“Mind what?”
“If I marry John?”
Quin held her breath as she said it, worried about her mother’s reaction. But why shouldn’t she speak about marriage? John was the perfect partner. He was from an old family like her own, wasn’t he? Like her, he wanted to use his training to do good things in the world. Maybe they would live together here on the estate, or maybe she would live with him somewhere more exotic, but either way, they would work together, fight together, to help the world. Tyrants and evildoers beware … And of course, she loved him deeply. Surely her parents could see that.
Quin’s eyes followed her mother, waiting for an answer as Fiona got up to tend the stewpot. It was a mystery to Quin what needed to be tended. It was stew, after all. You could cook it for days if you felt like it.
Her back to Quin, Fiona asked, “Has he asked you to marry him?”
“Well, no, not yet. But we understand it, I think.”
“You’re very young,” Fiona said softly. “I’ve never known— I’m still a bit surprised it’s John you’re choosing.”
Quin wasn’t sure what her mother meant by that. Who should she choose, some stranger she’d never met? Some older man her father picked out? But she went on quickly anyway: “I don’t mean now. Someday. Do you think Father will mind?”
Fiona turned to her, wiping her hands on her apron, her eyes looking anywhere but at Quin’s face. “I think your father will have strong opinions on the topic, yes. And a lot has yet to happen between now and the time when you’re ready to get married.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“But, Quin,” Fiona went on, as though Quin hadn’t spoken, as though she had to say the words immediately or they would disappear, “it doesn’t matter what he thinks. Your life is yours.”
Mildly astonished, Quin looked closely at her mother’s expression, which had a nervous edge to it. Briac was, well, Briac. His absolute authority was part of the strange and privileged life into which she had been born.
“Ma …”
“Your life is yours,” Fiona said again, almost urgently, taking a seat next to her. She glanced toward the window, then back. “If you … if you wanted to go to John right now … if you wanted to leave the estate with him … have a different sort of life together, right now. I would understand.”
It was such a strange thing to say, she decided her mother must be more drunk than she looked.
“I’m not drunk, Quin.”
“I didn’t say that! But … now that you mention it, I do smell something in your mug.”
“I’m not drunk,” Fiona repeated.
“I never said you were.”
“You did.”
It was pointless to argue about whether or not she’d said those words, so she didn’t bother. “I’m going to take my oath tonight, Ma. Didn’t Briac tell you? I can’t leave the estate.”
“He did tell me.” Fiona put a hand on top of her daughter’s hand and held it there firmly. “But I am telling you this: you take your oath only if that’s truly what you want to do.”
Quin was momentarily speechless. Finally she managed, “What—what have I been doing here my whole life? Of course it’s what I want to do. I—I know how lucky I am.”
“Are you sure?”
Quin smiled as she would at a child with an irrational fear. Her mother had never taken the oath. Fiona taught them languages, math, and history, subjects with no direct ties to Seeker-hood. Though her mother did not like to speak of it, Quin had gathered, from comments made by Briac, that Fiona had completed all the training, but something had prevented her from becoming a sworn Seeker. Sometimes apprentices did not make it, and this had, to some extent, ruined her mother’s life, perhaps even caused her fondness for alcohol. Quin loved her, though, and didn’t want her mother to be sad on this particular day.
She clasped Fiona’s hands gently. “I’m sure,” she told her. “And I’ll make you very proud of me. I mean to do great things.”
Her words did not have the desired effect. Her mother’s eyes searched hers for a moment, quite urgently. Then her gaze dropped back to the table, and she nodded to herself.
“Of course you will,” she said, moving her lips into a smile. “And I wish you every happiness in your life, my darling girl.”
Fiona got back to her feet and turned to the stove. Quickly, so quickly that Quin could not be sure it had happened, her mother wiped her eyes. Quin whisked Fiona’s mug off the table, sniffed the remaining cider inside, and dumped it down the sink before her mother could drink any more.
Quin could hear the aircar taking off outside, and she gave her mother a kiss on the cheek, then ran to the front door. From there she watched the car ascend in slow circles above the meadow, until it disappeared across the sky. It headed south, to somewhere far from Quin’s life, Edinburgh, perhaps, or London, or somewhere even farther away. Perhaps she would be going to those places soon too. Once she had gone There, she might go anywhere. And then the world would be open to her and she would be a player on its enormous stage, fulfilling her destiny.
She walked toward the woods, thinking she’d meet up with John again, tell him she’d learned nothing about the visitor to the estate. Halfway across the commons, she saw him. John and Briac were walking together. Briac’s hand was on John’s shoulder, and John’s face was turned toward the ground. She could almost feel the heaviness of John’s steps, as though her father were leading him to his execution.
I know he won’t do the wrong thing, John, she thought. You’ll stay on the estate and finish your training. Everything will be all right.
It was the last time she would ever think so.
CHAPTER 4
JOHN
Briac’s hand was resting on John’s shoulder as they walked along the commons. This made John uneasy. It was like having a battle-axe resting on your shoulder, just as hard and unforgiving. They’d been walking in silence, but eventually John couldn’t tolerate the quiet anymore.
“I failed my mental control,” he said. “I won’t deny it. But it’s only when you have the disruptor—”
Briac snorted, cutting him off, then walked a full twenty paces in silence. John was trying to decide whether he should simply repeat what he had said or come up with something new, when he felt Briac’s hand squeeze harder on his shoulder. A pair of metal pincers would have been more comfortable.
“You’ve always thought this was owed to you, John Hart,” Briac told him. His voice was soft, which was frightening. Nothing about Briac was naturally soft.
“My training was—”
“Not just your training,” Briac interrupted, his voice dropping even lower, and his hand twisting into the flesh at John’s shoulder. “All this.” He made a short gesture with his free hand, which seemed meant to encompass the whole of the two-thousand-acre estate around them.
“I have never wanted your land, sir.” John kept his voice steady, but he could feel anger rising from the pit of his stomach. He worked hard every day to stay friendly around Briac, but it wasn’t easy.
“Really?” Briac asked. “And you’ve made my daughter love you for pure and unselfish reasons?”
“Maybe she just loves me,” John snapped. Quin’s love was the one absolutely true thing in his life, and Briac had no right to take that from him.
Briac’s fingers were digging into John’s neck, but John refused to pull away. With Quin’s father, fighting back only made the punishment worse and John’s goals harder to reach. When I get back what was taken, I will not be at your mercy anymore, Briac. And neither will Quin.
“She doesn’t belong to you, John.”
“She doesn’t belong to you either, sir.”
Briac shoved John ahead of him, releasing his grip.
“It all belongs to me,” he responded. “Haven’t you realized that by now?”
They were walking near the edge of the woods on the river side of the commons. The sun had just dipped behind the hills, le
aving the estate in twilight. To John’s left, between the meadow and the distant river, lay a broad strip of forest. And at the edge, almost touching the meadow, were the three cottages of the Dreads. In all his years on the estate, they had lain empty, until the arrival of the Young and Big Dreads a few months ago. The third cottage was as dark as it had always been. John wondered if there was a third Dread somewhere, waiting.
The whole estate was much emptier now than it had been in years past. He’d heard from his own mother about there being several apprentices in training when she was a girl. And further back than her time, there had been dozens, filling the stone cottages hidden deep in the forest, which now stood empty. The current population of the estate consisted only of the three apprentices, Quin’s parents, Shinobu’s father, a few farmhands to help with the cows and sheep, and now the two Dreads.
Both Dreads were sitting outside their cottages, by the open fire pit. The Young Dread was dressed for battle, her whipsword and several knives arrayed along her waistband, her hair tied up inside a leather helmet. She was sharpening a long dagger with a whetstone by the light of the fire, her hands moving up the blade with steady, rhythmic precision. The orange firelight danced over her face, casting dark shadows around her eyes. Across from her, the Big Dread was putting oil to his own knife and chanting words to the young one, his voice as cold and hard as the blade in his hand. When he paused, the Young Dread would chant an answer.
Neither moved as they spoke, but as John and Briac went by, both Dreads’ eyes followed them for a few moments. It sent a shiver up John’s back.
They passed the third Dread cottage, empty and silent, and then they were away from the woods, walking across the meadow toward the dairy barn and stables. Even as he fought to keep his emotions in check, John felt a tingling of alarm. He knew now where they were headed. Briac’s hand once again found John’s neck, pushing him on.
“Briac, I will take my oath. I must take my oath.”
“There is no ‘must,’ John. There is only failure or success. You have failed.”
Those three words hit him like a blow to the gut. Until he’d heard the word “failed,” he had held out hope that Briac would be fair, that he would keep his promises and finish John’s training.
“I am the strongest apprentice,” he said quietly. “You know I am.”
“That you are,” Briac agreed. “A strong fighter. Also a distracted fighter, an emotional fighter. Both deadly for a Seeker, to you and your companions.”
They passed the stone stables, where John could hear the whickering of the horses, comfortable in their stalls. For a fleeting moment he imagined that Briac would take him in there and ask him for another show of his horsemanship. But they did not stop at the stables.
They passed the dairy barn with its special stink, unpleasant and yet friendly somehow. Briac continued to walk, his hand now a force at John’s back. Their destination was a structure with a very different feel.
Ahead of them lay the old barn. Half its roof had fallen in, but the back half of the building was still intact. From a window high up in the wall in the remaining half, a weak light spilled out into the dusk, a light tinged with metallic blue.
John stopped. Briac’s hand pressed more firmly on his back. But John would not move.
“I don’t want to go,” he said.
“We are going.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“And you will see it again.”
“No.” John hated the childish sound of his own voice, but Briac knew exactly how to make him feel helpless. Whatever the circumstance, you must control it. His mother had told him that. He must find a way to gain control again.
Briac took his hand from John’s back and walked on ahead of him. “You may leave if you wish, but you will never learn what I have to say to you.”
John stood there for a full minute, watching Briac grow fainter in the gathering darkness. He spent most of his days on the estate trying to forget what was in that barn. But it was there, whether he avoided it or not. Still, his feet did not want to move forward. His whole body longed to turn around and run. Finally, he hurried to catch up just as Briac was unlocking the barn door.
Inside, starlight came in through the collapsed half of the roof, providing just enough illumination for them to find their way. From the shadowy corners came the smells of old straw and wild weeds and rodents—smells he remembered from the last time he’d entered this place.
On the other side of the barn, a modern room had been built. It looked like a giant child’s building block shoved inside a larger and older toy. This room’s walls were smooth concrete, framing a large steel door. The two men crossed the barn, and John watched Briac enter numbers on a keypad. The steel door clicked open.
Briac gestured for John to enter first. As he stepped over the threshold, a hospital smell hit his nose, a mixture of disinfectants and decaying flesh. The weak blue light he’d seen from outside came from a bank of medical machinery stacked beneath the room’s lone window, set high up in one wall.
A figure lay on the bed in the center of the room, too hard to make out in the dim light, except for a halo of sparks floating around its head and torso, flashing faintly in different colors. Years ago, when John had first been here, those sparks had been brighter, hadn’t they?
When Briac switched on the overhead light, John’s instinct was to close his eyes, but he forced himself to look. The figure on the bed appeared dead. The IV tubes and machinery, however, told a different story: the skeletal shape lying before him was alive, if only technically.
John’s throat constricted. The figure’s gender and age were impossible to tell, and the flesh seemed withered by sources other than time. The hair was gray and patchy; much of it had fallen out. The bones showed through the skin, and though the muscles had disappeared almost completely, they had pulled the body’s joints into awkward positions. The face was especially skeletal, with sunken flesh and a prominent jawbone. Beneath the head, an old and unwashed hospital gown gave the figure a measure of privacy.
Briac said nothing for a while, forcing John to study the body. In the brighter light, the sparks were hard to see, so that John continuously felt his eyes were playing tricks on him, an effect that left him dizzy and sick to his stomach. He remembered being seven years old and seeing a web of bright flashes like tiny electrical explosions before he closed his eyes tight. Repay them for this …
“This is a Seeker who met a disruptor field,” Briac said, interrupting John’s thoughts. “Is this a pretty sight to you?”
“No.”
“This body has been here for years.”
“You’ve shown me before. You know you have. You’ve shown all of us.” John fought to control his voice. Briac clearly took pleasure in displaying this tortured creature.
“Yes. I keep it for apprentices. A Seeker should know what he’s dealing with before he takes his oath.”
John felt disgust at Briac’s self-righteous tone. “If you want your apprentices to know what they’re dealing with,” he said, “you should tell them what Seekers do after they take their oath.”
Briac ignored this. “You ask for access to the most valuable possession of mankind without properly earning it. Even though this”—he gestured to the figure on the bed—“would be the consequence. For you, or for those who rely upon you. Like Quin.”
“I have earned it,” John spat. “I can earn it. You’re simply pretending I can’t.”
“It takes some energy to keep this one alive,” Briac mused, again focusing John’s attention on the figure in the bed. “At first, there were unpleasant convulsions and twitches, when the muscles were still working, but that’s over now. It’s just the sparks, which are slowly fading. I have to feed a current of electricity through the body, besides the nutrients. Otherwise the sparks would drain the life out in a few days.”
Briac lifted one of the figure’s eyelids and stared down into the lifeless eye, which had lost whatever color i
t had once had, then let the eyelid fall closed.
“Stop feeding it,” John said. He tried to keep his voice even, but he could hear the pleading in his own words. “The dead should be allowed to die.”
“You find this inhumane?” Briac asked with false surprise. “This is an important training tool.”
John stared at the body—at the patchy hair, at the hospital gown. Just as he had years ago, when he’d first seen this horrible creature, he longed to slide up the hospital gown and look for the evidence he felt sure was there.
As if sensing his thoughts, Briac stepped between John and the bed. John’s eyes were drawn to Briac’s old leather boots with their heavy soles and metal tips, so out of place in this tidy medical setting. They were the boots of a man who’d done terrible things. John felt another wave of nausea.
He forced his head up so his eyes met the older man’s.
“It’s a pity you didn’t die in the practice fight,” Briac said with a deadly soft voice. “That would have been convenient. No one could have blamed me.”
“You’re a beast,” John replied quietly. “What’s going to happen when Quin finds out what you are and what you expect her to be?”
“Am I a beast?” Briac asked, his voice even. “And you—so innocent?”
“You made a commitment. There were witnesses.”
“I owed you your training. I have trained you to the best of my ability. You were sixteen last month. A Seeker should be sworn by his fifteenth year.”
“I came to you late. I was older than Quin or Shinobu—”
“Not my concern.”
“I was a child. It took time to convince my grandfather it would be safe for me to come—”
“You’ve missed your chance.”
John stared at Briac. He’d struggled for years to hide his hatred. Now it came upon him so intensely, he was nearly paralyzed. That would not do. There will be many things that try to pull you from the path. Hatred is one …
Hatred. He was almost vibrating with it. Yet he spoke as calmly as he could: “That ‘valuable possession’ you’re always talking about—whose is it, Briac? Who does it belong to?”