Quin looked toward the manor house. She wasn’t sure what she had been envisioning, but it was not this. What was I expecting? she asked herself. If she were honest, she had been hoping to chase down a criminal on her first assignment, or save a woman from being beaten and raped, or protect a child in the midst of an ugly civil war in some third world country. Small deeds to begin with, but worthy. She’d expected, she supposed, to be thrown into chaos, not such tranquility. And maybe she’d expected to arrive somewhere impoverished, not at a beautiful estate.
She looked again toward the quiet house in the distance. Perhaps they would be stopping some terrible injustice when they reached that large and peaceful house standing in the moonlight. Perhaps that house was hiding something awful.
Shinobu’s eyes met hers. He too seemed unsure.
They were both hesitating.
“We’re thinking,” she whispered. “And it’s going to make us fail.”
“We’re not going to fail,” he whispered back. “There are all sorts of bad people, aren’t there? Evildoers beware.”
“Evildoers beware,” she agreed, nodding to convince herself. Our purpose is worthy, she told herself. I will not be afraid.
Briac and Alistair were already moving silently toward the manor house, the Dreads close behind them. She and Shinobu followed their fathers in the running crouch they had used so many times in training.
I will not hesitate! she told herself. She discovered that her whipsword was already in her hand.
Quin was on all fours next to the fire, retching onto the ground. Shinobu was on his knees next to her, gasping for breath.
They were back in the clearing now, but it was impossible to tell how much time had passed. Was it an hour since they’d left the estate? A day? A year? Any of those seemed possible.
Beside her, Shinobu collapsed onto the ground, his face in the dirt and dead leaves.
The embers of the fire still glowed red, so they couldn’t have been gone longer than an hour. The Young Dread was adding more wood, bringing the blaze back to life.
Quin could not get her breath. She looked down at her arm. Blood covered it from elbow to fingers and was now drying to a sticky paste, but she couldn’t see a wound. She’d been cut earlier, she remembered, in the practice fight. But that had been the other arm. This was not her blood.
Shinobu, his face still in the dirt, was sucking in deep breaths like a drowning man, though on quick inspection, he didn’t seem to be injured either.
Quin suddenly noticed a patch of long blond hairs stuck in the drying blood on her arm. She retched again. Then she scrubbed at her skin with a handful of dead leaves, trying to clean those hairs off her. She’d had a gun, but it was gone now.
Briac pushed her over with his foot, sending her to the ground. “Stop it,” he said, his voice tinged with irritation. “Both of you.”
Next to her, Shinobu tried to slow his desperate breathing. He had taken off his helmet. His red hair was plastered across his forehead, and his face looked pale, even in the warm light of the fire.
Alistair was standing nearby, but he was not looking at Shinobu or Quin. Instead he was staring into the coals.
Briac turned to the two Dreads, who stood again on the other side of the flames in their formal position. They looked as steady, as calm, as they had before they’d left the estate. In fact, if Quin had not seen them walking in their deliberate, graceful way across the grounds of that manor house, if she had not seen them standing silently in the great room inside that house as it had echoed with screams, she could have believed the Dreads had never left this clearing. The Young Dread still wore her blank look, as though her mind were mostly somewhere else, far away from these dark woods.
“Have the standards been met?” Briac asked them.
The Big Dread stepped forward.
“The standards have been met. Their skills, in body and mind, are sufficient to use the athame.” His voice was strange, with an odd emphasis on each syllable, as though English were not his native language. As if speech itself were unusual for him.
Briac bowed his head, accepting their judgment.
“Bring the brand,” he ordered.
The Young Dread pulled on thick leather gloves and removed the long piece of metal from the fire. The end of it, the end that had been resting among the hot embers all this time, bore the shape of a small athame.
Briac lifted Shinobu upright so he was kneeling before the fire.
“Shinobu MacBain, I invite you to say your oath and become a sworn Seeker.”
As he looked into Briac’s eyes, Shinobu was wearing an expression Quin had never before seen on his perfect face: hatred.
Then Briac moved to Quin, pulling her up next to Shinobu so she too was kneeling.
“Quin Kincaid, I invite you to say your oath and become a sworn Seeker.”
She stared at her father, his dark eyes and hair, his fair skin, so like her own. But he was nothing like her. She felt the same hatred she had seen on Shinobu’s face. All her life, he had been lying to her. The existence she’d imagined for herself was an illusion.
“Say your oaths,” Briac commanded.
Neither of them spoke. The smell of the blood on her arm was in her nose, and she retched again, this time bringing up the remains of her dinner.
Briac slapped her.
“Say your oaths.”
They did not speak.
Briac nodded to the Dreads. The Big Dread came up behind Shinobu, put a knife to his throat. The Young Dread moved to Quin, and she felt a blade at her own neck. From the corner of her eye she could see Alistair. He had retreated to the edge of the clearing and was looking away.
“Say your oaths,” Briac commanded again.
The Young Dread pressed the knife harder against Quin’s skin. She could feel the edge of the blade, unyielding against her throat as she swallowed. I was blind, Quin told herself, feeling hot tears well up in her eyes, but I have done these things with my own hands. She could see in her father’s expression that he was willing to kill her if necessary. Once she had gone There, she must take her oath or die.
She could refuse; she could let this fourteen-year-old monster of a girl kill her. Was Quin willing to end it now, to never see her mother again, to never see John again?
The knife was cutting her skin. Blood was trickling down her neck.
“Say your oaths!”
She had been trained to obey Briac. She began to speak the oath.
Once she started, Shinobu’s voice joined in and they were saying it together, as they had always imagined they would.
“All that I am
I dedicate to the holy secrets of my craft,
Which I shall never speak
To one who is not sworn.
Not fear, nor love, nor even death
Will shake my loyalty to the hidden ways between
Rising darkly to meet me.
I will seek the proper path until time does end.”
Briac held out the stone athame. Quin noticed the tiny carving of a fox on its handgrip, a delicate detail in this moment of barbarity. The emblem of her family was a ram, the emblem of Shinobu’s family an eagle—why, then, did this athame bear a fox? And then Briac was pushing their heads toward the dull blade of the stone dagger, forcing them to plant a kiss on its cool surface.
Quin had always known her father was hard, but she’d clung to the certainty that his purpose was noble. Now she understood that there was nothing noble here; perhaps there never had been. And Briac was not merely hard; he was brutal.
The Dreads were holding them down. Quin felt the Young Dread’s small, strong hands pulling her left arm forward and holding it in place. Then Briac pressed the brand into Quin’s left wrist, burning into her flesh the shape of an athame. She cried out as he held the metal to her skin. She was a Seeker now, marked for life.
She had thought this brand would be an emblem of pride, but now it meant something entirely different. She was damned
.
John emerged from the trees, coming out of the forest gloom into late-afternoon sunshine. The tiny stone barn was up ahead, right at the cliff’s edge. The river was a low roar here, and as he got closer to the barn, he could see the water far below, carving into the base of the cliff as it headed east and south toward the lowlands of the estate.
The barn might once have been an outpost of the castle, a home for a lookout, maybe. But while the castle had fallen into ruin, the ancient barn was still standing, its slate roof as heavy and solid as the stones of the barn’s walls.
After his conversation with Briac the night before, John had been too upset to see anyone, and had spent the evening alone. Today he’d stayed in his own cottage, packing up his few belongings. Briac would be taking him to the train station late in the evening, and then John would be gone from the estate—until he figured out a way to get back.
After what he suspected had taken place before Quin’s oath last night, he’d hoped she would come to him in the morning. All day, he’d imagined her storming into his cottage, outraged at her father’s dishonesty and furious as well that Briac was kicking John out. Yet she had not come. Did it mean she was happy following her father? Had John lost her? This thought left him with an ache so intense that he’d driven his fist into the wall to make the feeling go away.
At last, when he could no longer tolerate her absence, he’d gone looking for Quin. She hadn’t been in any of the cottages or barns near the commons. Eventually he’d come to this little outpost on the cliff.
“Quin?” he called as he got near the barn’s open doorframe.
There was no answer.
He entered the barn. On the ground floor were a few decaying stalls once used for animals. The space was brighter than he’d expected. There were large circular openings—windows with no glass—at each end of the structure, up beneath the peak of the roof. The sun was coming through the western window, casting a yellow light into the rafters and onto the high sleeping loft.
He found her in that loft, a small space with a wooden platform wedged up against the wall. There was a fresh bale of straw on the floor, which Quin must have dragged up there herself. The bale was broken open, and straw was strewn across the platform, making a simple bed. There was a lantern on the floor, unlit now but with a pack of matches beside it. She was obviously planning to spend the night here by herself.
Quin was seated on the platform, her knees drawn up to her chest, staring at an old and very battered portable television. She didn’t turn her head as he climbed up into the loft.
Quin watching television alone in this remote barn was so odd that John was momentarily at a loss for words. And when he finally opened his mouth, he stopped himself. She was watching a news report on the shabby set, and something about it caught his attention. There had been a change of power in a large French company, one of those huge organizations that controlled a little bit of everything in almost every part of the world, much like the industrial empire ruled by John’s own grandfather. The head of this French company, the news was reporting, had disappeared, along with his family. Some sources speculated about sudden health problems. Others feared there had been a violent crime, because traces of blood had been found in the man’s country estate. Either way, the location of the man, his wife, and their children was unknown, and this unexplained absence left the business dangerously at risk of a takeover.
That French businessman—wasn’t his name familiar to John? John had never been much interested in his grandfather’s business talk. It had been the background noise of his childhood, which he had always tried to ignore. His mother had considered such work beneath him. And yet for years, his grandfather had been discussing business around him. Surely that name was familiar?
“Quin?”
Without looking at him, her hand reached out and switched off the television.
He sat next to her on the platform. Tucking her hair back, he gently kissed the spot where her jaw and ear met, and as he did, he noticed a small bandage on her neck. Quin gave him no response. Instead she stared out the window.
“Did you take your oath?” For a moment he wondered if her strange demeanor meant she’d failed. But without a word, Quin extended her bandaged left wrist. “May I look?” he asked her.
She glanced at him quickly, then away. Her fine white skin was particularly pale, without the flush her cheeks usually wore. Her pretty, dark eyes were like coal against snow. She shrugged.
He peeled back the bandage. There, terribly blistered, the shape of a dagger was burned into her skin.
“You did it,” he said.
“I did it,” she agreed, her voice lifeless. “Everything he asked me to do.”
John had expected her to be upset. But she was more than upset—she was in shock. The task Briac had assigned must have been particularly bad. He wondered what he himself would have done in the same situation. Would he have been able to go through with it? Do what has to be done, his mother had insisted. I will, he told himself now. Even when it’s hard.
“It wasn’t what you thought it would be,” he said softly. It was a statement, not a question.
Quin took her arm back, tucked it close to her body.
“No,” she agreed.
She studied John’s face then, almost as if she were trying to recall how she knew him. One of her hands came up to his cheek. “What happened to you?” she asked at last. “What did Briac say, when you met him yesterday?”
“He’s kicking me out.”
“That’s ridiculous. He has to finish your training.” She said the words automatically, but they seemed to have no real meaning to her. They were like lines from a play she’d performed years ago.
“Ridiculous, right. Because your father’s an honorable man, isn’t he?”
They held each other’s eyes, and finally they were sharing the truth about Briac between them. Quin was trying not to cry, but she was losing. She moved into John’s arms, and he held her tightly against him.
“All your life he’s made you think one thing while preparing you for another,” he told her softly. “Now you know.”
She was shaking against him, and her tears were coming faster.
“Are you saying you know what we did?” she whispered as she cried. “How can you know?”
“I don’t know exactly what happened last night,” he said. “But I know what Seekers do—what Briac does. And I can see the shock on your face.”
He held her away, just enough so he could look into her eyes. But she would not meet his gaze now.
“How do you know what Seekers really do?” she asked.
“My…mother,” he answered reluctantly.
“Your mother,” she whispered. “You never speak about her. Catherine.”
“Yes.” It felt strange, telling Quin anything about his mother, when he knew his mother wouldn’t have approved of Quin. When you love, you open yourself to a dagger. Hearing his mother’s name on Quin’s lips made him feel uncomfortable, as though she were exposing something private.
As though sensing his thoughts, Quin said, “My mother has said her name a few times, but she didn’t like to talk about her either. Your mother told you…specific things about what Seekers do?”
A lump was forming in John’s throat. His mother had done a great deal more than tell him about Seekers. She had, unintentionally, shown him.
“She told me…some things,” he answered, fighting to keep his voice even. “Do you want to tell me what you did last night?”
“No,” she said immediately. Then, more quietly, she added, “I never want to speak of it.” She wiped her cheek roughly with the heel of her hand. “Was it always like this? All these hundreds and thousands of years?”
“I don’t know. But it’s Briac’s way. He should have warned you.”
“Why?” The word sounded choked as it came out of her.
“Why should he have warned you?”
“No—why are you here, John, if you kne
w? Why would you stay?”
“I—I don’t want to do…whatever he asked you to do,” he told her haltingly. “But this is my birthright, Quin. Just as it’s your birthright. I have to take my oath. I have to become a Seeker and have an athame. Things must be put back—”
“Have an athame?” she interrupted, her expression changing into something like pity. “Do you think my father is likely to loan you his? Do you think he’ll ever let it out of his sight?”
“There are two here, Quin. Two athames on the estate. And one doesn’t belong. Is that another thing he’s been hiding from you? One is from Alistair’s family, but the other—”
“It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,” she said, cutting him off and not really listening, “because I’m leaving. In the morning I’ll leave.” She was speaking quietly but intensely, to herself more than to him, as though talk of the athame had suddenly blotted out everything except her desire to go.
“I want you to leave with me,” he told her. “I want you to come away with me. But—but not yet.” He put a hand gently under her chin and lifted her head so she had to look at him. “Quin, you have to stay and let him teach you the rest. All about the athame. So we understand it.”
A strange, strangled laugh came out of her. “I’m never going to use it again.”
“You will,” he said softly. “It’s what we were born to do.”
“No,” she said, tearing her eyes away from him. “I won’t do any of it again.”
John hesitated. He was about to ask her for something he would find very difficult to do himself. But there were larger things at stake.
“Quin, please listen. Can you…avoid the worst? And still learn to use the athame?”
“Avoid the worst?” she repeated, her voice rising. “There’s no avoiding the worst with Briac!”
“But if you stay, if you learn a little more, I—I have a plan.”
She was having difficulty focusing on him. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Did you know they have to tell you now? Once you’ve taken your oath.”
“Tell me what?”
“Whatever they know, whatever knowledge they’ve been taught. Once you take your oath, you only have to ask.”