Volume 2: Burglary

by R. A. Consell

  Marie snarled at the suggestion. “Are you sure you got that right? Can I trade with Arthur?”

  “And Kuro, you’re a pileated woodpecker, persistent and always in search of something.”

  Kuro stumbled to a halt as he was struck by an epiphany. “They’re searching for something.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Charlie. “Mostly bugs under bark, but it’s supposed to be symbolic, right?”

  “No, the burglar,” Kuro explained. A bunch of pieces fell into place for him. “They’re searching for something. That’s why the robberies look wrong, and why they keep happening. They’re not trying to get rich or scare anyone. They want something, and they don’t know who has it.”

  Kuro was so excited to sort out what had been preoccupying him all morning that he had forgotten he had an audience. He looked up to find that Marie was listening with curiosity, and Arthur had whipped out his notebook and was scribbling away.

  Charlie, however, flung her arms up in the air and shouted at Kuro. “No! Not now. Today we are learning to summon familiars. You can be interesting tomorrow. We’re too busy today. Now hurry up. I don’t want to miss anything.”

  The other three were so disoriented by Charlie caring about being on time for class that they complied without complaint. She pushed them all into the classroom just as the bell rang and Ms. McCutcheon started talking.

  Two hours of dance practice let Kuro work out more of the details for himself. He liked his explanation. It made a lot of things make more sense. The mess was a cover, so it was harder to figure out where they were really looking. The targets were noble people who might have inherited some powerful artifact or some proof of a claim to land or title like a signet ring or crown. If Dubois was involved, it might even have something to do with the missing heir to the Summer throne. That would explain why the younger students were being targeted. The heir was born about the same time as Arthur, so they’d either be a young second year or an old first year. He felt very clever for his solution, and that kept him in high spirits through most of the afternoon’s other failures.

  The dance portion of the practice ended with a collective sigh of relief. There was a reasonably strong divide in the class between people who had gotten the hang of it early and were now bored and those who were bad at it and had gotten annoyed. Kuro was in the latter half. He could do the steps and all the movements just fine, but the timing stumped him. The required tempo was much too slow; it felt like crawling when he wanted to run.

  “I shall now demonstrate a complete summoning,” said Ms. McCutcheon. There was a chorus of chatter followed by students loudly shushing each other so she could continue. “I shall also demonstrate an unsummoning. It is the same as we practiced on some of your earlier conjurations, but the experience will be different. A part of the familiar is tied to your spirit. When it is dispelled, you will absorb its experiences. The first time that happens can be somewhat disorienting. Also, if you cannot perform an unsummoning, we will need to pop your familiar manually, which can be unsettling.”

  Ms. McCutcheon then proceeded to combine the chant and movements they’d been practicing and invoke the spell with impeccable precision. As she did, pale blue tendrils of light spiralled out of thin air in front of her. They coiled into place like an explosion of a thousand springs run in reverse. As they combined, they formed into the unmistakable shape of a heron, which stretched its broad wings and arched its long, graceful neck. As she neared the conclusion of the ritual, the spiritual form started to solidify, growing a full coat of blue, black, and white feathers. With the final clap of the spell, the familiar’s eye turned from a glowing misty blue to a natural yellow, and it was done.

  It stood serenely as the students applauded, and then McCutcheon unsummoned it. With the much shorter phrase and movements, it unwove itself, and the streams of light flew back to the teacher and were absorbed through her ears, eyes, and nose.

  “You may now begin to practice on your own,” she said.

  Chaos followed.

  Everyone sang and danced in their own time, bumping into each other, rolling over each other’s tune, and getting distracted the moment anyone else had the tiniest flicker of success. Ms. McCutcheon moved through the room offering guidance, encouragement, and direction but somehow managing to stay unaffected by the ruckus.

  It struck Kuro how very much like her familiar she was. She walked proudly and with precision, but in a detached sort of way, wading through the torrent but staying above it and being unaffected by it. Kuro could have imagined a hundred creatures that would have suited her, but now having seen her heron, he knew it really couldn’t have been anything else.

  Kuro went through the motions of the casting himself but mostly watched others. As the afternoon wore on, students were starting to get things to happen. Oliver was making steady progress, with more and more misty green tendrils weaving together with each attempt and starting to form something fist sized. Beside him Sean Cassidy was repeatedly forming a beautiful swirl of luminous pink petals but never finished, because whatever it was forming was too small for his liking. Charlie kept conjuring a huge cloud of what looked like dandelion fluff, but she always got distracted by other people before it could form into anything. Morgan was consistently creating something long and low but seemed stumped as to what it was so couldn’t resolve it completely. Arthur was robotically repeating the spell again and again, with different results every time; a rainbow of shapes and colours whirled in front of him but never resolved into anything. Marie, like Kuro, couldn’t get anything to happen, but unlike Kuro, she was trying.

  Evelyn was, to nobody’s surprise, the first to manifest a recognizable form. Glowing golden cords knotted together, starting with large muscular hindquarters and then building up along the body until the unmistakable shape of a lioness formed. It stretched, and a full coat of fur bloomed along its length. It posed proudly for the class and soaked in the applause and admiration. Once Evelyn had deemed the quantity of praise was suitable, she ordered her familiar to her side, which it promptly ignored. It faced away from her and, with incredible poise, power, and grace, lay down and fell asleep.

  The class laughed, and she unsummoned it angrily. The lioness burst into a shower of golden glitter, which swirled back to its creator. Evelyn blinked slowly and stumbled as if drunk. She looked at her hands and the floor as if she’d never seen them before and licked the inside of her mouth as though her tongue were a new and foreign object.

  Ms. McCutcheon took the pause in action as an opportunity to offer some wisdom. “As you are all aware, since you read the pamphlet so thoroughly this morning, a familiar is not a pet or a servant, but an extension and reflection of some part of yourself. While most are cooperative extensions of their creators, others reflect some less admirable traits. They will not necessarily behave themselves or obey your commands. Some of you will find your familiars to be uncooperative, lazy, or even destructive. They are willful beings and become more so the longer they are out. They can even become resistant to being unsummoned if left solid for too long, and leaving the veil while they are out and about can sever your connection to them, in which case popping them can become quite an ordeal.”

  Evelyn’s success worked as some form of encouragement for most of the class. While everyone was pretty resigned to the fact that their familiars wouldn’t be as impressive as hers, she had proved that it could be done.

  Veronica Langston was next to succeed, conjuring a grey squirrel that immediately ran away and hid behind a shelf, followed shortly thereafter by Oliver Kagen, who created a bullfrog that just sat and croaked contentedly. Sean summoned a tiny red, green, and white hummingbird, which was promptly attacked by a falcon created by Leif and spent the rest of the class hiding in Gregory Zimmerman’s pocket for protection.

  Arthur managed to get his familiar to form, and it was a huge black dog that looked almost like a bear. He was so happy that he smiled openly in front of the whole class. Kuro
knew that Arthur idolized his adoptive father, and having a dog familiar would probably mean a lot to him. He and the dog just looked happily at each other until McCutcheon forced him to unsummon it to prove that he could.

  Of course, the moment it was gone, he started casting again to bring it back out, but on his second summoning, it was a small fluffy dog, and on the third it was an orange housecat, then a loon, then a bat, then a carp. The last one forced him to pause in his repeated summonings, as a classroom floor is not a proper place for a fish, and absorbing its experiences left Arthur goggle eyed and gasping for air. It also gave him a chance to realize that he’d gained the attention of the entire class.

  “I thought familiars never changed,” complained Magna, who had not yet managed to get hers to form.

  “Arthur may be something of a special case,” said Ms. McCutcheon. Arthur emphasized her point by involuntarily changing the colour and texture of his skin to try to blend in with the wall behind him.

  McCutcheon urged everyone back to their own work. It was getting harder to do so, though. The dozen or so fully formed familiars were wandering around the class, hunting each other, hiding from each other, or just generally getting in the way. The addition of a full-sized lioness prowling around the class and demanding the attention of everyone nearby was terribly distracting. With most people having developed some amount of success, the room was a storm of swirling lights and colours.

  Kuro gave up pretending to try and leafed through the instruction manual. Teachers seemed to like it when students read textbooks when they didn’t have to. It also provided him time to think. His theory about the crimes had some holes. The biggest was the torn open bedding. Even if the students were hiding something important, it would be strange to put it inside a pillow or duvet, since they got laundered regularly. Also, he had no idea who was doing it, or what they were looking for.

  As the final bell of the day approached, they were given a few dire warnings from Ms. McCutcheon. The first was not to teach the first years. She reclaimed all the manuals and counted them twice to make sure they didn’t get into the younger students’ hands. She reminded the class how they’d had to wait and how the older students had refused their demands to learn early. Next was to never let their familiar out of sight. They were responsible for anything and everything their familiars did. As far as the school was concerned, a familiar and its creator were one and the same. And finally, she reminded them that summoning a familiar had no impact on their grades, and they should all now move on and focus on their other studies.

  The bell released them, and nearly everyone made it to the school steps before completely forgetting the last piece of advice and trying to summon again.

  Kuro expected to walk back to the lodge on his own but was surprised to find his friends at his side. “Aren’t you gonna keep summoning stuff?” he asked.

  “Why would I?” said Marie. “It did not work in the room. I don’t think it will work on the lawn.” In a transparent attempt to hide her disappointment, she turned her attention to Arthur. “Good job. You didn’t think you would be able to do it at all, right?”

  Arthur smiled very slightly and looked at his feet. “Yeah. I was surprised.”

  “It’s so cool that you can make whatever you want!” Charlie practically exploded with delight. “What’s it like? How does it feel? Do you think you can make something really big, like an elephant or a dragon? What about a person? Can you make a person familiar? You could be like twins and go on capers where you take each other’s place at a fancy party while the other one steals the precious jewels.”

  Marie encouraged Charlie to let Arthur have a chance to talk by gently pushing her into a bush.

  “I don’t think I can control it,” he said. “It’s just different every time. I keep trying to get the first one back, but I can’t. Nothing happens when I try to force it to be something. I have to just let it be what it wants to be.”

  “That’s really cool, anyway,” said Charlie, having freed herself from the shrub. “I’m excited to get mine.”

  “I thought you would be more sad about not summoning it today,” said Kuro.

  “Nah, I got farther than I expected.” She thrust her fists on her hips and puffed out her chest. “It’s hard to think and sing and dance at the same time, and it was really distracting in that room with everyone else doing it at the same time. I kept forgetting to hold myself up and nearly falling over. Besides, I know mine is gonna be big and probably white. Maybe a polar bear! I’ll get it eventually, and now it’s like a Yule present where I get to guess what it will be.”

  Marie, annoyed by Charlie’s unflappable positivity, turned to Kuro for an ally. “It is only you and me with no hope, then,” she said, throwing an arm over his shoulder. “We tried our best, though, right?”

  “I wasn’t trying,” replied Kuro. He felt the arm slip from around him, and he turned to find Marie scowling at him.

  “What do you mean you did not try?”

  “It wouldn’t work anyway,” he said. “I haven’t conjured anything properly yet, even the easy stuff. I’d probably just blow something up.”

  “Don’t you wonder what your familiar would be?” Marie seemed almost angry with him.

  “No,” he lied.

  He was surprised to discover it was a lie. Earlier that morning it had been true. After a whole day of being forced to think about familiars, however, and watching other people have meaningful moments when they discovered theirs, he found that he wanted to know. It came as a bit of a shock. He also realized that part of him was still puzzling over the burglaries. There were pieces that didn’t fit, questions to which he wanted answers, and it frightened him.

  In the flurry of the busy day, he had let his guard down and had been possessed by a feeling he’d thought banished long ago. A feeling that had brought him nothing but pain and misery in his past, one that brought nothing but trouble.

  Kuro was curious.

  Fifteen

  Self-Guided Tours

  Charlie informed Kuro that he was officially allowed to be interesting again during first period social studies the following day. They were meant to be reading and summarizing a chapter on the history of Avalon Academy, an activity Charlie considered optional since it was “stuff everybody already knew” and much less interesting than what Kuro had to say about the burglaries.

  Kuro wasn’t sure who was included in “everybody,” as he certainly didn’t know anything about it. From Marie’s grouchy sidelong glance at Charlie, neither did she.

  Kuro tried for a moment to convince himself to argue. They could talk at lunch, and they should be doing their schoolwork. He knew it was the right thing to say, but he was prevented on several fronts.

  He knew that Charlie would be trying to summon her familiar the moment class let out. She’d stayed up late the night before and had eaten breakfast outside while trying to do it. She would only be interested in the burglaries during class and would keep bugging him about it until he’d spilled everything he knew.

  It was also clear that Mr. Widdershins was too busy dealing with the students who had familiars to care about the ones without. Getting anyone to unsummon their animals was a hopeless battle for him, and he was spending the entire period breaking up fights and trying to silence the dozen animals that had invaded his classroom.

  Kuro gave in and started to relate what he knew. As he spoke, Arthur diligently noted everything down, just as Dubois had. Kuro realized what the Hound had meant about not needing another informant. Arthur would happily pass on every scrap of information he gathered to his dad without a second thought.

  Kuro decided that he’d have to be careful about what he shared. At the moment, though, he was pretty sure he didn’t know anything Dubois wouldn’t have already figured out. A thorough report from Arthur would ease any lingering suspicion that the Hounds might have about Kuro’s involvement.

  So, he spilled everything he’d seen
. Arthur asked probing questions as a Hound would, about the colour of the carpet, and the shape of the tears in the sheets, none of which Kuro could answer with confidence. Charlie asked questions Kuro was even less able to answer, like whether the room smelled like a poltergeist and if the feathers could have belonged to a phoenix that exploded, causing all the damage. And Marie acted as though she wasn’t interested by pretending to do the assigned reading.

  She exposed the fact that she wasn’t really reading when Kuro brought up his idea of it being related to the Summer heir. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said from behind her book, unable to keep out of the conversation. “Half the victims were girls.”

  “So what?” replied Charlie.

  “Isn’t the heir a boy?” asked Marie, her momentary confidence wavering.

  “Nobody knows,” Charlie said. “The baby hadn’t been presented yet when the Coup d’Été happened, and everybody who knew got killed. It’s a huuuuge mystery. They don’t even know who the father was or what the baby’s name was going to be. All they really know is when the baby was born. During the coup, they found a changeling in the crib where the baby should be, but it changed into a monster and tried to run away.”

  “Yes, I know that part,” said Marie. “That was Arthur. Arthur is a boy.”

  “Not really,” said Arthur. “I’m a changeling.”

  “What?” asked Marie, getting flustered.

  “I can be a girl if I want.” As he said it, his figure and features shifted to look more like Marie.

  She cringed at the facsimile. “I asked you not to do that.”

  “Sorry,” said Arthur as he shifted back to his habitual narrow, pale blonde appearance. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “But that means the heir could be anybody?” asked Marie.

  “Not me,” said Arthur. “I’m a changeling.”

  “Or me!” said Kuro. “I was made by the people who started the coup.”