Luna’s opponent, Natasha, wasn’t especially strong or quick. But like all elemental mages she had the great advantage of range. While Luna had to run all the way up to Natasha to hit her, Natasha could just smack Luna off her feet with a water blast.
Which she did. Repeatedly.
When Lyle finally called the fight I waited at the table for Luna to get back. She was moving stiffly, but I could tell she was more angry than hurt. “Good job,” I said as she reached me.
Luna gave me a look.
“I’m serious.”
“That’s your idea of a good job?”
“Everyone loses their first duel,” I said. “What matters is you put up a fight.”
“Did you know I’d lose that badly?”
“I didn’t check.”
Natasha was talking and laughing with the boy with glasses, her hands moving in animation as she relived knocking Luna down. “All right,” Lyle called. “Charles and Variam, why don’t you go next?”
I looked at Luna. She was annoyed, obviously embarrassed about losing . . . and yet she looked better than I’d ever seen her. When she’d first walked into my shop a year and a half ago, she’d been silent and detached, never showing her feelings. Apprentice training isn’t easy, but Luna was engaged now; she had a place in the world. “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got a job offer.”
I knew Lyle wouldn’t question my taking Luna out of the class, and he didn’t. As the door swung shut behind us, I got a look at the two boys, Charles and Variam, facing off against each other on the piste. From a glance into the future I knew this match was going to be a lot more eventful than the last one.
chapter 2
“Apprentices are going missing,” Talisid said.
The little room at the end of the hall had been fitted out as an office of sorts, with an old computer on a cramped desk. Faded photographs of sports teams were mounted on the walls, and a window looked out onto the London rooftops. Talisid was behind the desk while Luna sat quietly on a table in the opposite corner. She’d agreed to Talisid’s demand for secrecy and now was listening with her ears pricked up.
“Since when?” I said.
“You know there’s always been a certain washout rate in the apprentice program,” Talisid said. “Some give up. Some fail their tests. Some—not many, but more than we’d like—defect to the Dark. And some have something happen to them. That last one’s rare, thankfully. But a few weeks ago some mages noticed that there seemed to be more going missing than there should be. Well, we put someone on it, and we found a very disturbing pattern. Within the last three months we’ve had three apprentices vanish from the program. No sign that they quit or walked out or had an accident. They just disappeared.”
“Just apprentices? No adult mages?”
“We think so, but it’s hard to be sure. Journeymen and masters aren’t accountable for their movements in the way apprentices are.”
“Any pattern to the disappearances?”
“None that we can find.”
“Any suspects?”
“Well.” Talisid looked at me. “There’s the obvious, isn’t there?”
I was silent. Luna looked from Talisid to me. “Um . . . ?” she said after a moment.
“Dark mages,” I said. “They’ve been on a recruitment drive.” I looked at Talisid. “You think they’re headhunting.”
“Or Harvesting,” Talisid said.
There was a silence. “Even the Council wouldn’t stand for that,” I said at last.
“No,” Talisid said.
“It’d start another war.”
“Yes. But there’s no proof.”
We stood quietly for a moment before I shook my head. “Why the secrecy?”
Both Luna and Talisid looked at me. “It’s not enough,” I said. “Okay, this’ll cause trouble. But any mage who put in the work could learn it. In fact, it sounds like lots of them know about it already. And if they do, they can figure out the same things I just did. Why is it so important to keep this quiet?”
Talisid looked back at me for a moment. “If you wanted to find a missing apprentice,” he said at last, “how would you do it?”
“If I had the resources of the Council?” I thought about it and shrugged. “Locator spells and detective work. Then I’d get a time mage and ask him to scry back to the missing person’s last known location.”
Talisid nodded. “We’ve done all those things.”
“It didn’t work?”
“It didn’t work.”
“Shrouds?”
“Yes. And something else. In every case, the missing apprentice disappeared somewhere where they couldn’t be traced. No witnesses, no physical evidence. And once they vanished, they didn’t come back.” Talisid’s eyes were grim. “Every disappearance was neat. Too neat. If these were simple kidnappings, we should have picked up some
