Volume 2: Burglary

by R. A. Consell

  “Me neither,” added Charlie. “I’m a half elf, and my birthday is in March.”

  “Why does that matter?” asked Marie.

  “Because,” Charlie drew out the word as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “The heir is from Tirnanog and was born in June.”

  “If I were going to hide a kid, the first thing I would do is lie about their birthday,” Marie replied in a parody of Charlie’s tone. “And didn’t you say they didn’t know who the dad was? Why could it not be you?”

  Charlie’s eyes and mouth grew so wide that she might have been a changeling herself. She slid slowly off her chair into a graceless heap under her desk without seeming to notice and stayed there as she processed the shock.

  Having effectively incapacitated her roommate, Marie stopped pretending to work and joined the conversation properly. She stole Arthur’s notes and started looking through them, tapping on the bridge of her glasses. “It doesn’t really make sense, though. It’s not like a secret hidden prince or princess is going to bring a sign with them to school that says they’re the heir. If they had one, they’d leave it at home, or in a box at the bottom of the ocean.”

  Kuro pouted. She was right, but he didn’t like it. His theory had been so clever.

  “It makes a lot of sense that they’re looking for something, though,” she said, easing some of Kuro’s disappointment. “But we don’t know what. Maybe we should think about who is doing it and how.”

  “It has to be someone who can sneak into a residence undetected,” said Arthur. “Someone powerful and clever.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Kuro, earning some quizzical looks that demanded he explain himself.

  “Wizards all think that way,” he said. “They all put fancy enchantments on things to stop spells and stuff, but I never stole anything by being smart or doing fancy magic. The easiest way to steal something is to just walk up and take it. If you look like you belong there, nobody even questions it.”

  “Who could get into a residence without raising suspicion?” asked Marie.

  “Almost anybody,” said Arthur, showing her the pages of potential burglars he’d compiled. “Students can go to each other’s residence as guests.”

  “Then everybody on the island is a suspect?” Marie had been starting to get excited about their chances of solving the mystery, but Arthur had dampened their spirits.

  “Not everybody,” said Arthur. “Evelyn was burgled during Samhain, and everybody was there. Only people who could get down to the ground and back could do it. So, it’s only high school students.”

  Freya Mimirdottir’s magpie familiar chose that moment to grab Charlie’s pen cap off her desk, and a look of mutual understanding passed among the friends.

  “A familiar could do it,” said Arthur, putting into words what had become obvious.

  Kuro shook his head. “Familiars can’t get in or out. The residences all have salt brick lining. Familiars can’t cross that, just like fairies and ghosts and lutin.”

  He and Arthur deflated a bit at having yet another theory dashed, but Marie smirked and crossed her arms in smug satisfaction. “I think it makes even more sense.” She let her friends wonder for a moment before relieving their curiosity. “Somebody goes into the residence and summons their familiar somewhere hidden, then the familiar comes out and does the burglary when the owner has a good alibi, and then they come back and get it later when it is not suspicious. That’s why the burglaries are so many days apart.”

  Arthur was so impressed that he quietly applauded her explanation. “You are very good at this,” he said.

  Marie shrugged. “My parents watch a lot of detective shows.”

  Charlie, having finally collected herself from the stunning revelation about her potential nobility, inserted herself into the conversation. “So how are we going to catch them?” she demanded enthusiastically.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Marie, picking her textbook back up. “That is for teachers and police.”

  The part of Kuro that was dangerously curious spent the rest of the day coming up with ways to search out the burglar. They could find out what each student’s familiar was and eliminate, one by one, which ones could be responsible. They could guess at who the next target would be and take turns watching their room. They could search out the hidden spaces in the other residences, looking for a familiar waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Or they could, as Marie suggested before heading out in search of bilious tree frogs that evening, “stop acting like children and get on with their schoolwork.”

  She was right, and Kuro didn’t like it. He was just starting to get the hang of being a child, and now he had to stop it. Charlie and Arthur did not agree.

  Charlie scrawled out a chapter summary in under ten minutes based on her loose understanding, then went outside to practice summoning her familiar. That was a bit of a relief—since Marie’s suggestion that she could possibly be the heir, she’d been insisting that they call her “your majesty.”

  Arthur decided to go with her, planning to summon familiars until he got a good one and not being concerned about getting the work done in time. They didn’t have to worry as much as Kuro. They worked faster, knew more, and probably wouldn’t end up in prison if they failed.

  Kuro was left with his thoughts and his homework, neither of which he was interested in being alone with. Even more annoying was that when he sat down to do the reading he should have been doing in class, he found that it was interesting. He had been all prepared to complain about it being a complete waste of time.

  He tried to write his summary, but the pictures and stories in the book were too complicated to sum up. He would have to skip all the best details. He decided that it would be a better use of his evening to explore the places the textbook talked about than to write about them.

  Before it housed a school, Kuro learned, Avalon Island had been fought over a lot because it was between all the territories and was so unusual, having seasons that never changed and an enormous stone spire in the middle. Every kingdom had held it at some point. There were all sorts of battles and assassinations and trials and marriages and betrayals.

  When the kingdoms made peace and formed a joint senate, they chose Avalon as the place to have their unified capital. The high school had been their parliament building, and the four residences had been their embassies. After a while, all the nobles got sick of taking boats through the Blandlands, so they moved everything to Bytown.

  They converted all the big buildings for use by the school, but they left other things behind that the textbook talked about.

  Kuro wandered out to the stone of oaths, where kings and queens of ages past had sworn vows to each other, a squarish block of limestone that sat on a cliff edge in the Summer Quarter. It was mossy and not easy to see among the untended weeds. The stone had looked much more impressive in the book, surrounded by people with crowns and swords.

  He jogged down to the amphitheatre in the Spring Quarter, where the school now held assemblies for the students. It had once been a court where criminals were tried. He went behind the stage to where they had kept the accused locked up. There was a steel door barring his way, but he picked the lock and went exploring. A steep narrow stairway led down to a cramped corridor containing four small windowless rooms with heavy metal doors.

  That was where Kuro would have been held if he had been caught by Dubois a hundred years earlier. He might have been executed or had his hands chopped off back then. He let himself into some of the rooms, but they weren’t very dramatic. They were just being used for storage. The rooms were full of servants’ uniforms, pillows and bedding, cleaning and alchemy supplies, coffee makers, and laundry machines. Much like the stone of oaths, it was underwhelming, a neglected and boring echo of something Kuro’s book made seem so historical.

  The last stop on his personal tour was much more satisfying. It was a mausoleum and graveyard at the border between Aut
umn and Winter, where the founders of the Confederation were buried. It wasn’t any more impressive than the previous two, but it felt more appropriate for a cemetery to be untended and overgrown.

  He climbed on top of the mausoleum and stared up at the stars emerging in the darkening sky until his thoughts came creeping back to him. The trip around the island had eased his gnawing curiosity for a while, but alone in the quiet at the edge of Winter, those notions crept back in. The one that decided to take hold of him was the question of his familiar. Did he have one? Like Arthur, he had assumed that it was a humans-only kind of thing, and it was so complicated that he’d never get it right even if he tried. But Arthur had one, and Kuro hadn’t ever cast the spell.

  It couldn’t hurt to try, he thought.

  Well, it could, actually. He considered all the spell attempts that had failed catastrophically for him.

  Nobody was around, though. He wouldn’t be putting anyone but himself in danger.

  He decided to give it just one attempt.

  He did what the book had said and meditated on thoughts of home and family. Once he’d overcome the associated panic attack from memories of Phineas and Detritus Lane, he started the song and dance but was interrupted.

  “What are you doing?” came a squeaky demand from right behind him.

  Kuro bolted like a startled chipmunk, clearing the cemetery in two bounds, and then shooting up a tree.

  He scanned the graveyard and found a grouchy lutin looking back at him judgementally, as though Kuro had clearly been up to some villainy.

  The sight of the little lutin eased some of the panic, and Kuro let some air back into his lungs. “Hi, Bindal.”

  “What are you doing?” he repeated, moving to the base of Kuro’s tree in a blink.

  “I was trying to summon my familiar.” Kuro hopped down, cushioning his fall with a burst of air. “But you surprised me.”

  “You will teach me that.” Bindal stood back and waited for Kuro to begin the lesson he’d just demanded.

  “It’s complicated,” said Kuro. “I can’t even do it myself.”

  “That is because you are very bad,” Bindal explained. “Teach me now.”

  “It’s in Gaelic,” argued Kuro.

  Bindal was insulted at the suggestion that he wouldn’t understand. “I know wizard words.”

  “I really don’t think I’m going to be able to teach you,” said Kuro.

  “You promised” was Bindal’s only reply.

  “Yeah, but I’d just waste your time. I’m no good at it. I could bring my friend Arthur. He can do it. He’d probably help.”

  “No,” snapped Bindal. “You teach me.”

  Kuro relented. He couldn’t see the harm in it. Bindal usually got bored and left pretty quickly anyway. But the lutin, who had always vanished at the first diagram in the dirt or threat or theory, kept demanding that Kuro explain again and better.

  Neither of them could get anything productive to happen. Kuro could occasionally stir up a bit of a dust storm, which could be mistaken for the start of a summoning, but they were nowhere near conjuring something.

  After three hours of explanations, demonstrations, and abject failure, Kuro was exhausted. He let his head fall backwards and groaned. He was cold and tired and just wanted to go to bed. “Just let me come back tomorrow with someone who can actually teach you.”

  “No!” Bindal shrieked. “No wizards. Only you.”

  His reaction was not like the normal overconfident demands the tiny lutin made. It was more of a panic. “Why?”

  “No wizards, only you,” said Bindal. “It is a promise.”

  “But I am a wizard,” said Kuro.

  “The kuro monster is not a wizard. The kuro monster is a monster.” Bindal was impatient having to explain something so obvious.

  Kuro regretted asking. It hurt all the more because it was true. “Okay,” he said, building some determination. “I’ll teach you, but I have to get better. I need practice. How can I find you when I’m ready?”

  “You can’t,” said Bindal. And then he vanished.

  Sixteen

  Party to a Disaster

  Kuro’s obligation to Bindal forced him to do something he truly didn’t want to do. He’d avoided it all year and had convinced himself that he could go on avoiding it forever. But after a week of trying and failing to get anything at all to happen, and with considerable encouragement from his friends, he stayed after class to study.

  As class let out at the end of the day on Friday, Kuro asked Ms. McCutcheon to borrow a familiar summoning manual.

  “I thought you weren’t going to concern yourself with your familiar,” replied the principal with the tone of someone claiming victory in an argument.

  Kuro wasn’t certain if he was allowed to teach a lutin how to summon a familiar. They’d been told not to show the younger students, but Bindal wasn’t a student. Still, he thought it best not to bother her with the details. “I changed my mind?” he said after what was probably too long a pause.

  Ms. McCutcheon took even longer to respond. She looked down at him, obviously not believing him but unable to think of a reason or motivation for lying. She slowly retrieved one of the manuals from a locked drawer and handed it over hesitantly. “The book does not leave the room, understood?”

  “Of course,” he agreed and then sat down at his usual desk for some review while Ms. McCutcheon got on with some paperwork at hers.

  The book was uncooperative. Kuro had hoped there would be some key element he’d missed in the noise and excitement of the formal lesson, but it yielded no new insights. He had the words right, he knew all the movements and gestures, and all the instructions about tuning his mind were clear. They didn’t make any sense, but they were clear: meditate on home and family in the key of E flat major, then find connections to the words of the spell. Most of those were about comfort, stability, and unhindered self-expression.

  It might as well have asked him to swallow gravel or sing underwater.

  He had been sorting through it for nearly an hour, interrupted only by the occasional shifting of papers, but the silence was broken by the principal demanding his attention.

  “Kuro, could you come here for a moment,” she said, cutting the silence and startling Kuro into the rafters.

  It took a few moments for his heart rate to calm enough to understand what she’d asked. He climbed down and obediently approached her desk.

  “Could you kindly explain this,” said Ms. McCutcheon, presenting him with a sheaf of paper.

  “It’s my homework.” It was a report on self-perpetuating spiritual entities he’d submitted a couple weeks prior. He had worked hard on it due to her warnings earlier in the year about how he’d be able to pass without casting anything. He was proud of it, but the tone of her voice told him that he’d done something terribly wrong.

  “That is quite apparent,” she said. “But why is it written in reverse?”

  “I’m left handed,” he replied. He had started the year still writing with his right hand, worried that he’d be punished for using his left, but it was so much easier with his left hand that he had drifted to it over time.

  She started to question him but couldn’t seem to find the words. The unflappable principal tried three times to get a word out and then gave up. She stacked papers neatly while her brow furrowed in thought. Then she balanced her chin on peaked fingers and stared at him, squinting. She looked him up and down as if she’d never laid eyes on him or anything like him. It was uncomfortable. Kuro wasn’t certain what he was supposed to do. He shuffled and fidgeted and regretted staying late.

  “I may have made a miscalculation,” she said at last.

  When she failed to elaborate, Kuro asked, “Am I in trouble?”

  The principal stood and walked around her desk so that she could loom over Kuro. “I believe that we have somewhat misjudged your difficulties with magic.”

  “I
’m just bad at it,” Kuro said.

  “That has been our assumption as well,” Ms. McCutcheon nodded. “We believed you simply to be behind the other students, and through hard work and perseverance, you would catch up. Yet, despite your considerable efforts, you appear to be making little progress.”

  “So, I am in trouble,” Kuro said, unsure if he was understanding what she was trying to get at.

  “No, Kuro.” She settled into a more teacherly voice as she continued. “The foundations of magical practice rely on thought. In order to perform the evocations and incantations taught here, one must comport one’s thoughts exactly correctly. The methods of instruction employed have been developed over generations as the most reliable method for establishing those patterns of thought in new spellcasters. However, those methods are based on the fundamental assumption that all of our students think in roughly the same ways and have similar experiences.”

  “So, I am bad at magic, then?” Kuro repeated, still not understanding where she was going.

  “I’m not convinced of that at all,” she said. “You are able to manifest magical effects as well as any student, just not the ones expected. It is not that you are bad at magic, but rather that we are bad at teaching you magic. You think differently than most children, and so our methods do not work well for you.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Kuro.

  She retrieved his homework from his desk and showed it to him as though he hadn’t written it himself. “Most left-handed students still write in the same direction as right-handed ones. The words would go in the same direction.”

  “But then I’d have to write all the letters backwards, and I’d smear the ink.”

  “Of course,” she said. “That’s very sensible. But most people would argue that the direction of the words is the important part, not the movement of your hand.”

  “Oh” was all Kuro could think to say. He felt very foolish for having thought otherwise. “I’ll go back to writing the other way, then.”

  “Not necessary.” Ms. McCutcheon, with a tuneful whistle and a complicated series of gestures, pulled the ink through the page to the other side so it read in the normal right-handed direction. “In this, at least, we should be able to accommodate you. However, I worry that you have a difficult time ahead that we are ill-prepared to help with. Us teaching you magic may be like trying to describe colour to the blind.”