His classmates curled into balls, ran for the door, and flipped desks to hide behind. Kuro just closed his eyes and waited for it to be over. After a minute, the whirlwind wore itself out, and the room went quiet except for the gentle rain of grit and bristles.
“That was,” Ms. McCutcheon started but paused to consider her words, “rather remarkable.” She had been unaffected by the storm of debris, having quickly conjured a large black parasol that floated in front of her, shielding her from the fallout. “If nothing else, Kuro has provided a challenge for the next bristlehog.” She pulled a name from the hat. “Genevieve, the floor is yours.”
Kuro was, to the shock and amazement of no one, held after class by Ms. McCutcheon. The desks returned themselves to their usual positions while she scrutinized her student. Kuro could not divine what she was thinking as she remained stony faced and impassive. She just looked at him, first through her glasses and then over them.
“How did you do that?” she asked him after the last desk had settled into place and the room fell silent.
That wasn’t a question he’d prepared himself for. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “It’s just what happens.”
She considered him for an uncomfortably long time before coming to some sort of verdict. “Normally if something like that were to happen in my class, I would assume the student was attempting some ill-considered prank.” Kuro began to protest but she held up her hand to quiet him. “However, I have observed a genuine effort on your part, and I believe this to be an honest failure.”
“Thank you?” replied Kuro, not certain whether being found incompetent was better or worse than being convicted of shenanigans.
“My purpose in keeping you here was not to interrogate you,” she said, all evidence to the contrary. “It was to offer some encouragement.”
This seemed an unlikely, and somewhat unnatural, suggestion. While she was supportive, it was more in the way of marble columns.
“While it is obviously preferable that you should successfully invoke all of the spells practiced this term, it is possible to pass the course without doing so.” She gave Kuro a moment to ponder her words before explaining. “It is not uncommon for a student to lack talent or capacity in conjuring, but the theory is critical for your future studies, and substantial marks are devoted to written work et cetera.”
Kuro chewed on her odd flavor of encouragement for a moment. “So, I just have to do really well on tests and stuff, and I can pass?”
“Yes.” McCutcheon nodded briskly. “It may seem like cold comfort, but I wanted to assure you it is possible. As you already know, there aren’t any marks at all awarded for summoning a familiar; only the theory will be graded.”
Kuro let his head hang back and let out a pained sigh of defeat.
“What is it? What have you done?” McCutcheon returned to her more comfortable mode of accusation-based interrogation.
“I was just going to skip the whole thing,” said Kuro. “I thought it wasn’t for marks. I haven’t been doing any of the preparation stuff. I was using the extra time for numerology.”
The principal’s unmoving expression faltered briefly into something approaching surprise. “Honestly? I have never heard of such a thing. Normally we require a combination of threats and bribery to get second-year students to do anything but summon their familiars. You truly are an anomaly of a student, Kuro.”
“Thank you?” Again Kuro was not sure exactly how to respond to the principal’s comments.
“I shan't keep you any longer.” McCutcheon dismissed him with a slight movement of her hand indicating the door. “Do visit my office on your breaks if there is anything I can do to further support your studies.”
It would have been rude to sprint from the room, so Kuro managed to keep himself to a hurried jog, though that restraint lasted only to the door. Once free of the crushing presence of the principal, Kuro ran. He wasn’t just fleeing—he had somewhere to be.
He waited impatiently for dinner and devoured it when it came, barely chewing or stopping to breathe.
“What is your hurry?” asked Marie, who was eating at a much more considered pace. She hadn’t quite decided if the honey and poppy seed sauce on the curried beets suited her tastes. “The baby raven won’t leave until midnight, after it’s molted.”
“I’m not climbing that tree at midnight,” Kuro replied through a full mouth.
“So, you are just going to sit up there for hours waiting?”
“Yes.”
“What about us?” demanded Charlie. “What are we supposed to do?”
Kuro hadn’t considered that they might want to help more. “You don’t have to do anything,” he said. “You already helped me find the bird. I should really do some of the work on my own.” He was just going to sit in the tree for hours waiting for the chick inside to fly off. He was looking forward to it.
“We should be there in case you fall and die,” said Arthur.
“We can just be there when you go up and climb down,” suggested Charlie. “Once you’re up, you’re pretty safe, right? You don’t need us there the whole time. We couldn’t do anything from the ground anyway, so we might as well be back here doing homework or whatever and not getting eaten by mosquitoes all night again.”
Kuro was moved at their concern for his safety and couldn’t argue. He also couldn’t argue with them wanting to skip the time just after dusk, when the air grew foggy with mosquitoes, which they had dubbed the itching hour. Charlie was still covered in red welts from her last couple nights of sky fishing with Kuro. “That sounds good.”
It was a struggle for Kuro not to run ahead of his friends out to the tree. He was impatient to climb it. It was something he could do, something he was good at, and after the utter embarrassment in spellcraft earlier that day, it was something he needed. The slow walk across the island was agony, but once they got to his destination, they could no longer slow him down. All they could do was watch.
Kuro plotted his course, backed up several paces to give himself a running start, and launched himself into the air. The blast of wind carried him high enough to get a good foothold on a knot from which he could throw himself across to another nearby tree. He heard Marie curse and Charlie cheer as he barely caught hold of the lowest branch with one outstretched hand.
He dangled there for a moment, plotting his next manoeuvres. His target was still well above him and in a different tree. He climbed through his current tree as he had the maze of antennae and fire escapes of his old haunts in Detritus Lane. He was heavier than he remembered being, and the climb tired his arms. He didn’t let it slow him, though. He would have hours to rest once he reached his destination.
He breached the upper canopy of the tree and hung off the top branch like a flag without a breeze. The Island glowed in the light of the sinking sun, and he could see the gentle shimmer of the veil in the distance. His friends far below were lost in the layers of leaves between him and the ground. He took the time to marvel at the beauty before returning to his mission.
He swung on the branch, tilting it back and forth, and the swirling wind that helped him run and jump pushed it farther until the tree creaked and complained about the strain. With a final burst of wind, Kuro flung himself out into space toward the nightraven’s nesting tree.
As he soared, unrestrained through the open air, he caught a brief glimpse of his friends tiny and quieted by the distance between them. Kuro thought of a dozen other, safer, more sensible ways they could have gotten hold of the guano as he hurtled toward the trunk of the massive tree. They could have waited until the next morning and used Charlie’s telekinesis to knock down the nest; they could have borrowed a broom or carpet and flown up; or they could have asked a favour from an upper-year student. He was grateful his friends had suggested none of these.
He slammed into the body of the tree and began to slide downward. He clung to the bark, which tore away in his hands, but it didn
’t need to hold his weight, just help direct his final leap. Like a squirrel, he sprang from the trunk of the tree out to the lowest hanging branch.
His first hand caught only leaves, but the second found a solid grip, and despite a groan from the branch, it held his weight. From there the ascent was easy, at least in Kuro’s opinion. He had branches aplenty in reach; it was like climbing a badly organized ladder.
Finally, he reached the branch that held the nest they’d seen from the ground. He was sticky with sap, completely exhausted, and utterly satisfied.
The nest was there. Well out from the trunk of the tree, lodged in a fork in a branch, was a tangle of sticks and dried grass in the middle of which sat a ridiculous looking bird. And to Kuro’s relief, the rim of the nest was covered in the remains of the chick’s defecation.
The chick was grey and fluffy, absurdly fluffy. It was more fluff than bird. The only thing that distinguished it from an exploded pillow was a long black beak and two bulging black eyes, which took a keen and curious interest in the invader.
It didn’t appear frightened or angry, just confused. Having known only two types of things in its life, it was having trouble categorizing Kuro as either food or its parents. It examined Kuro, first with one eye, then the other, twisting its head at odd angles as though Kuro would resolve into something it understood if it could only look at him the right way.
Kuro knew that the young nightraven was going to have quite a night of learning. Its parents, who had been diligently feeding it since it hatched on the previous new moon, would not be returning. They would leave it to grow hungry on this night, which would trigger it to fledge and then leave the nest to search for food on its own. Or at least Kuro hoped he knew that.
That was what Marie had told him. That’s what the book she’d found said. Given how little Kuro trusted anything a wizard told him, in general, he wondered why he trusted it when they wrote it in a book.
Kuro considered the possibility of raiding the nest for guano before the bird left, while there was still light enough to see clearly. While the bird wasn’t quite big enough to consider Kuro a meal, it was just the baby. If the parents returned and took offence at Kuro’s intrusion, their considerable beaks and matching claws could lead to a hasty and rather painful exit from the tree.
He decided to wait.
Kuro settled into a crook where a branch met the trunk. Not wanting to shout for fear of distressing the raven chick, he tried to signal his success by waving to his friends below.
A few minutes of confused gestures later he heard the faint sounds of either encouragement or admonitions and saw their tiny forms wandering off. He hoped that meant they’d understood, and he’d see them back at the base of the tree near midnight.
Kuro watched the bird, and the bird watched Kuro. He conversed politely with it, apologizing for the intrusion, explaining his situation, discussing the weather, and asking how the bird felt about its life so far. The bird added warbles and squarks occasionally, but mostly just stared.
Night settled over the island. It was a moonless night, and cloudless as well. Stars filled the sky, flooding it with a sea of twinkling specks, which shifted and drifted as their light passed through the veil, as if caught on waves. Kuro had never taken the time to really appreciate the night sky on the island. It was so much clearer on Avalon than in Bytown, but he was always in the lodge beneath the trees at night, so he never properly saw the stars. He promised himself to correct that in the future.
It was hard to judge the passing of time in the darkness of a moonless night. The best sense of it he could get was from the regular complaints of the nightraven chick. Just after dark it had started to croak every few minutes, probably calling for its parents to feed it. Those croaks grew steadily louder to become agitated squawks and then fevered cries. It thrashed around in its nest digging for scraps and, finding none, became frantic.
Kuro felt for the bird. He, too, had been alone and hungry before. He wanted to feed and comfort the lonely chick, but he had no food to give.
While the chick appeared abandoned, it had one thing that Kuro hadn’t: parents who cared for it. While they would not feed the baby, they were still around. As the chick grew agitated to the point of a screaming panic, Kuro could hear the cries of its parents calling it out into the night to join them.
In a fit of hunger and desperation, it raised itself up and spread its wings. The grey down fell from it like dirty snow as its full flight feathers filled in. They were almost invisible in the black of the night but for the tiny specks of light that streamed down the wings like falling stars. It stretched out its new wings, and with a final cry, it took flight. It dove out of the tree into the dark of night and was gone, leaving its nest forever.
Kuro climbed slowly out to the abandoned nest, feeling his way along the branch. He carefully scraped the foul excrement into a jar he’d brought for the purpose, placed it in a drawer in his satchel, and started his descent.
The journey down was much more cautious than his climb. Kuro’s limbs were tired from the initial ascent and stiff from sitting wedged in a tree for hours. A dew had settled, making the branches slick and hard to hold onto. Also, it was so dark he could barely see his hand in front of his face.
He reached the lowest branch of his tree and was rather disappointed to find that his friends had not yet returned. They were supposed to be back, partly to witness the event, but mostly to shine a light. Kuro was quite confident in his ability to land safely from any height, but that only worked if he could see where he was landing. The space beneath him was an inky void.
Kuro was annoyed that his friends were late. He was cold and tired, and while it was a very nice tree, it was quickly losing its appeal now that he was trapped. He tried to soothe his upset by explaining to himself that there were several very good reasons they might be late. For one, they might not be late at all. The book said that the nightraven would fledge at midnight, but it didn’t exactly have an alarm clock in its nest. Also, there wasn’t a timepiece in Autumn Lodge that kept time properly. Maybe they’d just chosen a particularly unreliable clock. Even if they were out in good time, maybe they were having trouble finding the right tree. It was quite dark, and the forest looked different at night.
Kuro found the best spot he could to settle himself and waited for the arrival of either his friends, or morning, whichever came first.
Ten
Fall Guy
Being startled awake in the middle of the night is a miserable experience. Doing so when cold, wet, and sore from spending hours exposed to the elements on a branch a hundreds of feet up a tree is considerably worse. Worse still is the sudden sensation of no longer being in that tree.
Kuro was falling.
There is an important distinction to be made between falling from a great height and jumping from a great height. Jumping implies a degree of planning, preparation, and orientation.
Falling has none of those luxuries.
This fall was worse than most, as Kuro spent the first few moments sorting out what exactly had happened.
He had fallen asleep in the tree.
Someone had shouted his name.
In his surprise he had slipped from his perch and was tumbling earthward.
Once that had been worked out, he had to determine which way was down.
The only source of light was growing larger and brighter, which meant it must be below him. He hoped it was near the ground. He locked his eyes on it and thrashed his limbs to make his body face the right way while he started to gather wind beneath him to cushion the fall.
While a couple hundred feet is a very long fall in terms of distance, it’s not long at all when measured in seconds, and Kuro was not fully prepared for the ground when the two of them met. His landing wasn’t fatal, but neither was it elegant. The impact knocked the wind from his lungs, wrenched his knee and shoulder, and bloodied his nose.
He lay there, face down in the sof
t dirt, while some familiar voices fretted.
“Kuro, are you okay?” Marie demanded.
“Give us a thumbs up if you can hear us,” said Charlie.
“I said he would fall and die,” Arthur added.
There was a fourth, unexpected voice in the party, a familiar nasal voice full of impatience. “I can see you breathing,” said Vice Principal Flint. “Playing dead won’t get you out of trouble.”
Kuro peeled himself from the ground and looked around as his eyes adjusted to the bright light that Arthur had conjured. His three friends were there. They looked worried for Kuro and ashamed at having led the vice principal to him.
The vice principal sent the others back to the lodge and marched Kuro to the school without explanation.
His office was a room in conflict with itself. His desk, a massive obelisk of dark wood too large to fit through the door, was meticulously tidy. A few writing implements were neatly arranged at his right, and a single file folder with Kuro’s name on it sat at his left. That was where the organization ended.
The walls were lined with shelves and drawers overflowing with all manner of oddities: bits of sporting equipment, daggers, wands, manacles, books that had been chained closed, a pocket watch that was violently trying to escape a cage, a dozen locked lead boxes, a grandfather clock that read ten to two, and a leafy plant that looked to have died several years prior. There were piles of armour in one corner, and an armoire in another, with a regular thumping sound coming from within. It looked as though everything that had ever been confiscated from a student lived on in this room in perpetuity. It reminded Kuro of the lost and found in the Granite Citadel, but with far less charm and fewer goblins.
Kuro was directed to a stiff wooden chair, which was too tall for him, so his feet were left dangling. Flint sat at his desk, opposite Kuro, and took a long pull from a steaming cup of tar-like coffee before asking, “Can you account for your whereabouts tonight, Kuro?”
“I was in a tree,” Kuro said. “In the Spring Quarter,” he added. “You saw me fall out of it.”
Volume 2: Burglary Page 9