Cursed

Luna settled into the basic rhythm, soft-soled shoes quiet on the stone floor. “Wouldn’t it be more useful if I learnt martial arts or something?” she asked after a while.

“No.”

“Why not?”

It was something I’d already thought about and decided against. Given the kind of situations I tend to get into, it would be a useful skill for Luna to know … except she’d be far more likely to end up hurting a friend than an enemy, and quite honestly, her curse is lethal enough already. “What you practice, you use without thinking. The last thing I want is to teach you to hit someone by reflex. Flares.”

Luna hesitated an instant, then stepped into left and right stretches, one arm holding a lamp low, the other lifted high to the ceiling. “I can’t even dance.”

“New Yorks,” I said. Luna obeyed reluctantly, turning on the spot in place of the backwards step. “I know dance, so you get to dance. Be grateful it’s Latin and not Morris dancing.”

“Might as well be,” Luna said under her breath.

Ballroom dancing was one of the odder skills I picked up as apprentice to Richard. Light and Dark mages are quite traditional at the upper levels and a proper apprentice is supposed to be able to fight a duel, dance a waltz, and know which fork to eat dinner with afterwards. “Fan and hockey stick.”

Luna hesitated again, trying to remember the complex figure, and this time the silver mist around her hands pressed outward. For just a second the lights flickered, then she stepped into the move and they steadied. She finished with a basic and started the next. “See? It’s not—”

“Alemanas.”

This time Luna managed without any hesitation. “Outer balance helps with inner balance,” I said. “Your routine again.”

Luna stopped talking for a few minutes as she worked through the pattern. The first time she got it wrong, but her concentration didn’t waver and the lights shone steady. The second time was perfect. “Good,” I said. “Now backwards.”

“Oh come on!”

“And keep doing it till I tell you to stop.”

Luna rolled her eyes again. I noticed, though, that even when she was struggling over the transitions, the silver aura around her didn’t flicker. I’d started to suspect over the past week that Luna’s control over her curse was tied more to her emotions than her thoughts: There didn’t seem to be any connection between the difficulty of what she was doing and how likely it was that she’d slip. “There,” Luna said after she’d done the reverse sequence three times in a row.

“Not bad. Now freestyle. Basic rhythm, any moves you like.”

“How much longer are we going to stick with this?” Luna said as she stepped smoothly into the figures. Her technique was still pretty bad, but she was moving with more grace. Luna’s never done much sport but she’s not naturally clumsy and she was learning fast.

“Until you can dance with someone without killing them.”

Luna stumbled, and the silver mist around her flared. The lights buzzed and flickered but she recovered control just in time, clawing the mist away from where it had been reaching for the lights. For a few seconds she stayed on basic steps, recovering her equilibrium. “That’s not easy,” she said at last, her voice quiet.

“Didn’t say it was. But if you can dance body to body with someone without letting your curse touch them, that’s when you’ll be ready.”

Luna returned to her routine, though with a little more caution in her steps than before. “How long?”

“However long it takes.”

“It’ll take forever.” Luna’s curse flickered, but only slightly.

I smiled slightly. “There’s a story that Napoleon once told his advisors he wanted to plant trees by the sides of every road in France, so that his soldiers could march in the shade. His advisors said, ‘But sir, that will take twenty years!’ And Napoleon said, ‘Yes, so we must start at once!’”

Luna was silent.

“You see, if something is going to take a long time—”

“I get it.”

“How did things go last night with Martin?”

The silver mist around Luna surged. There was a blue-white flash and a ringing sound, and both bulbs blew out.

Luna rounded on me, glaring, and with my mage’s sight, I saw tendrils of silver mist reaching towards me. They were ten feet away, five, and I tensed … then the tendrils halted and slowly pulled back, thinning as they withdrew. Only once they had merged back into the aura around her did Luna speak. “That wasn’t fair.”

“Wasn’t meant to be,” I said quietly. I didn’t think Luna understood what she had just nearly done. But she understood what the lights burning out meant.

“It doesn’t even—” Luna started to say in frustration, then caught herself. She turned and walked to the corner, unscrewing the bulbs from the lights, and dropped them into the bin. There was a clinking sound as they joined the pile.

I waited for Luna to cross the room and come back, giving things time to settle. “We’re done for the day,” I said. “I need to speak with Arachne. Wait outside and I’ll catch you up.”