Cursed (10 page)

Starbreeze is invisible to sight and to most other senses too. It’s not that she conceals herself, it’s just that she’s made of air, and she looks exactly like what air looks like. To my mage’s sight, though, she looks like a woman drawn in blurry lines of blue-white, ever-shifting. She changes her looks daily but there’s something in her face that’s always the same, something ageless. Starbreeze is an elemental, and she’s immortal and eternal, fast as the wind and as powerful as the sun.

She’s also got the memory of a goldfish. It’s like her mind’s got a storage limit, and for every new thing that comes in, one old thing goes out. Sometimes I think her immortality and her ditziness are connected: she can never age because she can never change. But she’s saved my life at least once and I care about her a lot, though I’d never tell her so.

Today Starbreeze looked like a woman in a flowing dress with long hair falling to her ankles. She whipped around me in a tight corkscrew. “Where’ve you been?”

“I’ve been dealing with monsters and assassins and trying to persuade someone not to … You know what, if I explained it you’d forget halfway through.”

“Forget what?” Starbreeze said brightly.

“Never mind. Can you take me to Arachne’s lair?”

Starbreeze came to an abrupt halt, upside down with her head eye level with me, her hair hanging down to the floor. “Present first.”

“Here you go.” I took a small silver piece of jewellery out of my pocket, a stylised dolphin designed as a brooch. I keep a stack of them in a drawer. “I just—”

“Ooh!” Starbreeze snatched the dolphin out of my hands and whirled up into the air, tossing the brooch around in delight. “Starbreeze!” I yelled.

Starbreeze halted, looking down at me from twenty feet up. “Hmm?”

“Can you take me to Arachne’s lair?”

Starbreeze’s face cleared. “Oh right.” Before I could blink she’d darted down, turned my body into air, and whisked me up into the sky.

I love flying with Starbreeze. When I was younger I used to wish I could fly but being carried by an air elemental is better. Starbreeze transforms the bodies of whoever she’s carrying into air, then mixes them with her own form, carrying them along with her. It means you can go as fast as she can, and Starbreeze is
fast
.

The city shrank underneath me as Starbreeze rocketed upwards, the buildings and roads becoming a winding grid. London looks sprawled and confusing from above, the twisting, irregular roads making it hard to pick out where you are. I could see the winding shape of the Thames to the south, and the green spaces of Regent’s Park and the Heath ahead and to the left. Starbreeze could have gotten me to Arachne’s lair in ten seconds flat but she was obviously enjoying herself far too much to hurry. She kept climbing until we were on the level of the clouds then started soaring between them, twining her way between the fluffy masses like they were some kind of gigantic obstacle course. Looking down at London spread out below me, I could see the
shadows of the clouds dotted across the city, the sun and darkness alternating almost like a chessboard. I was supposed to be at Arachne’s lair, but really, I didn’t mind that much. I relaxed, letting the scenery scroll beneath me.

There was a flat-topped cloud the size of an aircraft carrier drifting over Crouch End. Starbreeze swung towards it, soared vertically up its bumpy sides, then levelled off over the top, her wake brushing the cloud’s surface as she cruised over it. “Oh!” she said suddenly. “Someone’s asking about you.”

“Asking about me?” I said. My voice sounds weird when I’m in air form; a sort of buzzy whisper, though Starbreeze seems to understand it easily enough. “Who?”

Starbreeze brought us up onto a tower reaching up out of the top of the cloud. It gave a panoramic view of London, the city stretching away in all directions. “You!” Starbreeze said. “Cirrus told me a nightwing told him a man asked the nightwing.”

“About me?”

“Mm-hm.” Starbreeze frowned. “Wait, the nightwing told me. Maybe a man told Cirrus.” Her frown cleared. “Where are we going?”

“Just a second. What were they asking about me?”

“Who?”

“The men talking to Cirrus.”

“No, to the nightwing.”

“And they were talking about me?”

“They were?”

I sighed. “Let’s go to Arachne’s lair.”

“Okay!” Starbreeze whirled me up, did a somersault, and dived straight down into the cloud. There was a second of icy chill as near-freezing vapour rushed past us, then we were diving towards the Heath at what felt like a thousand miles an hour. I had one lightning-fast glimpse of rushing grass, people, and flashing trees, then Starbreeze turned me solid again, dropped me in the ravine, and darted off before I could even say good-bye.

I checked that no one was watching, found the right spot in the oak roots, waited for Arachne to recognise my voice, and entered the tunnel, my mind focused on what Starbreeze had just told me. Starbreeze hears everything and she probably learns as much of what happens in the mage world as the highest members of the Council—it’s just that she forgets it as fast as she learns it. But the fragment she’d repeated was enough to worry me.

I’m not ranked amongst the movers and shakers of magical society, and all in all, I like it that way. I’ve found my life is much easier if no one thinks I’m important enough to mess with. Having someone asking about me was disturbing. When mages take a sudden interest in a guy it usually means one of two things: they’re considering an alliance, or they’re planning to get rid of him.

L
una was waiting for me in Arachne’s living room, twirling a ribbon between her fingers. Arachne was perched over a table to one side, sewing away at something and apparently paying no attention at all. I felt awkward talking to Luna and it seemed she felt awkward too; I think both of us kind of wanted to apologise but didn’t want to raise the subject. It was a relief to focus on training.

Mages normally take an apprentice who specialises in the same type of magic that they do. The branches of magic are
very
different; trying to teach a type of magic you can’t use is a lot like trying to teach an instrument you can’t play. But sometimes you just have to live with it, especially if you happen to be landed with one of the more uncommon kinds: If some kid’s just discovered a talent for shapechanging, it’s not exactly practical to wait five or ten years for one of the handful of master shifters to free up his schedule to teach him. In Luna’s case, I wasn’t sure if there even
was
a mage with her exact talent, and she wasn’t a true mage either, meaning it was me or nobody.

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.