“Luna?” I asked, then my eyes went wide. Arachne’s cave is one of the few places I feel comfortable enough to relax my precognition, and I hadn’t been looking ahead until it was too late. “Arachne!”
Arachne is much faster than she looks. As Luna collapsed, Arachne’s legs blurred in motion, and she caught Luna an instant before her head could hit the stone. The dreamstone fell to the floor with a clink.
“Is she all right?” I asked anxiously. Luna looked perfectly healthy, but she was unconscious, breathing steadily in and out. The silver mist of her curse tried to soak into Arachne’s forelegs and was turned aside, blown away like smoke in a wind.
“No spells harming her,” Arachne said after a moment. “At least, none that I can see.”
“What happened?” I asked. I itched to get closer to Luna, put a hand to her forehead, but I don’t have Arachne’s abilities. The curse had been repelled from Arachne’s body; it wouldn’t be repelled from mine.
“I believe she’s sleeping,” Arachne said. “Check when she’ll wake.”
I looked ahead into the futures. I saw future after future of Luna lying silent and still and my heart jumped, then I looked further and felt a surge of relief. “She’s going to wake up. Four minutes, maybe five.”
Arachne looked down at Luna. “Hmm.”
“Did you expect this?” I demanded.
“No, but as far as I can tell she’s perfectly healthy. Wait.”
I waited, pacing up and down. At last Luna stirred and looked up at me, her eyes unfocused and clouded. “Alex?”
“Are you okay?”
“I think so.” Luna blinked, sitting up and running a hand through her hair. “Man. That was weird.”
“Okay,” I said. I walked to pick up the dreamstone, then set it firmly down on a table. “I think we’ve had enough experiments for one day.”
“I agree,” Arachne said. “Luna, rest. When you’re ready, tell us what you saw.”
| | | | | | | | |
“That was really strange,” Luna said fifteen minutes later.
“You just dropped,” I said. “It was like you went to sleep standing up.”
“Wasn’t how it felt. I was in Elsewhere, I think. I was in . . .”
“In?”
“My great-aunt’s village,” Luna said quietly.
“Where’s that?”
Luna glanced around. Arachne was off a little way away, giving us space. “You haven’t been there,” Luna said. “At least not . . . you remember when we got caught by Belthas, and you went looking for me? You remember the place we saw, right at the end?”
“A village in the mountains,” I said. It had been a memorable experience, though I hadn’t spent much time looking at the scenery. “Not in Britain, I think. It looked deserted.”
Luna looked at me in surprise. “You never said anything.”
I shrugged. “Figured you’d tell me when you were ready.”
“Huh. Well, it’s in Sicily, up in the hills.”
“When did you go?”
“A long time ago.” Luna’s voice was normal, but her eyes were distant. “After the accident. My dad had told me something about his family, the ones who never went to the mainland. I thought if I could find them, they could tell me what I was.” Luna was silent for a second. “She was my great-aunt, I think. I only saw her that one time. A little old woman, sitting in an armchair in the corner. And then I left . . .”
Luna trailed off and I didn’t ask her what had happened next. I knew that she was remembering the bad time in her life, her teenage years when her curse had reached its full power. Luna hadn’t had any way of understanding what was happening to her—all she knew was that everyone who got close to her was hurt, often badly, and she had no idea why. The “accident” had been when her parents had gone to fetch a psychologist, and their car had been hit by a truck. They’d survived, but that had been the last time Luna had ever seen her parents. She’d run out of the house and never come back.
“So you saw it again?” I asked. “That was where it took you?”
“What?” Luna started, then shook herself as though she’d been asleep. “Yes. I think.”
“What did you see?”
Luna looked up at me, and there was still that distant look in her eyes. “The same thing we saw the last time we went there in Elsewhere.”
“Oh.”
“Not my parents this time. Just . . . that.”
I knew what she was talking about. I’d only had one look at that creature, and it had been enough. “What happened?”
Luna shrugged. “We talked. Not in words. More like . . . you know when you have a dream, and you dream that someone’s talking to you? And you know what they’re saying, even though you don’t actually hear?”
I leant back, frowning.
Luna sat waiting for a while. “So was I in Elsewhere?” she said at last.
“Makes as much sense as anything else,” I said. “I wonder . . .”
“Wonder what?”
“The first time I picked up that crystal, I saw something,” I said slowly. “I thought it was something to do with the deep shadow realm, but maybe it was the dreamstone doing . . .”
“Doing what?” Luna asked. I shrugged and she tilted her head, thinking. “Do you think it was some sort of test?”
“For what?”
Luna shrugged. “Beats me.”
I looked across at the dreamstone, where it lay on the table. I wasn’t sure if Luna’s guess was right or wrong, but if it really had been a test, I had the unpleasant feeling that I’d failed. “I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”
| | | | | | | | |
Luna was quiet for a few days, then spoke up about a week later. We were in the Hollow, midway through setting up a perimeter security system, and the two of us were alone—Anne was off at her clinic and Variam was training for his journeyman test. “Alex?” Luna asked. “How did you pick your mage name?”
I looked at her in surprise. We were sitting under a tree, soaking up the warm air. A stack of rods was piled untidily on the grass—the idea was to plant them around the border of the island to detect any space magic effects. In theory, gate wards are supposed to stop that sort of thing, but it’s always good to have a backup. “That’s what you were thinking about?” I said. “I thought it was to do with your curse.”
“That’s not really something I worry about anymore.”
“Huh,” I said. “Well, I didn’t pick it so much as I was told it.”
“Told it? By . . . ?”
I shook my head. “Not by Richard. He had a hand in it though. He sent us all to Elsewhere and told us that that was where we’d find our names.”
“That was how you found out about Elsewhere?”
I nodded. “I always wondered how Richard knew it would work, because in all the times that I’ve been back there, the same thing’s never happened since. Not exactly, anyway. Maybe he did something. Or maybe it was just as simple as telling us, and our minds did the rest.”
“For all of you?”
“Well, Tobruk was bragging afterwards that now he had his name,” I said. “So I’m guessing it worked for him. He was going to announce it once he became Richard’s Chosen. Or he would have.” I looked at Luna. “Thinking about your own?”
“I’ve been back to the apprentice program a few times,” Luna said. “For duelling, or picking stuff up, or things like that. And I noticed that . . . I don’t know. I’m supposed to be a mage, but it doesn’t feel like I’m a mage. They don’t really treat me like one.”
“And you think the name’s got something to do with it?”
“Does it?”
“Yes,” I said. “You know that Light and Dark mages are more similar than they like to admit. The naming ceremony means a lot to them. They’re not just picking how they’ll be addressed; they’re leaving their old lives behind. The way they see it, humans are in the normal world, mages are in the magical world, apprentices are somewhere in between. Becoming a journeyman and taking a new name is the sign that they’re choosing the magical world.”