Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend

Author:Jessica Townsend
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, YA
Published: 2017-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE CHASE TRIAL

Summer was dying, but it refused to go down without a fight. The last weeks of August brought a heat wave to Nevermoor, with blazing temperatures and blazing tempers to match.

“Can we please take this seriously?” Morrigan said irritably. “The second trial is only three days away.”

She’d been trying to talk to Jupiter for an hour, but his attention span had evaporated in the heat. He sat in a shady corner of the Palm Courtyard, drinking glasses of peach sangria and waving a handheld fan. Fenestra was sunbathing nearby, while Frank snored quietly under an enormous sombrero. Jupiter had given all staff the afternoon off. It was much too hot to work, and they’d been sniping among themselves all morning.

Jack, mercifully, was nowhere to be seen. Morrigan thought he was probably tucked away in his bedroom practicing the cello, which was where he’d spent most of the summer—at least, when he wasn’t kicking Morrigan out of the best spot in the Smoking Parlor, or criticizing her table manners during dinner, or scowling in her general direction. Morrigan couldn’t wait for him to go back to school so the Deucalion could feel like hers again. He’d reached heights of unbearable smugness when he’d been allowed to go to the Nevermoor Bazaar with his school friends. Morrigan had waited the whole summer for Jupiter to take her, but every week something more important would call him away. Now the bazaar was over for the year, and Morrigan had missed out. All things considered, she was happy to see the last days of summer… even if that meant it was time for her next nerve-racking trial.

“Do you think he’s okay under there?” Jupiter asked, cracking one sleepy eye open to look at Frank. “He’s not going to burn down to ashes, is he? I don’t know how dwarf vampires work.”

“Vampire dwarves,” Morrigan said. “And he’s fine. Can we please focus on the Chase Trial? I need a steed. And it can’t have more than four legs—that’s in the rules.”

“Right.”

“And I can’t fly.”

“You certainly cannot,” said Jupiter, taking a sip of sangria, “for you are Crow in name only.”

Morrigan huffed. “No, I mean—the rules say—”

“Lighten up, Mog,” Jupiter snorted. “I know what the rules say: You can’t ride a flying animal. There was some kerfuffle a few years back with a dragon and a pelican. Poor bird got burned to a cinder three seconds after takeoff. More of a pelican’t, in the end. Eh? Pelican’t?” He grinned lazily at Morrigan, but her sense of humor had also evaporated. “Anyway. They banned the whole bunch of them, and now everyone goes on the ground.”

The rules for the Chase Trial had arrived by messenger the day before, sending Morrigan into a spin. It shocked her to realize that all these weeks, she’d barely given the Chase a thought. Perhaps Jack’s annoying presence all summer had been a blessing as well as a curse. They’d been so busy arguing and getting in each other’s way, it hadn’t left any time for Morrigan to dwell on the upcoming trial.

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