“They worked.”
The boy made a noncommittal grunt.
They were in a corner of Dun Tarm. Shinobu could hear other Watchers outside on the shore of the lake. But no one seemed to be nearby.
“Can you move?” Nott asked without much interest.
“Sort of.”
“Your mother and father and granny and whatnot. Did you know all of them?”
Shinobu blinked at the sky, trying to marshal his thoughts enough to answer this odd question. If it was strange for this Watcher boy to be asking him about his family, though, it certainly wasn’t the strangest thing that had happened to him in the last twenty-four hours.
“I met my grandparents on both sides a few times,” he said, deciding that this question was as good as any for pulling him back into the world of the living. “But my mother and father and I kept to ourselves. My mother’s father was a traditional Japanese man, and he wasn’t happy that she married a Scottish barbarian.”
“Oh.” The boy sounded disappointed at Shinobu’s tenuous family connections. “But you knew who they were, your grandparents and that?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“We only had our mother. And sometimes our bastard father who had fists like—what do you call them things blacksmiths use?”
“Hammers?”
“No, the other ones, underneath.”
Shinobu hazarded a wild guess. “Anvils?”
“Anvils, that’s it. Didn’t know more relatives than that. I don’t have a second name even, except sometimes I was called Nott Drunk son.”
The boy bounced the bat too roughly, but whenever Shinobu thought Nott was actually going to hurt it, he grew gentle and stroked the creature’s head and made chirping sounds at it.
“Wilkin is dead,” Nott said, as if he were announcing the arrival of rain or commenting on a passing bird.
Wilkin. I know that name. He made the connection. Wilkin had been Nott’s slightly older Watcher partner. Shinobu had fought them both, in the hospital room and on the Scottish estate. “Ah,” he said. “Wilkin’s the Watcher who fell down a ravine during our first hunt.”
Nott shrugged. The method of Wilkin’s death was apparently unimportant to him. “I thought I would be happy he’s gone, but I’m not,” he said thoughtfully.
“You liked him, maybe?”
“No, I hated him.” He was emphatic on this point. “But it was easy to blame him for things. I miss that.”
Little bastard, Shinobu thought a second time. He tested his arms and legs again. The pain throbbed up the center of his limbs, but he thought he could stand if he tried. The breaks themselves had knitted together. He ignored the pain in his neck and peered around the fortress. Uneven stone floor, puddles, stunted trees, and the lake beyond. Maggie was not in sight, and the other Watchers were all outside.
“Wait! She’s—” began Nott when he realized what Shinobu intended to do. But Shinobu pushed the boy away. He lurched to his feet and hobbled toward the fortress wall, where he’d hidden the athame of the Dreads. His legs were awkward, as if the two sides of his fractures were several degrees off center from each other, but the reconstructors must have been making progress by the minute, because the bones bore his weight with minimal complaint. He walked as fast as he could force his limbs to go.
Nott was on his feet and coming after him. “Shinobu, she’s—”
Shinobu’s muscles began to melt around his bones. His knees hit the ground, then his hips. He discovered his arms were putty and couldn’t break his fall. His chin landed on the ground with a hard smack.
What had just happened? He was looking across the puddles and broken stones of the fortress floor, which were at his eye level. He was still breathing, but he couldn’t voluntarily move anything. His body was no longer his to command. A lazy fly landed on his forehead and began to walk along his skin. When Shinobu automatically tried to brush it off with a hand that wouldn’t respond, he felt a deep panic take hold. He was a piece of meat left out in the sun, a consciousness trapped in clay.
From this position, he saw Maggie, sitting in a nook in Dun Tarm’s broken wall, regarding him with amusement.
“You didn’t tell him?” she asked Nott.
“I was getting to it.”
She stood with difficulty and carefully brushed off her pants. “Well. While I fetch John, you should explain.”
“Yes,” Nott agreed humbly.
As Maggie walked off, Nott crouched down so that his face obscured everything else in Shinobu’s line of sight. “She put something in your back. Don’t you remember? A metal plate with needles. The needles are in you.”
Shinobu made a grunting sound—it was all he could manage. His body was a slab of beef, soft and dead.
“She’s a little bit of a witch,” Nott told him confidentially, echoing Shinobu’s own thoughts. “She’s got something in her pocket that talks to the thing in your back. When she pushes the button, you turn into a puddle of porridge.” Nott snapped his fingers by Shinobu’s ear. “Like that!”
Shinobu had seen plates like the one Nott was describing. They were used in hospitals to stimulate damaged nerves. Maggie must be using one on him for the opposite purpose. Medical skills and a torturer’s sensibility—what a delightful old woman.
Nott got down onto his elbows and held up Shinobu’s eyelid to make sure he was paying attention. “She already found the athame you hid. She’s going to take us all There,” he whispered, “to get rid of the Seekers she doesn’t like. She’s going to give my helm back if I help her the most.”
Shinobu knew his mind wasn’t the sharpest right now, so he repeated Nott’s words inside his own head until he was sure he understood: Maggie is going to bring the Watchers There to kill Seekers.
“She hasn’t actually promised that I’ll get my helm back,” Nott explained anxiously, “but why wouldn’t she? Don’t answer that.”
Maggie was bringing Watchers There to kill Seekers. Unfortunately, Quin was a Seeker, and Shinobu had left her There.
He wanted to scream, but his vocal cords were not under his control.
Nott leaned into Shinobu’s ear and said, “You’re going to help her keep all the Watchers in order, because they’re scared of you, and this”—he tapped the metal plate in Shinobu’s back—“is going to keep you in order.”
—
Shinobu discovered the video screen when movement returned to his arms and legs. That took a while, and by then Nott had moved off to play with his bat, leaving Shinobu alone in his agony. It didn’t feel like animals were gnawing at him anymore. Now when he tentatively moved his hands and feet, it felt as though the individual cells of his body were on fire.
“Will I cut off your wings? Will I?” Nott was murmuring to his bat somewhere off to Shinobu’s left, while the bat chirped happily. “Or will I cut off your feet? No, I would never! But I would.”
Nott had shoved a pack under Shinobu’s head as a makeshift pillow, and there was something in the pack that was cutting painfully into Shinobu’s cheek—a knife handle possibly? He wanted to lie perfectly still until either he died or everything stopped hurting, but Quin was all alone, and Shinobu had to take any opportunity to get his hands on a weapon.
He pulled the pack out from beneath his head and realized that it was Maggie’s. He’d seen her carrying it. She’d left it, he supposed, for Nott to guard. What might Maggie have in such a pack?
Without attracting Nott’s attention, Shinobu carefully turned his body away from the boy, to block Nott’s view of the pack.
“Is that ticklish?” Nott was asking his bat. “It would be less ticklish with my knife. Aelred, you should stay on my good side!”
The muscles of Shinobu’s arms were burning as he unzipped the bag and ran his hands through the contents. There was nothing interesting inside, only a sheaf of papers, which felt old and well handled. He squinted against the bright sky to focus on the writing. It was a hand-drawn family tree; the generations went on fo
r pages and pages, going back hundreds of years, and here and there were house emblems, mostly foxes and stags.
So she can decide which ones of us are worthy of living? he thought bitterly.
But where was the object that had been digging into his face?
“You bit me!” Nott said crossly to Aelred. “How would you like me to bite you?” the boy asked, and then there was a screech from the bat, suggesting that Nott had done just that.
Shinobu felt into every corner of the bag and at last located something hard and flat sewn into the base. At first he thought it was simply part of the bag itself, but when he ran his fingers over one of the seams, there was a concealed pocket. Working his fingers inside, he touched a small sheet of rigid plastic. Not a weapon.
Dammit!
He drew the plastic out of its hiding place as Nott began to coo to the bat again about the various ways he could dismember it.
The hidden object was a square about six inches by six inches, a black sheet inside a slightly thicker frame—a video screen. A name had been scratched into the edge, and he had to tilt it this way and that before he could read it: Catherine.
“Are you awake?” Nott asked. He was still yards away, but the words were obviously directed at Shinobu. The boy had noticed him moving.
“Sort of,” Shinobu answered as he shoved the papers back into the bag. He hesitated over the vid screen as he heard Nott approaching. Would Maggie miss it right away? Did he care?
He decided he didn’t care. Shinobu had every intention of getting to Quin before anyone else did. He would find her, and she would want to see this video with Catherine’s name on it. Quin believed in Catherine and what she stood for. And Shinobu had to believe that Quin would have some reason to be happy to see him. He slid the vid screen beneath himself to hide it, as Nott stepped into view.
The boy stared down at him skeptically. “You can move, then?” he asked. “I thought maybe you’d be a puddle of porridge forever.” He looked disappointed that he’d been wrong.
“Is that you, John?” Gavin Hart asked.
“Hello, Grandfather.”
John pulled the door shut behind him and crossed the hospital room to his grandfather’s bedside. Through the room’s window, he saw the Young Dread in the hallway, leaning patiently against the wall. She’d come without her cape, in an attempt to attract less attention, and so she looked strange and modern to John.
“Where have you been?” Gavin asked. “I thought you’d forgotten me.”
“Of course not. I was taking care of my mother’s business.” He knew his grandfather would understand what he meant, that John had been living as a Seeker, in the shadow world his mother had once inhabited.
He’d last visited Gavin here a month ago, and his grandfather’s health had not improved. For all of John’s life, Gavin Hart had looked thin, dapper, and elegant, usually in an expensive suit. Now he struck John as frail enough that a stray breeze might blow him away. He lay in the center of the hospital bed, his white hair still perfectly trimmed, but his face giving the impression that it was shrinking in upon itself. He was hidden under a thick blanket, but medical machinery crowded around him, and tubes and wires disappeared beneath the cover to snake their way into his body.
“You look very well,” the old man told him. “Strong. My strong boy.” When he spoke like this, John wondered if the old man was confusing him with John’s father, Archie. John didn’t mind.
“I’ve been trained by someone demanding, Grandfather. If I hadn’t gotten strong, I would never have kept up.”
“How do I look?” Gavin asked. There was a wry edge to the question.
“You look…a little worse for wear,” he admitted.
In fact, Gavin was at the end. John had spoken to the doctors. They quibbled over details, but they were in agreement that Gavin’s body was failing. They were slowing down the end as much as they could, but mostly they were just making him comfortable now.
“What brings you to London?” his grandfather asked.
“A different task than I’ve ever set myself before,” John answered, adding, “but I can’t really explain.”
Gavin accepted this easily. It was the way he expected John to live—secretly.
John and the Young Dread had brought eight new patients to the hospital—the men, women, and children who had once been boar Seekers. They were now slowly waking up in a ward downstairs, while the doctors murmured theories to each other about their new patients’ injuries and their odd, temporary immobility.
Standing at his grandfather’s bedside, John was uncomfortable with what he’d done. It had felt good to bring those Seekers to the hospital, but here with Gavin, he could hear his mother’s voice, demanding to know why he’d saved her enemies.
“I’m glad you came, because I’m dying,” Gavin said bluntly. One of his arms came out from beneath the blanket, trailing tubes. He gestured at his own body as if it belonged to someone else. “It’s the poison.”
Many years before, John’s mother had poisoned Gavin with a substance that lived in his body permanently. She’d done it to control him. Such were the harsh realities of Catherine’s life. For decades, Gavin had required a daily antidote to stay alive, and Maggie had been the one to administer it—secretly, because John’s grandfather hadn’t learned about the poison until recently. Gavin had known Maggie only as an old family retainer of Catherine’s. Her familial relationship to John—confusing, even to John—had been kept secret.
“When I couldn’t find Maggie after Traveler crashed,” John said, “I thought the doctors might be able to counteract it without her. I thought you might still recover.”
“They did something better than counteracting it.” His grandfather coughed lightly, but he’d overcome the racking cough that had plagued him for months. “They removed every molecule of poison from my body.”
“Then—” John began hopefully.
Gavin shook his head. “No, I’m not cured, John. Quite the opposite. The poison had eaten its way through me—heart, lungs, muscles. Everything’s failing. If I were a young man, maybe there would be a chance. But I’m not, and there isn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” John whispered. The doctors had told him most of this, but it pained him to hear his grandfather’s unvarnished assessment.
“What are you sorry for?”
“I’m sorry my mother poisoned you.”
And he was. When John was a boy, Maggie had kept him perpetually on edge about his grandfather. John was ordered to keep the old man happy and keep his love—but John would have done this naturally if left on his own.
One of Gavin’s eyes drifted out of alignment with the other—a remnant effect of the poison—but it came back when he focused on John.
“You look like her,” he told his grandson. “I see Catherine in you all the time. You don’t look as much like your father.” He squeezed John’s hand. “Let’s forget what she did to me. I loved Catherine like she was my own. And she loved Archie with all of her heart, John.”
Tears sprang to John’s eyes. That his parents might have truly loved each other and been happy together, however briefly, was an idea he cherished, though it felt too nice to be true.
“She killed people, Grandfather.”
“Yes,” Gavin agreed quietly. “And I encouraged her. We had an understanding that the wealth was worth it. The safety, as she called it, was worth anything.”
“Do you still believe that?”
Gavin paused for a long while, and his right eye drifted out of alignment again, as if half of him were trying to escape these last, unpleasant days. Just as John began to wonder if he was tiring the old man out, Gavin said, “Was it worth it? I’m dying, so I can’t lie to myself. I caused others to die, and I’ve always been greedy, for things far beyond what I deserve. John, to keep what we have, there will be hard choices.”
Hard choices—like, should he have brought the adult boar Seekers here? Should he have killed them instead? He could
have saved only the children—
“Traveler is going to fly again,” John said, instead of speaking any of those thoughts aloud. “Any day now.”
Gavin said nothing for a moment; his energy was fading. Then he whispered, “You’re my heir, John. What your mother built, you should have.” He looked into John’s eyes, gathering his strength. “At the end, she was crazy. The poison…” He trailed off, chasing down a stray thought. When he caught hold of it, his bleary eyes latched on to John’s again. “It wasn’t her.”
“Do you mean the crazy Catherine wasn’t the real Catherine?”
Gavin shook his head, grasped John’s arm tightly. “No. Yes. The worst things she did…” His eyes squeezed shut, and there was a tear in the corner of one. When Gavin opened his eyes, he was staring over John’s shoulder. The old man opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He had exhausted himself completely. His eyes closed midthought.
“Grandfather,” John whispered.
The old man was breathing steadily. The machines surrounding him whirred and clicked without interruption. He had only fallen asleep.
“I’ll come back as soon as I can,” John told him.
He turned to leave and saw what Gavin had been looking at: Maggie was standing in the hospital hallway, gazing in the window at John.
“Maggie, you’re here,” John said as he emerged from the hospital room. He found himself caught somewhere between astonishment and relief. And there was a feeling worse than these; John was a grown man now, but he felt suddenly small and helpless. For so long he had relied on Maggie for his survival. She had been the one to take his mother’s place after Catherine had been removed from John’s life.
“And you’re here,” Maggie answered.
She looked just as she had the last time John had seen her. Her long gray hair was tied up neatly behind her head, and she was clothed in one of the simple, rather old-fashioned dresses she had always worn. Her posture was perfect, though John could sense the effort of holding gravity at bay.
“I couldn’t find you—” John began, just as Maggie said, “I’ve been looking for you—”