Volume 2: Burglary

by R. A. Consell

  Mr. Flint looked at Kuro with dead eyes. Clearly Flint had had even less sleep than Kuro that night. He had no patience left for the strangeness or foolishness of children.

  “Have you anyone that can corroborate your story?” he asked.

  “Charlie, Arthur, and Marie,” said Kuro.

  The answer looked to have caused Flint physical pain. “The three I brought from the other side of the island?” he confirmed.

  “Yes,” said Kuro. “They were supposed to come get me at midnight after the nightraven had fledged.”

  Flint almost had the energy to demand Kuro explain himself in a way that made some kind of sense, but weariness won out. “That is inconvenient,” he groaned. “So, there’s nobody that saw you between sunset and midnight?”

  There was a longish pause and Kuro thought that Flint might have fallen asleep. “Am I in trouble?”

  “There was a burglary this evening,” said Flint. “In Vertheim.”

  It was Kuro’s turn to groan. “I’m a suspect, aren’t I?” Kuro tried to get upset about being accused of a crime he hadn’t committed, but like Flint, he was too weary to work up the energy.

  “At the moment you are the suspect,” Flint said.

  “Was there a note?” asked Kuro. He couldn’t imagine someone forging his notes again given the events of the previous year.

  “Bjorn Skerdson accused you of the crime.”

  Kuro blinked vacantly at Flint for a time. “Who?”

  “Bjorn Skerdson, first son of Skerd Agnarrs, heir to Lindskalr in Saguenay?”

  Kuro shook his head. He hadn’t the faintest idea who that was.

  “First-year student.” Flint tried to evoke some glimmer of recognition out of Kuro. “Really yellow eyes, kind of dark hair for an elf?” When Kuro showed no reaction at all, Flint moved on. “It doesn’t really matter. We’re going to have to search through your things.”

  Kuro was annoyed that even first years would accuse him of any theft on the island, as though nobody else could possibly want to steal from some important heir. He wondered if his name had been added to the welcome brochures. “What was stolen?”

  Flint slurped at his coffee a bit before admitting, “We don’t know, yet.”

  “How do you know there was a burglary then?” asked Kuro.

  “The room was turned upside down,” said Flint. “Drawers dumped, bedding torn apart, closets emptied, bags opened. . . .” He trailed off. “I’m going to need you to empty your pockets while I search your bag.”

  It was horribly unjust. Kuro had done nothing, he knew nothing, and the only reason he was being accused was that he had been framed for thefts the year before. Some rich kid had accused Kuro, and now Kuro had no defence but to have every one of his meagre possessions rifled through.

  Kuro turned out his pockets, dumping a collection of scaly cedar leaves and bits of bark that had collected in them during his climb, and turned over his book bag to Flint.

  Flint upended the bag and, when nothing fell out, looked inside. Finding a room nearly as large as his office within, the last of his willpower gave out and he collapsed in exhaustion, resting his forehead on his desk, groaning softly. “I’ll have it back to you tomorrow.”

  Eleven

  Promises

  Having his bag, room, and person searched for stolen goods was insulting, it was embarrassing, and it was starting to get annoying.

  The second burglary had happened while Kuro had been out in the Blandlands visiting Dani, the bird lady, and his old cat, Graeae. He’d had a lovely time drinking tea, petting the cat, sharing stories about birds, and politely refusing the books she’d insisted on giving him.

  He returned from a delightful evening to find Flint waiting for him at the lodge, looking grim and annoyed at Kuro’s late return.

  While Dani was able to account for an hour of Kuro’s missing time, she couldn’t vouch for the time he spent travelling. He was again searched, and he was given detention for being out in the Blandlands.

  The third burglary happened while Kuro was serving his detention. Flint and Kuro had established a bond of trust the year prior, with all the time they had spent together. So Flint allowed Kuro to shelve some books alone in the library on a Sunday afternoon, and he finished his duties to find a frustrated Flint storming up the stairs accompanied by another baseless accusation for which Kuro had an inadequate alibi.

  The fourth burglary had happened while Kuro was tied to a tree.

  One dreary afternoon, while Kuro was practicing his summoning in the safety of an open space, he was assaulted by the Avalon Royal Defence League. Moira and Azalea attacked him from two sides of the meadow in which he was practicing. Moira accused him of villainy while conjuring a barricade of ice to block off his escape, and Azalea grinned menacingly as she hurled balls of flame. He ran, as was tradition for these meetings, but this time they had prepared a net into which they corralled him. He was captured, bound to a tree, and abandoned in the autumn drizzle.

  It took him over an hour to wriggle free of the bonds, and when he finally made it back to the lodge, he found Flint waiting for him, his room having already been turned inside out.

  By the fifth, Kuro didn’t even ask why he’d been called into Flint’s office anymore. He just dumped his bag on Flint’s desk, emptied his pockets, and left.

  Flint, for his part, didn’t enjoy the routine any more than Kuro. It was an incredible waste of time, which would have been better spent looking for the actual burglar. Unfortunately, everyone at school knew that Kuro was a notorious criminal, and so every victim accused him personally. As they were all the children of terribly important people, Flint had no choice but to perform his pointless due diligence and pull Kuro in for another round of inspections.

  Kuro’s efforts to be an unremarkable and ordinary student had been entirely undone as he was once again the centre of attention at the school.

  The ordeal was somewhat better than the previous year, when the thefts had made him an outcast. This time he had defenders, people who refused to believe that such a successful and elusive criminal as the Winking Weasel would be so sloppy as to consistently leave huge messes at the scene of the crime. Those same defenders, however, still paid Kuro more attention than he wanted.

  Kuro wanted nothing to do with the burglaries. He didn’t know anything and didn’t want to know anything. He really needed to focus on his schoolwork if he was going to pass any courses, and yet he was constantly being dragged in to consult on the wild theories being thrown around by his schoolmates.

  Charlie and Arthur were the worst speculators at the school. Charlie was prone to flights of fancy so elaborate that she could spend entire evenings expounding enthusiastically on the various impossibilities involved in her hypotheses. Nothing was too absurd for her. If her ideas required a dragon queen to team up with ninja pixies and engage in time travel, that was fine with her regardless of whether any of those things existed.

  Arthur was much less fanciful in his enquiries. His father was a great detective, and so Arthur knew about evidence and such things. He had a neatly organized notebook in which he detailed the various clues he collected regarding times, dates, locations, and the movements of various people he considered to be suspects. That list continually grew longer as Arthur learned the names of more people. Neither friend would give Kuro a moment’s peace, as they couldn’t imagine not wanting to be involved in solving the mystery.

  “What if instead of the window, the burglar cut a hole in the ceiling to get in and then replaced it when they left?” proposed Charlie. “Have you ever done anything like that, Kuro?”

  Kuro looked to Marie for help, but she was quite successfully doing her work despite the noise. A lifetime in a house full of siblings had trained her to ignore the inane ramblings of the people around her.

  “Véronique Archambault was out of her room for less than ten minutes,” observed Arthur, pen poised to add information. “How wou
ld you have gotten in and out in that time?”

  Kuro did not answer. Instead he tried to follow Marie’s lead. He buried his face in his books and tried to force the words he was looking at to drown out his friends.

  “Why do you think it’s only first years that have been burgled so far?” demanded Charlie, her eyes peeking over the top of Kuro’s textbook. “Do you think one of them has a secret key to the labyrinth beneath the island which holds the sword of lords that can only be drawn by the true king of the fairy realm, and the burglar is secretly the lost Summer prince who needs that key so he can draw the sword and claim his rightful place on the throne? Is that who you really are, Kuro Hayashi?”

  Charlie was a monster. She knew Kuro couldn’t resist that onslaught of absurdity, especially not after accusing him of being both the burglar and a prince, not to mention having the audacity to use his full name as though it meant something. He slammed his book closed and tried very hard to stifle his laughter. “I really need to get this done,” he pleaded. “I’m not like you guys. I’ll fail if I don’t do my work. I might fail if I do do my work. And then I really will have to start burgling people again.”

  His friends relented for the moment. Out of consideration for their embattled friend, they removed him from the conversation and instead debated loudly between themselves as to whether vampires or ghosts were more likely suspects, and whether anyone in Autumn Lodge would ever be targeted.

  While he had trouble ignoring his friends, Kuro was well practiced at ignoring the crimes of other people. His life in Detritus Lane had taught him well to leave others to their work. There was sort of an unspoken code of honour among thieves, born not out of respect, but out of a system of self-preservation. Interfering with another theft has a way of getting both parties caught, and knowing too much could make one a person of interest for the Guard. Kuro knew the other thieves around Detritus by their habits rather than their faces. A large rat lounging on the steps of a residence, a house with a second-story window forced open, a shabby man standing by a lamppost in the predawn hours, those were telltale signs of a thief at work and a collegial warning for other thieves to stay away.

  Kuro’s professional incuriosity made the school thefts particularly easy to ignore. They were sloppy, boring, and harmless. The thief, or thieves, made a terrible mess and barely took anything. To date, all that had gone missing were two hairbrushes, a pair of shoes, a parasol, and a mirror. All expensive and fancy ones, to be sure, but nothing substantial, nothing those students and their wealthy families couldn’t casually replace, and nothing particularly personal. The fact that Kuro didn’t have a decent alibi wasn’t particularly notable, given that almost nobody had one. All the crimes happened when people were in transition, between classes or around meals, when most of the students were moving from one place to another.

  Kuro dismissed it all as more student antics, inspired by the foolishness the year before, and perpetrated against first years because they would be the least able to defend themselves against a largely incompetent thief.

  Kuro settled in and ground through a good chunk of his Gaelic homework before he was inevitably distracted by Charlie and Arthur again. He had gotten used to the rhythm of their constant uneven chatter, with Charlie’s loud excited monologues occasionally punctuated by brief monotone observations from Arthur, but their conversation had accidentally veered towards something that mattered and hit a bump.

  “How’s your sludge hunt going?” asked Charlie.

  The unfamiliar silence that followed drew Kuro away from his notes. He looked up to find that Arthur had blanched at the question. He’d gone so pale that his skin became transparent, and his eyes retreated a good way into his skull. “Fine,” he said.

  “Are you having trouble finding it?” asked Marie. “You know we would help you.”

  “I think I found it, but . . .” Arthur paused to choose his words. “I’m having trouble collecting it.”

  “That’s not hard,” encouraged Kuro. “Just make sure you use a wooden spoon. It’ll give you a good zap if you use a metal one.”

  The others looked at Kuro quizzically.

  “I used to scrape that stuff out of the sewer tunnels for potions I had to make for . . . somebody.” Kuro still couldn’t say Phineas’s name, and he was grateful that his friends understood. “It’s not the worst thing I’ve collected. Not quite, anyway.”

  “Thanks, but that’s not the problem.” Arthur squirmed a little and flushed with embarrassment. “I don’t like the dark.”

  Charlie slapped Arthur on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t have guessed you were afraid of the dark. But that’s fine—you’re good at light evocations.”

  That was true, but Kuro wondered if it might be the reason Arthur was so good at making lights. It didn’t matter in this situation, though. Charlie didn’t know about luminous slime mold, but a meaningful glance from Arthur showed Kuro that he did.

  Luminous slime mold is thin, transparent, and indistinguishable from damp rock, which makes it particularly tricky to find given that it likes to live on damp rocks. The only way to find it is when it glows, and it only glows in the dark. To find it you need to hang out, still and silent, usually at night, in the absolute pitch blackness, for up to an hour before it starts to glow.

  “I can get it for you,” said Kuro.

  “I couldn’t let you do that. It’s my responsibility,” Arthur said as though he really hoped Kuro would insist.

  “It’s okay. It’s no trouble. You did the hard work of figuring out where it is; all I’m doing is scraping it into a jar. Besides, Charlie and Marie helped me find the nightraven. It’s only right that I help you out.”

  Arthur glowed with relief.

  “I’m not helping you write the report, though,” added Kuro.

  That evening Arthur led Kuro to a limestone protrusion near the Summer Quarter cliffs. It was a small mound with an opening in it tiny enough that even Kuro would have to worm his way in on his belly. There was also evidence that Arthur had found it some time ago: a line of clover on the ground looked like it had been worn down from someone pacing back and forth on it.

  “You really don’t mind?” Arthur asked yet again.

  “Not at all. The dark doesn’t bother me.” Kuro found he was looking forward to it.

  “I’m not afraid of it, you know,” Arthur said, though he fidgeted and fretted just looking into the hole. “It’s just that I don’t know who I am in the dark. Like, what do I look like when I can’t be seen? What if it’s bad?”

  Kuro knew Arthur had similar anxieties about sleeping. He always drew the curtains around his bunk whenever he slept and kept a fairy light in bed with him.

  “Do you need me to make a light for you?” Arthur asked as Kuro readied himself for a good crawl.

  “It’s okay. I can do it.” Kuro conjured a little glowing orb. It was faint and unstable but good enough to see in a small dark cave. “A good light would make the slime mold take longer to glow, anyway.”

  Kuro wormed his way inside, his little light illuminating a long snaking tunnel. After a good distance, the cave opened into a chamber tall enough for Kuro to stand and stretch in. It was cool and damp in the way that only the underground can be, where the air, the rock, the water felt as though they had been unchanged and in the same place, at the same temperature, for eons. It was utterly dark and ominously quiet. If Kuro quieted his breath, he could hear his own pulse in his ears.

  He had a hard time understanding Arthur’s discomfort with the dark. Kuro felt more himself in the cave. There were no eyes on him, nobody accusing him or judging him, no demands or expectations. The school uniform meant nothing in the dark; he didn’t have to pretend to belong in it. He was invisible and alone. He felt a tension in his shoulders that he didn’t even know he carried relax as he settled down onto the damp rock for a long, peaceful, and painfully uncomfortable wait. It was even better than his night in the tree.

 
He sat appreciating the silence and solitude while the cold of the cave slowly crept up through his bottom, gently numbing him. Slowly, a faint blue-green glow started to fill the cave, not enough to see by, but enough to start to make out the forking tendrils of the slime mold he’d been sent to fetch.

  He was in no hurry. The mold would get a little brighter, and it would be easier to find the best bits to scrape off, though it looked like someone had already done so. There were sharp lines where the mold suddenly ended.

  Kuro examined the work. It was sloppy, in his estimation. Too much had been taken at the edges. That was a mistake he’d made early on, gathering ingredients for Phineas. He supposed some of the older students must have to gather the mold for alchemy work as well, though he was surprised they could fit into the cave. It would be a tight squeeze for many of his classmates, let alone a high schooler.

  As he waited, a wavering in the dull light caught his attention. A patch of the mold had gone dark. Or rather Kuro thought it had. It was so nearly black that he wondered if it was his imagination. Regardless, he reached out to touch the spot where it had been only to find his approach blocked by a warm fleshy mass that screamed like a squirrel with its tail on fire.

  And then the cave was gone, and Kuro was somewhere else.

  Sudden isn’t a strong enough word for the transition. Transition might be too strong a word as well. Kuro was in a cave, and then he was not. There wasn’t a step or a blink or a pop to mark the movement. Kuro had stayed still while the world changed around him.

  He was overcome by a horrible sensation of not having moved. The sickening lurch that should accompany a sudden unexpected shift in position was uncomfortably absent, and it left a hollow void in its place. Each of his senses, in their turn, agreed that he was not at all where he had been, that he had gotten there in an entirely improper manner, and that they were ardent in their opposition to the whole affair.

  The place he found himself appeared to be a storage room for alchemy supplies. It was small, lit only by a single oil lamp, and empty except for himself and the creature he had surprised in the cave, whom Kuro could now see was a tiny lutin.