Kuro knew from his old master, Phineas Hearn, that his name meant “ninth” not “black” and worried at what his new last name actually meant. It seemed just as likely that he was now named “ninth lawnmower” as “black forest.”
De Rigueur waited eagerly for more questions, and when none came, he continued, regardless. “It’s properly Hayashi Kuro, since in Japan they say the family name first. The family is more important than the individual there.” He nodded sagely at the wisdom of the practice.
“But I’m not Japanese,” said Kuro.
“Well, that is no matter.” The professeur dismissed the argument. “It would not be proper to have a first name in a language different than your last. That would not do at all.”
This remark earned an indignant huff from both Jennifer Tanaka and Magna Singh.
Satisfied that he had boasted adequately, the professeur continued through the rest of attendance and eventually started teaching.
De Rigueur handed out textbooks and described the various transmutations and elixirs they were expected to produce that year, as well as something about a big class project, but Kuro was too distracted to listen because of the strange look Arthur was giving him. Arthur was looking at Kuro in much the same way Kuro looked at pie. He kept glancing right at Kuro with a warm and hopeful smile, two things normally quite foreign to Arthur. He was practically glowing.
Kuro had to wait the entire lecture before he could talk to Arthur about it. “What are you grinning about?” he asked as they climbed the several flights towards spellcraft.
“It’s official,” Arthur said. “You’re a child of the forest, like me.”
“What does that mean?” demanded Marie just a couple of steps behind them.
“It means we’re foundlings,” said Arthur simply. “Nobody knows who our parents are so it’s like we just came from the forest, children of the woods. We don’t have real family names, so the Ledgers just assign us one. It’s always something to do with the forest and where we’re found. I was found in Tirnanog, so I’m Wood. There’s a Wade Skorgson a year up from us. He was probably found somewhere in Alfheim.”
Marie shook her head. “But you were adopted. Why don’t you have your parents’ names? And why does your sister have another different name again?”
Not wanting to miss a chance to talk, Charlie crashed into the conversation. “There’s rules!” she asserted. “You can’t just give somebody your name. Everybody’s really fussy about who’s been a wizard the longest, so in Tirnanog and Acadia, you get the family name of whichever parent has the older name. In Alfheim, where my mom is from, your last name is the parent with the longer lineage’s first name but, like, with something added. So, my mom was Helena Vigdis, cause her dad was Vigdi, so it’s like she’s Vigdi’s Helena. Technically she’s actually Helena Vigdis Thorson Odrsdottir Somethingson Someotherthingsdottir and on and on till you get to the first wizards they can trace their lineage to, but my dad’s a stray, so I just got his name cause they really don’t like that kind of thing in Alfheim, but if you’re a foundling then you need a new name, but you never pass that on to your kids ’cause your other parent is always going to have an older name unless you’re both foundlings. Then I guess you’d have to fight or something. Hey Kuro and Arthur, don’t have kids together. It could be complicated.”
“The whole thing is complicated,” said Marie.
“How do they do it in the Blandlands?” asked Kuro.
“Well, most people in Quebec, where I’m from, get both of their parents’ names stuck together with a hyphen, so I should be Marie Akinwande-Jones, but my folks are actually from Toronto, so my mom got my dad’s last name when they got married.”
“Wait, your mom changed her name?” Charlie was scandalized. “How are you supposed to know who her parents were?”
The outbreak of hostilities was averted by their arrival at the spellcraft classroom and the unexpected presence of Principal McCutcheon.
She had the effect of evacuating the air from the room. Nobody dared breathe, and speaking was rendered pointless, as the sound would be afraid to travel without her express permission.
The children took seats in a quiet and orderly manner in hopes they would avoid her withering gaze.
Kuro had been dreading the return to spellcraft. Their previous teacher had been his favourite, but she’d been arrested for the crime of helping to create Kuro. He didn’t want to meet her replacement. He knew they’d be terrible. Or worse, they might be wonderful, and then Kuro would feel disloyal to Ms. Crawley for liking them. The reality was worse still.
“Good afternoon, class,” said Ms. McCutcheon in her crisp, clearly enunciated fashion. “We have not, as of yet, found a suitable permanent replacement for the post of junior spellcraft instructor, and so I shall be teaching this section for the coming year.”
Every back stiffened, every jaw clenched, and the temperature in the room dropped several degrees in response to the announcement.
She continued as a stack of textbooks began floating up and down between desks, distributing themselves. “This term we shall be focusing our efforts on the summoning, or more properly conjuring, of useful spiritual constructs to do simple chores.”
Morgan Greenwood cautiously raised her hand. Ms. McCutcheon raised a disdainful eyebrow and answered her question without it being asked. “We shall not be learning to summon familiars until after the Samhain festival.”
Two more hands rose, and again she did not need to hear the question before replying, “There are several reasons, not the least of which is that none of you speaks enough Gaelic or has enough skill in spellcraft to do the conjuring yet.”
Another hand rose, but this time Ms. McCutcheon did not have a ready answer: “Yes, Gregory, what is it?”
The stout boy swallowed hard and took a few seconds to prepare himself before questioning the principal. “Last year Ms. Crawley taught us to stop people reading our minds, ma’am. . . .” He trailed off, not quite sure how to turn what he had said into a question.
“I must say she did a fine job.” Ms. McCutcheon gave a sharp nod of approval. “Your minds are quiet and blank to me. I am not certain I could get a single thing from them if I tried.”
“Then how are you doing that? Answering all our questions before we ask them?”
“Because, Gregory, you are exceedingly predictable. It is the only thing second-year students have shown any interest in since before I was a student here, despite the fact that it has no particular academic merit. I should also say that there will be no marks assigned to the successful manifestation of a familiar. The only reason I leave it in the curriculum is that it provides a degree of motivation for you to practice the foundational skills on which it is built.”
“What’s your familiar, Ms. McCutcheon?” asked Charlie excitedly.
Ms. McCutcheon sighed and relented to the question. “My familiar happens to be a blue heron.”
A chorus of approval swept across the classroom, and a look of disapproval swept across Ms. McCutcheon’s face.
“Let me make something absolutely clear, students,” she said. “The form your familiar takes is wholly irrelevant, unpredictable, and entirely outside of your control. It says nothing about your quality as a person. Now, I do not want to hear another word about familiars until we begin practicing in November.” At that, she waved her hand, and the textbooks on every desk slammed open, marking the end of questions and the beginning of their lessons under the tyrannical rule of Principal McCutcheon.
Eight
A Brief History of Ignorance
The prohibition on discussing familiars in spellcraft meant that it was the only time or place where it wasn’t the main topic of conversation.
Everyone speculated endlessly on what each other’s familiar would be, all with very reasoned and rational explanations of why that creature was the only possible thing that they could summon. By dinner on the first night, Kuro was al
ready tired of hearing about it. He had other things to worry about anyway. The first of which was a missing Charlie.
Meals were pretty much the only thing that Charlie would reliably show up to on time without being physically dragged there by Marie. But despite some of her favourite foods, pork nuggets and french-fried beets, cooling on her plate, she was nowhere to be seen.
It wasn’t until the barbecue coleslaw was being dished out that she burst into the dining hall. “Look what I found in the library!” she shouted as she presented an old leather-bound tome with the title An Index of Familiars and Their Meanings. “It’s great! It has pretty much every animal ever and what they mean and famous people that had them as familiars, and there’s a sort of quiz thing at the back that tells you what your familiar will probably be. I’ve done it three times so far, and I got a fox, a bear, and a parrot.”
“I thought Ms. McCutcheon said that familiars didn’t mean anything, and that you could not predict them,” said Marie, eyeing the book skeptically.
“Well, of course she’s gonna say that,” replied Charlie. “She’s trying to make whoever gets a rat or a pigeon feel better. Not that I’d super mind getting a pigeon, though, they have really good senses of direction, and I could send letters without using the lutin post, like secret messages that can’t be tracked. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if the book is true, it’s fun. Hey, Meredith, what's your familiar?” Charlie shouted down the row of tables to where Meredith towered over her neighbours.
Meredith answered Charlie while chewing. “A trout,” she said.
Marie scrunched her nose at the answer. “Like the fish?”
“Yeah,” Meredith shrugged. “It’s not very useful unless you’ve dropped something in a lake. Better than one of the other boys in my year; Merlin Wellington got a tarantula, and he’s scared of spiders. He straight up fainted the first time he summoned it.”
Marie cringed.
Charlie, having found the right page in the book, shared her discoveries. “A trout familiar means that you are a boon to your companions and have great strength of character. You enjoy simple pleasures but do not suffer from overindulgence. You share a familiar with Loki Vandelson and Narcissa of Dodona.”
“Sounds about right,” laughed Meredith.
“Hey, Marie, you should do the test to find out what you’ll get.”
Marie had a brief battle between her skepticism and her curiosity and eventually gave in. “All right, go on.”
“Right, first, is your index finger on your right hand longer or shorter than the ring finger on your left?”
Charlie furiously tallied the results of Marie’s answers about her eyelash length, birthday, favourite flavours, sleeping habits, and experiences with ducks, which left the others an opportunity to talk.
“What do you guys hope to get?” asked Marie between questions.
Arthur, who was poking a pork nugget around his plate with a fork and chewing on his lip, answered first. “I don’t know if I can summon one,” he said. “Familiars are a human thing. I’m not really a human, so it probably won’t work for me.” He put some effort into rallying a bit of optimism. “If I can, though, I would like to get a wolf like my dad, but anything’s fine, really.”
“And what about you, Kuro?”
“Sorry, what?” Kuro was distracted from the conversation. There was something odd going on with the lutin, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. They were walking up and down on the tables distributing food and chatting with the students like normal, but something seemed off.
“What do you want your familiar to be?”
Kuro laughed that she bothered to ask. He had no delusions that he’d be able to cast the spell. It was long and complicated and in Gaelic. It was so hard that it wasn’t even going to be graded. Kuro wasn’t planning on even trying. He figured he could use the extra time to pass his other courses.
He did have one fear about it, one that he hadn’t yet realized, which chose that moment to voice itself. “Anything but a crow is okay with me,” he said.
Phineas’s familiar had been a crow. Kuro felt that he’d much rather have a trout or a tarantula than anything that implied that his old master still had any influence over him. That thought passed quickly, though, and he returned to his previous distractions. He couldn’t get the notion out of his head that there was something terribly wrong with the lodge staff. “Have you noticed anything strange about the lutin this year?” he asked once none was in earshot.
The other three looked at Kuro uncomprehending, then at a couple of lutin chatting with the new students at a different table.
They looked like they always did: tiny people with oversized eyes, ears, and noses, with braided and beaded mustaches and beards. They wore the same droopy knitted caps and woven sashes as the year before. They walked on the tables and served weird food just as they always did, and yet something seemed wrong.
“Nope, totally normal,” said Charlie, before returning to the advanced arithmetic required to calculate Marie’s familiar.
“No stranger than usual, I think,” said Marie. “I am never sure if they are strange because that is just the way lutin are, or if they just pretend because they like to confuse wizards.”
“That’s a good question,” said Arthur. “Lutin are very secretive. I had never seen one before I came here. Maybe they’re playing a big joke on us.”
Good question or not, it failed to help Kuro at all. It made him feel a bit like his mind was playing tricks on him. It would help if things would just slow down for a bit to let him think, but nobody seemed willing to give him the opportunity.
“A garter snake!” Charlie shouted and flung her hands up in excitement, nearly knocking Kuro off his seat.
“That isn’t useful or cool.” Marie groaned in disappointment.
“It means you’re not one to stand out, that you appreciate hard work as its own reward, and are slow to warm to people,” Charlie continued.
“Are you sure you did the math right?”
“Dead sure. I checked it twice. Do you wanna know what famous wizards had them?”
“Will I have heard of them?”
Charlie checked the names. “Probably not.”
“Skip it, then.” Marie proceeded to sulk into her slaw.
“Why are you bothered?” asked Arthur. “Like you said, you can’t predict familiars. The book is probably wrong.”
“Of course it is wrong,” snapped Marie. “But if it’s going to be wrong, it could be nice enough to say I am clever and pretty and will have a dragon that I can ride.”
Kuro continued to quietly puzzle over his concerns with the lutin for the next several days while everyone else continued to obsess over their familiars. He made no more progress than they did and was becoming more and more convinced that, like his classmates' familiars, it was all in his imagination.
The lutin themselves were entirely unhelpful. When Kuro approached one of them with his questions, she looked shocked at being asked and walked away in a hurry. From then on, all the lutin treated him like a dangerous animal, one to be fed and pacified but not interacted with. Kuro wasn’t sure whether this was a sign of their strange behaviour or his.
It wasn’t until Friday afternoon in social studies, while his ears were listening to a lecture on the Winter War of Succession of 1835, and his hands were busy scribbling notes that his eyes were reading off the board, that his mouth, having been left unsupervised, figured it out. “They were walking,” he blurted out over the teacher.
“Please raise your hand before speaking, Charlie,” replied Mr. Widdershins, automatically turning away from the chalkboard. He found Charlie to be as surprised as he was that it wasn’t her who had spoken out of turn.
“Sorry, sir,” said Kuro and raised his hand, though he didn’t have any question related to the class. “I just realized. . . . Do you know anything about lutin?”
Mr. Widdershins looked between Kuro a
nd his board full of details of centuries-old bloodlines and blood feuds, torn between his obligation to the curriculum and a student showing interest in something. “Know is a strong word,” he said at last. “I’ve read things, but a lot of that contradicts itself. The history of the lutin is a collection of lies and misunderstandings, and most of what’s written down is misleading or, more often, simply not true.”
Suddenly Mr. Widdershins found that he had the attention of the whole class. Startled and confused by a room full of interested pupils, he continued speaking. “There are a few things we’re sure of. For one, the lutin have been delivering the mail across the three kingdoms for a little over a century. Also, lutin of one form or another exist everywhere within the fairy realm, on every continent and pretty much every island. And of course, they can travel great distances almost instantly. After that, it’s a lot of hearsay and guesswork, which the lutin themselves seem to enjoy adding misinformation to.
“It’s said they can always tell if they’re being watched, and that they can turn invisible, and that they all share a single mind. Rumor is that they don’t see the veil like we do; where we see the veil at the edge of saltwater, they just see the far shore. Also, they can go back to anywhere they’ve been before just like that.” He snapped his fingers to punctuate the point. “The common wisdom is that once one lutin gets into a place, then they can bring their friends, and their friends can bring their friends and so on. It becomes impossible to keep them out.”
Mr. Widdershins leaned back on his desk and thrust his hands in the pockets of his ill-fitting suit with a casual confidence, somehow more comfortable talking about the things that he didn’t know than those that he did. “For most of our history they were viewed as pests and treated that way. Wizards went to great lengths to keep them out of their homes and towns. Even many of the buildings here have salted bricks built into the foundations largely to keep lutin and other fey creatures out. There were huge extermination efforts—”
Volume 2: Burglary Page 7