Wintersea Basement Theory + Five Years
One thing I noticed a few rereads ago was there was an interesting line up between Corvus Crow becoming Chancellor of Great Wolfacre
"That he was enjoying his fifth year as state chancellor despite such a handicap was a daily miracle to Corvus Crow, and the question of whether he could sustain this implausible luck for another year was a daily anxiety"
(Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow, Chapter One: The Cursed Crow)
and Jack's permanent residency at the Hotel Deucalion
"'Your chair? You've lived here all of five minutes and you've claimed the furniture? I've lived here five years. This happens to be where I eat my breakfast.'"
(Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow, Chapter Twelve: Shadows)
Originally I wrote this off as a coincidence, since I had been of the camp that Jack's parents were dead and nothing more was to be said about it without more information. But! With Silverborn out we have more information, and I'm more interested now about what could possibly be up with Rosie and Arj and where they could be.
Last summer, when the final delay was announced, and AUS paperback/US cover was revealed, Jessica Townsend did a Q&A, with two answers in particular that I found curious [full transcript here and video by @/nevermoor source:
What’s one thing about the direction of the series from Silverborn onwards you can say?
This is such a good question, So I remember, one or two books ago, talking to my publishers about kind of the structure of the series and the way that I see it. And I've talked about this before in interviews about how I see the series as being like, it's all one story. It's all Morrigan. It's all Morrigan’s point of view. But thematically they feel to me like three separate “acts.”
And I feel like the first act is Morrigan. It's like her immediate world. It's herself. It's her friends. It's finding a new family. It's finding her way in this new city.
And books four to six sort of feel like it's zooming out. So we're in quite close on Morrigan and her immediate, like, experiences of the world personally. And it's seen through that lens. And then with four, five, and six, it's like, we sort of zoom out and just see more of the world. We see more of Nevermoor kind of socially and politically and geographically A lot of different parts of Nevermoor that we haven't seen open up. She learns more about the Wundrous Society, more about herself and her own past and origins and family.
And then book seven, eight, nine kind of zoom out again. And we see… it's really tricky without trying to sort of give too much away, but, yeah… I feel like I nearly said too much.
Are we getting a realm hopping boom? Well! Definitely possibly!!
In Silverborn, Jack reveals that in the Spring Term, he's planning on accepting the League's offer to join them, with conditions around becoming an officer far sooner, to start his plans around joining the League and immediately going AWOL to look for his parents.
He smiled a disconcertingly vicious smile.
'Because I want them to keep coming on their little fishing expeditions. I always decline to speak to them, but I'm letting them see my resolution waver, and in the spring term I'll finally, reluctantly agree. Then my plan begins.'
[...]
'I'm playing the long game. Laying the groundwork for a negotiation. If they want me to enlist, I'm going to be the first person in history to become a ranked officer at eighteen, after my year of academy training. As a lieutenant, I won't have to wait four years to travel to outer realms like the other academy chumps.' His eyes locked on Morrigan's, blazing with reflected firelight. 'And on my very first outer realm mission, I'll abandon ship, set out on my own, and find my parents.'
(Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow, Chapter Thirty-Five: Merriment, Mystery, and Mutually Assured Destruction)
This scene ties into what was said in the Q&A
Is there more of Jack in Silverborn?
There is more of Jack in Silverborn. I will be honest to tell you, there's not like a mountain of page time for Jack, but the scenes that he is in are crucial, and they're really important for… I would say that there's a scene with Jack in this book that is probably the most important scene in the book in terms of what it sets up for future, for the rest of the series. (I've probably said too much, that's all I'm gonna say.)
And the final part of the Q&A I find relevant/interesting to this is this part:
Will we see more of the Free State as opposed to just Nevermoor?
Not in this book. In future books? I think so.
Now, what am I getting at here? Why am I calling it Wintersea Basement Theory? Um so the name is sort of a joke, like a very hyperbole thing of Rosie and Arj have been in Wintersea's Basement the whole time. Do I think they literally are? No? Yes? No? Maybe? Yes? I functionally think that Jack is not going to find his parents when he inevitably goes AWOL, but Morrigan is either going to ask Squall to help her, and find something nasty about that, either Corvus or Ornella were involved at some level, directly causing Corvus to become chancellor through some shady dealings, or that Bertram did something, or tried to stop it and failed. A big reason I think Morrigan is going to find Rosie and Arj is simply because she is the main character. That is what she does. It's so big that if it happened off screen, I think it would be less satisfying. I could be wrong, Jessica Townsend is a very skilled writer, but if I were writing that, I would have Mog find them. Or find out what happened to them. Why does Wintersea have them? Dunno, maybe they were spying on her and got caught à la what nearly happened to Jupiter when he met Ornella:
"As part of my work with the League of Explorers, I am sometimes required to provide intelligence to the Free State Security department regarding conditions in the Wintersea Republic ... could have made one cry for help, and I'd have been arrested and likely never seen again."
(Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow, Chapter Forty-Four: The Letters From Jupiter)
In Chapter Thirty-Five of Silverborn, Jack says that his mother worked for the League, while his father was an interrealm diplomat. Although Jack says his parents were on an outer realm mission, it's not impossible that they might have lied to him, since that's a lot less vague and scary than "we're going to spy on our enemy nation for a fortnight or so, cheerio", although Arj's occupation wouldn't make much sense here, unless he was doing spy work as well. It's possible too that their gate was interfered with. I think it's been suggested already that Rosie or Arj was a spy for the Wintersea Republic, and did something. Chickened out, or got caught, or were double agents for the Free State. But they're in the Wintersea Republic, and Squall knows where they are/what happened to them, and at least one of the Crows adult had a hand in what happened to them and it's related to how Corvus became Chancellor.
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