Charlie was able to put her feelings into words before Kuro. “There are so many questions. I don’t know where to start. What happened to the heir to Summer? Can you turn into a dragon? Who are your parents? What does it feel like when you change shape? Do foods taste different if you use a different tongue? Is it something you can teach us to do, or do you have to be born with it? Have you ever used your powers to infiltrate an international spy ring and save the world from the machinations of a despotic dictator?”
The questions poured out faster than Arthur could even comprehend, let alone answer. He just stared at Charlie, wide eyed and open mouthed, his features shifting to match hers as he blinked uncomprehendingly.
And then he laughed.
He exploded with joyful unrestrained laughter and doubled over. It looked like a laugh that had been building up all year had finally been allowed to escape. His hair tumbled through the colours of the rainbow, his face turned wolflike, then catlike. He grew a plume of feathers that smoothed into scales and then back to flesh.
Marie backed away, putting a chair between her and Arthur. Charlie clapped delightedly. Kuro just joined in laughing.
It was a good laugh, longer than any Kuro could remember. By the end, his belly hurt, and he and Arthur were leaning against each other for support. Marie, though, was not laughing. She was standing as stiffly as Arthur ever did and was biting her lip anxiously. When Kuro noticed, he did his best to choke back his giggles. He worried that they’d insulted her somehow.
Marie wrestled with her thoughts for a moment longer before saying, “I guess I should say mine, too.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kuro.
“My secret. You all told me one of yours. I should tell you mine.” She still looked conflicted. “It’s only fair. You’ll probably think it’s silly though.”
Charlie’s eyes grew wide with gleeful anticipation. “Oh, I knew there was something! Let me guess. You’re a werewolf, right? The Blandlands are just full of them. No, you’re secretly a princess. Or a pirate! No. You’re a werewolf princess who was captured and raised by pirates!” Charlie paused, eagerly awaiting confirmation from Marie.
Charlie’s imaginative speculation had taken the wind out of Marie’s sails. She shifted and cast her eyes around the empty library. “No, it’s just . . . well, my parents don’t know I’m here.”
“Haven’t they noticed you missing?” asked Kuro.
Marie shook her head. “No, they think I got a scholarship to a fancy Blandlands school. They’d never let me come here if they knew. They think witches are evil.”
Charlie scoffed. “That’s ridiculous. Have they ever met a witch?”
“Well, no,” confirmed Marie.
Arthur looked horrified, his whole face drooping in disbelief. “That’s awful. What did you tell them when you went home at Solstice?”
“Not much, really.” Marie shrugged. “I wouldn’t have been able to tell them anything even if I was allowed to keep my memories.”
Kuro almost missed that last bit; she had said it so casually. “Wait, what?” he interrupted.
“Don’t you guys know?” Marie asked in surprise. “It’s the same for all the Blandlanders. Mr. Flint keeps our memories of the school when we go home so we don’t go blabbing about magic schools and getting ourselves put in mental hospitals. He puts them in seashells. All I could remember were hazy things about some people and the grounds. Nothing about classes or magic at all. The weirdest thing is that I didn’t notice not remembering. It just felt normal to me at the time.”
Kuro was appalled. Not only because he knew that messing with people’s memories was dangerous, but it was also supposed to be illegal. Phineas was a powerful neuromancer, which was one of the many reasons the Guard was chasing him. Kuro shook his head. He’d been starting to trust the school and had even sort of gotten along with Mr. Flint, but this tore all that down. They were just like Phineas after all.
“Well, we should probably get back,” said Arthur, carefully reassembling himself into his familiar neat and stoic self. “We don’t want to look too suspicious.”
The others agreed, but just as he was reshelving the book, Charlie stopped him with another question.
Her eyes narrowed, and she leaned in towards Arthur. He literally shrank beneath her scrutinizing gaze. “If you’re not the heir to Summer, who’s your dad that you keep talking about? It’s not the king, is it?”
Arthur corrected her quickly. “I told you, I’m not the heir at all. I was an imposter. After I was discovered as a fake, they were just going to throw me in an orphanage, but somebody adopted me instead. They raised me like I was part of their family, like a human kid.”
“Who did?” pried Charlie. “Like someone in the court? Why aren’t you at Summerhill, then?”
Arthur’s hair turned a murky blue and tumbled down over his face. He sighed deeply and conceded. “Promise you won’t get weird?” he pleaded.
Charlie looked like she was about to say something foolish, so Kuro interrupted. “Of course we won’t get weird. You’re our friend. Right?”
Marie nodded. “I can’t imagine you telling me anything that would seem weird anymore.”
Charlie agreed as well, in her own way. “I promise to not get any weirder than I already am.”
Arthur retrieved the book and opened the cover to a large colour illustration on the page following the ones they’d read. He pointed to the proud man depicted in it, standing heroically in front of the Summer Palace, a large wolf at his side and a clawed baby in his arms.
“No way!” said Charlie with deep admiration.
“Who’s that, then?” queried Marie, completely missing the importance of it.
Kuro remained silent. He was so mortified that he was unable to form words. It was Talen Dubois.
Nineteen
The Distracting Draught
Kuro immediately regretted promising Arthur that he wouldn’t treat him differently knowing that Dubois was his dad. Arthur thought so highly of his adoptive father that Kuro was certain their friendship would not survive him finding out what Kuro thought of the man.
He imagined the conversation where he told Arthur that Dubois had attacked him, taken him captive, held him in a windowless cell, interrogated him, experimented on him, and forced him to be held in Avalon like a prisoner. He did not expect it would go well. He briefly considered that Arthur might even be one of Dubois’s spies, but Arthur had been too genuinely unaware of Kuro’s circumstances for that to be true. Still, he might be passing information to Dubois unwittingly.
It was a frustrating twist of fate. Arthur was happy to finally be able to stop pretending around his friends, and Kuro had to start again.
The other two had taken the new information in stride, though Marie lamented how ordinary she felt. “It’s not fair. You’re all master thieves, shapeshifters, and unicorn herders. I’m just a Blando kid. I’m so boring,” she complained late one afternoon in the library at one of their secret meetings.
“I’ll trade you for a finished essay,” replied Arthur. He gave up working on his social studies homework and let his head fall onto the desk.
Marie was much better at homework than any of them. She had more practice writing assignments, and she wrote so quickly and neatly that it looked like a magic of its own. Kuro felt that he would gladly trade situations with Marie. He couldn’t keep pace even with Charlie.
Kuro didn’t have much chance of getting his essay done in the company of his friends. While Marie was happy to help him, any assistance she could give was ruined by Charlie’s incessant questioning of Arthur.
“So what do you really look like?” asked Charlie, failing to write even one sentence since her last interruption.
“I don’t really look like anything,” replied Arthur. “That’s kind of the thing about changelings—we can change.”
“Can you turn into a dragon?”
“I don’t think s
o. . . .” Arthur’s skin turned scaly and red as he pondered the possibility. “I can’t change my bones much. I can’t grow a tail or wings or anything.”
“Can you grow extra eyes?”
The pair continued endlessly like that: Charlie probing every aspect of Arthur’s abilities; Arthur being mechanically forthright.
Problems with IOU notes continued, as did their plans to collect them. Meredith insisted that she had something almost ready for exposing the authors of the notes, and she just needed a week or two more.
Until then, Kuro was stuck being alone much of the time. He was back to sleeping in the lounge and wandering the island by himself. It was easier, in some ways. Charlie seemed to have mostly gotten over the news about her mother, but he sometimes caught the sad distant look in her eyes across the room in class. Going back to his old habits also meant he had to spend less time hiding his feelings about Dubois around Arthur.
Kuro still looked forward to their secret meetings, but he was no longer the only one. Arthur appeared at them early and eagerly, as it was the one place he felt comfortable relaxing and letting his appearance drift.
Arthur’s secret remained among the four friends. Evelyn continued to make comments reminding Kuro that she knew there was a changeling around. While the comments were directed at Kuro, they made Arthur very uncomfortable.
She was a favourite pet of the Professeur in alchemy class and used that to make Arthur’s life there miserable while appearing entirely innocent. She asked things like “Could you tell us more about the uses of changeling blood?” and “Is it true that fey folk in disguise can be exposed with the use of cold iron?” De Rigueur would always indulge his favourite student, and Evelyn would look smugly at Kuro as Arthur squirmed.
“You should just let it out yourself,” advised Marie. “Don’t let her hold it over you. Just get it over with. Do it quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid.”
“Like doing what?” asked Arthur. “It’s fine, really. Kuro’s right. She doesn’t really know it’s me. And it doesn’t bother him. That’s way better than the whole school being afraid of me.” His hair changed length and colour three times in that conversation, and his eyes kept shifting to match who he was talking to.
“Why would people be afraid of you?” asked Marie. “That’s silly.”
“People don’t trust changelings,” said Arthur. “They think we’re monsters that eat children and take their place. I don’t even know if they’re wrong. Changelings hide. Even from each other.”
Kuro’s next visit with Sabine El-Assar was more uncomfortable than usual. He spent most of it trying to decide whether she was Dubois in disguise, or if she really was just a nice lady that had been assigned to make sure he wasn’t going to turn into some kind of villain. He shuffled around in his chair, trying to get an angle that would see under the head scarf to check for Dubois’s scarred ear but had no luck.
For her part, Sabine was frustratingly friendly and failed to ask any suspicious questions at all. She asked about his studies and his friends but was pleased to let him give vague answers. She asked cautiously about Solstice and seemed genuinely delighted that he had received more than just the book she had sent. As he left, an older boy walked happily into the room and started chatting like old friends to her about his holiday.
Kuro grudgingly concluded that Sabine was probably not Dubois in disguise. If she was even a spy for him, she was probably a reluctant or unwitting one. Kuro found that he was disappointed. He had enjoyed being obstinate and evasive when he thought Sabine was Dubois. Now he was just being rude to a nice woman. More than that, he was a little offended that Dubois wasn’t even bothering to come in person to check in on him.
He left the meeting and dragged his feet a little on the way to alchemy. At what point he appeared was largely irrelevant for his grade. De Rigueur treated Kuro as if he weren’t in the room. He received a grade of “poor” on every potion he made, regardless of its efficacy. He imagined that De Rigueur would gladly give him a blanket grade of “unacceptable,” but he might have to actually evaluate Kuro’s work to justify failing him.
Kuro couldn’t wait too long, though, since Arthur still relied on Kuro a bit for help. Arthur had improved considerably in the class; he could reliably stir his cauldron in the correct direction and hadn’t burned anything he wasn’t supposed to since before the holiday. The real reason that Kuro and Arthur kept working together was Evelyn. She gloried in De Rigueur’s praise. She was also top of every class she was in. It felt good to be able to knock her down a peg in alchemy by helping make Arthur’s potions better than hers.
As Kuro stepped into alchemy a couple minutes late, he was surprised to see that De Rigueur wasn’t there. In his place was a skeletal elderly man wearing a vibrant orange scarf. The man looked rather familiar, as though Kuro might have met him before. He thought for a bit but couldn’t quite remember meeting anyone that had worn such a bright scarf. He worried that he might have been someone he’d borrowed from without permission.
The man at the front of class began speaking as though it were perfectly normal for him to be teaching. He didn’t introduce himself or explain De Rigueur’s absence. “Today, class, we will be working on a much more subtle concoction than we have to date. We shall not be growing or shrinking anything or changing its colour. No, nothing so ostentatious. Today we will be brewing a distracting draught.”
Kuro was pleased to hear that. He had helped Phineas make it several times back in Detritus Lane. Phineas used it when he was going out, though Kuro never knew exactly what it did. Having some experience with the process should make it easier. Also, maybe this substitute teacher would be less unpleasant than De Rigueur.
Oliver Kagen put up his hand and asked what the whole class was wondering. “Excuse m-me sir, b-but where is P-Professeur De Rigueur?”
“Whatever do you mean, Oliver?” The strange man removed his scarf, and the room gasped. “I’m right here.”
It was Professeur De Rigueur. It had been him all along, but the scarf had been just so distracting and out of character for him that he had been entirely unrecognizable.
“That is the effect you are aiming for today,” he announced proudly. “A good distracting draught will make you a stranger to your closest friends.” He walked behind a folding dressing screen as he talked.
A man walked out the other side a moment later. He must have been waiting back there since before class had started. He was old and thin and wore a very silly straw hat with a wide floppy brim. “With it,” the man said as if continuing a sentence, “you can befuddle your own mother just by wearing something unexpected.”
The class waited for Professeur De Rigueur to emerge from the screen as well, but he did not. The strange man who had been hiding behind it just continued to talk. “It is the simplest potion for disguising oneself. It’s not normally on the curriculum as it isn’t all that useful in everyday life, and it can be hard to get enough of the main ingredient for two whole classes. Dragonfey eggs contain a substance that makes them very difficult to notice.”
The man removed his hat and tossed it aside dramatically, revealing himself to be De Rigueur and eliciting a gasp from the class. “Fortunately, an unnamed Autumn Lodge student captured a live dragonfey queen before the holiday, and she’s produced enough eggs for us to work with. I’ve had them fermenting for the past three weeks.”
De Rigueur winked knowingly at Arthur, apparently believing him to be the brave monster hunter. Arthur reacted in his usual way: by deflating slightly and not lifting his eyes from his desk.
The potion was relatively easy to make, though it smelled awful while it was boiling. Fermented dragonfey eggs were not a delicate perfume. They drained the eggs, powdered some elan horn, and simmered peacock feathers in the mixture.
De Rigueur had brought an assortment of odd clothing that he kept putting on to befuddle the students. Even though Kuro knew that the man wandering the class was the same
man who had taught them all year, he appeared to be a complete stranger. Kuro’s mind was convinced that De Rigueur would never wear a fruit-covered hat, or a colourful sash, or fuchsia gloves, and he could not convince himself to take notice of any other feature.
At the end of class, to test their potions, they all put on bits of De Rigueur's strange apparel, and De Rigueur tried to guess who each student was. Those with weaker potions were easier to pick out. Charlie was one of the first ones caught, partly because she didn’t try very hard in alchemy, but mostly because she didn’t stop talking. Those with stronger brews were effectively impossible to recognize, so he mostly just matched up size, shape and colour, which meant Marie was caught out rather quickly.
The class dwindled down to four. Kuro had a pretty good idea who the two remaining girls were. One of them was definitely Evelyn, and the only other girl not out was Magna Singh, another Lodger. Kuro was able to reason which was which, as Evelyn was far too blonde to be the brunette standing next to him with a voluminous feather boa.
De Rigueur had obviously worked it out as well, but he made a show of having trouble discerning between the two. He puzzled over them before calling out Magna, leaving his favourite student the top mark among the girls.
Then it was down to the two boys. Kuro was still trying to sort out who the other boy was. Brown hair, snub nose, blue eyes, vibrant pink shawl. He couldn’t place him. Probably a Summerhill boy from the look of him. Kuro looked up and down the class at the students who had been picked out already. The only person he didn’t see there was Arthur. Arthur must be sick, Kuro thought. He was often sick, and he never wore pink shawls.
That wasn’t right. Arthur had been there that day. Kuro had helped him with draining his dragonfey eggs. He looked again at the boy on his right. “You cheater,” Kuro muttered, and the boy tried to contain a smirk. Arthur had changed his features to better disguise himself.
Volume 1: Pickpocketing Page 24