Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Seeker Houses
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Arwen Elys Dayton
Copyright
Seeker
Traveler
RHCP DIGITAL
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
RHCP Digital is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
www.penguin.co.uk
www.puffin.co.uk
www.ladybird.co.uk
First published Corgi Books 2016
This ebook published 2016
Text copyright © Arwen Elys Dayton, 2016
Jacket art copyright © Stuart Wade, 2016
Swords jacket art copyright © Bose Collins, 2016
Interior maps copyright © Jeffrey L. Ward, 2015
Fox and ram icon copyright © Shutterstock, 2016
Bear, boat, eagle, dragon, horse and stag icons copyright © John Tomaselli, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978–0–552–57056–5
e-ISBN: 978–1–448–19266–3
All correspondence to:
RHCP DIGITAL
Penguin Random House Children’s
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL
To my Tolkien-loving mother and father, for,
many years ago, treating me like an adult but giving
me all the time I needed to be a child.
“Shinobu?” Quin asked when she saw him stirring. “Are you awake?”
“I think so,” he answered slowly.
Shinobu MacBain’s voice was thick and groggy, but he raised his head to look for her. It was the first time he’d moved in several hours, and Quin was relieved to see him conscious.
She carefully tucked the leather book she’d been clutching into her jacket pocket and crossed the darkened hospital room to where Shinobu lay, in a bed that looked too short for someone so tall.
Even in the dim light, she could make out the burns on both of his cheeks. They were mostly healed, and his head was now covered with a thick, even growth of dark red hair—but she was stuck with the memory of the singed and blood-caked hair the nurses had shaved off when he was admitted for surgery.
“Hey,” she said, crouching next to the bed. “It’s good to see you awake.”
He tried to smile, but it ended up as a grimace. “It’s good to be awake . . . except for every part of my body hurting.”
“Well, you don’t do anything halfway, now, do you?” she asked, letting her chin rest on the bed’s railing. “You’ll help me even if it means throwing yourself off a building, crashing an airship, and getting cut in half.”
“You jumped off that building with me,” he pointed out, his voice still thick with sleep.
“We were tied together, so I didn’t have a choice.” She managed a smile, though the memory of that jump was terrifying.
Shinobu had been in the London hospital for two weeks. He’d arrived close to death—Quin had brought him by ambulance after their fight on Traveler and the airship’s crash into Hyde Park. She’d been in this room, walking restlessly and sitting and sleeping in its uncomfortable chair, ever since. She had, in fact, turned seventeen several nights previously, while pacing between his bed and the window at midnight.
Behind Shinobu, the hospital’s monitors beeped and whirred, glowing lights traveling across their screens in shifting patterns as they measured his vital signs. They were the familiar backdrop of Quin’s days.
She lifted his shirt to look at the deep wound along the right side of his abdomen. The nearly fatal gash he’d received from her father, Briac Kincaid, had healed into a tender purple line, seven inches long. It had been sewn up so neatly, the doctors said the scar might disappear altogether, but at the moment the wound was still swollen and, judging from Shinobu’s expression, terrifically painful whenever he moved.
Aside from that injury and the burns on his face, he’d entered the hospital with a badly broken leg and several crushed ribs. The doctors had bathed the wounds liberally with cellular reconstructors, which were forcing him to heal at an accelerated rate. There was one drawback: the process was rather excruciating.
Quin brushed her fingers over a lump beneath his skin near the sword wound, and Shinobu caught her hand.
“Don’t make it drug me, Quin. I want the doctor to take those things out. I’m sleeping too much.”
To help with the quick-mending wounds, he’d been implanted with painkiller reservoirs near his worst injuries. If the pain became too intense, or if he moved too vigorously, or if someone pushed on the reservoirs directly, they released a flood of drugs, which usually knocked him out. That was why he’d been mostly unconscious for the past two weeks. This brief conversation was already one of the longest periods awake he’d had in days, and Quin took it as a very good sign. The doctors had told her his recovery would happen this way—slowly at first, and then accelerating unexpectedly.
“You’re refusing drugs now?” she asked him archly. Shinobu had been on very friendly terms with illicit substances back in Hong Kong, a habit he’d only recently broken. “You’re full of surprises tonight, Shinobu MacBain.”
He didn’t laugh, probably because that would have hurt, but he pulled her closer with the hand that didn’t have an IV running into it. Quin eased herself onto the narrow bed, and her gaze instinctively swept the chamber. The room was large, but bare of furnishings except for the bed, the medical machinery, and the chair in which Quin had been living. Her eyes stopped on the large window above the chair. They were on a high floor of the hospital, and through the glass was a panoramic view of nighttime London. Hyde Park was visible in the distance, emergency lights still erected over the broken bulk of Traveler.
Shinobu pushed his shoulder into hers on the bed, bringing her back to him. Her mind went to the journal in her pocket. Perhaps he was awake enough to see it.
He whispered, “There are things to say, Quin, now that I’m awake. You kissed me on the ship.”
“I thought you kissed me,” she responded, teasing him lightly.
“I did,” he whispered seriously.
That kiss . . . she’d replayed it in her mind hundreds of times. They’d kissed and held each other during the nightmare, whirling crash of Traveler, and it had been right. They had been so close as children. They’d remained close during all of their Seeker training, even when John came to the estate and altered the dynamics of their lives. But it was not until they’d met again in Hong Kong, changed and older, that she’d seen him for what he was—not just her oldest friend but the other half of her.
“Is it too strange, the two of us?” she asked before she could stop herself. She wasn’t sure of her footing in this new and unfamiliar territory of intimacy.
“It’s so strange,” he replied immediately. Quin didn’t like that answer at all, but Shinobu drew her hand up to his chest before she could respond, kissed the palm, and whispered, “I’ve wanted to be with you for so long, and now here you are.”
The words and the weight of his hand filled her with warmth. “But . . . all those girls from Corrickmore . . .” she said. There had always been lots of girls in Shinobu’s life. He’d never once given the impression he was waiting around for her.
“I expected those girls to make you jealous, but you never noticed,” he told her. He didn’t say it bitterly; he was simply opening his heart. “All you cared about was John.”
She responded softly, “You took care of me anyway. When John attacked the estate . . . and in Hong Kong . . . on Traveler . . . You’re always taking care of me.”
“Because you’re mine,” he whispered back.
She glanced at his face and saw a sleepy smile appearing. He moved her hand closer to his heart, held it there. She turned toward him on the bed, thinking it might be time to kiss him again—
“Ow!” he gasped.
“What happened? Did I—”
“It’s—at your hip.”
“Sorry! That’s the athame.”
Quin scooted away from him and drew the stone dagger from its concealed location at her waistband, where it had just been crushed into Shinobu’s hip bone.
“Oh, there it is,” he said, and he took the ancient implement from her hands. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot while I’ve been lying here half-asleep—or dreaming about it, maybe.”
The athame was about as long as her forearm and quite dull despite its dagger shape. Its handgrip was made up of many stacked circular dials, all of the same pale stone. This particular athame belonged to the Dreads. The Young Dread had handed it to Quin after the crash of Traveler, and it was somewhat different from the other athames she and Shinobu had seen during their Seeker training, more delicate and also more complicated.
Shinobu shifted the stone dagger’s dials with practiced ease, his IV tube bobbing as it trailed off his left hand. “It has more dials, so you can get to more specific locations than you can with other athames, don’t you think?”
Quin nodded. She’d spent hours in the quiet of the hospital room examining this athame. As on all athames, a series of symbols was carved on each dial. By rotating the dials, you could line up seemingly endless iterations of those symbols. Each combination was a set of coordinates, a place a Seeker could go using the ancient tool. The additional dials on this particular dagger meant one could choose locations with much greater precision. During their fight on Traveler, the Dreads had used it to enter the moving airship. It was a feat that would have been impossible with any other athame. None but the athame of the Dreads could access a moving location.
Watching Shinobu study the dagger so intently and rotate the dials so nimbly, Quin decided that there was no reason to wait; he was alert enough to hear more. She pulled the leather book from her jacket and held it out to him.
“Is that . . .?” he asked.
“It arrived this afternoon.”
It was a copy of the journal that had belonged to John’s mother, Catherine. Quin had had the real journal with her when she and Shinobu had parachuted onto Traveler during that crazy night two weeks ago, but she’d lost it—or rather, John had found it and taken it during the frenzied confrontation on the airship.
What Quin was holding was a copy—a copy she’d made back in Hong Kong weeks ago, before they came to London. Her mother, Fiona, had been with them on Traveler during the crash, and then in the hospital. Fiona had returned to Hong Kong a few days prior, and the first thing she’d done upon arriving was send the copied journal to Quin. She’d even bound the pages in leather, turning them into a new journal in their own right, an accurate copy of Catherine’s original in size and shape.
Quin flipped through it, with Shinobu watching over her shoulder.
“Some of it is so old, I can’t read it well, but the parts I can read are about the different Seeker families.”
“Families besides ours?”
“Yes, but our own families too,” she answered.
While Quin and Shinobu were growing up on the Scottish estate, they’d understood—theoretically—that there had once been many other Seeker families. But they’d only ever met members of their own two houses—Quin’s, the house with a ram for its emblem, and Shinobu’s, the house of the eagle. They knew that John came from another Seeker house. But John’s family had already fallen apart and mostly disappeared before his generation, and she and Shinobu hadn’t given his ancestors, or anyone else’s, much thought. Quin’s father, Briac, had even removed the insignia of other houses from the estate.
Other Seeker families had felt like distant history. They were part of the old tales Shinobu’s father had told them as kids, about Seekers who had unseated terrible kings, hunted killers, driven criminals out of medieval lands, and been the force of much good in history. If . . . , Quin thought angrily, any of that was true. They’d grown up believing that Seekers were noble, but Briac had changed their world. He’d used their ancient tools and once-honorable abilities to turn Seekers into little more than hired assassins, collecting money and trading on power, and Quin couldn’t help but wonder: How long has it been like this?
“We know Catherine and John belonged to the house of the fox,” she said, turning pages until she reached one with a simple, elegant drawing of a fox at the top. Beneath this picture were paragraphs in small, neat, girlish writing, which continued for several pages. “These notes are about older members of the house of the fox,” Quin explained, running her finger down a list of names and dates and locations. “Catherine was writing about her grandparents and ancestors. She’s trying to account for where everyone was, and where they all went.”
“‘She.’ You mean John’s mother, Catherine?” Shinobu asked.
Quin nodded. “This is her writing. See?”
She flipped to the very beginning of the journal. Beneath the front cover, on an otherwise blank page, was a small inscription in the same hand:
“A traveler?”
“That’s what she says. Her handwriting is everywhere in the journal. Though there’s also writing from a lot of other people in the earlier entries.”
“So . . . you get this book a few hours ago, and the first thing you check is John’s family?” he asked, his head bumping softly into hers on the pillow to take the sting out of his words.
She rolled her eyes and poked him gently with her elbow. “It’s because I’m still in love with him. Obviously.”
“I knew it,” he whispered.
He pulled her closer. Quin thought about closing the book, but Shinobu was looking at it intently, and she wanted him to see it while his mind was sharp, before he drifted off again.
“I read about John’s family first because his mother took the best notes on her own house,” she explained, trying to ignore, for the moment, each place where her leg and arm and shoulder were touching Shinobu’s. “But it looks as though Catherine was trying to keep track of all the Seeker families for a long while. She wanted to know where they’d all gone.”
“And where did they go?” Shinobu asked.
“That’s still the question.” Quin fanned through the journal. “When I’ve read all of this, maybe we’ll get some answers.”
“Quin.”
Shinobu struggled to sit up a bit, then gave up and lay back on the bed. He took her hand again and looked at her seriously.
“Quin, what are you doing?” he asked.
She glanced down at the journal, closed it. “I thought we should follow—”
“We aren’t Seeker apprentices anymore,” he told her. “We’ve gotten away from your father and from John. When I get out of the hospital, we don’t have to be anything. We could go somewhere together and just be.”
Quin was quiet for a time, thinking about this. That simple future sounded lovely when Shinobu offered it. He had set the athame on his chest, with his left hand over it, protectively. Quin put her own hand on it as well, feeling the cool stone and the warmth of his hand. Why couldn’t they go off somewhere and just live—live as ordinary people? Their life as Seekers would never be the life they’d expected as children; that future had been a lie. So why not become something else?
But she knew the answer already.
“The Young Dread gave this athame into my keeping—for a while at least,” she told him. “She wanted me to have it.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to use it,” he responded gently.
“I think maybe it does.”
He regarded her for a long moment, then asked, “What is it you want to do, Quin?”
Shinobu looked tired, but his eyes held that intensity that was particular to him. Quin understood that whatever she told him, he would give her his unwavering loyalty, just as he’d always done.
She whispered, “I was raised to be a Seeker. A real Seeker. One who finds the hidden ways between, finds the proper path, and makes things right.”
“Tyrants and evildoers beware . . .” Shinobu murmured. That had once been the motto of Seekers, and it had been a mantra for Quin and Shinobu when they were apprentices. “I wanted that to be true,” he said.
Quin flipped to the final page of the journal, where Catherine had printed the three laws of Seekers:
A Seeker is forbidden to take another family’s athame.
A Seeker is forbidden to kill another Seeker save in self-defense.
A Seeker is forbidden to harm humankind.
They were laws her father hadn’t even bothered to teach her; she had learned them only later, from the Young Dread. Yet this was the original code of Seekers. Breaking them had been punishable by death.
“We were true once,” she whispered, her fingers tracing the words. She thought of an afternoon by a fire, when the Young Dread—Maud—had spoken to her about history. “There have been many, many good Seekers. Now my father kills who he wants—does it for money. John thinks he’s fighting for his family’s honor, but he’s willing to be a killer like Briac.”
“Yes,” Shinobu agreed.
“So, when did Seekers become like Briac? And if there were more of us, where have they gone?”
She flipped to the journal’s first pages. There the handwriting was ancient, so cramped and full of ink blots that Quin could make out very little—except for the word “Dread,” which occurred frequently. These early pages were apparently letters and notes written by others in the distant past, and then pasted into this book by Catherine.
“The first half looks like it’s about the Dreads. Closer to the beginning of Seekers. And then there are Catherine’s own entries, searching for other Seeker houses, tracing where they might have gone.”
“You think the journal will point you to when we went wrong,” he said, guessing her thoughts exactly.
“I want to discover where these dishonorable Seekers began.”
Shinobu slid a finger down the side of the stone dagger as though measuring it or perhaps contemplating all it stood for. Then he whispered, “So you can make things right?”
“Yes,” she said. “If they can be made right.”
She could feel Shinobu nod, his head moving against her own, but she sensed that his burst of energy was fading.
“I want that too,” he told her.
She closed the journal and laid it on his chest. His hand covered hers where it lay atop the book, his skin almost feverish. Their long conversation was straining him.
“Do you remember where we first began?” he murmured close to her ear.
“Yes,” she said softly. “It was in the meadow on the estate. You kissed me there when we were nine.”
His eyes were half closed, but his face formed itself into a smile, and she felt his sleepy gaze upon her. “I didn’t think you remembered that.”
“I thought kissing was disgusting then.”
“And what do you think now?”
She felt a smile pulling at her own lips. “I could give it another chance.”
Shinobu slid his arm beneath her and pulled her to him. Quin’s lips met his, and she discovered that she’d been waiting two weeks for this. He turned his body to put his other arm around her, and as he did, he let out a pained cry.
“Shinobu?”
His arms fell limp, and his head rolled back onto the pillow. It took Quin a moment to understand that the reservoir of painkiller in his gut had released a dose when he’d twisted toward her. He lay next to her with his eyes closed, a smile on his lips, one of his arms still caught beneath her.
She leaned her head against his and laughed softly. “I’m sorry.”
It was late, and she’d been awake for a very long time. After tucking the journal and athame away, one in her jacket and the other at her waist, she pulled herself closer to him and let her own eyes drift closed.
John was there, in Quin’s dream. He was so clear, standing across from her—it couldn’t really be a dream, could it? She could see every detail of his face and body, outlined in moonlight.
It was cold. They were outside. His breath was clouding the air. And she felt the deep chill herself, sinking into every muscle. Yet somehow she was able to ignore the discomfort, keep the sensation of cold distant, as though it were of so little importance, she could pretend it weren’t there. John was disregarding the frigid air as well; he wore only a thin undershirt and shorts, and he wasn’t shivering.
He stood a good distance away, yet Quin could discern a small wound near his shoulder, as if her eyes could see much farther in this dream than they did in normal life. Briac shot him on the airship, she remembered. And that’s where the bullet went in. She had a very similar wound of her own—one that John himself had given her, back when he’d attacked the Scottish estate and everyone on it.
She wondered why she felt no hatred as she looked across at John. He’d attacked her, hurt her and those she loved so many times in order to get what he wanted. But in this dream—if it were a dream—she felt neither hatred nor love, merely tolerance.
John began to run, and she was throwing objects at him, her arms moving with a speed almost too fast for her mind to follow. She felt her muscles respond to her own mental commands like lightning, throwing and throwing with a swiftness and force she’d never had in waking life—
“He lied to us,” a child’s voice said from somewhere nearby. “Our master’s not here.”
“His athame’s here!” a different voice hissed close to Quin’s face. “Look! How can that be?”
“Are you going to get it?”
A smell like dead rodents filled Quin’s nose.
Her eyes flew open. She was lying on the hospital bed next to Shinobu, and someone was there, leaning over her. Dirty hands were sliding toward the waistband of her trousers.
Quin’s arms came up the moment she understood what was happening, and she knocked the intruder away. He staggered back, but quickly lunged for her again. Quin grabbed his shoulders and held him off as his hands ripped at her waist.
“Give it back!” the attacker hissed, his closeness bringing the overpowering smell of dead animals to her nose again.
He was after the athame. She’d tucked it out of view down her waistband as she fell asleep next to Shinobu, but the handle was visible, and the intruder was about to get hold of it.
She pushed harder against his shoulders, keeping him at bay.
“Stop!” he spat.
He was strong. He changed tactics and reached for her throat instead.
He was younger than she’d thought at first, maybe fifteen, with bright, cruel eyes, the color of coal, and matted hair that might have been dark brown but was so dirty it appeared gray. His fingers scrabbled around her neck as she struggled to thrust him off.
Quin scanned the room to take in the full setting of the attack. Someone else was there. A boy—younger than the first, maybe twelve years old—was dancing from foot to foot in the dim nighttime lights, waiting for his chance to help. He looked fair and freckled but just as dirty as his companion.
The older boy leaned his weight against Quin’s arms, and his hands slid fully around her throat. He looked down at her with anger and elation, as though choking people were one of his favorite pastimes and he couldn’t wait to get started. His lips drew back, revealing filthy, black teeth.
Quin slid sideways, trying not to knock into Shinobu, who was still drugged or asleep. Her feet came off the bed, twisted up, and made contact with the teenaged boy’s chest. She kicked him away so violently that he hit the IV stand and crashed with it to the floor. She sprang to her feet.
“Shinobu!” Quin hissed. In one swift motion, she pulled her whipsword from its concealed spot beneath her shirt and cracked it out. She rotated her wrist to force her weapon into the shape of a long, broad sword, and the oily black material flowed into place and solidified.
The younger boy, the freckled one, jumped at her, then away as she slashed her weapon at his face. Neither boy showed any surprise at the appearance of her whipsword.
“What?” Shinobu mumbled, rubbing at the spot on his hand where his IV tube had been sharply tugged when the stand went down.
The smaller boy pulled out a weapon, and Quin saw with shock, a moment too late, that he had his own whipsword. She raised her sword to block him but entirely missed the child’s attack. Somehow the boy’s sword slid right by her own. She reeled back, her arm cut just beneath the elbow.
“Ha ha,” the boy said, tripping backward to get away as Quin came at him again. The older one lurched unsteadily to his feet.
They had whipswords—were they Seekers? Quin had to guess not: Their fighting style was bold but very wild. And they were so dirty and disheveled. Yet what would she know, really, of other Seekers? Her father had hidden their very existence.
Whoever these boys were, their skills were unexpectedly good. In a quick assessment, Quin decided they weren’t better than she was; she would best both of them eventually. But Shinobu lay unguarded on the hospital bed, where they could injure him if they took an interest. She had to end this fight quickly.
“Help!” she called as she moved toward the door. “Help!”
Shinobu was up on one elbow, blinking fiercely, trying to understand what was happening. Quin willed the boys not to notice him.
Both attackers came for her as she neared the door. When they lunged simultaneously, she saw why their whipswords had slid by her before—the boys’ weapons were half the usual length. Even slender and fully extended, as they were now, their swords were no longer than Quin’s forearm, and the tips were not as sharp as they should have been. They were like whipswords that had been inelegantly cut in half.
“So together you have one whipsword?” she asked, swinging wide and fast to block both of them. “Are they two halves of the same sword? Are you each half a person as well?” She was continuing to speak loudly, as though she were a fighter who liked to bait her opponents, when in truth she was trying to rouse Shinobu and also the hospital staff on the other side of the door, and to keep the boys’ eyes focused on her. “If you’re two halves of the same person, couldn’t at least one of you learn how to wash?” Their odor had filled the room.
“Least we’re not a thieving girl,” the little one said, smiling nastily and displaying his own dirty teeth, which, like the older boy’s, appeared to have been smeared with soot. “Give us the athame our master should have!”
The older boy slashed at her with vicious skill, but Quin’s larger weapon made quick work of his blows, and she sent him sprawling into his partner.
She turned for the door.
And found her father staring back at her.
Briac Kincaid was hiding in the dark alcove at the room’s entrance, barricading the closed door, his own whipsword drawn. A handful of multicolored sparks danced around his head.
Sparks.
Before she could think any of this through, Briac had cracked out his sword and raised it.
Quin wavered.
And then the two boys were on her from behind. Her hesitation had cost her an important moment—
Then a metal tray crashed into the older boy’s head, sending him staggering. Shinobu was there, his IV tube trailing off his left arm in a long tangle. He swung the tray a second time, cracking the older boy across the temple and sending him down. The smaller one struck back, and Shinobu used the tray as a shield as the half-sized whipsword clanged off it again and again. Quin could only guess at how much of the narcotic was being pumped into Shinobu’s blood with each impact.
She saw her father’s sword swing toward her, and turned to parry the blow. Briac was still blocking the door. There were muffled yells from the other side—hospital staff trying to get in.
“Stupid wife! Fiona!” he spat. “Give the athame back.”
If it was strange to find her father here, it was stranger still to hear him address her that way.
Shinobu smacked the younger boy directly across the face with the tray, felling him, but Shinobu himself collapsed as well.
Quin made a quick decision. She leapt away from her father, who seemed glued to the door, and grabbed Shinobu by his shirt. Hauling him across the room, she positioned the bed between them and their attackers. The window was directly behind her.
The two boys were struggling up onto their hands and knees, trying to get vertical for another attack, though they had obviously been knocked almost senseless.
“Hold them off!” she said to Shinobu, who was attempting to stay upright. “Do your best.”
Hospital staff pounded on the door, but Briac managed to keep it shut.
Quin drew the athame from her waist.
“Don’t you dare!” came a yell from the older boy at the sight of the athame. He’d made it up onto his knees, was shaking his head as though trying to clear it. “Don’t use his athame! You’re not allowed.”
“I can’t keep standing,” Shinobu told her. He’d listed to one side.
“Your implant is drugging you,” she breathed. “But adrenaline can overcome it. Think about fighting them!”
The athame’s dials were different from what she was used to. She adjusted them as well as she could.
Both boys had made it up onto their feet. Shinobu balanced himself upright, and, swaying, he kicked open the wheel locks at the foot of the bed. Then he rolled the bed directly into the boys.
Quin flicked her whipsword, making it small and thick, turned, and smashed the window. It shattered, allowing cool night air to pour into the room.
She pushed down on one side of the athame’s blade with her thumb, and a long, slender piece of stone came free of the blade with a gentle click. This was the athame’s lightning rod, its partner and necessary complement, the object that would bring the ancient dagger to life.
She struck the lightning rod against the athame, and a deep, penetrating vibration filled the air. Furniture began to rattle. The pounding on the door stopped as the vibration spread beyond the bounds of the hospital room.
“Stop!” yelled the younger boy, grabbing the bed to drag himself to his feet. “It’s not yours! You’re a thief!”
Quin reached the trembling athame through the broken window and drew a wide circle in the air below the ledge. Where she traced that circle, the athame cut through the fabric of the world as easily as a fin cuts through ocean water. In its path, tendrils of dark and light were exposed, and these snaked away from each other to create a doorway, an anomaly, humming with energy. Through the doorway was blackness.
“Climb up!”
She pushed Shinobu at the open window, even as she kept her own eyes away from the view. The forty-story drop was making her dizzy.
The door shook behind Briac, beneath renewed assaults from outside. Quin saw her father struggling to keep it closed.
Shinobu climbed up into the window frame with difficulty, Quin steadying him from below.
“Have you got your balance?” she asked. She avoided thoughts of him plummeting all the way to the ground.
“Yes, I’m all right,” he breathed. Then he tumbled forward and fell directly into the anomaly. Quin’s own stomach dropped as she watched him do it. Then she jumped up into the broken window. The London streets far below appeared to tilt and sway.
I’m scared of heights, she realized. No, I’m terrified! It was a new fear, and entirely inconvenient at this moment.
The older boy was reeling across the room toward her, his dark eyes furious.
“I will put you in your place!” he cried.
There was a loud bang, and both boys turned toward the hospital room door. Briac had at last been shoved aside, and uniformed guards were streaming into the room.
Quin turned toward the night, briefly glimpsing the endless lights of London stretched out before and below her. Then the view was swimming, and her stomach was lurching. She was falling through the cold air, falling through the anomaly she had carved from here to There.
The drugs were floating Shinobu away. He’d slid out the window and managed to fall into the right spot, his whole body making it through the anomaly. Now he was There, out of the well-lit darkness of the London night and surrounded by this other darkness, blacker and more barren.
He was supposed to say the time chant, to keep himself focused.
“Knowledge of self, knowledge of . . .” he began. What came next? “Quin?” he croaked.
“I’m here,” she answered, grasping his shoulder. The feel of her hand helped a little. “Hold on to me,” she whispered. “I’m a little dizzy.”
Shinobu was more than a little dizzy, but he followed Quin’s arms upward to her shoulders and held on to them. That position reminded him of their last moment atop the skyscraper in London, harnessed together, just before they’d jumped and parachuted onto Traveler. He’d left his friend Brian on the building’s roof. Shinobu imagined Brian standing alone, with the building swaying gently beneath his feet, wondering what in the world had happened to Shinobu after he’d jumped.
Now in the blackness, he could almost hear Brian saying, “Where have you gone, Barracuda? I had to find my way back to Hong Kong on my own.”
Blinking against the drugs, Shinobu wanted to answer, “I don’t know exactly where I am, Sea Bass.”
But then he did know. In the blackness, he could see the outline of her face in the faint glow of the athame she held in her hand. This athame, the athame of the Dreads, glowed more brightly than the others he’d seen, and its vibration was much stronger, as though it held and directed more energy than any other.
Say the chant! he told himself. Before it’s too late.
“Knowledge of self,” he managed.
“Knowledge of self,” Quin was whispering next to him, “knowledge of home, a clear picture of where I came from, where I will go, and the speed of things between will see me safely back. Knowledge of self . . .”
Shinobu hoped those words would focus Quin’s mind on the time stream they’d left behind, so she wouldn’t lose herself There, where time did not really exist, so she might pull them both through—because Shinobu was going to be of no use at all this time.
The air around him sounded wrong, as if he were, at once, in a tiny soundproof room and in an enormous cavern. Quin let go of him, and he’d already lost himself enough to worry that she was gone forever. Then he saw her fingers moving along the athame’s dials. She was right next to him.
“Where will we go?” he asked. His voice was thin and stretched out. How long had they been here? Moments? Hours?
“Hong Kong,” she whispered. “I hope I’m choosing Hong Kong.”
I should breathe, he thought. Am I breathing? He inhaled raggedly. He could hear the faint clinks of the athame’s dials being moved into place, but the sharp little noises arrived at his ears as distant, slow thuds. Time was slowing down. There was another vibration, low and rumbling.
Her hand was beneath his arm. Quin, you’re touching me, he thought. That was enough, at the moment, to keep any fear at bay. Her closeness was an anchor in the darkness, drawing him back to himself. Time speeded up as she carved another anomaly. The blackness drew apart, snakes of light and dark coiling into each other, forming the border of a new circular doorway, its energy flowing outward, from the darkness around them into the world beyond.
There were trees and a morning sky out there. All at once, he could see Quin clearly, her dark hair and eyes, her lovely, fair face, and the lips that had kissed him just before he fell asleep.
“Can you walk?” she asked, pulling him across the seething border.
“Of course,” Shinobu answered, and he promptly fell down.
They had swept some of the debris out of the castle courtyard, and now John stood at one end of the space, facing the Young Dread. She was in the middle of the yard, looking back at him, her body completely still.
It was well past midnight. The moon was low in a partially clouded sky, casting long, dark shadows across the ground and outlining the crumbling remains of the castle.
And it was cold. The temperature was not low enough for ice, but nearly so.
The Young Dread, or Maud, as she now allowed him to call her, had ordered John to strip to his undergarments and remove his shoes. Whenever John began to feel slightly comfortable with his training regimen, Maud found a way to make him uncomfortable again. His breath came out in billowing clouds as he waited for her first command. Yet John didn’t shiver. In the past weeks, he’d learned to concentrate well enough that he could stop his body from shaking with the cold—for a while at least.
Against all expectation, the Young Dread had sought him out after the fight on Traveler, and had told him she would complete his Seeker training. When Briac had refused to train him further, John had tried to force Quin to help, but he’d succeeded only in hurting her and others. He was prepared to hurt, or even to kill, if it was absolutely necessary. You mustn’t be scared to act, his mother had told him, all those years ago, as she was dying in front of him. Be willing to kill. And yet it was better, of course, if he didn’t have to go after Quin. The Young Dread had offered him an alternative.
She’d asked, in return, for his full dedication to the training. He intended to give it and to prove himself an excellent student. He was eighteen, older than Seeker apprentices usually were. This was his chance, at last, to learn to use an athame and to become the man his mother and grandmother had expected him to be.
The wound beneath his left shoulder, where Briac had shot him on board Traveler, throbbed painfully, but it was halfway healed already, thanks to the finest medical treatment his grandfather’s fortune could buy. This was good, because Maud didn’t accept pain as an excuse for poor performance.
The Young Dread herself was dressed similarly to John, only a loose undershirt and simple short trousers on her slender, wiry frame. Whatever her demands upon John, she was no less demanding of herself. He could see her lean muscles outlined with shadow. She, of course, was not shivering either. She held her body in such tight control, John imagined she would freeze to death before she allowed herself to tremble. He’d come to understand that she preferred discomfort; it kept her sharp.
Maud’s hair was tied up behind her head, and the youthful planes of her face looked both terrible and splendid in the moonlight, a statue of a vengeful goddess on the threshold of springing to life.
At her feet was a pile of objects—rocks, rusted metal horseshoes, clods of dirt, broken pieces from old weapons. They had collected these items for days, scouring the estate when his training had begun. And now the Young Dread was using them against him, over and over and over again.
Sitting on the ground near the heap of objects was John’s disruptor. Maud had left it in sunlight all day to gather energy. Now its iridescent metal shimmered in the glow of the moon, making it look almost pretty, when in truth it was a weapon designed specifically to instill horror. It resembled a small, wide cannon with a barrel ten inches across that was covered with hundreds of tiny openings. When it was strapped across the user’s chest and fired, swarms of electrical sparks rushed from those holes to encircle the head of its victim. And if those sparks caught you, if you failed to get out of their way, they twisted your thoughts and destroyed your mind. You became disrupted.
John knew the Young Dread would not fire the disruptor at him tonight. She’d told him that would come only later in his training. Still, she’d brought it here to the castle ward and set it near her where he could see it easily. Terror of the disruptor had been his downfall when training under Briac Kincaid, and so Maud wanted him to become used to its presence. He tried not to look, but his heart beat more quickly whenever his eyes happened upon it. He thought of his mother’s words: Do what has to be done. Somehow he would overcome this fear.
“Begin!” the Young Dread called.
John kicked his muscles into motion and started running around the perimeter of the courtyard, which was littered with stones, dead branches, and chunks of the ruined castle. He stared ahead, taking in everything before him and everything in his peripheral vision without moving his eyes. Maud had taught him the focus of the steady stare, which he used now. He could see her at the corner of his right eye, her body turning to follow his progress, turning so slowly and smoothly that her feet did not appear to be shifting at all.
“Now!” she said, giving him a warning.
And then she began to throw things. Her arms moved—so fast that he saw only a blur—and a dark object was hurtling toward him.
John pivoted to his left, using his speed to turn full circle, as a rock whistled by his head and crashed into a boulder at the edge of the yard.
“Now!” she said, another warning, and a new black shape flashed toward him.
John leapt atop a piece of rubble and pushed off, carrying himself high into the air. Whatever she’d thrown—a horseshoe maybe?—winged his calf. He landed hard, feeling the shock of the object’s impact only when his feet touched the ground. Pain seared up his leg. But still he ran.
Pain is nothing, he told himself, keeping his eyes ahead and his vision still. Pain is nothing. My mother went through much worse. My grandmother showed me much worse . . .
Maud wouldn’t call out to him again; the following object would come without warning. He was turning the corner at the south end of the yard when he saw the next flash of motion. He threw himself down and rolled, as a large rock soared through the air. Before he was back on his feet, another came. He leapt up, barely pulling his legs out of the way in time. And then another object, and another.
“Very good!” Maud called. “Much improved!”
John knew better than to slow down or look at her. Already a new barrage was coming his way.
“If you’d done this well in your training with Briac,” she pointed out, “you wouldn’t have had to betray Quin.”
The words were said as she said everything—evenly, steadily—and yet they stung as though she’d slapped him. She was trying to distract him, and it was working. I didn’t want to betray her. I loved her. But she wouldn’t help me.
An object caught him in the ribs. It was only a small stone, but Maud had thrown it so hard, it felt for a moment as though he’d been shot. He stumbled to the side but somehow managed to keep moving forward.
“Focus!” called the Young Dread. “Do not look at me.”
She was throwing again, using both arms. In his peripheral vision, he thought he saw her bend toward the disruptor as though she would pick it up and aim it at him.
She won’t do that.
“Your mother wanted to raise a traitor,” she said as he ducked one of her missiles. “She wanted you to be ruthless.”
“I’m not a traitor—” John yelled, taking the bait and turning toward her.
A series of rocks hit him in the chest, immediately knocking him from his feet. He landed hard on the gravelly surface. I’m not a traitor, he thought angrily. And she only wanted what was best for me. He pulled himself up to standing and rubbed his chest, which felt like it had been pounded by a hammer.
The Young Dread was staring at him from the center of the courtyard.
“You let me distract you,” she said quietly as she approached him. “My words threw you off. And thoughts of the disruptor?”
John nodded, recovering his composure with difficulty. Why had he reacted to her taunting? “I’m sorry. Let me try again.”
“It’s enough for tonight. Are you hurt?”
He dropped his hand from his bruised chest. “Pain means little,” he told her, echoing the words she always used with him.
She nodded agreement. “It is only pain.”
Even so, she examined him carefully from head to foot. She took a moment to inspect the healing bullet wound beneath his shoulder, which was visible through the loose neck hole of his undershirt. Up close, he could see the girlishness in her body and features, attributes that had become obvious as they began training in minimal clothing. Yet as Maud looked him over, he didn’t feel as though a girl were studying him, but rather as if he were being x-rayed by a hospital scanner. He looked away.
“You’re a good fighter, John,” she told him. “When you don’t get distracted.”
“That’s what everyone says—Briac, Alistair, Quin,” he muttered, his voice full of the frustration that had hounded him for years during his training on the estate. He was breathing hard from his run, and he worked to calm his lungs. He had been doing so well.
“It’s easy to throw you off. A few words, a gesture toward the disruptor, and you’re lost.”
She was still scrutinizing him, prodding gently at the places where his ribs had been bruised by rocks. It was unnerving when she stood so close.
Abruptly she finished and stepped back. “Pick up the disruptor,” she ordered.
John hid his unwillingness. He walked to the center of the courtyard and lifted the weapon from the ground. It was heavy, nearly solid metal, with a thick leather harness that added to its weight.
“Put it on,” the Young Dread said. She was still near the edge of the yard and was watching him, her face impassive but her voice commanding.
He slipped the harness over his shoulders, settled the disruptor to his body. Its base covered nearly his whole chest. The holes across the barrel were irregularly spaced and of different sizes, as though they’d been gouged out randomly and viciously by someone disturbed.
When the sparks surround your head, they form a disruptor field. The field distorts your thoughts. You form an idea, but the disruptor field changes it, sends it back to you altered. It had been years since he’d heard those words from Shinobu’s father, Alistair MacBain, when Alistair had first explained the disruptor to the apprentices on the estate, but John recalled the words perfectly: Your mind will tie itself into a knot, fold up, collapse. You will want to kill yourself, but how can you? Even that thought spins out of your control.
John had last worn the disruptor during the fight on Traveler, when he’d fired it at Briac Kincaid. He’d experienced a rush of cruel delight in that moment, but now when he recalled firing the weapon, the memory came with a surge of dread. Before Briac, there had been others John had seen disrupted—Alistair MacBain, and John’s own man Fletcher. Those had been accidents, but that didn’t take away from the guilt. And before them he’d seen his own mother disrupted, then kept alive for years as a tortured half corpse by Briac. John’s experience with the weapon made him more terrified of it, not less; with the weight of the disruptor on his chest, John knew he was cradling another’s sanity in his hands.
“Bring it to life,” Maud ordered.
“Why?” he asked, coming back to himself.
She kept her unwavering gaze pinned on him and said nothing else; she’d given him a command and expected him to obey.
He slid his hand down the side of the weapon. From within the disruptor came a high-pitched whine, growing in volume. A crackle of static sprang up all around the weapon, and John watched a red fork of electricity climb up his hand, then disappear.
The Young Dread approached him, but stopped halfway across the ward.
“Fire it at me,” she said.
“Why?” Nausea was creeping into his stomach. He didn’t want to shoot at her.
“Fire it at me.”