Volume 1: Pickpocketing

by R. A. Consell

  “Excuse me, sir,” said Kuro as politely as he could. “Could I have a moment of your time?”

  “Of course,” replied Mr. Ogonov brightly. Ogonov was almost always friendly to Kuro. Kuro assumed it was a continued effort to win his trust as a spy for Dubois, but he could use that friendliness to his advantage. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  “I was just wondering,” said Kuro, trying to sound innocently curious. “If there is an evocation to help people find lost things, is there an opposite one, to help lost things find their owners?”

  “Are you perhaps looking to have some things find their way back to where they belong?” Ogonov had a twinkle in his eye and a warm smile on his face. He had misunderstood Kuro’s intention and thought that Kuro wanted to return stolen goods. Fortunately, he thought this was a course of action worth supporting. “Well, there is a returning charm. It’s quite a complex spell that high school students learn in advanced spellcraft. I could give you the name of a book in the library that would have it.”

  “Thank you very much, sir,” said Kuro gratefully.

  “I doubt you will be able to cast it yourself,” Ogonov warned. “But I do always encourage students to study ahead, don’t I? If you need any help at all, I’ll be happy to show you how it’s done.” Ogonov gave Kuro a wink as he scrawled the title of the book on a piece of paper and sent him on his way.

  It was a start. Kuro was certain that he wouldn’t be able to cast the spell, but maybe Charlie would be able to. She was the best of them at magic. If they could get it to work, maybe they could get the IOUs to fly back to their creators. It was worth a shot.

  He didn’t have time to get to the library that day, though. He had to dash to make it to French on time, and he and his classmates barely had time to choke down lunch before spellcraft.

  They slid into their seats, still shoving pickled beet and herring sandwiches into their mouths. They had spent the past couple of months learning about the nature of magical fields and how they bent space within them. It was Kuro’s least unfavourite class, partly because Ms. Crawley had been reasonably kind to Kuro, and he felt as though he was actually learning something, but mostly because until this point, he hadn’t had to do any magic. Today promised to rectify that.

  Ms. Crawley had informed them last class that they would be starting to practise protective magic this week. Kuro anticipated a day of getting blasted around the room as he failed to defend himself, or worse, blasting himself around the room as his spells backfired.

  Ms. Crawley entered the room obviously concealing something behind her back. She wore the same tight expression she always did, which made her lips look a bit like an owl’s beak, but a hint of mischievousness sparked in her large eyes.

  “I promised that this week we would begin training you to better resist the effects of magic,” she began. “But a shield can only be tested if you have something against which to defend yourself. To that end, we shall begin by learning your first spell.” Her voice was dark and filled with ominous portent.

  “Wicked!” blurted Charlie excitedly.

  “Of course,” continued the teacher, “you will need to practise the spell on something other than each other while you master it. Can anyone tell me,” she said as she brought her hands out from behind her back and displayed what she was holding to the class, “what this is?”

  She held up an iridescent black and blue blur of legs, spines, and teeth.

  “That’s a dragonfey, ma’am,” said Charlie immediately, not remembering to put up her hand. “They sometimes nest in our crabapple trees. They eat a lot of pests like mice and locusts, but they can get really bitey if you disturb their nest, but the nests are sometimes hard to see because they’re made of leaves and—”

  “Thank you, Charlie,” Ms. Crawley interrupted, though not vigorously enough to give Charlie any pause.

  “They love sweets,” she continued, not pausing for breath. “And I ate a big lollipop right under a tree with some in them once, and they were all over it, and their jaws got stuck and—”

  “Thank you, Charlie,” Ms. Crawley repeated more crisply.

  She put the angry little creature into a wire mesh cage on her desk. It settled enough that they could get a clear look at it.

  It was like a dragonfly and a lizard had made a very angry baby. It had six spindly legs, each with razor sharp talons at the end, and four insectoid wings, which buzzed loudly as it fluttered around its cage. It had a long thin tail that trailed behind it, and a wide mouth full of vicious fangs that it gnashed at the class. The whole thing was covered in black scales that glimmered purple and blue when they caught the light.

  “This is, as Miss Cook correctly identified, a dragonfey. They’re nasty little guys and will nip off a finger if you let them. Fortunately for us, they are also very ticklish, what with having an extended rib cage and six feet.” She took a minute to smile at the class as they stewed in their confusion. “The spell we will be learning is the tickling spell.”

  She distributed a small caged dragonfey to each desk, with strong warnings to keep the doors sealed.

  The warning was immediately ignored by Charlie, who had pulled a honeycomb and raisin cookie from her bag and had her ferocious critter eating out of her hand.

  “In most ways, a spell is no different from the evocations you’re all becoming so accomplished with.” Ms. Crawley nodded to the class encouragingly, though Kuro didn’t find her words terribly comforting. “The only difference is that you can bind up more nuanced thoughts and manipulate energy more precisely with the use of words. To cast a spell correctly, you need to say the words but also have a really good understanding of what they mean and push them out with intention. It is still your thoughts that matter most; the words help add clarity and complexity to those thoughts, and the sounds help to give shape and direction to the spell.”

  She paused a moment to let the students absorb what she’d said and get accustomed to the furious little monsters on their desks. “Can anyone remember what the first word you learned in Elvish class was?”

  There was a murmur of uncertainty. “Hlàtr?” Jennifer Tanaka proposed hesitantly.

  “Good, and what does it mean?”

  “Laughter,” said several people confidently.

  “Does anyone think that an odd word to be the first you learn?” asked Ms. Crawley with a mischievous smirk.

  The class nodded in agreement.

  “Ms. Frigard starts with ‘hlàtr’ because we need you to get very familiar with it before this lesson. The tickling spell is one of the simplest spells there is—just one word and no complicated movements. You just have to point—” Ms. Crawley turned to face the caged dragonfey on her desk and extended her right index finger towards it—“know the words and fill them with their meaning.” She closed her eyes for a moment as if to meditate on the idea. “Then speak them perfectly with the full weight of intention . . . Hlàtr.”

  She spoke the single word in a light and bubbly tone, almost a laugh in itself. A flurry of ghostly orange petals extended from her finger and swirled around the dragonfey. The snarling beast immediately dropped to the floor of the cage and started squirming and chittering out a squeaky little giggle.

  She went over the finer details of the spell a few times and then released the students to practise on their own.

  Some of the more skilled students, those for whom Elvish had been spoken at home and who had private tutoring before coming to Avalon, mastered the spell in minutes. With a bright and light “hlàtr,” a small blast of orange petals shot from the tips of their fingers and tickled the dragonfey for a moment, making the tiny monsters giggle and squirm.

  Kuro took some time to build the courage to try the spell. He’d never done any magic on a living thing before and worried for its safety. With much of the class already tickling their dragonfey mercilessly, he steeled himself and pointed at the cage on his desk.

  Everyone in the s
eats around him paused their work to drag their desks to a safer distance. The scraping of legs drew the attention of Ms. Crawley. “What’s all this, then?” she demanded as several students ducked behind their chairs for cover.

  “Kuro’s a m-menace,” said Oliver Kagen. “Never know w-what w-will happen when he d-does magic.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” replied Ms. Crawley. “Get back in your seats and stop bullying your classmates.” She obviously hadn’t been speaking to Ogonov much.

  “No, it’s okay,” said Kuro glumly. “This dragonfey should probably be hiding too.”

  “Just take your time and relax,” she said comfortingly. “Nothing about this spell can do any harm. The worst you can do is to have nothing happen at all.”

  Being watched by the teacher and the entire class did not fill Kuro with confidence. His insides felt hollow and his hands clammy. His arm felt like a piece of rubber as he raised his hand to cast. He pointed and in his bubbliest voice said, “Hlàtr.”

  A stream of black ash spewed from the palm of his hand and engulfed the little dragonfey. It stopped fluttering and collapsed, unmoving, to the bottom of the cage. The class gasped in horror, and Ms. Crawley’s eyes went wide.

  She rushed over to the cage to inspect the fallen dragonfey. She risked opening the cage door and prodded the comatose creature. “Curious,” she mumbled very quietly to herself. Then, more loudly so the rest of the class could hear, she said, “Just stunned. A good tickle will get him right as rain.”

  She pointed her wand at Kuro’s dragonfey and said, “Hlàtr.” Unlike the fleeting burst from her demonstration, she maintained her focus, and the petals continued to swirl around the tiny monster. It started to stir, then to snarl angrily at the magical assault, but finally yielded to the tickling and started to giggle and squirm.

  Mercifully, the bell to signal the end of class rang. “Please bring your dragonfey back to the front and read pages 104 through 127 in preparation for next class!” shouted Ms. Crawley above the din of students rushing to escape the room. “And Kuro, please stay behind, if you have a minute.”

  Kuro caught a sympathetic look from his friends as they exited, but they were still pretending to not get along, so they couldn’t do much more than that for him. He sat, defeated, in his chair. A second teacher was about to scold him for dangerous foolishness in class over which he had no control.

  Ms. Crawley fetched one of the short student chairs and pulled up close to Kuro. She looked down at him with her large quizzical eyes, which her glasses magnified absurdly. “How did you do that?” she asked without a hint of accusation. She seemed genuinely curious.

  “I don’t know,” said Kuro. “Everything I cast comes out wrong.”

  “Could you do it again?”

  She brought out a caged dragonfey and set it down for him. Kuro did his best. He thought hard about the word, focused on his understanding of the word, pointed, and said, “Hlàtr.”

  Exactly the same thing happened, a burst of ash and a crumpled pile of dragonfey.

  As Ms. Crawley revived the creature, she muttered to herself, “Fascinating.” She examined the dragonfey closely before reviving it with a vigorous tickle, and then asked him to do it again.

  He did, with the same effect. Once she had the thing back up and about, she turned to Kuro wearing a tight little smile. “How very curious.”

  “What is so curious?” Kuro grumbled. “I’m just bad at spells.”

  “No,” contested the teacher with absolute certainty. “You are not.”

  Kuro stared at the dragonfey, still unmoving in a pile of its own limbs. It did not look like he had successfully tickled it. “Huh?” he asked, scratching his head.

  “Your problem is not that you are bad at casting spells,” Ms. Crawley stated firmly. “You have cast the same spell three times in a row without fail. That’s quite good for someone new to spellcraft. The issue is not with your ability. I believe it has much more to do with your relationship with the language. Do you know what spell you just cast?”

  “The tickling spell, but very badly,” Kuro replied.

  “You did not cast Hlàtr, not even a little. What you cast is a rather nasty debilitating spell: Dolor. It is, as you might guess, not one we teach in this class. Where did you learn it?”

  “I didn’t,” Kuro said defensively. “I’ve never heard of it before.”

  “Truly?” She tapped her small beaky nose with her finger as she considered Kuro. “Can you tell me about your strongest memories of laughter?”

  Kuro felt his blood drain from his face and his chest constrict. The memory of Phineas’s hollow laughter following the murder of Helena crashed over him in waves. Kuro couldn’t speak. Just shaking his head in refusal was an effort.

  Ms. Crawley’s brow furrowed in concern, but she did her best to move on. “Then this all makes sense.” Ms. Crawley seemed quite satisfied with herself, but Kuro was still completely in the dark.

  “What makes sense?” he asked, somewhat afraid of what she’d been able to divine from his reaction.

  She began to explain, sounding much more like a teacher again. “The power of spells is that words carry meaning when spoken, and the specific words that you use matter because their cadence and melody help to sculpt the magical effect. That’s why we must say ‘hlàtr’ and not ‘laugh’ for the spell to work, and we must say it in a specific way. Does that make sense?”

  Kuro nodded. That part he understood. They’d covered it in class pretty extensively, but he couldn’t make sense of why she was repeating it to him.

  Satisfied with his response, she continued to lecture. “The actual words do not really matter, though.”

  Kuro goggled. “But you just said—”

  She gave him a quieting glance and spoke on. “Words, themselves, don’t have any power. If you write it in a book, it’s just a word. The real power comes from the meaning you give it when you use it. It is your thoughts that drive the magic, not the words. So if, for example, you associate a powerful feeling of grief with the idea of laughter and speak the word ‘hlàtr’ with the cadence of ‘dolor,’ you might end up inflicting concentrated sadness on a dragonfey instead of tickling it.”

  “Is that what I was doing?” Kuro demanded, horrified at what he’d done to the little monster.

  “Yes,” Ms. Crawley said, as though apologizing. “The dragonfey was not injured or unconscious; it was just too sad to move.” Ms. Crawley looked sympathetic. “I’m sorry I made you cast it so many times. I didn't recognize it at first. I’ve never actually seen it done. Most people can’t cast dolor. I couldn’t even if I tried. You have to truly understand the feeling. . . .”

  She stood and shook off the sense of gloom that had settled in the room. “Perhaps we should have you try a different spell,” she said brightly, as if the rest of the conversation had never happened. “Gráðr, maybe. It makes things hungry. How does that sound?”

  Kuro nodded his agreement. Hunger was certainly something he had much more experience with than laughter.

  Ms. Crawley spent the next hour going over the details of the spell with Kuro. It was more complicated than Hlàtr. It still had only the one word, but Kuro had trouble getting his mouth to wrap around the consonants correctly while rising and falling in pitch appropriately. There were also more motions. It wasn’t just pointing a finger; a couple of sweeping gestures had to be done at just the right speed, and Kuro’s musical skill really hadn’t improved much.

  After working on each piece separately for a while, they tried to put it all together. Ms. Crawley demonstrated first. As she moved and sang out the word, a blue mist trailed from her hands, which she gathered and pushed toward a dragonfey.

  As the mist settled on the creature, its behaviour shifted from furious to ravenous. It scurried around its cage trying to find something to lock its jaws on. Ms. Crawley pulled out a bit of maple toffee from her desk and slipped it into the cage. “It woul
d be cruel to leave it in that state,” she said as they watched it gnaw gleefully on the sticky ball. “Ready to try?”

  Kuro tried to swallow his nerves as he mumbled, “Okay.”

  Thankfully, Ms. Crawley did not direct him to try his first shot at the dragonfey. She had him aim at a pencil instead. Kuro did what he’d been taught as well as he could. He focused on the idea of hunger, swung his arms up and down and back to guide and collect the energy of the spell as he sang out the word, “Gráðr,” and then pushed it forward.

  The effect was familiar and explosive. A burst of wind shot him backwards across the room and sent the pencil and the desk it had been on flying in the other direction.

  Kuro wasn’t hurt, having become fairly well practised at catching himself after these incidents. Ms. Crawley, though, was shocked and worried. “Oh my goodness, are you okay?” she asked, running to help Kuro up.

  “It’s fine,” he replied, straightening his clothes. “I’m used to it.”

  “This happens often?” she asked, her concern shifting quickly into curiosity.

  “All the time. I have a special desk in evocations so I don’t hit anyone.”

  “Curious,” she said before shaking some stray thought away and returning to the task at hand.

  “Try it again, but don’t try to force the spell into shape. Allow the words to form it for you. Remember, wizards are lazy; they wouldn’t do it if it was hard work.”

  She was right about that. Wizards never did anything that magic couldn’t do for them. Maybe he was putting too much effort into it. He relaxed, let himself be unmotivated, and did his best to ignore his ever-present worry. He cast, and nothing happened.

  “Well, that’s an improvement of sorts,” said Ms. Crawley approvingly. “Now let’s work on crisping up your intonation.”

  Another half hour passed with nothing happening. He was starting to get frustrated and hungry. Dinner had probably started. He worried that he had gotten soft since being here if being a few minutes late for a meal had started to bother him. He ignored the grumblings in his stomach and pressed on.