Alistair flipped up a shelf within the trunk and exposed another layer of weapons. He pulled out several, which he laid on the forest floor. In the firelight Quin saw that they were modern guns.
Guns? She glanced at Shinobu, who was equally surprised. Of course they had trained with guns. They’d trained with almost every sort of weapon. Yet these were not the proper arms of a Seeker.
She watched Briac select two pistols and secure them in holsters so cleverly concealed among the folds of his clothing and armor that Quin had not noticed them before. Alistair did the same. Then Briac gestured to the apprentices.
“Will you choose any other weapons?”
“Will we need them, sir?” Shinobu asked, finding his voice before Quin could find hers.
“Likely not,” Briac said. “The choice is yours.”
Slowly Quin moved forward and selected a small pistol and holster, which she positioned at her lower back. Shinobu did not take a gun.
Alistair closed the trunk and stood to face them with Briac.
“We are honored tonight by the presence of these two,” Briac said formally, gesturing at the Dreads. He spoke as though he’d carefully memorized his words. “They have come here to witness the last stages of your training. Tonight they will observe the final formalities and administer your oath, if you are successful.”
Quin studied the Dreads again. They were armed already, though not with guns. The Young Dread’s right hand rested near her whipsword and her left near her long dagger. With her hair tucked away, she looked much younger than Quin, which made the blank look she wore disturbing, as though she were a child robbed of her natural emotions. The Big Dread had a very different expression, intense and expectant. Because he held his body so still, Quin had the impression that this was the only look he had ever worn, as if it had been carved into his features at the beginning of time.
“Our respected visitors are armed,” Briac went on, still speaking of the Dreads, “but they will not participate in the next actions unless forced by circumstance. Let us prove our worth by ensuring that does not happen. Are we agreed?”
“Agreed, sir,” Quin and Shinobu said together, though Quin had no idea to what they were agreeing.
“It is time to don our cloaks,” Briac told them.
These were the ritual words. Despite her confusion about the guns, Quin felt her excitement returning.
Briac and Alistair pulled on their own dark cloaks, fastening them about their shoulders. Turning to the apprentices, they placed cloaks around Quin and Shinobu as well. Quin felt the weight of the thick cloth envelop her. She thought, My life is finally about to begin.
Then, with smooth, measured motions, Briac drew an object from within his own cloak. All eyes turned to stare at it.
It was a long dagger made of pale stone.
Quin realized she was holding her breath. The dagger was about a foot long and quite dull, clearly not made for cutting. Its handle was cylindrical, built of several stone discs that had been stacked on top of one another—dials that Quin knew could each be turned independently. The dagger was bathed in the orange light of the fire, which it seemed to drain of color and to magnify, creating a pale light around its blade.
It was called an athame. The tool of the Seeker. John had poked fun at Briac’s description—“the most valuable artifact of mankind”—but there was nothing amusing about the ancient dagger now.
Quin had seen this athame twice before, both times with Shinobu, when they’d done especially well in a practice fight. Both times, they had gotten only a brief glimpse. Now her training with the stone dagger was about to begin. In all of human history, only sworn Seekers had ever used it. It lay at the heart of their power.
“The athame,” Briac recited. “The finder of hidden ways.”
Then, quite unexpectedly, he pulled another object from his cloak. This one was not a dagger, though it was something similar. It was made of the same pale stone, slightly longer than the athame, with a simple handgrip at one end, and a flat, dull, gently curving blade.
Quin and Shinobu glanced at each other in surprise. They had never seen or heard of this object before—Briac had kept it entirely secret, a final mystery before they took their oaths.
“The lightning rod,” Briac intoned. “Companion of the athame, whose touch allows the athame to come to life.” He held the implement up for another moment as they stared at it. Then he asked, “Are your weapons ready?”
A final check of their weapons, and Shinobu, Quin, and Alistair answered as one, “Ready!”
The Dreads did not move or respond. They were simply watching.
Briac slid the lightning rod back into his cloak. Then he adjusted the dials that formed the haft of the athame. Each dial had many faces, and on each face was a symbol. Briac was lining up a specific set of symbols along the handgrip.
“Do not think! Do not hesitate!” commanded Alistair. “Hesitation is the enemy of the Seeker!”
I will not hesitate! I will not hesitate! Quin told herself. She glanced at Shinobu and knew he was repeating the same words in his own mind.
“Prepare yer chants!” called Alistair.
Briac held the athame and lightning rod above his head and struck them together. At the moment of their impact there was a vibration from the athame, low and penetrating. It filled the space around them and grew, resonating throughout the clearing. The stone dagger was coming alive.
Briac moved the athame, directing the vibration. With it, he drew a huge circle in the air before them. And as he drew it, it became not a circle but a circular doorway, a humming hole in the fabric of the world, opening onto blackness beyond.
An anomaly, Quin thought, amazed to see it just as her father had described it. The doorway he had drawn would take them from here to There.
The border of the circle swirled in tendrils of black and white, the ragged edges of the world cut through by the vibrations of the athame. Then the edges tightened into a solid line, framing the gateway and seeming to pulse with energy that flowed inward, toward the blackness beyond.
Quin began her chant, and next to her Shinobu did the same.
“Knowledge of self
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.”
One by one, the Seekers and the Dreads moved through the anomaly. Quin was last, stepping over the edge of the opening and into the darkness on the other side. When she had crossed through, she turned. Behind her, the anomaly hummed, and the humming began to lose its rhythm. She could still see the woods and the firelight through that circle. Then, slowly, the tendrils of black and white stretched out, shuddered as they grew into each other, and the opening was gone. They were in darkness.
I am a Seeker of the dark and hidden ways between, she thought. Evildoers beware …
She began to feel a strange tug on her mind, almost a relaxing of her mental control, a sensation of time changing, growing longer, slowing down. A sense of eternity washed over her, like the cool waters of a lake. She could imagine losing herself in those waters …
She forced herself to begin her chant again:
“Knowledge of self
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.”
The chant brought her back to herself. She was Quin. She was now.
They were There, and the only sounds were of her companions breathing. Very little was visible except for the athame itself, glowing faintly. She could discern, just barely, the shape of her father’s hands upon it, shifting the dials in the haft again, choosing a new set of symbols. And then she heard the athame and lightning rod strike each other. Once again the dagger’s vibration enveloped them all.
In the dark
ness, she watched the athame making a circular slash, cutting its way from where they were, from no-space, from no-where, from no-when, from between, from There, back into the world.
A new anomaly opened in front of them, a circle framed once more in pulsing tendrils of black and white, but this time the energy of the cut seemed to flow outward, from the darkness into the world. Through the opening was visible a wide expanse of lawn rolling through gardens and down to an enormous manor house in the distance. The house was quiet. It was the middle of the night.
They stepped through the anomaly and onto the grass. Quin watched the doorway behind them lose its stability and collapse in upon itself, the edges growing together in a discordant hum, disappearing. She turned and found Shinobu standing next to her, also watching.
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.
CHAPTER 7
QUIN
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 fami
ly 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.
CHAPTER 8
JOHN
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.