Hermes blinked once.
“Been looking after her?”
Hermes seemed to consider that, then blinked again.
“She okay?”
Blink blink.
I sighed. “That’s about what I figured.”
While Luna stayed in the shower, I looked around the room. It looked as though she’d been in here for a while . . . a long while. Anne had been back to visit, but now that I thought about it, she’d never told me where they’d gone. Had Luna been holed up in this room for two weeks straight?
When the bathroom door finally opened and Luna reappeared, she looked in better shape. Her skin had more colour, her hair had been brushed into some sort of order, and her clothes were clean. She also seemed to have recovered some of her defiance. “Anne said you were going to let me be.”
“Yeah, well, giving you space wasn’t working,” I said. “So I decided to hurry things up.”
“I don’t need any help!”
I looked deliberately around the trash-covered room. To my side, Hermes yawned, got up, then began digging in one of the piles of clothes, apparently scenting food.
Luna got the message and she didn’t like it. “You know what?” she said with a flush. “I’m not your apprentice anymore. You can’t just barge in.”
“That’s funny, you’re acting like an apprentice.”
“How?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, the rest of us are not exactly having a fun time,” I said. “I’ve got two crappy jobs working for Morden and for the Keepers, Anne’s having an equally bad time in the healer corps, and Vari’s trying to watch out for us from the Order of the Shield. Everyone has a lot on their plate, and it’s not likely to get easier. Meanwhile you, one of the extremely few people we can count on, are sitting around in a hotel room expecting someone else to foot the bill. It would be very helpful if you could start pulling your weight.”
“Oh, screw you,” Luna snapped. “You are such a jerk.”
I was starting to get pissed off now. “Are you going to help, or not?”
“Well, it’s not like I ever have before!”
That brought me up short. “What?”
Luna started to answer and stopped. The look on her face was the look of someone suddenly wishing they could take back what they’d said. “Nothing.”
“What do you mean, you’ve never helped before?”
“I said it’s nothing.”
“You’ve been a ton of help, and we could use some more of it.”
“Yeah,” Luna said. “Because all of you mages really need an adept around.”
I frowned. “What’s got into you?”
Luna looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“What do you mean, ‘you mages’? You never used to say that to me.”
“Yeah, well, maybe it’s finally getting to me,” Luna said. “You think it’s fun having everyone in the apprentice program thinking you shouldn’t be there?”
“You just left the apprentice program. You graduated; you’re officially recognised as a mage. This is literally the most ridiculous time possible to start complaining about being treated as an adept.”
Luna didn’t answer.
I paused. I wanted to keep arguing, but something was telling me that the adept/mage thing was a diversion. Luna was still upset, but that wasn’t what was really bothering her. The only time that she had looked really off balance had been when she’d said . . . “You think you’re useless?”
Luna didn’t meet my eyes.
“Don’t seem very useless to me,” I said. “I mean, you’ve saved my life how many times now?”
“Most of those times I was the reason it needed saving,” Luna said bitterly.
“Is that what this is all about?” I said. “You’re feeling sorry for yourself? Look, I’m sorry, but we really do not have the time. Anne and I are in deep shit and if you don’t—”
“I’m the reason you and Anne are in deep shit!” Luna shouted. “It didn’t just happen—it was because of someone! Me! You two were safe, you were off running around Africa and Argentina and none of Levistus’s men could catch you until they went after me, to threaten me and bring you back. And it worked! Anne told me what you were about to do, okay? You were about to commit suicide to stop them blowing me up! So don’t tell me how much you need my help because it’s bullshit!”
I looked at Luna, slightly shocked. “They trapped your house while you were sleeping,” I said. “It can happen to everyone—”
“No, it doesn’t! It doesn’t happen to everyone! Back when everyone was after the fateweaver, the whole reason you got pulled in was because of me! And then right after that I screwed things up with Martin, and you had to come rescue me again! Over and over again, and I thought okay, maybe it’s time to start listening. And you told me that if I trained and worked hard then I could get better, I’d master my curse and things would be okay. And I believed you. And then when I finally passed my journeyman test you weren’t there, but I still believed you’d come back. And it was all for nothing! You’re stuck with Richard and Morden, and Anne is too, and it’s all because of me. If you’d never taken me on you’d be fine!”
Oh. I opened my mouth to give Luna an answer and nothing came to mind. She was exaggerating, but . . .
. . . but she was right. Not a hundred percent right, but enough that I couldn’t just deny it. It had been the threat against Luna that had drawn me back, and it had been to save her life that I’d been ready to fight that last stand in Bow. I tried to think how I’d have felt if that had been me, and realised I didn’t have to imagine very hard. Only a couple of hours ago I’d been listening to Arachne tell me about the attack on her lair, and believing that it had been because of me.
I remembered exactly how that felt. It had felt shitty.
“Say they hadn’t been able to catch you,” I said. “You think they’d have had an attack of conscience and just stopped? They’d have worked their way down the list until they found someone else I cared about.”
“Great,” Luna said bitterly. “So I’m in the same category as helpless acquaintances now.”
I frowned at Luna. “That’s not fair.”
“Why didn’t you take me with you?”
“Where?”
“With you and Anne,” Luna said. “At least then I might have been good for something.”
“The whole reason we went through that crash course of throwing you into the journeyman tests was so that you wouldn’t have to run away with us,” I said. “Anne and I spent that month running between hotel rooms and spending every spare second looking over our shoulders wondering when the next assassination attempt would come along.”
“Yeah, well, that sounds a lot more fun than how I spent this January.”
“How?” I demanded. “You had a place to stay. I left you some money, enough to get you on your feet. And you were a recognised mage.”
“Great, so I get to call myself a mage while I’m sitting alone in my room.”
“What do you mean, alone? We weren’t there, but you could find someone else and—”
“There isn’t anyone else.”
I looked at Luna in surprise. “What?”
“I don’t have any other friends,” Luna said. “There’s you, there’s Anne, and there’s Vari.”
“What about the others at your duelling class?”
“You think I could talk to them about this?”
“But there has to be someone else,” I said. “Friends or family. Someone you’re honest with, tell them what’s on your mind . . . ?”