the sleigh bed.

  Martha had given her a wicker basket full of brightly colored bubble baths and carved soaps. Kedgeree’s gift was a small, exquisite version of the bird chandelier in the lobby, handcrafted from glittering black beads and silver wire. Frank had given her a book bound in bloodred cloth called One Hundred Gruesome Deaths in the Age of the Nightwalkers. There was a delicate amethyst bracelet from Dame Chanda, a pair of jodhpurs and a promise of horse-riding lessons from Charlie, and a large dead pheasant without a gift tag, which Morrigan presumed was from Fen. (It’s the thought that counts, she reminded herself as she tried to delicately push the feathered corpse off her bed with one toe.)

  But the most interesting present was hanging from the bony wrist of her skeleton coatrack: a pair of ice skates made from crimson leather, their laces loosely knotted together. There was a small handwritten card that Morrigan couldn’t read from this distance, but she knew instantly who this present must be from.

  Tumbling awkwardly out of the sleigh, she crossed her bedroom floor and took the skates down from the hook. Sure enough, the card read:

  Jolly Christmas, Mog.

  —J.N.

  Morrigan grinned, shaking her head. They were shiny and beautiful, but she had no idea how to ice-skate.

  Still, she thought, holding up the skates to admire the fine red leather and stitching. Very pretty. As the skates spun in a circle, a glint of reflected light caught her eye. Attached to the laces was a small, old-fashioned silver key.

  Ah! An excited little tornado of moths began to flutter in Morrigan’s stomach. This wasn’t, after all, the first time that Jupiter had given her a slightly odd gift. It wasn’t the first time he had given her a key.

  A memory came to her of a strange locked door on a quiet floor of the Hotel Deucalion. The tip of her oilskin umbrella—a birthday present from Jupiter—turning in the lock with a satisfying click. An enchanted lantern-lit room full of shadow-monsters within.

  A strange but splendid present, from her strange but splendid patron.

  There was a sudden knock on Morrigan’s bedroom door. She ran to open it, Jupiter’s gift still clutched tight in one hand, and was greeted by a confused-looking Jack. His pajamas were rumpled, eye patch crooked, and hair an absolute mess… and he too was holding a pair of ice skates. His were made of rich forest-green leather.

  “Right,” Jack said, blinking down at Morrigan’s red ones. “Thought so. Weird, though, cos there isn’t any—”

  “—skating rink nearby?” she finished for him. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. But did you also get—”

  “—a key?” He held out his other hand, where a silver key sat, catching the light. “Yep. You?”

  She held up her identical one, grinning. “Do you think we should—”

  “Definitely,” he agreed. “And bring the skates.”

  It was still early, and the Deucalion was mostly quiet but for the occasional rustle of someone in a pink-and-gold uniform hurrying down a hallway. Jack and Morrigan tried at least a dozen doors throughout the hotel (avoiding guest bedrooms and places they already knew) before at last finding their present on the ninth floor: a large oak double door with two locks. They each tried to open it separately first, to no avail.

  “Ugh, I knew it,” Jack groaned as they turned both keys simultaneously and the door opened with a soft click. “I knew he’d make it so we had to cooperate, or something. That’s so Uncle Jove.”

  The doors swung open and a gust of icy wind hit them fair in the face. Morrigan and Jack stood still, both entirely speechless for once as their brains tried to make sense of the room’s vast interior.

  The room was not a room; it was a lake. A proper, for-real lake, inside the Hotel Deucalion. Frozen solid and surrounded by rolling snow-covered fields. The far opposite wall, on the horizon beyond the fields, was made of floor-to-ceiling arched windows, frosted over and letting in enough wintry sunshine to light the whole gargantuan space. Morrigan would never even have guessed the hotel was big enough to contain such a thing.

  And in the middle distance, twirling and spinning across the lake like he’d been doing it all his life, was Jupiter North in a pair of smart blue ice skates.

  “Took your time, didn’t you?” he shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. He swept over toward them at high speed. “Come on, then. It’s a very good lake. Get your skates on!”

  Jack didn’t hesitate; within moments, he’d laced up his boots, tottered out onto the ice, then glided away like a professional athlete.

  Typical, Morrigan thought, making a face at the two of them as they circled each other, skating backward and then switching direction seamlessly to go forward again.

  Jack called out to her, “Morrigan, hurry up and get out here! This is so much fun! It’s a very good lake.”

  She wasn’t so sure. She’d never ice-skated before. Growing up as a registered cursed child, she’d learned to avoid any activities that had even the smallest chance of ending in catastrophe. Ice-skating had most definitely been off the list.

  “Mog!” shouted Jupiter. “What are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know how to ice-skate.”

  “What?”

  “I DON’T KNOW HOW TO ICE-SKATE!” she shouted.

  “Nor do I,” said Jack, taking off to the other side of the lake with an uncanny grace.

  “No, nor do I,” echoed Jupiter.

  Morrigan rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah, I can see that. That quadruple spin thing you just did looked really amateurish.”

  Her patron soared over to where she stood at the edge of the lake and came to a neat stop, breathing heavily but smiling all over his stupid ginger-bearded face.

  So annoying, thought Morrigan.

  “No, Mog, really,” Jupiter said. “I’ve always been rubbish at ice-skating. I’ve got no idea what I’m doing. Just try it, all right? It really is a very good lake.”

  She hesitated, looking down at the skates still in her hand.

  “Do you trust me?” he asked.

  She looked up. He’d asked her that once before, when there’d been much higher stakes than just an awkward fall on the ice, and her answer then had been an unequivocal yes.

  It was still a yes.

  Morrigan gathered her nerve, laced up her skates, lurched dubiously out onto the ice, and took a few wobbly steps, certain she was going to fall flat on her face at any moment…

  … then launched into a series of perfect pirouettes, followed swiftly by an arabesque spin, and ending with a neat little axel jump. Jack and Jupiter burst into applause. A surprised laugh tumbled out of Morrigan’s mouth and skipped across the frozen landscape.

  They skated for hours, and it was the most extraordinary sensation. It felt as if the ice and her feet were connected, like they were communicating somehow without her even having to think about it. She felt cushioned and weightless. There was no risk of falling. No risk, in fact, of anything bad happening while she was on this lake.

  It was a very good lake.

  Lunch was held in the fancy dining room for the paying Deucalion guests as normal, but this year Jupiter had set up a long table in his private parlor for the staff (and Jack and Morrigan) to share the meal as a family. They enjoyed five delicious, meandering courses, ending with a plum pudding that Morrigan set alight with a triumphant whoosh of Inferno, to thunderous applause from all.

  Several hours later there they still were, everyone full of food and good cheer, and nobody yet willing to call an end to the festi
vities. Martha and Charlie were working on a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle together, sitting closer than was strictly necessary, whispering and giggling an awful lot. Frank and Kedgeree had briefly fallen out over a passionate argument about how they would rank the top five hotels in Nevermoor, but then reconciled over their shared belief that the Deucalion was definitely number one, and that their chief rival, the Hotel Aurianna, didn’t even make the list.

  Dame Chanda had a pile of newspapers and was scouring the cultural sections for reviews of her Christmas pantomime performance at the Nevermoor Opera House, reading the best bits aloud to the room. Morrigan, Jack, and Jupiter were seated by the fire playing round after round of an old game called Tax Collector, while Fenestra snored loudly on the rug beside them. (Jupiter won every round by exploiting various mysterious loopholes in the rule book, but Jack was determined to beat him. Morrigan enjoyed the bit where you set the other players’ villages on fire if they couldn’t pay their taxes. She’d already melted two playing pieces and singed a hole in the middle of the board.)

  At one point there was a sudden, dramatic gasp from Dame Chanda.

  “Jupiter!” she cried, beckoning him over to look at her newspaper. “Did you see this?”

  Jupiter stood and crossed the room to read over Dame Chanda’s shoulder. His forehead wrinkled as his eyes flitted across the page.

  “Oh dear,” he murmured. “How awful.”

  “Poor, sweet Juvela.” Dame Chanda turned her mournful face up to Jupiter’s and grasped his arm. “Darling, we must send flowers. No—we must take flowers immediately. A whole carriage full of them. It’s De Flimsé.”

  “Quite right,” Jupiter agreed, nodding.

  “What’s De Flimsé?” Morrigan asked.

  “Oh, you’ve heard of De Flimsé, darling,” said the opera singer with an airy wave. “Of course you have. It’s De Flimsé. You know… De Flimsé.”

  Jack looked up from where he was assembling the board for round five of Tax Collector. “De Whosay?”