“Kind of.” I closed into range again and began a series of attacks, measured and steady, switching targets from waist to shoulder to thigh, each strike flowing into the next one. Luna had to keep blocking, catching the blade against her hand each time. She couldn’t move too abruptly without making the book fall. “The deal she offered was a probationary membership. It means I’m not an auxiliary, but I’m allowed to be treated as one for a trial period, so long as she’s the one supervising.”

“So it’s what, a trial?”

“Pretty much. I’m still doing exactly what a Keeper auxiliary would be doing, it’s just not official.”

“So how—?”

I broke my pattern, sending the sword flashing up at Luna’s face. Luna had to jump back, both hands coming up instinctively to block the blade with a smack. The book wobbled and she had to catch it with one hand as she backpedalled. I paused to examine the blade. Where Luna had touched it, there was a pale patch on the metal. “You let a bit through.”

“Oh, come on,” Luna said. “That wouldn’t even give you a nosebleed.”

The mist that swirls around Luna is the manifestation of her curse, a spell of chance magic, and the fact that Luna’s spells are applications of her curse rather than effects she produces herself is the reason that she gets classified as an adept rather than a mage. Luna’s curse is very hard to spot, invisible to normal vision and difficult to see even with magesight, and it brings good luck to her and bad luck to everything that mist touches. “Bad luck” at low concentrations of that mist means stuff like tripping or breaking a nail, but at high concentrations it can do anything from making a building fall on your head to directing a serial killer into your neighbourhood to say hi. It’s also cumulative, and the more of it you get, the worse it’ll be.

The exercise was a simple one; Luna had to avoid the sword without letting her curse touch it. The sword is a simple focus, designed to react visibly to magic. Once upon a time just having Luna touch it would have turned the whole blade white in seconds, but Luna’s put a lot of time and effort into learning to control her curse, and nowadays she can touch something for a second or so without letting any of that deadly mist stick—which is long enough to push that something away. We’d been playing this particular game for six months or so and Luna’s become very good at it, which was the reason for the conversation and for the book on her head—I’d had to keep upping the difficulty.

In this case I’d managed to shake her concentration, although not by much. “Keep talking,” I said, moving in to threaten her again. “And take your hand off the book.”

Luna rolled her eyes and obeyed, retreating to a safe distance. “So how long does the probationary thing last?”