Volume 2: Burglary

by R. A. Consell

  “Of course,” Willis replied, now full of friendly familiarity. “See you at the lodge. Make sure they don’t start to eat without us!”

  Kuro feigned a smile and waved politely as he turned and restarted his journey to Autumn Lodge.

  The narrow road was packed with cars and carriages delivering the students too wealthy to walk the few hundred yards to the Chateau du Printemps, and vastly too proper to sweat their way through the heat to get to the Summerhill Residence in their travelling clothes.

  Kuro bolted past the line of slow-moving vehicles with a wind at his back, startling drivers and spooking horses as he went. But it wasn’t until the line of black sedans discharged their passengers in the middle of Summer and folded themselves down into briefcases that Kuro could really cut loose.

  He gathered a gale behind him so strong that his feet could hardly keep up. He bounded down the hill through the rest of Summer at irresponsible speeds, a loose piece of gravel away from disaster the entire time.

  The stifling heat of the quarter broke, and the leaves started to change to the brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges of fall. The crisp autumn air, with its musty scent of damp moss and dry leaves, filled his lungs, letting him know that he was nearly home.

  Another mile of sprinting along the dirt road, as the pavement had given up in Summer, had the Autumn Lodge in view. The broad low log building welcomed him with the warm glow of a fire in the hearth leaking through the small windows at the front. Kuro paused nearly long enough to catch his breath and wipe his feet before pushing open the heavy wooden door and hopping inside.

  The lounge was just as he remembered it. Too much furniture and none of it matching. The wood floors, varnished too many times, were still full of chips and dents from years of mistreatment by incautious students. The couches and armchairs surrounding the fire were all faded and patched, with worn-out springs, so that they swallowed anyone who sat in them. The soft light was just a bit too dim to read by without squinting. And the whole room was just the right amount of warm and smoky to fight away the chill autumn breeze outside. It was a perfectly engineered space for long naps and slow cups of hot chocolate.

  Something was unsettling about the lounge, however: it was eerily quiet. The occasional cracks and pops from the fire punctuated how otherwise silent the building was.

  Kuro had expected to be the first student to arrive—in fact, it was his intention. He had an ulterior motive for getting there before the others, a mail-related mystery to unravel, and the lutin who worked at the lodge were his next best lead. Lutin who were conspicuously absent.

  Kuro hadn’t considered that possibility. The lutin were always at the lodge; they were all but inescapable. The tiny people clambered in the rafters, chattering at each other in their squirrel-like voices. They climbed over and under all the furniture, cleaning and tidying, happily interrupting and inconveniencing students to do so. They were an ever-present feature of the lodge, and they were entirely missing.

  Kuro checked the dining hall and then the kitchen. There were always at least a couple of lutin cooking or cleaning there, and the welcome-back meal would need a lot of work.

  They were empty.

  They weren’t just empty; it was as though they had been abandoned in a hurry. There were half-set tables, half-diced vegetables on cutting boards, bacon and broccoli sizzling in a frying pan, and a pot of peach and asparagus soup threatening to boil over.

  Worried that there was some unseen danger from which he should be evacuating, Kuro quickly moved the pots off the heat and hurried back towards the exit, whereupon he found several lutin greeting the arriving students.

  Some of the high schoolers owned flying brooms and carpets of their own and got to the lodge nearly as quickly as Kuro. They were exchanging “hellos” and “how do you dos” with the lutin, who were sitting casually right where they hadn’t been moments earlier. Kuro heard a shuffling in the kitchen. He ran back in to find it still empty but the pots returned to their rightful place on the heat.

  Baffled and a little numb, he sank into a sofa in the lounge and waited for everyone else to arrive.

  The room gradually filled with the familiar cacophony of the lodge. Students started up games and conversations. Familiars chased each other around the room: bats, budgies, cats, and cobras playing a game of tag. Kuro was slowly joined on the couch by some of the other kids from his year, Magna, Gregory, and Arthur. The first two were so eager to share their stories of the summer that it saved Kuro or Arthur from having to say anything.

  The smell of food drifting in from the kitchen made everyone ravenous and impatient, but it wouldn’t be served until the first years arrived. While they all understood why the new students walked together in a group, it didn’t stop the complaints about how slow they were.

  They could only move as fast as their slowest member, but keeping clumped up avoided any of them being lost, eaten, or exploded on their way, which would delay mealtime even more. The food wasn’t served until they arrived because it was an excellent incentive for the older students to go and find them quickly should any go missing.

  The arrival of old Pete with the baggage cart offered some distraction, for with him came the room assignments. He shuffled into the lodge, took a deep breath as if to shout the room into silence, but just let it out again in a slow wheeze. He handed a list off to one of the senior high school girls before throwing his beard over his shoulder and wandering back to help make dinner.

  The girl, probably the smallest in her year, interrupted a game of cards by climbing onto the table on which it was being played. “Oy! Stuff it!” she yelled. It was clear why Pete had chosen this girl as his speaker this year. She was impossibly loud for her size, and her voice carried an implied threat that her eyes promised to make good on.

  The room hushed, allowing her to continue in a volume and tone that was merely distressing, rather than jaw-clenchingly terrifying. “I’m Katherine Hammersmith. Pete’s put me in charge of the yelling this year. You can call me Katie if you want. You could also try calling me Kat, but not if you like walking without a limp. I’ve got the room assignments here, so keep quiet till I’m done.”

  She read through the list, starting at the senior high school girls and working backwards, down to the lower years. Kuro paid the list little mind until she reached the girls of his year. “Singh and Tanaka, room six. Cook and Akinwande, room five. Greenwood and Bedi, room four.”

  It was the same pairings as the previous year, which all the girls seemed pleased with. Kuro noted Charlie and Marie’s room number for them, since they were still walking with the first years.

  Katherine then repeated the same for the boys, finally arriving at some familiar names at the bottom of the list. “Cassidy and Kagen, room nine. Wood and Hayashi, room eight. Nobody’s in room seven ’cause they still haven’t fixed it after what Milton did to it last year. Khaldun and Zimmerman, room six. Right, that’s it. Go get your luggage.” She jammed the list in her pocket and hopped off the table, allowing conversation to resume.

  Kuro let out a long sigh. He shouldn’t have been surprised that he had been omitted from the list, as he was a perpetual clerical error. He looked to Arthur, whose face was a tableau in horror.

  “Hayashi?” said Arthur, the colour washing out of him completely.

  Arthur was not good with new people, and people were generally not comfortable with changelings. It had taken half of the previous year for him to get used to rooming with Kuro, and he didn’t seem eager to repeat the process.

  “Probably a third year without a roommate,” suggested Kuro. Even if that was true, it wasn’t good news. The odd student without a roommate was rarely the most likable of the group. Kuro and Arthur had lucked out by being amicably strange the year before. Hopefully, the fact that they hadn’t heard of Hayashi meant that he was shy rather than terrible.

  They sighed in collective resignation before separating, Arthur to find his room and
new roommate, Kuro to find the keeper of the list.

  He navigated the crowd and found Katherine hauling one end of her large wooden trunk toward the girls’ dormitory, the other end in the mouth of her familiar. She was difficult enough to approach when she was just yelling; being in the company of a mountain lion did not help the matter.

  It took three tries for Kuro to make a noise loud enough for her to hear. “Miss Hammersmith, could I bother you?”

  She responded by dropping her trunk and laughing. “Miss Hammersmith! Oh! That’s good.” She shook her head at the foolishness of her juniors. “Do I look like a teacher to you?”

  “Um . . .” Kuro took a moment to guess at what answer she would prefer. “No?”

  “Right,” she said. “Call me Katie. Not ‘miss’ anything. Not unless you want to be sleeping outside, that is.”

  “That’s sort of the thing, um, Katie,” Kuro said. “I might be sleeping outside already. I don’t think I was on the list.”

  She gave him a skeptical scowl. “I’m sure I saw your name,” she grumbled as she pulled the list back out.

  “You know my name?”

  “Of course.” She waved away his surprise like a moth flitting too close to her head. “After all the stuff that happened last year, everyone knows who you are.”

  Kuro was only given a moment to process the horrible truth of what she’d just said. He suddenly wished that he could be sleeping outside, hidden and unknown in the woods.

  “Yeah, there you are!” She thumbed a spot on the list. “Unless there’s another Kuro I don’t know about. You should have been listening better.”

  She presented the list to Kuro. There he was: room eight, Arthur Wood and Kuro Hayashi.

  He stared at the strange second name that followed his own. He had woken that morning convinced that he would solve a mystery. It seemed instead that he was accumulating more.

  Seven

  Familiar Faces

  After a summer of emptiness, the school was impatient to once again gorge on the torment of bored and frustrated children. There could be no other reason that classes needed to start straight away after arrival. Surely a day or two to get settled and reconnect with old friends would be allowed if the classrooms weren’t on the verge of starvation. At least that’s what Kuro thought as he tried and failed to pay attention in numerology.

  He couldn’t imagine what sort of monster would put that as their first class back to school. They could have had a gentle entry with something like music, or alchemy, or even one of the languages. Instead, they had Mrs. Lovelace turning their brains inside out.

  She had misled them by opening the lesson with a promise that their first class would just be a quick review of some of the important material from the year before.

  Kuro found that not only had he forgotten pretty much everything, but he had also forgotten it so thoroughly that nothing Mrs. Lovelace said was at all familiar. As she breezed over “simple” topics like the volumes of four-dimensional polyhedrons and commutative properties of irrational topologies, Kuro had only the faintest recognition of the words she was saying, and none whatsoever of the processes being demonstrated.

  At least he wasn’t alone.

  The classroom was awash with confusion and misery. Those still trying to make sense of the lesson had their features contorted in agony, their faces twisting to match the impossible geometries Lovelace was describing. Most had already succumbed to despair, however, and slumped in their seats with vacant hollow stares.

  They were so humbled by the experience that they were quiet for most of their next period, in social studies. Mr. Widdershins made it through fifteen minutes of uninterrupted teaching about the different rules of royal succession in the three kingdoms before he became unsettled by the silence. Their class hadn’t given him a moment of peace in their entire previous year. The young teacher was unaccustomed to being able to hear himself talk.

  “Are you all okay?” he asked, interrupting one of his own sentences.

  “Numerology.” Magna Singh said the word as though it might attack her for using it.

  Mr. Widdershins nodded in solemn understanding. “I’ll take it slow then,” he said before turning back to his chalkboard and spending the rest of class using large letters and small words.

  Somewhat refreshed by the compassion of Widdershins and his gentle pace, they set off for alchemy, which was immediately horrible.

  It wasn’t horrible like numerology, where the shared sense of misery fostered some sense of solidarity among the students. No, this was a very personal and direct kind of horrible specially tailored to Kuro.

  Alchemy should have been Kuro’s best class. He had lots of experience from assisting his former master with experiments and the production of potions and tinctures. His small and nimble hands helped with the delicate preparation and measurement of ingredients. Also, he enjoyed the practical nature of it, with much less theory and writing than the other classes. Yet, it was the first class where the Chateau du Printemps students joined the Autumn Lodgers, and with them came the insufferable Evelyn Lemieux d’Ys.

  She entered the room with the grace and authority of royalty, followed by a gaggle of retainers vying for her attention or hoping that some of her perfection might rub off on them. The moment her radiant smile fell on Kuro and Arthur, her whole bearing changed. The brilliant smile twisted into a grimace stretched over gritted teeth.

  She had suffered the indignity of earning only the second highest grade in alchemy class the year before. Arthur having earned a slightly higher grade was an offence against her, equivalent to high treason. While she hadn’t for a moment recognized Kuro’s skill as having any part of Arthur’s victory, she blamed him for the detentions she had been forced to serve after she’d been caught stealing.

  She stormed up to the work bench where the pair had sat themselves and declared war. “I will be earning the top grade this year, as I rightfully did last year.” She issued her challenge to Arthur while guarded by Dominique Gauthier, a brute of a boy who enjoyed the role of protecting her from the dangerous and unpredictable changeling.

  “Okay, that’s fine,” replied Arthur, not even looking up from his desk.

  He was naturally shy and rarely met people’s eyes, but Evelyn took this as a mark of disrespect and flushed in anger. She didn’t have any ammunition with which to continue her assault on Arthur, though, so she turned her anger on Kuro. “And you, thief,” she thrust her finger at Kuro aggressively but wouldn’t filthy herself by making contact with him. “Keep away from me. Better yet, don’t even speak in my presence.”

  Kuro gave her an enthusiastic thumbs up. That seemed a perfectly lovely arrangement to him. He had no desire to spend any time in her company and had few words to share with her that wouldn’t earn him a detention.

  Angered at having such amicable enemies but unwilling to lose the high ground in front of her followers, she tossed her luxurious locks back over her shoulders and strode to a bench at the front of the room to take her seat as near to the teacher as possible.

  The teacher, or “professeur” as he preferred to be called, lounged on his chaise blithely ignoring the students until the ringing of the bell demanded his service. He rose stiffly and adjusted his voluminous white wig.

  Professeur De Rigueur was old, thin, and always overdressed. He looked as though a fashionable Acadian gentleman had thrown everything he was wearing, including his skin, over a coat rack, which had then started teaching classes at Avalon.

  He began taking attendance, noting his favorite students along the way, and asking them about their families. It was what Kuro had come to expect from the alchemy teacher, which suited Kuro just fine. He hadn’t any family or achievements worthy of attention from the professeur, and he liked it that way. He doodled as he waited for his name to be called.

  He missed it.

  Twice.

  “Hayashi Kuro,” De Rigueur wheezed out a third tim
e, looking directly at Kuro.

  He said it backwards and in such a strange accent that Kuro hardly recognized his own name. “Here?” Kuro said slowly, trying to make sense of what the professeur was doing.

  “That’s a new name, Hayashi-kun, do you like it?” De Rigueur sounded very pleased with himself for something, and the corners of his mouth stretched out into a smile, raising a mountain range of wrinkles.

  Kuro hadn’t put much thought into whether he liked the name. It was like finding a live squirrel on his dinner plate and being asked if he liked it; it seemed a much more pressing matter to know what it was doing there. In the end he just gave the answer the professeur seemed to want. “Yes, thank you.”

  “Oh, you are most welcome,” he replied. “I’m so happy you like it. You know I was consulted on the matter.”

  “Were you?” Kuro was suddenly very interested in what the professeur had to say.

  “Oh, yes.” De Rigueur settled in for a bit of a story, caring nothing for the rest of the attendance or for teaching anything. “Well, of course, you needed a surname. It’s no good running around with just a first name, quite unseemly. You were a difficult case. The Royal Guard, they did not know what to do with you. There are conventions, you know, for children found in any of the three kingdoms, but you, you were not found within their borders; Detritus Lane spans all three of them and is considered neutral territory. Since you had a Japanese name, a certain guardsman we both know”—De Rigueur paused there to give what appeared to be a wink to Kuro, though his eyelids were so droopy it was hard to tell—“he consulted with me as an expert in the language. Did you know that I was once an ambassador to Takamagahara?”

  Kuro nodded. It was by no means the first time De Rigueur had boasted of his old post.

  “Well, as the leading local authority on the language, I was the natural choice to consult on naming one such as you. Hayashi, it means forest. And Kuro, it means black. It is a good name, I think, since the Black Forest in Germany is famous for the veil being very thin, and strays passing through and becoming lost in the fey realm.”