He would have experimented endlessly with his newfound freedom, but he had obligations to Bindal. Teaching Kuro lutin magic was all in service of Bindal learning the wizarding ways. Kuro’s success with the help of Bindal just reinforced the possibility of Bindal’s success with the help of Kuro, and what started as a wild theory started to manifest effects.
It was mostly trial and error. The books Kuro could find gave hints and ideas, but after that, it was guesswork and instinct. Given that neither of them had much in the way of wizardly intuition, Kuro was amazed that they had any success at all.
Kuro only half-understood what they were doing. It felt like he provided the raw materials while Bindal sculpted it. The first positive sign was misinterpreted as a large black leech dropping off the mausoleum roof. They both panicked when it appeared, and Bindal hit it with a rock.
Once they recognized that it was just how Bindal’s familiar was going to come together, they overcame their discomfort and pressed on.
Then one day in early March, on a dark and sleet-filled evening at the edge of Winter, it worked.
A small army of wriggling black shapes oozed up from the ground and squirmed their way towards each other, knotting into a single long branching shape, like a twig made of slime. What Kuro imagined to be the skeleton of the thing emerged as the thing itself, the slimy surface crystallizing and hardening into a small spindly creature. It had four delicate wings and six legs ending in sharp claws, a whiplike tail, and a long neck. Its whole body was covered in black armoured plates, and its head had glittering faceted eyes and a mouthful of fangs.
“It’s a dragonfey,” said Kuro.
“Of course it is,” replied Bindal.
Most people reacted to their familiars with a sense that they should have known all along and that it couldn’t have been anything else. Bindal reacted with a sense that he had known all along, and that Kuro should have known as well.
It was unmistakably Bindal’s familiar. It moved with the same twitchiness, bursts of speed with sudden stops to look around. It zipped around the graveyard with aggressive curiosity, sniffing and tasting things.
They watched the creature figure itself out and explore the world until the cold soaked through them and weariness reared its head. “I guess we should figure out how to unsummon it,” said Kuro.
“No,” Bindal refused. “It is too late. You keep it in your bag with my candy.”
Kuro wasn’t given a chance to argue. Bindal just grabbed his familiar, jammed it in Kuro’s satchel, and vanished.
Kuro wouldn’t have minded keeping hold of the dragonfey for a couple of days if it had behaved itself at all.
Familiars inherited pieces of their creator’s personalities, and some of their knowledge and reason, but often not quite enough. Whether it was able to understand Kuro or not was irrelevant as it had no interest in listening to him. Much like Bindal, it considered Kuro to be its subordinate, and Kuro spent the next several days trying to keep track of the creature.
When it first escaped at dinner one night, he had to claim it was his own familiar to stop people from trying to kill it. He was initially praised for having such a cool and unusual familiar, but it quickly became trouble. It was impossible to keep contained. It chewed through any leash or box he tried to keep it in, so it was constantly escaping.
Also, a trait it had clearly inherited from its maker was an appreciation of sweets. Kuro had to put the remainder of Bindal’s candy palace in a drawer and then tie it closed to keep the beast from devouring it. Unlike Bindal, however, the dragonfey was extremely friendly and curious. It wanted to meet everyone and look inside everything, regardless of whether those people wanted to meet it, or would accept it exploring their possessions.
Several times, the dragonfey returned to Kuro in a panic and hid in his bag for protection from the person it had just accosted. He spent a lot of time apologizing and making promises he couldn’t keep. He was saved from having to unsummon it himself by the widespread acceptance that Kuro was so incompetent that he hadn’t figured out how. There were many threats to just pop the thing, but fortunately most students were aware how unpleasant it was to absorb the memories from a traumatic unsummoning, so they were only threats.
Kuro was grateful for that. If anyone had popped the dragonfey, he would have had a hard time explaining the results. Normally, the remains of a familiar stream back to its owner and weave into their brain. It would have been awkward if those streams of memory flew out the door instead of into his head.
The most ardent voice against Kuro’s familiar was Marie. She hated it. She was angry that it even existed. She wouldn’t say it out loud, but the fact that even Kuro, who couldn’t do nearly any magic properly, could summon a familiar when she couldn’t was beyond what she could accept.
When she found it rummaging through her belongings in her bedroom, it was the last straw. She threw the creature at Kuro and stormed away without saying a word. Kuro had never seen Marie upset enough to not even swear.
After days of putting up with the troublemaking familiar, that was also Kuro’s last straw. He was out of patience, and losing a friend for Bindal’s benefit was straining his willingness to keep caring for the creature. He brought it to the graveyard with the intention of popping it if Bindal didn’t come to take responsibility for the thing.
Fortunately, Bindal did appear that night. Kuro was relieved because even though he’d told himself he would do it, he wasn’t confident he could. He knew it wasn’t really alive, and that familiars weren’t supposed to care if they were destroyed, but that didn’t make it any less real when he thought about smashing the curious creature with a rock.
“We are unsummoning your familiar right now,” Kuro said with all the authority he could muster.
Bindal ignored him. Instead, he dove inside Kuro’s bag for candy. He climbed back out with his jaw stuck closed by a mouthful of toffee and accused Kuro of stealing his sweets and trying to hide the evidence.
“It wasn’t me,” said Kuro. “It was your familiar. I wasn’t hiding it from you. I was hiding it from that little beast. It likes candy more than you do.”
Bindal nodded as though that were right and proper.
“We’re unsummoning it,” repeated Kuro.
Bindal pouted at the suggestion and crammed more candy into his mouth.
“If we unsummon it, you will get its memories,” suggested Kuro. “Wasn’t that the point of all this?”
Bindal was only slightly moved by the argument. “What if we can’t make it again?” he replied.
“We definitely can,” said Kuro, though he wasn’t sure he was telling the truth. “It will be easier. Also, you will get to remember the candies it ate.”
That was more than enough to get Bindal to change his tune. “We will do it right now,” he said, gulping down his mouthful of gingerbread.
The unsummoning ritual was remarkably successful, though surprisingly uncomfortable. Since Kuro had helped make the familiar, that apparently meant the memories returned to Bindal via Kuro. They shot through his brain briefly, giving him impressions of sights and sounds and tastes and places that he’d never been, but leaving nothing but the faint sensation of having forgotten something in their wake.
Bindal had quite the opposite experience. He revelled in the adventure the creature had gone on. The familiar, not bound by any of Bindal’s promises or strict rules, had gone places, eaten things, and met people that Bindal had never been allowed. Even if the lutin was bossy and curt and treated Kuro as either a tamed monster or a servant, Kuro could still appreciate his feelings.
It was freedom.
Both spent their lives bound by others and trapped in rules and promises. A little bit of freedom was worth chasing. Bindal had unintentionally given Kuro more freedom than he had ever known, and Kuro was glad to repay the favour. He watched Bindal explore the new parts of his mind with a sense of pride and accomplishment.
Bin
dal stopped marveling at his new memories and appeared as though he’d just seen something very distressing.
“What’s wrong?” asked Kuro. “Did something bad happen to your familiar?” Kuro imagined that the experience with Marie might have been a complicated one to digest.
Bindal shook the unwelcome thoughts clear. “Again,” said Bindal. “We will make it again.”
“Not without a way to control it,” said Kuro. “I’m going to get expelled if it causes any more trouble.”
“It will not cause trouble,” Bindal asserted. “Let’s make it now.”
Kuro crossed his arms and refused to move.
“You promised,” Bindal said, trying to convince Kuro that this was part of his obligation.
“I promised to teach you, and protect you,” replied Kuro. “And your familiar is going to cause you trouble if it’s not controlled. No summoning until we have a leash it can’t chew through.”
Bindal vanished without a word. Kuro was left alone in a dark and chilly graveyard wondering if that was the end of the argument. He eventually turned to leave and found the lutin blocking his exit with a chain in hand. It was the sort that was used in sinks to avoid losing the plug and included a metal ring that could be used as a collar.
Kuro was annoyed that Bindal had been so quick to work around Kuro’s ultimatum.
They summoned and shackled the dragonfey. It yielded to the collar easily, probably knowing it needed to behave better, since it inherited some of Bindal’s knowledge. He attached it to his satchel strap so that he could easily force it inside his bag should it misbehave. The creature tested the limits of its leash before moodily settling down on a shelf inside Kuro’s bag.
Kuro was about to lay down some more ground rules for him babysitting the monster when Bindal quickly said “Goodbye” then vanished in a panic.
Kuro felt it too.
There were eyes on him.
Twenty-five
Unhelpful Aid
Kuro spun to find the watcher, and he barely caught it. It was no more than a rustle in the underbrush, but it was enough to follow. He prowled the shadows, stalking the creator of the noise as it retreated from the graveyard, where it had interrupted him and Bindal.
He needed to know if whatever it was had seen or heard what they had been doing. Bindal could get in trouble for it, and Kuro couldn’t allow that. He had promised. That fact drove him against his own instincts to run and hide. He wasn’t used to being the predator; he felt like a rabbit hunting a fox.
For a good while Kuro was convinced he was following nothing more than a gust of wind. It didn’t help that he was trying to hide from it at least as much as it was trying to hide from him. He almost gave up, but then he caught sight of a fluffy striped tail shuffling under a bush.
It was a raccoon.
Kuro had all but forgotten the troublesome little pest that he had chased halfway across the island. He didn’t know if this was the raccoon or just a raccoon, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t help but follow the creature at this point. He left his worries and began chasing down a mystery.
He followed it all the way through Autumn to the edge of Summer, where the chill in the air eased, and the leaf litter on the ground was replaced by tall grasses and ferns. It slid out of view, and Kuro heard a voice chanting nearby.
It was both a voice and a chant he knew. Marie was unsummoning a familiar.
For a few moments, Kuro’s mind reeled. The raccoon had been around for ages. Why had she pretended not to be able to summon a familiar? What had she been doing all those nights? Did she and the raccoon have something to do with the burglaries after all?
While he had a million questions, he dreaded the idea of asking her any of them. If she was keeping a secret, it was her secret to keep. Kuro was keeping secrets, too. Even so, Kuro was stuck needing to know what Marie knew if he was going to protect Bindal.
He steeled himself and did what he should have done months ago—he went to talk to his friend. Kuro pushed through the underbrush into a lovely glade where Marie stood alone, surrounded by low-standing ferns and flowers.
She saw Kuro and looked fearful, angry, and sad all at once. “You saw?” she asked.
Kuro nodded.
She all but collapsed. She stomped the ground and bit her fist to fight back tears. “Now you know my secret,” she said. “Will you tell?”
It was a confession of guilt if Kuro had ever heard one. She was so overcome with shame that some of it was leaking out, wilting petals on the flowers near her and seeping into Kuro, making his chest heavy with shared remorse. “No,” said Kuro. “I won’t tell. I don’t even know what to tell. I swear.”
“Thank you,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”
Even if she was a secret thief, she was still the Marie that he knew. Kuro couldn’t blame her for hiding that kind of thing from him, even though he wished she could have told him sooner. It would have been nice to have something in common with someone, even if it was crime. “It’s okay,” he said. “I just don’t understand why you did it.”
Marie sighed. “It’s stupid. I just,” she choked back some tears and tried to find some anger to replace them. “You are all so remarkable. You are thieves and Valkyries and changelings. I’m just a stupid Blandlands kid. I wanted a cool familiar, and then Arthur got one that changes shape, and Charlie got that stupid pegasus unicorn that she never puts away. And even you managed to summon something cool and get a dragonfey.”
Several competing thoughts fought for priority in Kuro’s mind. First was the recognition that if she didn’t know the dragonfey wasn’t his, then Bindal was safe. Second, what did she mean by “even him”? It wasn’t unjustified, but it still hurt his feelings. Third, what in the world was she talking about?
That last point Kuro gave voice to. “Huh?” he asked as eloquently as he could.
“You saw it,” she said. “It’s the worst. I thought if Arthur could change his, maybe it was possible for me to change mine. I spent so much time trying and reading and stuff that I couldn’t give up. The longer I tried, the more stupid I felt for trying and the more I hated the one I got.”
Kuro took a moment to find his way back to the conversation that Marie was having. He had believed that they were engaged in the same discussion, but he had clearly been mistaken. She wasn’t making excuses about clever thefts. She was more upset about not being the sort of person who might be involved in such things. She just didn’t like her familiar and had gone to extreme lengths to try to change it.
To be fair, Kuro wasn’t a fan of raccoons, either. They were too clever and curious for their own good and were nearly as good as Kuro at getting into places they shouldn’t. Even so, there were less appealing options. “It’s better than a trout,” Kuro offered.
“I guess,” she said. “But even you said you didn’t want one.”
“When did I say that?” Kuro racked his brain for some memory.
“I am not surprised you don’t remember,” said Marie. “It was way back when Charlie first asked us all. You said that you would take anything except a crow.”
Kuro did remember saying that. “Yes, my old … someone I knew had a crow familiar. I didn’t want to be the same as him. That’s all. But—”
Marie was visibly shaken by that news and cut him off. “Crows aren’t bad familiars?” she asked in a tone as flat as Arthur’s, as if she had run out of feeling to express.
“No, they’re very useful,” said Kuro. “They’re smart, and they can fly. Lots of good people have them, too. But—”
“But they are common,” she cut in again.
That wasn’t what Kuro was going to say, but he went along anyway, too confused to control the flow. “Yes. Is that bad?” asked Kuro.
“It shouldn’t be,” said Marie. “But it’s hard. Everybody here is a princess or a knight or something special. You and Charlie and Arthur do incredible and impossible things all the time. I’m
just ordinary. I don’t belong here. I hoped it would be different than it was in the Blandlands, but it’s just the same.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kuro.
“I wasn’t like everybody at school. My parents weren’t from Quebec, and I was weird and a nerd. I didn’t fit in at all, and I didn’t have any friends. I thought when I came here it would be different, like in silly kids’ storybooks, but it’s just the same.”
“We’re your friends, aren’t we?” asked Kuro.
“Only because Charlie decided it,” she replied.
Kuro wanted to argue her point, but she was kind of right. Marie was a victim of Charlie’s gregariousness as much as he was. He had thought many times that if she hadn’t spoken to him on the first day, he would still be alone. “I’m glad she did,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t think I’m stupid?”
“You’re the smartest one of us.”
“Even after I nearly sank a boat with your Christmas present?”
“That was my fault,” said Kuro. “I didn’t think about you not having your memories out there.”
She took a deep breath, and some of the tension in her drained as she let it out, allowing her to regain some of her usual poise. “Thanks, Kuro,” she said.
Kuro let her rest for a while, but he could not hold back the question that he’d been trying to ask for what felt like an eternity. “What is your familiar?”
“It’s a crow,” Marie said, annoyed that he made her repeat that disappointing fact.
“Not a raccoon?” Kuro confirmed.
“Definitely not,” confirmed Marie. “Did it look like a raccoon?”
Volume 2: Burglary Page 27