Luna had brought me back to Camden, to the same street that the Arcana Emporium had been on. It had been months since I’d been here, and it felt strange to recognise the old sights and smells: tourists in the streets, cafés and restaurants with their doors open, the scent of the canal. This place had been my home for so long that going back felt weirdly dislocating, like stepping back in time. “Look, I like the place too, but I’ve kind of seen the sights already,” I said as we walked up the street. “So unless you’ve got somewhere new to show me . . .”
Luna pointed. “Funny you should say that.”
I followed the direction of Luna’s finger and stopped. “What the hell?”
Luna was pointing at the wreck of the old Arcana Emporium . . . except that it wasn’t a wreck anymore. When I’d last seen it, it had been a burnt-out ruin. Now it was a construction site. The building was up to two storeys already, and the height of the scaffolding and some steel I-beams rising up over the first floor suggested that another one would be added in time. Tarpaulins covered the area where the shop front had been, and a skip was parked outside.
I turned to Luna. “Is some property developer doing this?”
Luna shrugged. “You’re looking at her.”
I stared. “Come on,” Luna said, taking out a key and unlocking the door. “Take a look inside.”
The ground floor smelt of concrete and paint. What had once been the main shop was just a bare box, but the rubble had been cleared away and the room was empty and clean. The walls were whitewashed and a new wall had been placed in roughly the spot where the old one had been, a little heavier and thicker. The tarpaulins made the room gloomy, but I could see that the street-facing side had been designed for tall windows running nearly to the ceiling. “What do you think?” Luna said. “The first firm I talked to said the whole building was a write-off, but then I found some Polish guys who thought they could salvage the structure for the ground floor. Needed a bit of reinforcing, but I figured that was a good idea anyway, right?”
“How exactly did you pay for this?” I asked. I give Luna a stipend and I’d left her some money during the dustup over Christmas, but this kind of work is not cheap.
“Remember back when you were taking me to casinos trying to figure out if I could use my curse that way?”
“Yeah, and the answer we came up with was that it probably didn’t.”
“That was before I started studying with Chalice,” Luna said. “A few months ago, I decided to give it another try. It didn’t work at first, but I finally figured out that that was because I was doing it the wrong way. Turns out my curse might not be all that good at making me win, but it’s great at making everyone else lose.”
“And that paid for a new building,” I said. For some reason, seeing the place rebuilt made my spirits lift. “Arcana Emporium, mark two?”
“I thought I’d just keep the old name,” Luna said. “More consistency.”
I thought about going back to my old life as a shopkeeper, and just for a moment I could see myself behind the counter again, selling to Wiccans in dresses and kids in T-shirts. It was tempting, maybe not so much for what it was as for what it meant. I’d been happy working as a shopkeeper, I think, though I hadn’t known it at the time.
But then reality set in. I sighed and let the image fade. “Luna, I appreciate it, I really do. But . . . I don’t think I can go back to running a shop anymore. Maybe someday in the future, a long, long time off, when things have quietened down. But it won’t be any time soon. If I did it now, I’d just be putting myself and everyone else in danger.”
“I know,” Luna said. “That’s why I thought I could do it instead.”
I looked at her.
“I’ve been doing some thinking,” Luna said. “Back when I first started learning to duel and learning to fight, I loved it. I thought I could use it to protect myself, not be useless. Only . . . I guess I started to notice after a while that it didn’t actually help all that much. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather know how to fight than not, but when we do get into fights, it doesn’t usually make anything better. It’s just sort of a bad outcome that we only take because it’s a choice between that and an even worse outcome.”
“If you’re competent, then violence is your first option and last resort.”
“Yeah, Landis said something like that once,” Luna said. “I think it was the White Rose fight that made me really think. I mean, there was so much Council power there, and what did it accomplish? White Rose was broken, but that was almost by accident. If things had turned out a little differently, then just as many people would have died, but nothing would have changed. And that made me think back and count up the number of times that me being able to fight actually made a positive difference. And there were a few, but . . . not many.”
I nodded. Every now and then you wind up in a situation that calls for violence, and when that happens, you need to know what you’re doing. But even if you live an especially dangerous life—which, to be fair, Luna and I do—all of those times put together are going to average to less than twenty-four hours per year. The other ninety-nine-point-something percent of the time you’re going to spend doing something else. And if you try to solve problems with violence when you don’t need to, it really doesn’t take long before you turn into the kind of person other people are worried about protecting against.
“So I started thinking about what else I should be doing,” Luna said. “And you know what? The thing that made the biggest difference in my life wasn’t anything to do with duelling or fighting. It was what you did for me. And I wouldn’t have found you without your shop.” Luna shrugged. “I think it should still be here.”
I looked at Luna. She looked back at me steadily, and there was something in her eyes that made me think she was serious. But I wanted to be sure. “What if I told you it was too dangerous?”
“You said that people would be coming after you,” Luna said. “Not me.”
“That hasn’t stopped you from becoming collateral damage before.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got a few ideas,” Luna said. “For one thing, no offence, but I think that habit of yours of sleeping right above your shop was kind of dumb. Once the building’s done, I’m going to set up the top floor as a flat, put in a bed and a wardrobe and everything, and then every night I’ll go up there and then I’ll gate somewhere else and make very sure not to sleep there, ever.”
“And what if I told you not to do it at all?”
Luna frowned. “Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“But why?”
“Because I said so.”
Luna looked at me strangely. “I thought you’d be okay with . . .”
I didn’t answer. Luna wavered, then her expression set. “No. This is important. Someone should do it. And okay, this is still your shop, but if you won’t let me do it here? Then I can find somewhere else.”
I looked at Luna, and she looked at me, then I relaxed. “I think it’s a good idea.”
“That’s—wait.” Luna looked suspicious. “Were you testing me?”
“You’ll need one thing more,” I said. “Mages won’t take you seriously until you’ve taken a name.”
“Vesta,” Luna said.
“Vesta?”
“Vesta.”
I looked at Luna curiously. Vesta is the Roman goddess of hearth and home, and I’ve never heard of a mage taking her name. Most who choose mythological names pick ones associated with magic or war or rulership. “You don’t want something grander or more imposing?”