Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,3

and rolled her eyes. ‘And you’re not supposed to be a boring cry-baby who’s constantly telling everyone what to do, but here we are.’

Anah scowled at her. ‘If you do it again, I’ll tell your Scholar Mistress.’

As she stomped up the path ahead of them, Cadence muttered to Morrigan, ‘I liked her better when she couldn’t remember who I was.’

If Anah really was inclined to tell the terrifying Scholar Mistress for the Arcane Arts, Morrigan thought she’d have her work cut out for her. She’d been trying to speak with Mrs Murgatroyd herself for weeks now, but it was proving impossible. Every time she saw her in the halls of Proudfoot House, she seemed to get lost in the crowd, or even worse, to suddenly transform into her School of Mundane Arts counterpart, the awful Ms Dearborn. It had happened so often lately, Morrigan was beginning to wonder if Murgatroyd was deliberately avoiding her … or if Dearborn was trying to interfere.

Until about six weeks ago, Morrigan had been a greysleeve – a scholar of the Mundane Arts, just like Hawthorne, Anah, Mahir, Arch, Francis and Thaddea. Overseen by Scholar Mistress Dulcinea Dearborn, the School of Mundane Arts was the largest of two educational streams in the Wundrous Society, comprising three departments: the Practicalities on Sub-Three, Humanities on Sub-Four, and Extremities on Sub-Five.

The School of Arcane Arts was much less populated, but still had its own dedicated three subterranean floors, deep beneath the red-brick five-storey building of Proudfoot House and only accessible to Arcane scholars.

They were much harder to navigate than the orderly Mundane floors. They weren’t divided into three departments so much as countless covens, workshops, clubs, labs, top-secret mini-societies and top-top-secret guilds dedicated to various esoterica – none of which seemed to acknowledge their own existence, or each other’s. There were an awful lot of locked doors and unanswered questions in the Arcane school, but in the past six weeks Morrigan had learned to simply go where her timetable sent her and nowhere else – certainly not, for example, down a mysterious fog-laden hallway that hadn’t been there the day before. Detours like that were guaranteed to make you late for class.

Dearborn had been furious to learn that Murgatroyd had swiped Morrigan from the Mundane into the Arcane Arts. Not, of course, because she had any warm feelings towards her – just the opposite, really. Dearborn didn’t think she should be in the Wundrous Society at all; she couldn’t tolerate the idea of Morrigan learning anything more than the absolute bare minimum. It would be so like the icy, silver-haired Scholar Mistress, she thought, to sabotage her education from afar.

‘You’re being paranoid,’ Cadence said when Morrigan mentioned it later that afternoon. They were lurking in a hallway on Sub-Seven waiting for Lam, so they could all head to their final class of the term together. ‘Anyway, why would you want to talk to Murgatroyd? Personally, I try to avoid it as much as possible.’

Morrigan found that most people tried to avoid the unsettling Mrs Murgatroyd as much as possible, and with good reason … but she still preferred her to Ms Dearborn.

‘Look at this.’ She sighed and held out her timetable, pointing to that morning’s roster of lessons. ‘Peering Into the Future. Finding Your Familiar. Yesterday it was Opening a Dialogue with the Dead.’

‘You said you loved that class! You love spooky stuff.’

‘I did,’ she admitted. ‘I do. I just don’t know why Murgatroyd keeps putting me in all these weird subjects, when she’s the one who said I should be learning –’ Morrigan paused, glancing around to make sure nobody could overhear. She lowered her voice a little ‘– the Wretched Arts.’

A brief look of discomfort crossed Cadence’s face. She knew as much as Morrigan did about the Wretched Arts – which was to say, not very much at all.

Morrigan knew the Wretched Arts were the tools of the so-called ‘accomplished Wundersmith’, and that she’d have to learn how to use them if she was ever going to understand what it really meant to be a Wundersmith. She’d picked up a few little scraps, and she’d been practising them on her own. But there was only one other person in the entire realm who could properly wield the Wretched Arts … and it was an uneasy feeling indeed, to have something so important in common with him.

‘I just mean … I’m not a clairvoyant!’ Morrigan went on. ‘Or an oracle, or a sorcerer, or a witch, or