“What do you think that means?” demanded Charlie.
“I’m hesitant to speculate,” said Arthur. “It is a mistake to theorize before one has data.”
Charlie pressed him for more.
Arthur yielded only a little. “It seems like they weren’t very personal. They weren’t the kinds of things that could be located using a finding charm. Also, they were covered in a very smelly mud, so the Hounds couldn’t get a good scent off them.”
“So, we’re dealing with a clever thief,” concluded Charlie. “Perhaps a rival of the Winking Weasel. Kuro! Do you have a nemesis from Detritus Lane whose pride you wounded and now they seek to prove their thieving superiority and frame you in one fell swoop?”
“Not that I know of,” said Kuro.
Charlie was disappointed at the lack of cooperation with her flights of fancy, but at the same time, eliminating one theory just gave her the opportunity to come up with new ones. Her next idea was cut short, though, by Arthur offering more inconvenient facts.
“They don’t have to be very clever. Every student at the school learned the finding charm last year,” he said. “We all know what things it works for.”
“Fine!” said Charlie. “Be boring if you want.”
“It’s not boring,” defended Arthur. “There are very interesting things we learned from the stolen objects. For one, the jewelry box was empty. The thief could have taken valuable jewelry but left it and took the box. Also, there were some small animal prints on them, maybe a monkey’s paw. Also,” Arthur paused for dramatic effect, which was somewhat diminished by his inexpressive tone, “Kuro’s name was in the journal.”
“What?” Charlie clapped with delight and celebrated Arthur saving the most salacious piece of evidence for the end.
Arthur continued his revelation. “The book appears to be a diary, but only the first three pages were filled in. Most of the writing had been ruined by being soaked in the mud, but Kuro’s name was definitely in there.”
Charlie was absolutely delighted, and Kuro was shocked, but not in the same way as Charlie. “How did you find out what was in the book?” he asked.
Arthur went silent and pale.
“Did you,” Kuro said, pointing an accusing finger at his roommate, “Arthur Wood, son of a knight commander in the Royal Guard, tamper with evidence?”
Arthur shrank, and his skin changed to blend in with the wall behind him as he tried to hide from his shame. “I only peeked a little,” he said in a whisper.
Charlie cackled with delight and threw an arm over Arthur in congratulations for his risky clue collection. Kuro laughed along. He enjoyed catching Arthur in less than upright behaviour.
Sleeping through the first day back turned out to have been a terrible miscalculation. While it hadn’t really been a choice, Kuro regretted it. After spending the week before Solstice doing nearly nothing, they were making up for lost time. Every class started a new unit, and information was being thrown at them as if they hadn’t spent the past couple of weeks having the knowledge drain out their ears.
Mrs. Lovelace introduced superpositional logarithmic field theory in numerology on the same day that Mr. Ogonov started rotational kinetics in evocation. So far as Kuro could tell, both had stopped speaking English and were just reciting the same elven poetry that Miss Frigard was teaching.
By the end of the first week back, Kuro’s brain had been tied in knots. Whenever he thought he understood something, the teachers would say something completely contradictory and knock over the shaky structure of understanding that he’d built.
In evocation, when they were all attempting to get fans to spin, Kuro was, for once, the first to succeed. But it was just another failure in disguise. Mr. Ogonov asked Kuro to tell the class what he’d done. When Kuro explained that he’d just made the wind blow, and that got the blades spinning, half the class laughed at him. He didn’t fully understand what he’d done wrong, and after Ogonov explained, he understood even less.
“Your results are exemplary, but your theory is a little off,” said the teacher in a loud, encouraging voice. “The spinning fan forces the air to move. You can’t create wind directly. Turbulent airflow, you see, interrupts and alters thought patterns. In extreme cases, strong winds can develop enough random energy to simulate the effects of thought and create magical effects of their own, the most common being areas of unusual heat or cooling, but sometimes more complex reactions. There have been examples of purple snow or glass spires being formed during extraordinary storms. Fascinating, right?”
Ogonov looked around the class to confirm that the students found the subject as riveting as he did. Most had returned to trying to get their own fans to spin, but he continued, regardless. “Driving air currents is impossible to do with magic, but with some wizard ingenuity and a clever application of rotational kinetics, we can still generate a breeze.” He emphasized the name of the unit they were working on just in case anyone had forgotten what they were doing. “The very reason we’re practicing with fans is to work on overcoming the interference caused by the wind they generate. The faster you spin your fan, the stronger the wind, and the greater the challenge.”
Kuro was deeply confused by what Ogonov had said. He recognized that he had done something incorrectly, that he was supposed to be spinning the fan to make the wind blow, not the other way around. That was just the same thing backwards, though. It wasn’t impossible.
Making the wind blow wasn’t just possible, it was easy, often too easy. Kuro sometimes had trouble making it stop.
Kuro’s first instinct was to assume that he was wrong. He did not know very much. Every class he attended reminded him of that fact. He had spent his life in hiding and had grown up in a strange place doing strange things. He probably just didn’t understand what he was doing, and clearly the wizards at the school knew how magic worked, as they were very good at it.
The problem with that explanation, though, is that Kuro was doing it. He could get the wind to blow. He could smuggle gold through the veil. Impossible things, apparently. Also, other beings did impossible things. If the coyote was to be believed, George could see the future. Lutin could blink from one place to another. Arthur could change shape. Even Kuro’s existence was supposed to be impossible; half-lutin didn’t exist.
All those impossible things weren’t. How many of them were deemed impossible because some wizard couldn’t yet solve the math? How much was just because it couldn’t be done by wizards?
Kuro considered this as he tried to get his fan to spin using the correct method. As it failed terribly and embedded itself in the far wall, Kuro came to a simple and obvious conclusion. He was not a wizard.
He was only half wizard, maybe less. Ms. Crawley said he was a half-lutin, but she hadn’t been specific about the other half. He could be one-third gecko. He was trying to do wizard magic using a brain full of lutin parts, and lutin magic with wizard brain bits. It wasn’t surprising he was failing. It would have been more surprising if it worked.
He would have liked to ask Ms. Crawley for her insights, but she was unavailable. She was still being punished for the crime of helping to create Kuro. Instead, he turned to the only other half-wizard he knew.
Finding Meredith wasn’t difficult. As a half-ogre, she was a head taller than any other student at the lodge and nearly twice as broad. With her booming voice and jagged teeth, she could be quite intimidating to someone who didn’t know better.
Everyone at the lodge knew better.
Kuro found her studying in the lounge, but after getting her attention, he wasn’t sure how to ask what he wanted to know. “Does your magic work right?” he ventured.
Meredith puzzled over the question for a moment, working out whether she was more confused or offended. She settled on jovial. “Last I checked, yeah. Does yours?”
“No,” Kuro said. “That’s why I asked. I used to think I was just bad at it, but maybe it’s a half-wizard thing.�
�� He thought for a moment longer. “Maybe it’s both.”
Meredith nodded sagely and slid up a chair beside her for Kuro to sit. “Some things have been harder for me, yeah,” she said. “A lot of magic assumes a certain size and shape of person.” She adjusted how she was sitting, and the chair creaked underneath her, emphasizing her point. “But mostly it’s been fine. I grew up around other normal wizards, so that probably helped.”
Kuro was crushed that his theory had been so soundly discredited. Even if he were undersized, that didn’t excuse his overwhelming incompetence. Seeing his disappointment, Meredith offered Kuro some consolation. “Magic is half what you think and the other half how you think. Learning what to think is pretty easy, but changing how you think it, that’s a lot harder.”
That comforted Kuro a little. It gave him a bit of an excuse, that maybe his brain just worked wrong, and he’d never be able to do magic properly. Just like only changelings could shapeshift, and only certain humans could pass through the veil or do magic, maybe he just wasn’t made properly to do magic.
“Can you do anything that wizards can’t?” asked Kuro.
“You mean like ogre stuff?” Meredith guessed. “Yeah, a bit. I eat rocks.”
“You can eat rocks?” Kuro looked at her huge jagged grin in a whole new light.
“Not just can, I do,” she said. “I have to. I get all weak and mopey if I don’t eat my breakfast quartz. Love a good bit of cinnabar with my dinner if I can get it.”
“Do you chew them or just swallow them whole?”
“I usually just crush them up in my hand and sprinkle them over my food.”
“You can crush rocks in your hand?” asked Kuro in astonishment. “That’s incredible.” He was going to say “impossible,” but he was coming to understand that impossible was a very individual thing.
Meredith shrugged as if it were not a big deal at all.
The conversation with Meredith had the unexpected side effect of giving Kuro some ideas about how he might help Bindal learn wizard magic.
He excused himself and ran to their usual meeting place. As he slid into the overgrown graveyard, he was greeted with the familiar squeaky complaint.
“You are late,” said Bindal. “I have practiced. Watch and see.”
The lutin performed the familiar summoning ritual flawlessly. Every syllable and movement better than Kuro could hope to achieve himself. He must have spent the entire holiday doing it over and over. Kuro applauded the performance and congratulated Bindal on his progress.
“It is not working,” Bindal argued. “It is how you told me. You told me wrong.”
“Doing it right is only part of it,” said Kuro. “You also have to think right.”
“I am thinking right,” said Bindal. “I am thinking the things you said. You said them wrong.”
“I think the problem might not be what you’re thinking, but how you think it,” he repeated Meredith’s wisdom. “You can’t just think what a wizard thinks. You have to think the way they think it.”
Bindal scrunched up his face in disapproval. “Wizards think wrong,” he said.
“Usually,” agreed Kuro. “But if you want to copy their magic, you have to copy their thinking. Come with me, I have an idea.”
Kuro led the way to the nearest shore, with Bindal hiding in his shadow. Bindal was extremely hesitant to leave the graveyard, and constantly wary of an encounter with an actual wizard. He made small whines and fidgeted as they crossed unfamiliar territory.
Kuro stopped abruptly at the shoreline, which surprised Bindal, who walked into Kuro’s back. “Why did you do that?” Bindal demanded and then quickly scanned for danger.
“Because it’s the edge of the veil,” said Kuro. He pointed to the silky shimmering border between the fey realm and the Blandlands, which washed in and out with the salty waves.
“Is it?” asked Bindal, squinting and moving his head around as though it would be more visible out the side of his eyes.
Kuro looked again at the veil. It was unmistakable. It stretched around the entire island and beyond sight into the sky. Rainbow swirls danced along it, and it blurred and muffled the saltwater bay on its far side.
Bindal looked skeptical, so Kuro picked up a rock and tossed it through.
Bindal squeaked in surprise as the rock flew into the Blandlands and splashed into the surf. “It is gone!” he said. “Where is it gone?”
“It’s in the Blandlands,” said Kuro. He heard that lutin couldn’t see the veil, but he didn’t know it would surprise Bindal so much to see it demonstrated.
“That is wrong.” Bindal threw his own rock, and to Kuro’s amazement, it vanished as it crossed the veil. Even more astonishing was when Bindal casually crossed the veil and, instead of falling out into the Blandlands, disappeared. He returned moments later with the rock in hand.
Kuro had not been prepared for that. He had planned to use the veil to help Bindal think about the world more like a wizard, but Kuro hadn’t considered just how deep a rift there was. He would never have imagined that the difference could extend to a rock. Rather than it being a clever instructive lesson in wizard thinking, Kuro ended up doubting everything he had ever perceived.
Not only could Bindal not see the veil or the blurry Blandlands beyond, but he couldn’t hear the waves. On the other hand, Bindal could still hear Kuro after crossing the veil. What appeared to be miles of Blandlands water between Avalon Island and the far shore to Kuro was just a couple of uninterrupted feet for Bindal. There was no border or edge to speak of.
When Kuro complained that the distances didn’t make any sense, and the island’s shoreline was so much smaller than the land that surrounded the huge saltwater bay, Bindal pointed out that Kuro had no problems with the fact that his satchel had room for a chair and a desk inside it.
After considerable argument and sinking several rocks into the bay, both ended up mentally devastated. What they saw, what they felt, and the sounds that reached their ears, all of them were in conflict, but all were demonstrably true. It was the sort of problem that could only be adequately remedied by a heavy application of chocolate. Fortunately, Kuro had some.
Kuro had nearly forgotten Bindal’s gift in all the fuss over the veil. He retrieved the small white box from his bag and presented it to Bindal. “Happy Solstice.”
Bindal examined the box carefully, expecting some sort of vicious trick. He prodded it with a stick and inspected the ribbons that tied it closed. “What is it?” Bindal asked without risking opening the dangerous container.
“It’s full of candy,” said Kuro. He didn’t think Bindal would mind having the surprise ruined. “It’s a present.”
Still wary, Bindal cautiously undid the ribbon and the box started to bloom. The sides unfolded and stretched out. A gingerbread palace with coloured sugar windows, frosting crenulations, and candy minarets constructed itself. A chocolate train on a licorice railroad drove in circles around it, puffing out cotton candy smoke.
Kuro marveled at the incredible skill and attention that Ms. McCutcheon poured into her gifts. It was both a work of art and a feat of magic that Kuro couldn’t imagine how to even begin replicating.
Bindal was overcome. “It is for me?” he asked in awe and wonder.
“Yup,” said Kuro. “I hope you like it. Careful with the licorice witches; they’re pretty gross.”
Bindal hesitantly plucked a chocolate guard from in front of a toffee tower and gently, almost reverently, bit its head off. As he chewed, his entire bearing changed. His tense aggression melted away. His whole body softened and drooped, and he began to weep openly. “It is so good,” he said while chewing.
“I didn’t know you liked chocolate so much.”
“I didn’t know either,” replied Bindal as he bit into the torso of the chocolate guard.
The caramel filling flowed out into his mouth, and he nearly collapsed with pleasure.
“Have you ne
ver had it?” Kuro asked once Bindal had recovered enough to speak.
“No,” said Bindal. “It was never given to me.”
Kuro had clues that Bindal had strict parents and a difficult life but hadn’t known the depths. Even Kuro had managed to scrounge some chocolate for himself in his days under the thumb of Phineas Hearn.
Bindal, after adequately savouring the guard, turned to Kuro and said, “Your promise is done.”
Kuro felt the knot of obligation to give chocolate to Bindal untie from his chest. He had chosen the gift because of the promise but hadn’t thought that would be the end of it. He’d expected the lutin to hold him to chocolate delivery duty for the rest of his life. Kuro wondered whether the lutin was so overwhelmed by the experience that he was being uncharacteristically reasonable.
Then Bindal carefully plucked each of the chocolate pieces off the candy palace and began to diligently eat his way through them.
“Don’t you want any of the other bits?” Kuro asked.
Bindal stared at Kuro blankly for a while, and then realized what Kuro meant. “I can have it all?”
Kuro nodded.
Bindal’s jaw dropped, and he stared at the pile of sweets before him. “It is too much. I cannot eat it all.”
“Just take it with you,” replied Kuro, laughing. “Save some for later.”
“I cannot.”
Bindal looked at the treats in a way that Kuro recognized from his own life. He couldn’t take them home safely. His strict parents, who had refused him chocolate to this point, would obviously be upset at him having a whole confection palace.
“Do you have anywhere good to hide it?” Kuro asked.
“It will get wet and dirty,” Bindal replied.
“You can keep it in my bag if you want,” offered Kuro.
“You will not eat it?” Bindal said, suspicious that the monster would devour the lot.
“I won’t,” said Kuro. “I can promise if you need me to.”
Bindal wrestled with that idea and seemed to surprise himself by saying, “No. I believe you.”
Volume 2: Burglary Page 25