The fox snarled but released the third owl from his grip. She gave an angry hoot, and the sisters flew through an open window and out into the bright morning.
“Well, students.” Mr. Timinson turned and sat in front of them. “I see you are making some progress in your homework.”
Kit and Eeni stared at him, slack-jawed and dumb-struck.
“Kit, I hear you had an interesting conversation with a coyote,” Mr. Timinson continued. “And, Eeni, you appear to have gotten to know an otter named Chuffing Chaz.”
“Well . . . I . . . ,” Eeni stammered.
“Rather bold choices by both of you, of course, for a first homework assignment, but I admire it,” the fox continued.
“We would’ve been bird meat if you hadn’t shown up to fight them off,” Kit said, feeling less the hero and more the raccoon in need of rescue.
“We foxes have our vows too,” Mr. Timinson said. “To those who want wits, we provide them. For those who lack wits, we deride them, and when a friend is in need, we’re beside them.”
“But we aren’t friends,” Eeni said. “You’re our teacher.”
The fox cocked his head. “I was a friend to someone close to Kit and I promised her that I would look out for him if he ever came my way.”
“Her? You mean—”
“I knew your mother,” Mr. Timinson told Kit. “And she told me to look out for you. She hoped you’d be in my class. She knew you’d grow up to be something special, with the right guidance.”
Kit reached into the inside band of his hat and pulled the wooden token out to look at it. His mother’s token.
“She hoped, when the time came, you would be the kind of raccoon who could steal a star from the night, trick a dog from its tail, and outwit the Flealess and the coyote with a plan the rest of us couldn’t possibly imagine,” Mr. Timinson said. “Just like an ancient Moonlight Brigadier.”
“She believed that about me?” Kit sniffled.
“She did,” said Mr. Timinson. “Of course, all parents believe that about their young. It’s the reason they don’t eat them as soon as they’re born.”
“Oh,” said Kit, frowning. “Do you believe it about me?”
Mr. Timinson stared back at him with gentle eyes, but he did not say yes. “What I believe doesn’t matter,” he said. “I am your teacher. It is up to you to become the raccoon you want to be.”
“Oh,” said Kit again, swallowing hard and studying the emblem on the coin some more. All of One Paw. Every paw had its own role to play. Was that what it meant? There were teachers and there were friends and there were hunters and thieves and there were tricksters. What role was Kit meant to play? He wanted to play the hero, but he always got other folk hurt when he tried.
“You do have a plan, don’t you, Kit?” Mr. Timinson said.
“I really could’ve used the Rat King’s advice,” said Kit.
“I’m sure you could have,” said Mr. Timinson. “But the Rat King knows when it’s time to make themselves scarce, and you don’t have time to wait for their return. Like the salamanders say, You can’t wish for a river when you’re stuck in the muck. You gotta swim in the river you’re in.”
“My plan’s not really a plan yet,” said Kit. A plan for the second part of his trick, the Sting, had started to form in his mind, but there were a lot of missing pieces. Coyote knew the stories about Kit defeating the Flealess, so it was those stories that Kit would rely on to trick him. But he wasn’t sure yet how to do it. “It’s more like a daydream,” he told the teacher. “I don’t know how to make it happen yet.”
“Well, you’ll have some time to think about it tonight,” said Mr. Timinson. “During our field trip. We’re going to look for inspiration.”
“We are?” Kit wondered. “Where do they keep inspiration?”
“At the carnival, of course,” said Mr. Timinson. “If you’ve got any seeds left in your pockets, you’ll want to bring them along. The carnival’s a great teacher, but the crows don’t give away its lessons for free.”
Kit wasn’t so sure a class trip to a carnival was the best use of his time. His uncle was knocked out in a sack, and the alley was headed toward a winter of starvation. Every passing moment was a moment closer to Coyote’s deadline.
“If a trickster can’t find inspiration at a carnival,” said Mr. Timinson, “then he’s no trickster at all.”
Kit flexed his paws. He wouldn’t let his teacher, his uncle, or his alley down. He would live up to his mother’s hopes for him and become the Moonlight Brigadier they wanted him to be.
He tucked the wooden token back inside his hatband. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Fourteen
THE CARNIVAL OF CROWS
THE Crows’ Carnival opened on the first day of the leaf-changing season and went far into the cold days of winter. It was held in a part of the city beneath the Slivered Sky where People rarely gathered, but where they made giant mountains from the things they tossed away.
Declan and the other bats dropped off Kit’s class just after sunset that night. All of their bellies were grumbling with hunger, but Mr. Timinson acted like he didn’t hear it.
He had to hear it, Kit thought.
“They call this place a dump,” Mr. Timinson explained to them as he led the class quickly to a high hedge across the road. “It is a treasure trove for our kind, filled with food and scraps and all manner of useful things, but you will have to resist your natural urges to steal. The crows love a game and a gamble, but they do not take kindly to stealing the way folks in Ankle Snap Alley do. They don’t see the fun in it, and they’ve got long beaks and quick wings. Thieves don’t make it out of the carnival with their eyes intact, understood?”
“Understood,” said everyone in the class together, as none of them wanted to be pecked to pieces by a carnival of crows.
Mr. Timinson cocked his head at Eeni, whose voice had been strangely absent from the class’s response. Kit elbowed her in the side.
“Understood.” She shook her head sadly. “What fun is a carnival if you can’t pick a pocket or two? We could show back up at home with a few seeds and nuts to spread around.”
Kit had to laugh. No matter what bad luck came her way, Eeni was always true to herself: a sneaky little rat with a fearsome streak of loyalty to her neighborhood.
“No stealing. Period,” Mr. Timinson said. “The crows can be generous birds, when generosity is shown to them, but with thieves they are cruelest of all the creatures. Not even the Flealess dare steal from crows.”
Mr. Timinson sniffed the cold air and watched a single leaf fall, fluttering, from a high branch. Then he peered around a set of trash cans and turned back to the class. “We’ll have to cross the street here. We go one at a time. When you see one of those big rolling Rumblers speeding at you, for the good of your guts, do not stop. I can’t tell you how many of our animal folk get squashed flat beneath the wheels of Rumblers because they panic in the lights and freeze. Think of this big concrete street like a river. If you stop swimming you’ll drown. And of course, by drown, I mean ‘have your insides flattened against the pavement and your bones pulverized into dust.’”
“Do we really have to cross?” one of the Liney sisters asked nervously.
“I’ll help you,” Fergus, a frog with a constant bubble of slime on his nose, offered. She scowled at him and whispered with her sisters, giggling.
“You can help me cross,” Eeni offered, and the frog smiled.
The Liney sisters rolled their eyes.
“Kit, why don’t you go first,” Mr. Timinson suggested.
Just then, a roaring Rumbler zoomed by, its terrible tires twirling and kicking up huge clouds of dust and plastic bags behind it. Kit swallowed.
“Don’t be scared, Kit,” Matteo the church mouse offered. “The night we return to Mother Moon is written already b
y the Great Scribe’s paw. If it’s your time to go, then there will be endless feasts of cheese waiting on the other side.”
“Uh . . .” Kit didn’t take much comfort in the mouse’s faith. He’d rather be alive than eat cheese for all eternity.
“I bet the Moonlight Brigade wasn’t afraid of crossing a street,” Dax the squirrel added, which was a far better argument to get Kit moving.
Mr. Timinson beckoned for Kit to step forward. “When you see there are no Rumblers coming this way or coming that way, you run across, got it? But look both ways first. We aren’t deer. We don’t just charge across and hope for the best. Always look both ways. If you are careful, you have nothing to fear.”
Kit nodded and took a creeping step forward. Then another.
“Go!” Mr. Timinson gave him a shove on the backside, and Kit ran, straight across the wide strip of pavement. Halfway across, he stopped. He’d reached a line that ran down the middle and stretched as far as he could see in either direction. Was it some kind of fence? Some sort of barrier? He sniffed at it.
“Go!” Mr. Timinson shouted. “Go!”
Kit looked back and saw his class staring at him. Dax shifted anxiously from paw to paw, Fergus’s neck bulged with every croak, and Eeni waved frantically to urge Kit along. Only Matteo looked relaxed. He winked at Kit.
Kit raised a paw to step across the strange line, hesitated, then saw a Rumbler coming his way. It seemed to be getting bigger and bigger with every instant he looked at it. Its lights blinded him, brighter and brighter.
He realized too late it was a trick of the eyes. The box wasn’t growing, it was getting closer very, very quickly. He started to step forward, doubted that he’d make it across in time, then turned to run back the way he’d come, but he froze that way too. Eeni and Mr. Timinson and the rest of his class were shouting at him, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying over the deafening roar of the approaching Rumbler. His ears filled with a strange noise, like the honk of a goose, only much louder.
Suddenly, Eeni broke from her hiding spot and charged at him, and Mr. Timinson bolted after her.
“Run!” she yelled.
They ran at Kit. Eeni dove onto Kit’s head as Mr. Timinson tackled him from the front. The Rumbler, which it turned out had been making the goose sound, swerved and passed straight over them. Kit looked up to see its underside, all gears and wheels and hot liquids dripping.
The thing was gone almost as soon as it had arrived, zooming along without slowing or coming back to check if it had squashed them.
Mr. Timinson shoved them the rest of the way across the street to the fence around the carnival.
“Well, that was the wrong way to cross a street,” he told Kit. “You’ll need to get better at that in the future. Wait here while I get the rest of your classmates across.”
“Yes, sir,” Kit muttered, looking down at his paws, burning with shame.
The embarrassment of needing a rescue in front of everyone might’ve been worse than getting crushed to death. Heroes didn’t need their best friend and their teacher to tackle them. Heroes could cross a street themselves.
Maybe he wasn’t the raccoon his mother hoped he’d be. Maybe he wasn’t meant to be as great as the Moonlight Brigade, after all. Maybe the time for that kind of hero really was past. Maybe his home and his uncle were doomed because he’d had dreams that were much too grand for such a frightened little raccoon.
Eeni put a paw on Kit’s back, but he brushed it off, ashamed.
Once the whole class had made it across, Mr. Timinson led them through a hole under the fence.
They popped up on the other side amid great heaps of the most astounding trash Kit had ever seen. There were piles of metal, heaps of plastic, oozing mountains of food scraps. Empty cans and boxes and crates and bags wafted delicious smells in Kit’s direction: sardines and chocolate and pickle juice and cabbage. Scraps of paper fluttered in the breeze, and the moonlight sparkled off shining shards of colored glass more vivid than a rainbow.
Between these great mounds of garbage, a path meandered. This path was the midway of the carnival, where the crows set up their gaming booths and amusement rides. Every sort of creature—light lovers and night dwellers alike—roamed wide-eyed through the midway, awed by the spectacle the crows had created.
Church mice spun on sideways bicycle wheels turned by a tired-looking crow in a dark blue apron. A colony of young weasels whooped and hollered as they ran through a maze of pipes, while a clutch of chickens clutched one another in fright, watching Cecil the Scorpion Tamer. Cecil was a gopher in nothing but a feathered hat who danced around three trained scorpions, using a spork to keep them at bay.
Countless crows watched from above, roosting on their mountains of trash, while more perched inside the booths and others flew this way and that, carrying prizes or sacks of seeds, singing songs, and cheering when a customer won one of their games. They looked friendly enough, but the fox’s warning reminded Kit that though the crows had cheerful expressions, their eyes were open for trouble and their beaks were sharp as sunlight.
“Well,” said Eeni. “What are we supposed to learn here?”
“First, we eat,” Mr. Timinson said, and, with a wave of his paw, summoned over a concession crow. He bought a small bag of Worms ’n’ Nuts for every one of his students. Kit noticed his teacher’s seed sack wasn’t so full either, but maybe he had heard all their stomachs grumbling.
While they ate, their teacher gave them their assignment. “Play a game,” he said.
“You brought us here to play a game?” Kit complained. “My uncle’s been taken hostage! I’m supposed to be saving the alley from coyote! I’m supposed to be robbing the Flealess! Why should I be playing a game?”
Kit sounded angrier than he wanted to, but he couldn’t stop himself. His pride still stung. He needed to remind them that he had bigger worries than some school field trip. He was a hero, and he had hero’s work to do!
The other students avoided eye contact with him, which made him feel worse.
His teacher folded his paws in front of himself and lowered his head to Kit, speaking low. “Kit, do you know how you will rob the Flealess and save your home?”
“Not yet,” Kit mumbled.
“Then this is the perfect time to play,” the teacher told him. “Since the First Animals walked the world, play has been our way to learn. Bear cubs wrestle so that they learn to fight. Foxes stalk butterflies so that they learn to hunt. And raccoons . . .”
“Play games so that they can learn some tricks,” Kit said.
“That’s right,” Mr. Timinson told him. “Play is how we bend the world to our will. Without play, there can be no discovery. And what you need now, young Kit, is a big discovery. The crows scrounge far and wide to have the best prizes in their booths. Perhaps you’ll find some inspiration from their collections. The carnival is the classroom of the imagination, you know. But keep your wits about you.”
“I always do,” said Kit, his confidence returning. Mr. Timinson hadn’t given up on him, after all.
“As for the rest of you,” Mr. Timinson said. “Play a game you’ve never played before. Win or lose, it doesn’t matter. I want you to play and to tell us all about the game when you’re done. Now go!”
He barked once, and the class scurried across the midway looking for serious fun. Kit and Eeni set off together.
“Thanks for saving me from the Rumbler,” Kit told her.
“Well, I didn’t feel like making a new best friend,” she said. “So I figured I’d need to keep you from getting smushed.” She smirked at him and flicked her tail from side to side. “So . . . uh . . . any inspiration yet?”
Kit looked all around as they walked among the Crows’ Carnival booths. Each booth was made from the discarded junk in the People’s dump, but they had transformed it into art. There were colorful canopi
es crafted from the metal hoods of Rumblers just like the one that had nearly killed Kit. Bright banners hung from these canopies, some decorated with flowers or birds, others with bold patterns, and a few with rough drawings of all sorts of animals, as if the People’s artists didn’t have enough ideas on their own, they had to steal from the animal folk.
There were booths selling grubs from great buckets, cans full of corn kernels, entire booths filled to bursting with acorn candy and peanut-butter-cricket cakes and more kinds of cheese bits than Kit had ever seen before, even at Possum Ansel’s bakery.
“Worms and grubs! Worms and grubs fried fresh today!” a crow called out his ballyhoo, trying to entice a passing company of moles to spend their hard-earned seeds on his treats.
“I got grubs too!” a crazy-eyed crow shouted from his booth directly across the way. “Fried or steamed, sugared or salted! Grubs, grubs, grubs!”
“Oh, stuff your grubs!” the first crow shouted back. “My grubs have twice the flavor at half the price!”
The moles hesitated.
“He lies!” the other crow yelled.
“Only one way to find out for sure,” the first crow said. “Try ’em both! If his are better than mine I’ll give you a second helping for half the price!”
Kit realized that wasn’t a good deal at all, and that the crows were probably working together to get these moles to part with their seeds. It was a quick trick, but it still had all the parts Kit recognized: the Bamboozle, where the crows acted like they were against each other; the Sting, where the moles bought grubs from both of them; and then the Brush-Off, when the moles went away with their bellies full, feeling like they’d gotten a bargain, never knowing they’d been tricked into buying twice as many grubs as they’d wanted in the first place.
Kit admired the crows’ trickery.
“Come play the Beetle Bag!” another crow called out to Kit. “Best Beetle Bag in the whole midway! Our prizes are grand, and our prices are low! Bag up some beetles like a crow who’s a pro!”
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