He was young, his beard barely a patchy goatee, and his nose and ears were still much too big for his head. He dressed in oversized brown overalls, which slouched over his boots, and a muddy blue shirt. The little lutin was shaking from the surprise of being grabbed in the cave and took a moment to calm his breathing. It was only a moment though.
After letting out most of a sigh, he noticed that Kuro was still holding onto his elbow. He squeaked in panic, and then the world turned inside out again.
They appeared in a snowy glade with a few small stone buildings. Kuro almost had time to sort out which way was up before the world shifted again, and they were on top of the Junior High, then under a growth of elephant ferns in the swamp, then a bedroom, a kitchen, a tool shed, a tree stump . . . each flip lasted less than a second, and each was punctuated by a startled cry from the lutin. Pop, squeak, pop, squeak, pop, squeak.
It was disorienting to the point of nausea, and while his body was flitting about like sunlight off waves, his brain felt like it was taking the normal overland route.
The rapid slideshow of locations thankfully ceased. The lutin instead tried squirming free of Kuro’s grasp.
Kuro nearly did release his accidental captive. He had started to loosen his grip, which had become quite tight during their unsettling transitions, and to apologize for surprising the lutin. He hesitated, though, as he noticed where they were.
They were standing on a rock in the middle of a lake. It was bare except for some aggressive lichens, whose spindly masses reached out toward the invaders, eager for the nourishment they could provide.
While even the most predatory of lichen could be outrun at a slow walk, being trapped on a boulder with a colony of the stuff, surrounded by water, when Kuro didn’t know how to swim was going to eventually be quite fatal. If he let go and the lutin left, he’d be stuck.
“I’m sorry for surprising you, but could you bring me back to the dark cave with the mold?” he asked as politely as he could.
That was when the lutin really looked at Kuro for the first time. As he took in the features of his captor, a slow horror crept over his face. His eyes went wide, and his mouth opened in a scream that took several seconds to find its voice. The cry that eventually emerged was an ear-piercing shriek that would put a banshee to shame, lasting until the lutin had run out of breath.
Once that had subsided, a panicked flurry of legs and arms thrashed about, trying to escape from the horror that was Kuro. “Help!” he shouted. “The kuro monster has me. It’s going to eat me!”
"I'm not going to eat you," Kuro said in as soothing a tone as he could, though any assurance he gave was weakened by the fact that he refused to loosen his grip.
"Yes, it will! The kuro monster eats lutin children to steal their powers."
The recent behaviour of the other lutin towards Kuro crystallized in that moment. Their caution around him since returning from summer break, their unwillingness to talk to him, his mail not being delivered—it all made sense if they thought he was that sort of predator.
He wasn’t even sure they were wrong.
Kuro was part lutin, but he didn’t know which part or how it got there. Maybe he had eaten lutin children back before he could remember. Maybe Phineas had taken those memories from him; that was the sort of thing Phineas would do.
Kuro let the terrified lutin go. It wasn’t a well-considered decision, but he felt too guilty at the possibility of the claims to monsterhood being true to hold on with any strength.
Free from the grip, the lutin scrambled away across the rock and raised the wooden spoon he’d brought for mold scraping like a sword in preparation to fight off the dangerous creature that was the kuro monster.
The two stared at each other until the silence became awkward. “Aren’t you going to leave?” Kuro asked at last.
“You will follow me and eat me,” the lutin asserted. “I will fight you here.”
“I can’t follow you,” Kuro said. “I don’t know how.”
“You are lying. You followed me here.” The lutin backed up to the edge of the boulder so that Kuro couldn’t possibly get around behind him. He was ready to fight for his life. “You won’t trick me.”
“I didn’t follow you. You brought me,” Kuro repeated.
The lutin didn’t believe Kuro. Not that Kuro could blame him; the lutin had every reason to distrust the kuro monster. As Kuro continued to stand still, however, hands in his pockets, gently nudging away any carnivorous lichen patches that inched too close to him, a glimmer of doubt settled into the lutin’s resolute posture.
All it took was that flicker of uncertainty, and the lutin was gone, vanished from the spot, leaving Kuro alone in the middle of a troublingly large lake.
Kuro kicked himself for his sympathy. He could have held on and threatened the lutin until he’d been brought back to Avalon and then let the child go. It wouldn’t have made much difference to the lutin. He had already been assaulted by a terrifying lutin-eating monster. A couple of empty threats wouldn’t have made his day much worse.
Kuro started weighing his options for escape. The nearest shore was close enough that he could discern a dock with a small boat. He even thought he could see someone standing on it. He might have a chance at rescue.
Kuro shouted and waved, trying to get the person’s attention. They didn’t seem to notice him, or even move. He squinted and shielded his eyes, trying to block out the sun flickering off the ripples on the lake. Either the dock was very large, or the person was very small. Also, they looked like they were holding a weapon.
Kuro’s moment of optimism evaporated. It was the lutin, watching him, making sure Kuro didn’t get the drop on him.
Kuro crouched down and tested the water. There were a few underwater boulders nearby, but they fell away quickly to a silty darkness. He couldn’t tell how deep it was, but it didn’t really matter whether he drowned in ten feet or a hundred. He was distracted from his worries about drowning by some motion in the water. Out in the middle of the lake, a long serpentine form crested the surface, its spiny fin shining like a rainbow in the sunlight. It took several seconds for its full length to slide past.
“What are you doing?”
The accusing question from behind him startled Kuro, and he lost his footing, slipping gracelessly into the lake. He scrambled for a handhold but found only masses of lichen that came away from the rocks and clung eagerly to his hands. He struggled to find footing on the slippery submerged rocks in the water while trying to avoid inhaling too much of the lake and scraping off his new carnivorous mittens.
“Why didn’t you follow me?” the lutin demanded, failing to show any sympathy for Kuro’s plight.
“I. Can’t.” Kuro could speak only one word at a time as he had to hop on the underwater rocks to get his mouth to clear the water.
“Why are you in the water?” The tone of the questions implied that this was all some part of Kuro’s devious plan to eat the lutin child.
“I. Slipped,” Kuro said, taking a new breath with each hop and holding it as his mouth went back under water.
“Why are you hopping on a rock?”
“I. Can’t. Swim.”
“Then the pogo will eat you.”
“Then. Would. You. Please. Help. Me?”
Kuro bobbed impatiently as the little lutin considered the request. He had a terrible monster at his mercy. All he had to do was wait, and the kuro monster would be eaten in what must seem like a just twist of fate. But the lutin wavered. Perhaps Kuro was failing to live up to his legendary monstrousness, or maybe the lutin just wasn’t ready to be responsible for somebody’s death, even if it was deserved.
Cautiously, the lutin reached out his wooden spoon to Kuro, ready to drop it and vanish if Kuro made any sudden moves. Kuro grasped it gently, not wanting to startle his rescuer, who hauled on the spoon to pull Kuro within reach of a clear patch of boulder.
Kuro dragged himself ou
t, heavy from his soaking uniform, and took several long breaths. “Thank you,” he said to the lutin.
“You are not a very good monster,” he replied.
Kuro sighed. It was yet another thing to add to his lengthy list of incompetencies. “No, I’m probably not.” The autumn air, wherever they were, was chilly and cut through his wet clothes. “I suppose it would be too much to ask for you to bring me back to that cave on Avalon.”
The lutin looked at Kuro with intense suspicion. “You will eat me.”
Kuro groaned in frustration. “I promise I won’t eat you. I just don’t want to be stuck on this rock waiting to get eaten myself.”
Something about that stirred a change in the lutin. He was still wary but less tense. “You would make a promise?”
“Of course,” Kuro replied, though there was something odd in the way the lutin said the word. There was a weight to it.
“A real promise, a fairy promise, not a wizard promise.” It was half a question and half an accusation.
Kuro began to understand; he was familiar with wizard promises. They were given out freely and abandoned at the slightest sign of trouble. At best they were honest claims of good intentions, and in Kuro’s experience, wizards were rarely at their best. “I think wizard promises are the only ones I know how to make,” he apologized.
The lutin scowled at the revelation and managed to lower his opinion of Kuro even further. “I will show you, and you will promise. You will promise not to eat any lutin anymore.”
“Is that all?” Kuro agreed a bit too eagerly.
The lutin paused and considered his terms. “No,” he said, realizing the power he had over Kuro. “You will promise to protect lutin instead. And you will promise to teach me wizard magic. And to get me chocolate. And to not tell.”
Kuro cringed at the last two. “I can try to get you chocolate, but I can’t get it very often either. Also, I’m worse at magic than I am at being a monster.”
“I do not care. You will promise or I will leave you here and the pogo will eat you.”
“Okay, okay, just tell me how to do it.”
The little lutin became deadly serious. “It is old magic. It is names and blood and truth.”
“How much blood?” Kuro worried that he’d gotten himself into a problem just as big as the water serpent in the lake.
The lutin shook his head at the folly of wizards. “It does not matter. It matters that it is yours and you give it to the promise. Shed your blood, say our names, and make your promise. That is all. If it is true, then it is done.”
It seemed much too simple. All the magic Kuro knew that could do anything powerful involved rituals and chants in strange languages and often lots of drawings in chalk and ash. If it would convince the lutin to bring him back to Avalon, though, it was worth trying.
Kuro chipped the edge of the jar he had that was meant for gathering slime mold and slit his thumb a little on the edge. It was shallow, but a thin line of blood appeared. The lutin nodded in approval, but Kuro hesitated. “I don’t know your name.”
“I am Bindal,” said the lutin proudly. “Now say your promise to me.”
“I, Kuro, promise you, Bindal, that I will never eat a lutin.”
Kuro knew right away why Bindal had said the word “promise” with such force and respect. The moment Kuro said it, it was true. It had been true before, but now Kuro knew that it had to stay true forever; he had promised. It was a feeling he knew, but from an entirely different source.
It was like the magic Phineas had used to bind Kuro into his service, but instead of having the chains forced on him, Kuro had put them on himself. He could no more break the promise than disobey his old master, but at the same time it was entirely different.
The magic that had compelled Kuro to follow his master’s orders had been almost a forgery of this one. It had been made of the same parts but dissected and reassembled to create a twisted copy of the original.
He continued the promises as Bindal instructed, each tying him to the words he said, or more the intention behind them. All but the promise to teach wizard magic. He could not make that promise. He tried but he didn’t believe that he could do it, and so the truth wasn’t there. The best he could do was to promise to try.
Bindal the lutin was enormously satisfied with his victory over the kuro monster. In his mind he had not only defeated a giant but subjugated it as well. He was almost eager to take Kuro back to the cave on Avalon to prove that he had tamed the beast.
Kuro held onto Bindal’s elbow, and despite Bindal’s insistence that it was impossible and not at all how anything worked, Kuro was again pulled along as Bindal blinked between places.
The world spun while they stood still. The bright sun of the lake winked out, and they were engulfed in darkness. Slowly Kuro’s eyes adjusted to the darkness of the cave and the dim blue light of the slime mold.
As they filled their jars with the luminous sludge, Kuro instructed Bindal on the proper way to do it. It wasn’t that he thought Bindal needed the instruction, but he couldn’t help trying to teach him the way wizards did it. He had made a promise.
When both had enough for their purposes, Bindal vanished, and Kuro crawled out of the cave. As he exited, he was greeted by Arthur, waiting patiently in his pacing rut. He looked at Kuro, cocked his head, and asked. “Why are you all wet?”
Twelve
Samhain
Despite the oaths Kuro had made to Bindal, the lutin didn’t demand much of his new servant. He was “very busy,” apparently. He popped up unexpectedly from time to time when Kuro was alone to “remind him who was boss.”
Kuro did his best to fulfill his obligations of sweets and education, but chocolate was hard to come by, and Bindal had little patience for the lessons he had demanded. The moment Kuro started talking about magical theory or threatened to write something down, Bindal would vanish, escaping the lesson before it could get truly dull.
It was something Kuro wished he could do.
Classes were relentless, and Kuro was trying to remember why he had been looking forward to returning. Everything was hard. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to, and there weren’t enough hours in the day to do all the work assigned, even without the regular visits from Flint and the harassment by Moira and Azalea. He felt like he was still in the lake, balancing on a slippery rock, fighting for a last breath of air before he was gobbled up whole.
There was a light at the end of the tunnel, though. Or more in the middle: Samhain.
He had missed the festival the year before due to a fight with Bella that had ended with him nearly freezing to death in the Blandlands. He had suffered through days of Charlie recounting the joys and wonders that he hadn’t experienced. There were games, dancing, a bonfire, displays of magic, and, most importantly, there was food. The feast Charlie described was beyond Kuro’s wildest fantasies: too much of everything, all made to satisfy the taste buds of the wealthiest and most royal of students. This year he was determined to go.
He spent the entire week on edge, waiting for the inevitable disaster that would land him in detention, or the hospital, or jail. But the days were unsettlingly uneventful. There were no burglaries, no threats on his life, no attempted kidnappings, not even a surprise visit from a lutin or an assault by a pair of first-year girls. The week was so mundane that he found himself grinding his teeth with dread.
By noon on the day of Samhain, when the bell rang to release them from classes and nothing terrible had yet happened, Kuro was a nervous wreck. He didn’t believe he would make it to the festival until he was standing on one of the magic carpets used to bring the junior students to the top of the mesa at the centre of the island where it would be held.
As Kuro shifted nervously on the paisley-patterned rug, their pilot, Mr. Ogonov, said, “Nervous of heights, eh Kuro?” misunderstanding Kuro’s unease. “Don’t worry about it. That's very normal. I’ll keep her steady as a rock.”
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br /> The teacher waited for Kuro and his friends to get settled on the rug before he lifted off gently. True to his word, he kept it absolutely steady and level. Out of misplaced consideration for Kuro’s fears, the ride took an eternity, which made Kuro even more anxious. It took all his resolve not to leap from the carpet and start climbing the monolith himself.
When the carpet finally landed at the top of the plateau, Kuro was almost in tears at having made it. He crawled onto the soft grass and took in the scene that he’d waited a whole year to experience.
It wasn’t quite what he had expected.
He wasn’t certain what he had been expecting, but this wasn’t it.
The plateau was broad and flat and contained only two buildings. The first, a sprawling manor house of red brick, not entirely unlike the junior high school, was the teachers’ residence; they were just as trapped on Avalon as the students during the school year. It was surrounded by a high iron fence covered in thorny vines. While neither of those would keep a determined high school student out, they did give a clear indication as to how welcome uninvited guests might be.
The other building was the high school itself. Kuro had seen it only from below and at a distance, where it looked like an ominous fortress. From up close, it was still that but so much more. It was a castle, a cathedral, and a palace all at once. Its thick heavy stone walls were complimented with soaring arches and stained-glass windows. Its black slate roof was a masterpiece of interlocking and overlapping shields, each with heraldic animals like lions and griffons and caribou carved into them. Its massive spires, which rose like spears into the sky, were adorned with sculptures of all manner of creature: gargoyles, winged unicorns, dragons, and more. Features of it reminded Kuro of Summerhill, Vertheim, and the Chateau du Printemps, but at the same time, it wasn’t any of them. It was massive, beautiful, and imposing, and Kuro hadn’t seen anything like it.
Volume 2: Burglary Page 11