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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Tempus

The shadow wolves slunk close to Morrigan, and she felt one brush against the palm of her hand. The Hush lifted, a familiar shift in her mind as instant and effortless as if someone had turned on a lamp in a dark room, and her memories walked, fully formed, out of the shadows.

That trick – using her reach, shaking out the floor – he taught her that. Squall. But it had only taken her by surprise because she didn’t know she could do it. Because she wouldn’t let him remove the Hush. Because she wasn’t ready to tell the truth about her apprenticeship.

Morrigan’s fury turned inwards, and she clamped it down. She had to fix this.

‘Can they see us?’ She waved a hand in front of Miss Cheery’s face, watching for any minute reaction. ‘Can they hear?’

‘I think not.’ Squall tilted his head. ‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’ she pressed, feeling close to hysteria. It was bad enough she’d just destroyed part of their house. Now she’d let the most hated man in Nevermoor into it. ‘When Professor Onstald did this it was like … I’d slowed down, but he hadn’t. I could still hear and see everything.’

He took a leisurely stroll across the room to Lady Darling, leaning in to examine her eyes up close. ‘Mmm. This is a full stop. Onstald’s work was an ellipsis at best. The tortoisewun could stretch time, but stopping it completely was a skill he never mastered.’

‘Then how have I mastered it already?’

He laughed. ‘ You haven’t mastered it either, I’m afraid. This is a fairly typical first invocation of a Wundrous Art. Happens to most young Wundersmiths at some stage. It happened to you before, remember?’

‘When I breathed fire for the first time.’

‘You’d never learned the art of Inferno, but in a moment of rage, you invoked its fullest and purest expression.’ As he spoke, Squall wandered to the far side of the room, admiring the view from the shattered window. The grounds of Darling House swept down towards the Greater Circle canal, and the floral expanse of the Paramour Pleasure Gardens beyond that. ‘Powerful feelings can forge powerful pathways into discovering our abilities. Rage and Inferno are siblings; they have an obvious connection. Tempus, on the other hand … let me guess. You did something stupid. You panicked. You wanted to take it back.’

Morrigan nodded. Her heart still felt like a bird beating its wings violently against a cage. ‘How do I end it? How do I start time again?’

Squall gave an indifferent shrug. ‘It’ll start itself.’

‘ When? ’ she demanded, and her voice echoed desperately in the vast, still space.

‘Once you’ve calmed down, I expect.’ He swung back around to her then, suddenly annoyed, and jabbed a finger towards the Darlings. ‘You know, this is precisely the sort of distraction we don’t need right now. Whose idiotic idea was it? Introducing you to your mother’s family?’

‘I don’t – Holliday’s, I suppose …’ Morrigan took a deep, slow breath to try to calm her thumping heart rate, then had a sudden realisation that spiked it again. ‘Wait, how did you— What do you know about my mother’s family ?’

‘You don’t think I do background checks before attempting to kidnap people?’ he asked wryly. ‘Meredith “Malcontent” Darling, the newspapers called her. By all accounts a silly, spoiled twenty-year-old, born with a silver spoon and a rebellious streak. Nobody seems to know how she found her way through the border, but after graduating from a very exclusive finishing school she absconded from the Free State, leaving the Grand Old House of Darling to pick up the tattered remnants of their reputation.’

Morrigan’s mouth fell open. ‘She ran away … from Nevermoor? To the Wintersea Republic?’

‘There’s no accounting for taste,’ said Squall. ‘The enterprising Miss Malcontent wormed her way into the inner circle of the Wintersea Party, married a ranked member as educated and ambitious as herself, and helped to hoist him up the political ladder. I refer, of course, to your loathsome father.’

Morrigan raised both eyebrows. She and Squall disagreed on many things, but at least they were in lockstep on Corvus Crow.

‘Young, well-bred Mrs Crow was the darling of the party wives for a brief time,’ he went on. ‘Until she had the misfortune of conceiving you.’

‘Did you know her?’ she asked, letting the insult roll off her back.

‘No.’

‘You must have!’ she accused him. ‘You’re in Wintersea’s inner circle, aren’t you?’

He gave her a scathing look. ‘It’s not as exclusive a club as you might think, and I’ve never made it a habit to play backgammon with the spouses of politicians.’

Morrigan pulled her coat tight around her ribs, trying to cocoon herself as she paced back and forth, smashed tiles crunching beneath her boots. Her head was reeling, overloaded with the mountain of new information that had been shovelled into it in one afternoon.

My mother was from Nevermoor.

My mother ran away from Nevermoor … to the Wintersea Republic.

My mother was a traitor.

That’s what all of this added up to, she realised, connecting the dots in her mind. Meredith Darling had left the Free State and married a member of their enemy nation’s ruling political party. That was treason . When Lady Margot said it was complicated, she’d been understating it.

Corvus and Ornella had never told her anything about her mother, and she’d known better than to ask. She had no memories, no letters, no stories. Meredith Crow was just a lovely face, an idea that lived in the confines of a gilt frame, locked away in the dark and lonely Hall of Dead Crows.

But this new person, Meredith Darling – this woman she was meeting for the first time … She was a traitor. Meredith Darling was a rebel. She was a person, a real human being who existed and had stories and made choices – dreadful ones, apparently.

And perhaps Morrigan should have been appalled by this revelation. But the truth was, she was exhilarated by it.

After thirteen years, her mother had at last come to life.

And here she was, standing in the house where Meredith had grown up, staring at her family, who held all those missing stories and memories in their hands like long-lost treasures … and with one reckless, idiotic, catastrophic impulse, Morrigan had thrown it all away. Just because she couldn’t control her temper.

She felt the unreasonable urge to lash out at someone else. ‘You knew my mother’s family lived in Nevermoor and you just, what? Forgot to mention it? ’

Squall looked at her with pure, perplexed amusement. ‘I don’t recall you hiring me as your on-call detective. I’ll invoice you for the legwork, shall I?’

Morrigan glowered but ultimately had nothing to say to that. Of course he hadn’t told her. Why would he? Out of the nonexistent goodness of his nonexistent heart? The man murdered eight of his own friends; not bothering to tell Morrigan she had relatives in Nevermoor was hardly the worst of his crimes.

‘Your precious patron, on the other hand,’ he continued, ‘seems to have been holding out on you all this time.’

‘I – Jupiter ?’ Morrigan yelped incredulously. ‘ He doesn’t know any of this! Holliday said the Elders were briefing him about it this afternoon. If he knew before then, he would’ve …’ She trailed off. He would have told me , a voice finished in her head.

Squall’s eyelids drooped like a hound. ‘Why don’t you ask Captain Wonderful and find out?’

‘Why are you even here?’ She’d wanted to pivot to a less prickly topic, but only as she asked the question did Morrigan realise how odd his arrival actually was. ‘We weren’t supposed to meet today.’

‘Believe me, I have better things to do. I felt this little disturbance through the Gossamer and had a sneaking suspicion you might have done something calamitous.’ He gestured at the mess she’d made of the Receiving Room. ‘But I can see now you’ve got a terrific handle on things, so I’ll just—’

‘Wait!’ A tiny seed of hope began to blossom inside her chest. She didn’t know how to fix this mess, but Squall did. ‘You can turn back time. Lean on me through the Gossamer, like when we destroyed the Hollowpox. Please. You can use Tempus to undo all this!’

Squall gasped in faux surprise. ‘Can I really ? Lucky me.’

‘I—’ Morrigan faltered. Admittedly she’d never taken a lesson in Tempus, so she couldn’t say she understood its scope. Her hope began to wilt. ‘Are you saying … Is that not something you can … do?’

‘I can do it,’ he said. ‘What I’m telling you is that I won’t .’

‘Why not?’

‘It isn’t particularly ethical, for one thing.’

Morrigan’s jaw dropped so dramatically, it might have unhinged itself like a boa constrictor. ‘SAYS THE MURDERER.’

He ignored that. ‘And for another, I don’t believe it serves you to conceal your true nature. Why not let them see what you’re capable of? Sometimes a healthy bit of fear is a good thing.’

‘Why would I want them to be afraid of me? I’m not you !’ she shouted, close to tears of frustration. ‘Don’t you get it? They won’t want anything to do with me now. They’ll never invite me back here! Not now that they know I’m dangerous.’

‘Oh, I doubt that.’ Squall stepped close to examine Lady Margot, a curious expression on his face. ‘If anything, they know you’re valuable.’

‘Just one minute ,’ she pleaded. ‘ One minute so I can un-ruin everything!’

‘ Just one minute ,’ he mocked her. ‘ Just one more week. Unravel time! Don’t remove the Hush! Do you know how pathetic you sound? I’m not your magical butler, Morrigan Crow. That’s not the nature of this arrangement. How will you find the courage to stand on your choices if I clean up every mess you make?’

‘Is that what this is about? The Hush?’ Morrigan tugged at her white shirt collar, suddenly unable to bear the fabric against her skin. The stillness of the room, the stillness of time, was stifling , and her own voice sounded unbearably shrill in her ears. ‘ Fine . I’ll give you back the week I asked for if you’ll give me this one minute . Deal?’

A warm breath of air drifted in through the broken window, tickling the back of her neck. Time was slowly, slowly beginning to grind back into life.

‘ Deal? ’ she pressed him frantically.

But Squall shook his head as he stepped onto the Gossamer bridge and began to walk backwards across it. He flung a hand vaguely in the direction of the Darlings.

‘I really think they ought to know what they’re dealing with.’

‘Wait— No! ’

But it was too late. Squall had gone, the Hush was descending in Morrigan’s mind and time was stretching like caramel, like a rubber band ready to snap back at any second. This still, quiet reprieve was about to end, and she was going to have to stand on her choices after all, to face the consequences and the mess and all those terrified, disappointed faces.

But the Hush hadn’t fallen all the way yet. There was still a window of escape if she chose to take it.

Morrigan whistled, low and eerie. Her escape route galloped out of the shadows, eyes like burning coals. She mounted her shadow horse, and by the time Darling House had stuttered back to life, she was gone.