Volume 1: Pickpocketing

by R. A. Consell

  “Oh, I suppose you expect me to believe that this just appeared in Belladonna’s pocket?”

  “I didn’t make it!” he cried. What would he even do with four sovereigns? There wasn’t anything to buy on the island.

  “I warned you when we accepted you that theft would not be tolerated. You will be punished for this.”

  Kuro climbed out of the chair and prepared himself for the worst. He shut his eyes, and his whole body tensed and waited for her to deliver on her threat, but it did not come. There was just a slow uncomfortable silence. He risked opening his eye. Ms. McCutcheon was still standing there, but now with a look of confusion instead of anger. “What are you doing, child?” she asked.

  “Waiting for you to punish me?”

  “Detention. You will be receiving detention. A month of it at least,” she replied crossly. “You will be seeing Vice Principal Flint every Tuesday and Thursday evening for the month of November.”

  Kuro wasn’t entirely sure what detention was. Other students seemed to dread it, but the few he’d known to have served one had been alive and well the next day. He took some solace in knowing that whatever it was, it wouldn’t likely land him in the hospital, or jail.

  Ms. McCutcheon threw a blanket around Kuro without even asking Dani and marched him out the door. As they left, Dani shouted after them. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Kuro. Come back and visit Grey any time.”

  Ms. McCutcheon glared daggers at Dani for the suggestion and prodded Kuro to move faster.

  It was well past dark, and Kuro was cold through again by the time they reached the thinning of the veil, where the ferry landed. Kuro was so tired when they finally reached Autumn Lodge that he could no longer keep his eyelids open. The only reason he hadn’t just fallen asleep in a bush in the Summer Quarter was the firm hand of the principal on his shoulder, guiding him home.

  Exhausted and aching all over, Kuro crossed the threshold to Autumn Lodge eager to find his bed. Instead, he found something he had not expected that made his heart ache with happiness. Four students were still in the lounge, dozing by the fire. Charlie, Mary, Arthur, and Meredith turned their bleary eyes towards him as he stepped through the door. Meredith was on him in a flash, crushing him in her strong arms and sobbing into his hair about fearing that he had died.

  Arthur stood and bowed slightly. He said, “I am glad that you’re alive,” while staring fixedly at the floor and then rushed off to his room. Kuro was touched. That, for him, was a remarkable outpouring of emotion.

  Charlie was too overcome to stand or even speak. She just grinned madly at him while tears rolled down her cheeks.

  It was Marie who finally gave him some of the admonishment he felt he deserved. She stormed over and punched him in the arm. “Don’t ever do that to us again, you understand? Never again.”

  Kuro was speechless at the reaction of his friends. He couldn’t imagine anyone caring about him enough to be that upset at his death. All he could do was apologize again and again until they finally released him to his bed and sleep. As he closed his eyes and sleep began to take him, he was surprised to find himself glad to have been brought back to the lodge. It felt almost like he had a home.

  Thirteen

  Dragonfey

  Kuro’s pleasant feelings were not allowed to go unchallenged for long. Bella’s story spread quickly across the island. The belief that Kuro was dangerous and violent had redoubled, and now the whole school seemed to know that he had been the Winking Weasel, notorious serial thief. People avoided him in the hallways and clutched their bags more tightly when they passed. Every time something went missing, be it gold, glasses, or a dirty sock, he was blamed. Professeur De Rigueur had gone from ignoring Kuro to actively avoiding him and encouraging others to keep a close eye on their potion supplies. To make matters much worse, some people had started forging more notes. Whether they did this as pranks or as cover for real thefts, Kuro couldn’t know, but he suspected a bit of both.

  Even his friends, the ones who cared well enough to shed tears over his death, were wary of him. They eyed him suspiciously and didn’t have much to say to him.

  It wasn’t too bad in class—they were usually too busy to chat anyway—but dinner was a different story. They were all silent, and their eyes were evasive. Even Charlie was quiet, paying all her attention to her fish stick and asparagus pie.

  After two days of this, Marie finally broke the silence. “How much of it is true?” she asked.

  Kuro thought this very charitable of her. Everyone else just accepted the whole story. The bandage over Bella’s eye was proof enough for most. Kuro didn’t want to tell her the truth. He worried that she wouldn’t be his friend anymore if she knew that he was a thief and that he really had almost blinded Bella. He couldn’t lie to her, either, though. Not just because he was a very poor liar, but she trusted him. If she was going to stop being his friend, he thought it should be because of the truth. “About half,” he managed to mumble as he poked an asparagus floret around his plate. “I am a thief like they say. And I did cut her, but I didn’t steal anything from her, and I didn’t mean to hurt her. I just panicked.”

  There was another lengthy silence, made more pronounced by the boisterous chatter at the other tables in the lodge’s dining hall.

  Arthur was, uncharacteristically, the first to speak. “Everyone has secrets,” he said. “I can understand why you wouldn’t want to tell us this one.” He paused for a while as if he had something more to say on the subject but changed his mind. “But how did they know that you were the Winking Weasel?”

  “I don’t really know,” Kuro admitted. “Lucky guess, maybe?”

  “I’m going to ask my dad. Maybe he knows something,” said Arthur. “I’ll send a letter tomorrow.”

  Marie was not quite as quick to trust as Arthur. “But you are a thief? You steal things?” She looked increasingly uncomfortable sitting across from him. Until his confession, she might have been able to give him the benefit of the doubt. Now his criminal history was inescapable.

  “Not anymore,” Kuro said, slouching lower in his seat till his chin rested on the table. “I don’t need to here. They feed me plenty. Besides, I’m probably the worst wizard in the school. So why is everyone afraid of me? Any one of them could turn me inside out if they wanted, and they get all jumpy because I reached into somebody’s pocket.”

  Kuro must have said something right because Marie turned from wary to sullen. “You’re not the worst wizard here, either,” she said glumly. “That’s me.”

  “No way,” argued Kuro. “You’re way better than me in almost every class.”

  “That’s just the reports and things, ordinary school stuff. I’m no good at magic at all.”

  “At least you don’t blow something up every time you try.”

  They both laughed at their shared struggles, and the atmosphere at the table eased. With the release of tension, Charlie finally spoke, and it was like a dam broke. “You could have told me,” she said, grabbing Kuro and shaking him vigorously. “Keeping a secret like that. I thought we were friends. Are you really the Winking Weasel? I heard that the weasel was supposed to be a really clever witch. How did you steal all those jewels and things?”

  “It’s not like that!” Kuro retorted. “I borrowed sandwiches and loose change. I never took anything valuable.”

  “But how did you do it?” she demanded excitedly. “Are you just pretending to be bad at magic? Are you really a secretly trained ninja wizard from the Orient?”

  “What?” Kuro replied, exasperated. “No. Is that even a real thing? No. I didn’t use magic. I just picked things up when people weren’t looking.”

  “What? Like an ordinary thief?” Charlie looked crestfallen. “Well, you must have had some adventures, right? Exciting times? Daring heists? Far-flung romances?”

  Charlie had clearly read too many storybooks.

  With the returned support of his friends, Kuro fel
t somewhat shielded from the dirty looks and accusations of the other students. Things kept getting worse, though. He almost always had someone’s familiar spying on him, despite the rules about keeping them in sight. If ever he was found alone, he was immediately accused of attempting to burgle someone. By the third time Kuro had been cornered in a hallway by a third year shouting at him to return their enchantment homework, his friends decided that something had to be done.

  “You’ve been framed,” said Charlie at breakfast with a mouthful of waffled eggs. “Don’t you want to seek justice and clear your name? We just need to prove your innocence and show McCutcheon that you didn’t do anything.”

  “But I’m not innocent,” Kuro argued. “I really did stab someone in the face. She’s lucky she didn’t lose her eye. It’s fine, really. I’ll just do my detentions and hopefully people will forget about all this. I don’t want you guys getting in trouble because of me.”

  “It is not fine,” Marie argued. “You had to run halfway across the island yesterday to get away from that Vertheim girl who thought you’d stolen her diary. I agree with Charlie. We have to stop this before you get hurt again.”

  Kuro had hoped that Marie would have been the reasonable one. He looked to Arthur for a level head.

  “I think I’ve already found our first clue,” said Arthur, holding up a copy of the Seelie Times, which had been sent to him by his father. An article had been circled in red.

  Kuro threw up his hands in defeat.

  Arthur began reading robotically. “Winking Weasel at Avalon?” read the headline. “The Times has uncovered evidence that the attempted robbery of Wing-Tips on August the 26th was perpetrated by none other than the notorious thief the Winking Weasel.

  “While the Hound’s Office has not wavered from their official statement that there are no suspects in the crime, and Schumacher himself has been tight lipped, witnesses of the event have come forward. They confided that there had been a duel in the streets and a youth who had fled the scene of the crime.

  “All reports of Weasel activity have ceased since the incident. Who was the assailant? Is the Weasel a student at Avalon? What aren’t the Hounds telling us?

  “Are your children safe?”

  There was also a photo of some of Kuro’s notes.

  Charlie slammed her fist on the table victoriously. “That explains how they knew it was you.”

  “And how they made a copy of your IOUs,” Marie said enthusiastically.

  “What’s our next step?” asked Arthur in his unwavering monotone.

  They all turned to Kuro, as if this were somehow his idea. He stared back silently for a while before conceding. “I guess we have to prove that the notes are fake somehow?”

  The plan that they worked out was pretty simple. The other three would try to collect the IOU notes under the pretense of building a case to get Kuro expelled. While they did that, Kuro would try to find a way to prove that they were forgeries.

  His friends couldn’t be seen being too friendly with Kuro, so they only talked to each other when they could find private places to meet in secret. That meant more isolation for him. It also meant that he spent a lot of time exploring the island on his own while trying to find places to hide from his accusers. The more he looked, the more he found.

  The school itself was expansive. The insides were folded back on themselves even more than Kuro’s old apartment building in Detritus Lane. There was a corridor that had seven left turns and never crossed itself; a staircase that let out on three extra floors, which appeared largely unused; a full gymnasium hidden in a closet; and a second library inside a cupboard in the main library.

  The snowy forests around Vertheim were too cold to spend much time in outside, but a splendid garden grew in a greenhouse that was almost always empty. Despite it being fairly warm inside, the thick snow and cold weather of the Winter Quarter kept most students from wandering out of the golden halls of Vertheim. It was a shame, too, as someone was clearly tending the sprawling garden of snowblossom bushes, holly trees, and glittering icicle vines. The few students that did come to the garden tended to be in pairs and were far too involved with each other to notice a small boy doing his homework in a back corner.

  In the Summer Quarter, he found a secluded grove of elephant ferns with leaves so big he could lie on them. Other students avoided the grove as it grew out of a rather smelly bog. Nobody else seemed to consider using the leaves as support. Kuro would lie in the hot summer sun, safe from almost anyone.

  The Spring Quarter was the busiest, having the junior high, the amphitheatre, the Chateau du Printemps, and the best weather, so Kuro didn’t hide there often. When it rained, however, the spring forest emptied of other people, and the air filled with the rich scent of wet soil and new leaves. One tree had a particular hollow that he could sit in to watch the raindrops on the river.

  Kuro’s best hiding spot was one he could use only rarely. Dani’s house in the Blandlands took almost an hour to get to from school, and he had to leave before her dinner was delivered. Every night, Ms. McCutcheon would come with food and wood for Dani, and it didn’t seem like a good idea for her to find him outside the veil.

  Kuro used that refuge sparingly. Only when he was completely cut off from his friends and unable to hide elsewhere would he risk slipping through the veil by the ferry dock and taking the long walk in the cold up to Dani’s place.

  She was always pleased to see him. She made him foul-smelling tea, told him about the birds on the island as she worked or read, and tried to send him home with books. Kuro played with Graeae while he listened to stories about ptarmigans, snow geese, and pintails and politely refused to take books that he knew he wouldn’t be able to read.

  Playing with Graeae was strange. On the streets, they had been partners. They had kept each other warm, safe, and fed. Seeing his scrawny ally become plump and playful warmed his heart. Even if she had been taken from him, Kuro was grateful to Dani for taking such good care of the battered stray cat.

  One thing Kuro couldn’t hide from were his classes. They continued their relentless progress, leaving Kuro further and further behind.

  Everyone else, even Marie, could do simple evocations now. They could all reliably get textbooks to float, boil a kettle, and freeze an ice cube, and some of them had become so skilled with illusions that they could make lights dance around the room.

  Kuro still had not successfully cast anything that he was supposed to, though his skill was slowly improving. As long as he was calm and focused, he could reliably get nothing at all to happen. He hadn’t thrown himself or anything else across the room or been sent to the nurse in days. Mr. Ogonov even congratulated him for his “dedication to overcoming his deficiency.”

  That praise did not prevent Ogonov from also drawing attention to Kuro’s alleged crime spree. “There has been something of a rash of disappearances of late,” he said in class the last week of October. “I thought it might be of interest to learn a finding charm.”

  Several members of the class glowered at Kuro at the mention of missing items.

  “It is a relatively simple charm,” Ogonov continued. “But very different than anything we have tried yet in class. Unlike our previous evocations, this one requires the use of a magical implement, a dowsing rod.” With a flourish, he revealed a tapered stick a little longer than a pencil. “You must first choose the object you wish to find. It must be something you know very well, something dear to you, and something you can picture in your mind perfectly. Something that you have put a little bit of yourself into. Things that you have made yourself are very good choices, as are cherished mementos. People and pets won’t do. They have too much mind of their own. Everyone, now choose an object!” He punctuated his instruction with a burst of brilliant blue flame from his palm.

  Kuro knew exactly what to look for. He had only one precious possession, and it had been missing since the fight with Bella and Seph—his shoes. He was a l
ittle concerned that the rod wouldn’t be able to distinguish his shoes from any other pair. He was considerably more worried that he would detonate some portion of the classroom.

  “Once you have your object firmly in mind, extend your index finger and balance your dowsing rod on top of it,” instructed Ogonov.

  There was a clattering of rods falling as students fumbled to find balance points. Kuro, for once, didn’t have a problem following instructions. His little twig had a well-placed crook, and it sat, wobbling only slightly, on his outstretched finger. He closed his eyes and imagined his shoes. He pictured what they looked like, remembered how they felt on his feet when he ran, felt their absence tug at his heartstrings.

  His rod started to rotate on his finger as if a nail had been driven through it. It spun slowly in one direction, then the other, like a compass needle.

  “Now that everyone has their dowsing rods ready, hold that object firmly in your mind and focus your intention steadily forward in a low G flat.” He pounded on the appropriate piano key to help people tune their thoughts.

  Kuro tried his best to match the note with his mind, but the wand shot off his finger, bounced off his face, and spun across the class.

  “Don’t worry if you don’t get it the first time,” said Ogonov as he levitated Kuro’s rod back to him. “It is a more advanced evocation than we have tried before.”

  By the end of class, about half of the students had succeeded in getting their rod to obey. Kuro had no luck in getting his rod to stay on his finger. He was annoyed at himself. He wanted this evocation to work more than any other. It almost seemed to be working, too, but as soon as he tried to tune his thoughts, it just shot off across the room in no particular direction. Complete failure aside, the class had given Kuro an idea.

  He waited around after class for a chance to talk to Ogonov in private.