Volume 1: Pickpocketing

by R. A. Consell

  “I did.” Ms. McCutcheon’s fierce eyes seemed to cut right through him. “And the story he tells sounds more like the work of a talented high school student, not a bumbling junior-high freshman.”

  “No! I just got lucky,” Kuro pleaded. “I’m useless, ask anyone. I can only cast three spells, and two of them always come out wrong. I’m not pretending.”

  “One of them is a powerful offensive spell,” she countered. “One that is not taught or used at this school.”

  “I learned it by mistake, I swear.” Kuro felt his eyes getting wet and his chest growing heavy from the injustice of the accusations.

  “I’ve heard of more thefts, as well. With notes.” She crossed her arms and pursed her lips as if she’d just brought down an inescapable trap over him.

  “They’re fakes!” shouted Kuro, tears starting to flow. “You think I’m smart enough to be a secret super-wizard and stupid enough to steal from people and leave them notes telling them I did it? I can’t be both, can I? And how am I supposed to steal anything? I’m always being watched. Everyone already knows I’m a thief.”

  Ms. McCutcheon considered him coldly for what felt like an eternity, her angry eyes seeming to peer into his soul. “Go,” she said dispassionately. “You will be late for your next class.”

  The meeting with the principal changed nothing. His detentions remained, as did his reputation as a scoundrel. If anything, his situation worsened, as being called to the principal’s office was never a good thing and made for more variety in the gossip already surrounding Kuro.

  Saturday arrived slowly, but with it came a chance to really talk to his friends again. Kuro waited for them in a forgotten corner of the second, inner library. He hoped that one of them could make more sense of the returning spell than he could. He hoped they would remember to come.

  He had taken out the book that Ogonov had suggested and found the spell without issue, but it didn’t make any sense. The instructions were so complex and foreign that he couldn’t tell if it was just advanced or if he’d taken out a German copy by mistake.

  Arthur was the first to arrive.

  He walked stiffly, eyes fixed on the floor in front of him. Kuro guessed that appearing incredibly anxious was Arthur’s way of looking nonchalant. “Hey,” he whispered, not raising his eyes from the floor.

  “Hi,” said Kuro, much more at ease. Kuro had made sure the area was empty before he’d sat down. Also, something about Arthur’s awkwardness made Kuro feel more confident about his own lack of social grace. “How are you?” Kuro felt strange having to ask the boy who was supposed to be his roommate and friend, but they’d barely said more than “pass the squid ink” to each other in the past week.

  Arthur slowly relaxed, or relaxed as much as he ever did, and sat down. “I only have one note so far,” he said, a little ashamed. “How are you making out?”

  “I have a spell.” Kuro pushed the book over to Arthur. “But I don’t think I can cast it.”

  Arthur looked it over and then turned the book the other way up just to check that he was reading it the right way round.

  Charlie and Marie also found their way to them eventually. Charlie crept through the library as though she were breaking into a high security vault, sidling along bookshelves and ducking quickly around corners while walking on tiptoes. Marie just walked up, sat down, and waited for Charlie to finish her clandestine approach.

  Charlie had done no better than Arthur. She was too well known as Kuro’s friend and was a terrible liar.

  Marie, on the other hand, had collected seven. Unlike Arthur and Charlie, who were only children, Marie had four brothers and sisters and had gone to a Blandlands public school. “Tricking other children is basically our national sport,” she explained. “These wizard kids are clueless.”

  None of them could make any sense of the spell. By the end of their meeting, they’d each gathered a small pile of reference books just trying to figure out what the words meant. They concluded that it was one-third Latin and two-thirds Gaelic. Eventually they gave up and just spent the rest of the afternoon doing homework and talking.

  Kuro was finally able to tell them all the excitement of the week, from exploring the island to casting spells. At Charlie’s insistence, he cast Gráðr on her. She could resist it pretty well, but even so, she couldn’t help but gnaw on the remains of some maple jerky cookies from her backpack.

  He told them about the dragonfey and his adventures in the greenhouse. Charlie was enthralled and demanded that he embellish the stories more for her entertainment. Marie was scandalized that the staff would endanger a student so. Arthur was unsurprised at the whole thing and said his dad had told him stories about his detentions. “One time he had to clean out the Chateau du Printemps stables with a spoon and a toothbrush,” he said earnestly. “He was a pretty bad student.”

  As supper drew near, they started to clean up and separate, promising to meet back the next week with more notes and ideas. Kuro would keep working at the spell, though none was very hopeful about it.

  The weeks began to go by more quickly. Classes were still largely terrible, but he was getting used to the routine: blow himself up in evocations, be ignored in alchemy, dance poorly and sing worse in music, not be able to hear Widdershins over the chatter of the class in social studies, spend hours listening to words he didn’t understand in the three languages, have his brain turned inside out in numerology, and sometimes actually do something right in spellcraft.

  Detention still happened, and even though Flint never mentioned the incident at the greenhouse again or the note he had given to the principal, he assigned only small and relatively pleasant chores. One night, Kuro’s task was to bring a case of Blandlands cola to the lutin, who were so thrilled that they demanded he join them for its consumption.

  Dubois returned twice in the guise of the government orphan watcher Ms. Sabine El-Assar. He appeared for monthly check-ups on Kuro, claiming it was to make sure he was doing well. Kuro was amused that Dubois would dress as a woman repeatedly just to fail to get information out of him. Kuro also started to enjoy the cat and mouse game. Dubois would pose innocent-sounding questions, trying to trick Kuro into exposing secrets about his master, and Kuro would dance around them, providing evasive and unexpected answers.

  Dubois pried with questions about Kuro’s parents and family. Kuro responded with stories about his cat and Father John. Dubois came at him sideways with questions about how he learned to read and what kind of education he’d had. Kuro said that he’d learned everything he knew from the Seelie Times. That elicited a brief look of distress from the disguised Dubois.

  Kuro’s favourite question was when Dubois asked him about his heroes. “I suppose I should say it’s someone like Talen Dubois,” Kuro started. “He’s supposed to be powerful and all that, but if he were really that great, he’d have found the Summer heir by now.”

  Kuro knew that was a sore spot for Dubois. The paper talked about it a lot. Kuro enjoyed watching Dubois try to maintain his composure and stay in character as Sabine after that one.

  He pretended to adjust his head scarf and shuffled through some papers uncomfortably. It was delightful.

  Dubois asked some other, much crueller questions, as well. Kuro wasn’t sure that Dubois knew that they were mean. They seemed like they were meant to be innocuous filler, maybe to make Kuro feel safe and confident. Things like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and “What do you wish people thought of you?”

  Kuro had never really thought about the future. His greatest hope when he’d lived on the streets had been that he would still be alive when he grew up, and he had never wanted anyone to think anything of him. It was safer that way. Now, though, the ideas of having friends, a family, and a home seemed possible, and this haunted him. Did he really deserve any of them? Would he ever be able to escape his life as a thief? Could he ever be anything more than a servant? Kuro didn’t really believe any of it cou
ld happen, but now that the ideas had taken hold, they had started to eat away at him.

  The worst question, though, came at the end of their meeting in December. “If I could cast a spell and make all of your problems go away,” Dubois asked in his badly faked Arabic accent, “where would you most like to be?”

  Kuro knew the answer in his heart, but he refused to say it aloud. He just stared back at the warm pretty smile and kind golden eyes Dubois was faking. The Hound had won. Kuro had to concede.

  The place that Kuro wanted to be more than anywhere else in the world was right there, at Avalon. He didn’t even need Dubois to magic away his problems. Even with half the school treating him like a hardened criminal, Kuro was still happier at Avalon than he had ever been in his whole life. He hadn’t even known what it meant to be happy until he’d come.

  He loved the lodge with its weird food and the warm fires and his soft bunk bed. He loved the island, how there were always new places to find, and the barren Blandlands side with its warden and her unpleasant tea. He liked learning, even if it was hard and he kept messing up. He even liked some of the teachers, especially Ms. Crawley. He thought he might even miss Mr. Flint if he had to go. More than anything, he loved his friends, Marie, Charlie, and Arthur. The idea of having to leave them and be alone again hurt his chest.

  “You don’t have to answer right away,” said Dubois. “It’s just something to think on.”

  Dubois, in his grey uniform jacket, lavender dress, and scar-covering head scarf patted Kuro on the shoulder, told him that he’d be back in January to check up on him, and left him to his tortured thoughts.

  Still stewing over the fear of losing his friends, he went to dinner, where those feelings were further abused. Meredith interrupted dinner to announce the details of the holidays, when Kuro would be all but abandoned. “The ferry is leaving on December eighteenth. It comes back on January first. Anyone going home for the holidays needs to fill out the forms that are being passed around now and get them signed by your parents or you’ll be stuck here. So get them to the lutin to be delivered before it’s too late.”

  From that moment on, nobody spoke about anything but Winter Solstice break. Kuro felt like the only one still paying attention in class. Even the teachers mostly gave up on teaching new material and turned to seasonal filler. The halls were buzzing with talk of presents and candy and debates as to whether Santa Claus visited children in the Blandlands. Kuro was constantly reminded of just how alone he really was.

  His friends tried to be sympathetic, but they couldn’t contain their excitement. Charlie rambled endlessly about all the animals on the farm that she missed. She worried about the old nag of a unicorn that had faded from white to grey, and she desperately wanted to see the chimera cub that had just hatched.

  Marie was excited to see her family. She missed her brothers and sisters very much, but she worried often about how to explain what she was doing at Avalon. Her siblings would all want to come back with her, but they weren’t magical and were all too young anyway.

  Arthur thought that Solstice was the best time of the whole year. He almost vibrated with anticipation at going to see his parents and sister and promised to send presents. Apparently, his family were just as eager because he was sent home on a special trip a day before anyone else.

  By breakfast on the eighteenth, Kuro was feeling very abandoned indeed. He had always spent Solstice alone. Even Phineas had found places to be on Solstice Day, but now that Kuro had people to miss, it would be much more lonesome.

  Almost everyone was in warm travelling clothes, ready for the trip across the now frozen bay. The strong prow of the ferry could break through the ice, but it was expected to be a cold and bumpy ride. His friends were being as apologetic as they could, but their warm holiday wishes just made him want for them to stay even more.

  After a hearty breakfast of sweet potato pancakes with apple butter and pickles, Kuro saw off his friends. He wanted to walk down to the docks with them, but in an effort to maintain their ruse of unfriendliness, he kept his distance. He watched Charlie and Marie board the boat from the lot where the sleds, cars, and carriages of the other residences were dropping off their students. It wasn’t only students boarding, either. Most of the teachers as well as footmen, maids, and staff from the other residences were leaving.

  He was just turning to walk back to the lodge when Evelyn decided to stop by. She had dismounted from one of the elegant chateau carriages, followed by her ever-rotating entourage. Never wanting to miss an opportunity to point out her superiority, she paused to offer her form of holiday wishes. “Oh, it must be so hard being a stray dog at Solstice. Nobody to love you. No presents at all.” Her voice was dripping with condescension.

  Her simpering followers laughed and pushed past him roughly. Far from deepening Kuro’s self-pity and loneliness, Evelyn’s derision improved Kuro’s mood considerably. For one thing, it reminded him that she would be gone for nearly two glorious weeks, a blessing in itself. More than that, though, Kuro hated the idea of her being right and decided to enjoy himself over the holidays. Head held high, or as high as he could hold it as he was very small, he marched back to his home in Autumn Lodge.

  The lodge was almost completely empty. Fewer than a dozen students were still there. To his delight, he found that Meredith Thrump had stayed. Even after finding out he was a thief, Meredith had done her best to protect him. “Nobody’s perfect,” she had said, and few were willing to disagree with her in her presence.

  Kuro spent that first day just running and climbing by himself. With no other students to get in the way, the grounds were his to explore. His many nights with Flint had taught him of several hidden passages throughout the school, and he aimed to find them all before the other students returned.

  He arrived at supper that day dirty, sweaty, out of breath, and utterly satisfied. He hopped happily into the lodge and tripped over himself when he saw what had happened to it.

  A pine tree in the middle of the room was so large that its top branches pressed against the ceiling. It was decorated from top to bottom with glittering glass orbs of every colour. Enchanted icicles hung from the branches, and silk garland crisscrossed strings of popcorn, which was being nibbled away at by glittering fairies who nestled among the needles.

  While the tree dominated the space, it was by no means the only change. Several tables had been replaced with a huge candle holder with eight extra arms. Each candle was nearly as big as Kuro and their unprotected flames covering the timbers above in soot and threatening to burn down the lodge. Holly leaves and cedar boughs hung from every rafter. An unreasonably large log had been shoved into the central fireplace and was slowly starting to smoulder away. A goat’s skull with ivy entangled in its horns hung over a gingerbread house large enough for Kuro to sleep in. Candy canes were placed in the corners of pentagrams; wreaths of oranges and pomegranates adorned doors; Margret the bear had bells and ribbons wrapped around her, and she munched lazily through a pile of watermelons.

  The lutin, who had obviously enacted the miraculous and baffling display, argued gleefully with each other as they continued their festive decorating. They were all in great disagreement about exactly how humans celebrated Solstice, and their solution was to include everything they had ever heard of.

  Most of the tables had been removed to make space, and everyone was eating at one long central table. It wasn’t just Autumn Lodgers, either. The very few students left behind in the other residences joined them, as did the remaining teachers. Kuro crept in and took a seat beside Meredith, who welcomed him heartily and filled his plate with roast chicken in spinach whipped cream.

  Kuro knew only one other student at the table, and he was as unhappy to see her as she was to see him. It was Bella. She was engaged in conversation with a Vertheim boy, but she shot Kuro a dirty look when he sat down.

  Kuro had made a point of avoiding her since their fight in the woods. This was the first time he
had seen her up close since then. She had a thin scar on her cheek and eyebrow where his rock had cut. When she turned to face him, he saw that the wound had gone much deeper. Her hazel eye had been slashed from bottom to top, and while her eye had been fixed by the nurse, the iris had not healed cleanly. It looked like she had replaced her eye with one from a cat.

  Kuro felt very guilty about scarring her in his panic and stared fixedly at his food for the rest of dinner.

  Being at the table with the teachers was strange. They chatted casually, reminisced about years past, and called each other by their first names. It was unsettling to listen to Ms. Crawley and Mr. Ogonov call each other Beatrice and Stan while laughing about old students and telling Mr. Widdershins stories from years past, as it was his first year teaching. They seemed almost human.

  Kuro retreated the moment it was polite to do so and went to his dorm. It had been months since he’d been able to sleep in his own bed. With most of the other students gone, though, there wasn’t so much opposition to his entering the dorms. He nestled into his warm, soft bed and had a truly peaceful sleep.

  The second day started much as the first, but he knew that he couldn’t just spend the whole vacation playing. He was behind in every single class except alchemy, and he had made no progress at all on the returning spell. After a quiet afternoon spent in the library struggling with an essay on the Treaty of Confederation of the Four Courts for social studies, he went down for dinner.

  He was expecting much the same as the night before, but upon entering the dining hall, he was tackled and thrown backwards into the wall.

  “Kuro!” the assailant shouted. “I was looking everywhere for you!”

  It was Charlie.

  Kuro stared up at her, dumbstruck. He couldn’t express how happy he was to see her, or how confused he was at her presence.

  Charlie, true to form, did not make him wait long. “I got all the way to the docks on the other side, and Dad had sent a message that there was a huge snowstorm and he couldn’t come get me. He’s a stray, right, so he has to take a truck. Well, I guess he could have rode a unicorn or something but we don’t have one that could carry both of us and my stuff, and they can stand on top of snow on their own but not with riders, so he had to take a truck, but he couldn’t because of the snow. Anyway I had to wait for the next day when the ferry could make a special trip and then come all the way back, and there were only two other people on the ferry, and it was really boring, but I had a pretty good book to read, but I couldn’t turn the pages outside the veil, so that was no good. I tried to find you when I got here, but you weren’t around, but you’re here now, so that’s fine. So guess what? I’m staying here for Solstice. Isn’t that great?!”