“Extermination?” shouted Ali Khaldun. “Like, killing them?”
“Oh yes.” The teacher nodded solemnly. “But the thing is, it’s not clear that any were actually killed. There are certainly reports of great massacres and sweeping victories over the lutin swarms, but not much in the way of evidence. There should be hundreds of bodies, thousands if some of the accounts are to be believed, but there are only a couple dozen lutin skeletons known anywhere. Some reports have whole teams of hunters spending months trying to catch just a single lutin and failing. The histories just don’t tally. We don’t even know how many lutin there are. There are somewhere between two hundred and fifty million. It could be the same handful of lutin popping up all over the world or a thriving global civilization. We just don’t know.
“A hundred and fifty years ago the lutin were really on the ropes; they’d been driven out of each of the three kingdoms and were being hunted relentlessly. They surrendered to the wizard forces and signed treaties limiting where they could live and where they could go and swearing fealty to the crowns. Here’s the really interesting part, though: the same sort of thing happened all over the place. Lutin in Europe, Asia, Africa, everywhere independently came to agreements with their local wizards. The wizards didn’t figure that out for decades. Most of the kingdoms around the world claimed it as a proud victory that no other kingdom could have accomplished. There’s a growing school of thought that the whole thing was just an elaborate prank by the lutin, and they were never in any danger at all. That’s the sort of thing which makes history fun, finding the mysteries and the holes in the stories.”
Mr. Widdershins was grinning and pacing, waving his hands about as he spoke, but he caught sight of the chalkboard by accident and deflated. “But we should get back to the lesson,” he said as he reclaimed his chalk.
“But why?” whined Leif Ivarson. “It’s so boring.”
“Because the Winter king thinks it’s important that students know the history of the royal family of Alfheim,” said the teacher with little more enthusiasm than Leif. “If you disagree, you are welcome to take it up with him. Also, it’s what’s going to be on the test next week.”
That marked the end of anything interesting happening in social studies, possibly forever. And Kuro was again left with his thoughts while Widdershins stuttered through an endless series of names, places, and dates.
He’d been so interested in what was being said about lutin that he’d almost lost hold of the realization that had started the whole thing. It took some considerable scavenging through discarded and abandoned thoughts to find his epiphany again. Once he did, he took the time to examine it more closely.
The lutin had been walking. They walked up and down the table delivering meals. They walked away from him when he asked them questions. These were entirely normal things to do for people, which is why it took Kuro so long to notice how strange it was for lutin, and two months away from the school had blurred his memory of how they normally behave.
Lutin didn’t walk anywhere. They just popped between places. The previous year it had been strange to see them walk more than the whole length of a table. They’d blink from one side of a person to the other just to avoid having to walk around them, yet this year Kuro hadn’t seen a lutin appear or disappear once.
He asked his friends about it after the bell rang and was startled by the response.
“Of course I’ve seen them disappear,” said Arthur flatly. “They do it all the time.”
“You can barely look at them before they are gone again,” agreed Marie.
“It’s pretty much all they do,” added Charlie. “I wonder where they go?”
Sensing an impending bout of speculation from Charlie, Marie quickly returned a question to Kuro. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t think I’ve seen one do it all year,” said Kuro. “They’ve been walking places.”
“No, they haven’t,” said Charlie. “I’ve been right beside you at dinner every night and they pop all over the place.”
“Not when I’m looking.”
Charlie went off like a firework in her excitement at that claim. “Do you think they really can tell if people are looking at them?”
“What’s so weird about that?” asked Kuro. “Can’t everybody?”
This was greeted by stunned looks and silence from his friends.
Marie nearly asked a question, but thought better of it and dragged the others into an empty classroom, out of sight of other students before whispering, “Do you think you can do it because you are a demi-lutin? Like, is it something you were born with?”
Kuro considered the possibility. He’d been told that he was a half-lutin by Ms. Crawley before she was arrested, but he’d never put too much thought into it. He was a failed experiment. Phineas had been very clear about that. Virtually nothing about Kuro worked the way it was supposed to. Kuro’s creator and former master might be a cruel and evil man, but dishonesty was not one of his faults. And if he had been honest about anything, it was the disappointment he felt about Kuro.
“I don’t think so,” Kuro said at last. “I don’t think I was born with it. It’s something I learned when I was picking pockets. I bet anyone could do it if they spent a few years trying not to get seen stealing things.”
The others looked skeptical.
Still whispering, Marie continued her thought. “Do you think maybe it is why the lutin are acting strangely in front of you, though?”
“I don’t think so,” said Kuro. “They didn’t act this way last year.”
“But did they know last year?” Marie gave Kuro a meaningful look that made him reconsider his position.
He hadn’t kept being a half-lutin a secret. The principal and a bunch of Hounds had been there when he found out, too. Lots of people knew. Then again, Hounds liked keeping secrets, Ms. McCutcheon probably wouldn’t tell anyone, and all the people Kuro had told himself were in the room with him.
“Did you guys ever tell anyone?”
Arthur looked shocked at the suggestion. “I would never tell anyone after you kept my being a changeling secret.”
“It’s way too good a secret to share,” said Charlie.
Marie shrugged. “Who would I tell?”
The conversation was rudely interrupted by the sound of the bell, informing them that they were already late for alchemy. They rushed to class to find it in disarray.
Nobody was in their seats. Students were all crammed to the front of the class, fighting for access to the chalkboard.
Charlie very nearly had to tackle someone to figure out what was happening.
“Class project,” explained Sean Cassidy, who was too timid to fight his way to the front of the throng. “De Rigueur wants us to collect the ingredients ourselves. There’s a sign-up sheet for who is getting what.”
“Cool!” Charlie clapped in delight. “What are we making?”
Overhearing Charlie’s questions, the professeur shambled over to the tardy students. “We will be enacting one of the foundational formulas of alchemy,” he said. “We shall together concoct the formula to transmute lead into gold. We are most fortunate that on this island, nearly all of the required ingredients can be found.”
He wandered off to congratulate Evelyn Lemieux on her excellent choice of ingredients. She had held up the line deciding between pixie dust and moondrop nectar.
“We’re making real gold?” asked Marie in disbelief. “Like, real gold?” she repeated.
“Yeah,” said Arthur casually.
“Isn’t that really valuable?”
“I guess,” said Arthur. “It’s one of the most expensive building materials, I think.”
“Building materials?” Marie clutched her head in her hands.
“Of course, great for roofs.” Charlie joined in. “It’s heavy, but it lasts forever. They love it up in Alfheim. You’ve seen Vertheim up in the Winter Quarter, right? The whole roof is m
ade of gold shields.”
“Those are actually gold?” said Marie in a mix of astonishment and anger. “Just one of those could make you rich in the Blandlands, and you are using them as shingles? What is wrong with wizards?”
“It’s no good in the Blandlands. You can’t take it out through the veil,” said Charlie, crushing Marie’s brief hopes. She chewed on the inside of her cheek as she tried to remember what she’d heard on the subject. “It’s like inert or something. It can get in but can’t get out. It’s like the opposite of salt, which messes up the veil and magic just bounces off it; gold absorbs magic really well but just bounces off the veil.”
Marie groaned in disappointment. Her scheme for living a life of untold wealth was snatched from her in its infancy. “Is that why the school was so fussy about us fireflies not bringing jewelry and electronics? It would get stuck on this side?” she asked.
“Probably,” replied Charlie.
Being late to class had not been a good idea on this particular day. They were the last to reach the sign-up sheet, and the pickings were slim and unsavory: luminous slime mold, nightraven guano, moosefly larva, and bilious treefrog bile.
None of them could quite decide which was the worst option, or who should be stuck with the last choice, so they played rock-paper-scissors to decide who got what.
“Could be worse,” said Kuro of his assigned task of collecting bird droppings, but nobody wanted to trade, so he wasn’t sure.
Nine
Heights
“That’s really high.” Charlie craned her neck and squinted.
“Are you sure there’s one up there?” Marie tried to see first with her glasses on and then without, neither giving satisfactory results.
“No,” admitted Kuro. “But it’s the closest I’ve seen to the description we found in the book.”
What they were looking at, or more what they were trying and failing to look at, was a bird’s nest. From the ground all they could see was some dried grass wedged in the branches at the top of an enormous cedar tree in the Spring Quarter.
Kuro had spent weeks searching for one.
Just finding a nightraven was hard enough. They were black birds who flew only at night and had tiny glowing specks on the underside of their wings to make them blend in better with the night sky. Finding their droppings required finding a nest that was still in use, which meant not only locating a bird, but following it home.
Marie had found a book on them for Kuro, which gave him a good idea where to look. That turned out to be a swamp frequented by bats, the nightraven’s favourite food. Kuro had then spent his nights trudging through stinking muck and swatting mosquitoes while watching for a black bird to snatch a black bat from the air in the dark.
While the swarms of mosquitoes were miserable and inescapable, they were a blessing in disguise, for they chased away more troublesome predators, namely the Avalon Royal Defence League.
The league had formed to protect the nobility at Avalon Academy from threats. It consisted of volunteers from the ranks of the lesser nobility with the stated aim of preventing another Coup d’Été, which had decimated the Tirnanog royal family thirteen years prior. It wasn’t a real club like the lacrosse teams or the broom racing guild. Azalea and Moira had just made it up and were its only members.
The two girls had become fast friends, which was unsurprising as they had so much in common: they were both training to take up their inherited duties as knights of the Summer Court, they were both brilliant wizards far ahead of the rest of their peers in terms of talent and knowledge, they both had older siblings at the school, and they both enjoyed making Kuro’s life as difficult as possible.
They used the time that less talented students would have to spend studying to hunt Kuro. They followed him around and sprang traps on him if ever he strayed too far on his own, with the justification that nearly anything he did was suspicious and probably criminal.
Kuro tried to get Arthur to intervene with his sister, with no success. Arthur said that Moira had never done anything he’d asked, but he was pleased that she had made a friend. Apparently, she had struggled in that regard. Arthur speculated that it was because of her training to take up her mother’s role as a personal guard to the queen of Tirnanog, should there ever be one. Kuro thought that it might be her eagerness to hunt people for sport, but he kept it to himself.
Kuro’s search for a nightraven had been an exercise in frustration until Charlie had suggested a clever, if somewhat morbid, plan. He just needed to go “sky fishing.” She’d had to do it once when some manticore pups had gotten loose on her farm.
The idea was to tie some of the nightraven’s favourite food to a long string and then float the food in the air for the bird to snatch. They could then use the string to follow it back to its nest.
Charlie was kind enough to do the dirty work, and she laughed at how squeamish her city kid friends were. Tying a dead bat that she’d found to a string and using magic to flap it around a swamp was nothing compared to the gross stuff she had to do at home.
The second night out proved her plan. She got a bite, and after a lengthy run through the forest in the dark, the nightraven landed high in a tree to the excited squawks of a baby bird.
That was the tree at whose base the four of them now stood, having returned in the daylight to inspect it. It was the tallest around, as was preferred by nesting nightravens. The lowest branches cleared the tops of the trees around it, which Marie said were still taller than any she’d seen in the Blandlands. The trunk was a near perfect cylinder that one could comfortably build a cottage inside without terribly bothering the tree, with bark like strips of paper that tore away easily.
“I think I can get up there,” said Kuro, to which Marie responded with incredulous profanity.
“You will fall and die,” Arthur added.
Kuro looked around and tested the ground. It was soft, and there wasn’t anything nearby on which to impale himself if things went poorly. “I think I’ll be okay. I’m pretty good at landing.”
Kuro was eager to prove himself, but he would have to wait for two unavoidable reasons. The first being that it was just after breakfast, and he needed to be in the tree at night. If it really was a nightraven nest with a chick inside, it would fledge at midnight under a new moon, leaving a nest full of fresh droppings. Kuro was very lucky that Charlie had found the nest, as it was the new moon that night. Otherwise, there was a good chance the guano would be washed away by the next rain, and he’d be stuck hunting down another nest with birds still in it.
The other reason for delay was a test that afternoon where they would need to demonstrate the bristlehog sweeper spell. Kuro had studied for it, practiced for it, and truly devoted himself to succeeding. As with anything Kuro had to devote that much effort to, he was entirely doomed.
The minutes passed like hours, and despite all that extra time, Kuro took in no new information. He was too anxious. He considered it a crime to hold tests at the end of the day. If it had been in the morning, he could have failed, sulked thoroughly, and been ready for more school by the end of lunch. Instead, he wasted the whole day reciting the spell under his breath and reviewing the motions.
Ms. McCutcheon had moved the desks aside so that there would be space for the summoning. Everyone stood around the edge of the room to watch each other’s work. Ms. McCutcheon said it was so that they could learn from each other’s technique, but as far as Kuro was concerned, it was just a means to deepen his embarrassment.
She drew names from a hat to decide the order of demonstration. It was supposed to make things fair, but it just made Kuro even more uneasy. It would have been better going first than waiting anxiously until the whims of fate decided to release him.
The first few students all performed the conjuring beautifully. They chanted evenly through the lengthy elvish poem and swayed their arms through the intricate series of gestures needed to complete the spell. As they worked
, a little golden ball of light formed on the floor from which sprouted a thick coat of stiff, straight hairs. The little ball stretched long, blooming more bristles as it went, and finally unrolled so all its hairs rested on the floor, looking very much like a horsehair brush.
As their spell ended with a clap and a stomp, the little brush burst into motion, shuffling around the room on its thousands of hairlike legs, using them to sweep up dirt and dust laid down for the purpose. It busily pushed all the dirt into a pile in the middle of the floor before disintegrating into the collected debris.
Everyone’s bristlehog was a little bit different: some bigger, some smaller, some eager, some lethargic. Charlie’s was lopsided and energetic, preferring to spread the dust around instead of collecting it. Arthur’s was precise and particular, if a bit hesitant in its motions. Marie’s shoved at people’s feet to get at dust and was reluctant to fall apart at the end. Evelyn’s was perfectly formed and, after proving itself fully capable of sweeping, showed no more interest in doing so. Instead, it just collapsed into an elegantly arranged lump of bristles.
At long last it was Kuro’s turn. While it felt like he was the last to go, a quick count told him less than half the class had demonstrated. He steadied his breath and his hands. “You might want to close your eyes,” he said before beginning his chant.
Those with a long enough memory to recall Kuro’s attempts at magic the year prior followed his advice, and some particularly wise students sought cover. Others more interested in watching his spectacular failure than self-preservation opened their eyes wider.
Kuro cast the spell exactly as he’d been taught. He said the words, thought the thoughts, and made the motions. Just like every time he had practiced it, the tiny gold ball of light refused to form, and instead a tiny cyclone grew in its place. At the final clap and stomp, the foot-tall tornado began hunting the dust. It sucked up the dirt and bristles from all the previous conjurings, but rather than gathering them to the middle of the room, it flung them up and out, filling the air with high-speed needle-like hair.
Volume 2: Burglary Page 8