Unfortunately, I was just as new to the master business as Luna was to being an apprentice, and the teaching methods I’d tried out over the last five months had been kind of hit-and-miss. Most had been ineffective, a few had turned out promising, and two or three had led to really spectacular disasters. But while sweeping up the mess from the last one, it had occurred to me that there might be a way of making use of how Luna’s curse worked on objects. Her curse affects inanimate things as well as living ones; it’s just that it’s a lot weaker against dead material. But as we’d found out the hard way, the more vulnerable an item was to random chance, the more easily the curse seemed able to destroy it. After a bit of research, I tracked down the most unreliable and fragile brand of lightbulb on the market and bought a case of them.
Which was why Luna was standing in the middle of Arachne’s living room with a lamp in either hand. We’d cleared a section of the room of fabric and furniture, and the brilliant white light cast a rainbow of colour from the clothes hanging all around, the fluorescent bulbs making a faint, persistent buzz. “Do I have to do this?” Luna asked.
“The better you learn to control your curse, the less likely you’ll hit someone you don’t want to.”
“I get that part. Why do I have to dance?”
Luna was perched with her weight on her right foot, the left foot resting lightly with the leg straight, her right-hand lamp held at chest level in front of her and the other down by her side. This was her third session on Latin-the last two weeks had been ballroom-and it had taken me a good hour to get her stance right. It’s a lot harder to correct someone’s posture when you can’t touch them.
To my mage’s sight, the silver mist of Luna’s curse swirled around her like a malevolent cloud. At her hands, though, the mist was reduced to a thin layer. The two lamps had a few strands of mist clinging to them, but not many. Luna was holding her curse back, keeping it from reaching the items in her hands. The bulbs were fragile and I’d learnt from experience that a single brush from her curse at full power was enough to burn them out. “Again,” I said. “From the top.”
Luna rolled her eyes but did as I said. I’d been teaching her a routine, and as I watched she ran through each move in the sequence. The silver mist flickered and swirled, but it stayed clear of her hands and the lamps shone steady and bright. “Good,” I said once she’d stopped. “Now start doing basics and I’ll give you instructions.”
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.”
Luna obeyed silently. I watched her go with a frown, then turned to see that Arachne had stopped work. Her eight eyes studied me, unreadable. “Okay, so that could have gone better.”
Arachne didn’t answer and I looked at her. “What’s wrong?”
“I see why you were unsure about training her.”