“So the Council are going to be upset,” Luna said. “The Council are always upset. They’re never happy and they’re never going to like me, and you know what? I’m pretty much okay with that. I know doing this might be dangerous but . . . ever since I’ve been in the magical world, ever since I walked into your shop, I’ve been taking risks. And I kind of like it. I don’t want to be a hundred percent safe. Besides . . . the last few years, it feels like it works. Okay, yeah, sometimes it goes wrong, but everything good that’s happened to me, it’s because I took the chance and did something that could have turned out badly, isn’t it? I mean, that was the only reason I met you. If I hadn’t decided to go for it, I’d be back at home alone, sleeping most of the day and trying to find a reason to get up every morning. And that’s if I was lucky. So I don’t know what’ll happen, but . . . maybe it’s worth it.”

I looked at Luna. She was sitting up straight, meeting my gaze, and I felt a pang. She’s growing past the apprentice stage, isn’t she? How much longer before she’d be ready to strike out on her own? Two years? Less? I didn’t know, but all of a sudden as I looked at her, I felt sure that Luna was past the halfway mark. The time ahead of her as my apprentice would be shorter than the time she’d spent already. It was a strange feeling, proud and melancholy at the same time.

And if she was going to be a journeyman soon . . . then maybe it was time to start treating her like one.

“I’ll talk to her,” I said. “But I’m not promising anything.”

“Thanks.”

| | | | | | | | |

Once Luna was gone I opened up and spent the rest of the day running the shop. My shop’s called the Arcana Emporium, and it’s in the back streets of Camden. As far as I know it’s the only magic shop in Britain that sells actual magic (there are rumours of one in Ireland, but I’ve never gotten around to checking them out). The weather outside was cold, but I didn’t have any shortage of customers.

I get two general categories of customers in my shop: the ones who have a clue (the minority), and the ones who don’t (much more common). Generally speaking, the clueless ones aren’t a big problem—all they want to do is browse around and poke things. They’re just here for entertainment, and as long as they don’t break anything, I don’t really mind.

The ones who are a problem tend to be the ones at the far ends of the scepticism-to-credulity scale. First you get the sceptics, who are absolutely certain that magic isn’t real and will explain this to you at length. This is generally irritating rather than dangerous, but still gets old fast, particularly since a large fraction of said group seem to believe that if you don’t agree with them, then all that means is that you must not understand what they’re saying. So they’ll go back to the beginning and explain all over again about how all of this magic stuff is superstition and why no one in their right mind could really believe in it, while I try to explain in turn that yes, that’s very interesting, but there are three other customers waiting behind you and would you mind getting out of the way so I can talk to them instead?