Fated

The cube wasn’t glowing now so I focused on it and concentrated. All mages can see into the magical spectrum to some degree, but as a diviner I’m a lot better at it than most. A mage’s sight isn’t really sight – it’s more like a sixth sense – but the easiest way to interpret it is visually. It gives a sense of what the magic is, where it came from, and what it can do. If you’re skilled enough you can pick up the thoughts the magic was shaped out of and the kind of personality that created it. On a good day I can read an item’s whole history just from looking at it.

Today wasn’t one of those days. Not only could I not read the item’s aura, I couldn’t read any aura on it at all. Which made no sense, because there should have been at least one aura, namely Luna’s. To my eyes Luna glowed a clear silver, wisps of mist constantly drifting away and being renewed. A residue of it clung to everything she touched: her pack glowed silver, the scarf glowed silver, even the grass she was sitting on glowed silver. But the cube itself radiated nothing at all. The thing was like a black hole.

Left to their own devices magic items give off an aura, and the more powerful the item, the more powerful that aura is. This was why I’d had Luna bring the thing out here; if I’d tried to examine the cube in my shop I’d have had a hundred other auras distracting me. The park is a natural oasis, a kind of grounding circle which keeps other energies out, allowing me to concentrate on just one thing at a time. It’s possible to design an item so as to minimise its signature, but no matter how carefully you design a one-shot or a focus, something’s going to be visible. The only way to mask a magical aura completely is to do it actively, which left only one thing this could be. I dropped my concentration and looked up at Luna. ‘You’ve found something special, all right.’

‘Do you know what it is?’ Luna asked.

I shook my head and thought for a moment. ‘What happened when you touched it?’

‘The sparks inside lit up and it glowed. Just for a second. Then it went dark again.’ Luna seemed about to say something else, then stopped.

‘After that? Did it do anything else?’

‘Well …’ Luna hesitated. ‘It might be nothing.’

‘Tell me.’

‘It felt like it was looking at me. Even after I put it away. I know that sounds weird.’

I sat back against the tree, looking down at the cube. I didn’t like this at all. ‘Alex?’ Luna asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘This is going to be trouble.’

‘Why?’

I hesitated. I’d been teaching Luna about magic for a few months, but so far I’d avoided telling her much about the people who use it. I know Luna wants to be accepted into the magical world, and I also know there’s not much chance of it happening. Mage society is based on a hierarchy of power: the stronger your magic, the more status you have. Sensitives like Luna are second-class citizens at best.

‘Look, there’s a reason not many mages run shops,’ I said at last. ‘They’ve never bought in to the whole idea of yours and mine. A mage sees a magic item, his first reaction is to take it. Now, a minor item you can keep out of sight, but something really powerful … that’s different. Any mage who finds out about this thing is going to be willing to take time off his schedule and track you down to take it, and he might not be gentle about how. Just owning a major item is dangerous.’

Luna was quiet. ‘But you don’t do that,’ she said at last.

I sighed. ‘No.’

Luna looked at me, then turned away. We sat for a little while in silence.

Luna’s curse is a spell of chance magic. Chance magic affects luck, bending probability so that something that might happen one time in a thousand, or a million, happens at just the right time – or the wrong one. The spell around Luna does both. It pulls bad luck away from her, and brings it to everyone nearby.

The really twisted thing is that from what I’ve learned the spell was originally invented by Dark mages as a protection, not a curse, because it makes you as safe from accidents as a person can possibly be. You can run across a motorway in rush hour, climb a tree in a lightning storm, walk through a battlefield with bombs going off all around you, all without taking a scratch.

But the accidents don’t go away; they just get redirected to everyone nearby, and when the spell is laid permanently, the results are horrible. The closer Luna gets to another person, the more the curse affects them. She can’t live in the same house as anyone else, because something terrible would happen within a month. She can’t keep pets, or they die. Even having friends is dangerous. The closer other people are to her, and the longer they stay near, the worse the result. Whenever Luna comes to care about any other human being, she knows that the more time she spends with them, the more they’re going to be hurt. She told me once that the first boy she kissed ended up in a coma.