I trailed off. Luna was shaking her head. “Wait,” I said. “We’re the only ones you talk to?”
“I’m not like you guys, okay?” Luna said. “Vari can walk up to anyone and he’ll be rude and insult them and somehow they’ll like him for it. Anne might be a life mage, but she’s beautiful and kids love her. And you . . .”
“You think I’m some kind of social butterfly?”
“You’re better at it than I am.”
“Only after I spent a really long time behind a shop counter learning to field questions. Is that what this is about? You feeling lonely?”
“No.” Luna ran a hand through her hair. “I mean, yes. It’s that . . . Look. You know why I came to your shop? That first time?”
“You told me that you woke up one morning and couldn’t think of any reason to get out of bed,” I said. “And you decided that you needed to find someone who could help. Because if you didn’t change something, then one day you’d just stop getting out of bed altogether.”
Luna looked at me in surprise.
“I’ve got a pretty good memory for things I care about,” I told her.
“Yeah, well, it’s not that bad anymore, but . . . ever since I joined up with you, it feels kind of like I’ve been running, running, running. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they drown? Like that. Like I’m always running from something. From Dark mages who’d go after me, from Light mages who wanted to prove I couldn’t make it in the program, from myself . . . I dunno. It just felt like I had to keep moving, you know? Prove something. And then there were the journeyman tests, and then . . . I just stopped. There wasn’t anywhere to go.”
I was silent. “And then you came back,” Luna said. “And it was like it was all for nothing. No, worse. If I’d never been here at all, then you’d have been fine. But I spent all those years working and learning and fighting and in the end I was just another liability. You know how Anne complains about all those people who expect her to take care of them? She says I’m different, but I’m not, am I? I’m just another victim.”
I sighed. “I’m . . . not sure what to tell you.”
“Tell me it gets better,” Luna said. “Or that there’s something I can do. Just please don’t tell me this is it. You know what it’s like, realising you’re a living bad-luck charm? That everyone else’s lives would be better if you just gave up and died? Please don’t tell me I’m back there again. I won’t be able to stand it.”
I looked at Luna. She had a pleading expression, and I knew she wasn’t kidding. Luna’s curse is an inherited one, and usually the bearers don’t die of natural causes. They die from misery or suicide, and each time the curse jumps to the next youngest daughter of that original victim, so many generations ago. The curse protects the bearer, in its way, but it can also kill, and it might still be just as deadly to Luna as Barrayar’s explosives could have been.
It suddenly occurred to me that maybe this was why Luna had done so well as a duellist. She had been introduced to duelling around our visit to Fountain Reach, not long after she’d first met Anne and Variam, and she’d taken to it with a will, practising alone and with partners for hours and hours until she could beat every other apprentice in her class. She’d placed in tournaments, beating initiate mages with more far more power and experience, and that skill had been one of the reasons she’d been able to pass her journeyman test so convincingly. I’d never really thought about why she’d practised so hard. Maybe it hadn’t been just because she liked it. Maybe it had been to prove something—prove to the Light mages that she was as good as they were, prove to herself that she could be a help to her friends instead of a millstone around their necks.
But if that were true, she’d never been working towards something, she’d been running away from something. That might be why she was at such a loss now. “Did you ever think about what you wanted to do after passing your journeyman test?”
Luna shook her head.
“Why?”
“I didn’t really like any of the choices,” Luna said. “I mean, some of the Light mages were saying I should go study in America—they’re supposed to have some good chance mages there. But I’m not sure I want to. And I don’t want to be a Keeper.”
“Then what do you want to do?”
Luna shrugged helplessly.
“Okay,” I said. “Then the first thing you’re going to have to do is answer that question.”
“How?”
“Look, maybe if times were easier, we could sit down together and spend a few weeks coming up with ideas,” I said. “But I’m stretched to my limit right now, and so’s everyone else. You said you weren’t my apprentice anymore? Well, this is what not being an apprentice means. We need you to be a mage, and long term, you’re the only one who can figure out how to do that.”
Luna was silent. “But if you want a place to start,” I said, gesturing to the hotel room, “then sort out all of this. Find a place to live, get back into shape, make yourself self-sufficient. Are you going to need any help getting on your feet?”
Luna hesitated, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’ll be okay.”
“Good.” I straightened. “You ready to settle things with the management?”
Luna looked unenthusiastic, but with a visible effort got to her feet. “Let’s go.”
| | | | | | | | |
I kept an eye on Luna, but in the end she managed to pull herself together without any extra help from me. Within a few days, she was settled in a new flat and in the process of looking for somewhere better.
For my part, I started putting out feelers for the item Arachne had told me about. Unfortunately, before I could make much progress, I got the visit I’d been afraid of.
| | | | | | | | |
It was the last week of February, and I was in my house in Wales. Anne had a late shift and I was alone for the evening, and I was sitting in the kitchen with a set of tools spread out on the table, along with what looked like coils of grey plastic rope. The rope was a material known as detcord. Jarnaff had been particularly threatening at the War Rooms today, and I was starting to get the feeling that it might not be too long before he decided to scale things up. I wasn’t sure what form that was going to take, so I was trying to cover all my bases.
I sensed my visitor a way off. I was already paying close attention to the short-term futures—when working with explosives, it’s highly important to know exactly what will and won’t make them go bang—and he wasn’t making any effort to hide. I sat up, studying the interactions. No immediate threat, but I didn’t think I was going to be happy with anything he had to say. I got to my feet, stepped out into the night, then shut the front door and waited.
The Welsh valley was quiet. Wind blew in the trees and to my right came the sound of the flowing river, but as far as people went, I could have been the only person alive. The night was overcast, and the sky and hills all around were pitch dark. The only light was the glow through the kitchen windows behind, throwing splashes of bright yellow across the grass and to the edge of the garden wall.
Footsteps sounded. A figure emerged from the shadow, walking through the garden gate to face me.
“I assume you’re here for a reason,” I told him. I knew that my position, leaning against the door with the lit windows on either side, would make me hard to see.
“I have a message for Mage Verus,” the figure said. The voice was mechanical, artificial-sounding.
“Okay.”