The Seeker

by Isobelle Carmody

  I wondered suddenly if these notes had been scribed by Alexi or Madam Vega. But when I looked at the scribing on the maps again, I saw that it was faded with age.

  Suddenly a picture came into my mind of the potmender who had seemed so familiar to me, and I remembered where I had seen him before. He had been the older man with Daffyd, the boy I had met at the Sutrium Councilcourt. It seemed too much of a coincidence that Daffyd and I had spoken of Obernewtyn, and now here was the man that had been with him. I shook my head, reminding myself that this was not the time and place for solving such puzzles. At last, I found a book of modern maps. I opened it, but to my disappointment, they were all of the lowlands. I was about to replace the book when I noticed an inscription that read, “To Marisa.”

  Marisa! Impulsively, I opened another book to the front page and found the same inscription. It was the same in a Beforetime book. Amazed, I understood that the collection had belonged to Marisa Seraphim. Then it struck me that the crabbed notes I had been reading were hers. I turned back to the painting, and Marisa’s eyes mocked me in the light of the dying embers.

  I began to search again, and this time I was startled to find that one set of shelves swung like a door. Behind it was another enormous chamber. I saw the unmistakable gleam of metal amid a pile of papers. And sure enough, it was an arrowcase. Delighted, I thrust it into my pocket. Then I noticed a square steel box standing on legs in a niche between two shelves. It was a metal cupboard with a lock built into the door. Curious, I knelt down and worked the tumblers with my mind. It was more complex than the door locks, but the mechanism was more delicate and therefore needed less force. In a moment, the door clicked open.

  There were only two shelves inside, and both were stuffed with old papers and letters. I was disappointed, but I pulled out several pages. On top of the rest was a letter. It read:

  My darling,

  I have bitterly thought this over, and I have decided we cannot meet again. Mine is a strange family, tainted with madness. I do not want you to be part of that. I am the Master of Obernewtyn, and I belong here, but you do not. It would destroy you to be here. Forget what has passed between us. My mother has arranged a marriage. The lady in question does not love me. This is best, for, Lud knows, I do not love her. She bonds for gold, and I for convenience.

  The letter ended suddenly halfway down the page, which suggested it had never been completed. I wondered why, and which Master of Obernewtyn had penned it. Not Stephen Seraphim, certainly, and not Lukas Seraphim. So it must be his son, Michael. And the mother he mentioned must be Marisa.

  I found two more letters among the papers. Both had been opened and replaced neatly in their envelopes. One was a missive from Lukas Seraphim to his wife, Marisa, and the other was addressed to Michael Seraphim. I had no chance to read either, though, because I heard the sound of a muffled voice.

  I quickly closed the door on the cabinet, the forgotten letters falling from my lap. There was no time to reopen the cupboard and replace them, so I thrust them in the narrow space beneath it and crept to the edge of the hinged shelves. My heart pounded at the knowledge that I was trapped.

  But the voices faded without anyone coming into the doctor’s chamber. Relieved, I waited until the voices had faded completely and then made my way back to my own room as fast as I could. Twice I had to conceal myself as older Misfits passed. By the time I was in my own bed, I was soaked with sweat and dizzy with fatigue. But even as I drifted to sleep, I seemed to see Selmar’s dead eyes, gazing emptily at me.

  I slept only two hours before being wakened. I had missed firstmeal, and there was no chance to talk to Matthew and Dameon, for they had already been taken through the maze to the farms. Nor had I any opportunity to speak to them at midmeal, for there were other people clustering about them. Too tired to eat, I stretched out in a patch of shade and slept, waking only when everyone was returning to their labor.

  It was not until nightmeal that I finally had the chance to speak with them, but before I could whisper my news, Matthew leaned across the table and told me softly that the new Misfit was sitting at the next table. I looked where he had indicated, and my exhaustion fell away in my shock, for I knew that face.

  It was Rosamunde! She seemed to sense my gaze and looked up. As I had expected, she recognized me. What I did not expect was the look of blank bitterness she gave me.

  18

  IT WAS SEVERAL days before I had the opportunity to speak to Rosamunde.

  After that first meal, she did not come to the same sitting. I only saw her from a distance on the farms once or twice; then at last, one midmeal I saw her come out of a barn to collect her lunch. I followed and sat down beside her.

  “What do you want?” she asked listlessly.

  “Do you know me?” I said in a low voice.

  “You are Elspeth Gordie,” she said flatly.

  Bewildered by her manner, I leaned closer and asked, “Is it Jes? Has something happened to him?”

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Rosamund said dully.

  I bit my lip and suppressed an urge to shake her. “He would not have let you come here alone. He cared about you,” I said. Her face trembled with some feeling, so I pressed her. “He’s my brother. You must tell me if he’s all right.”

  She looked away from me. “Leave me alone,” she whispered.

  “I know that you denounced me,” I said, desperate to get a response from her.

  Her face paled a little. “You knew?” Then the bitterness I had seen that first day in the kitchen returned to her eyes. “Of course you knew. You read my mind. I should have guessed you were like him,” she said colorlessly.

  I reeled at her words. “Are you saying that Jes can read your mind?” I said at last.

  She gave a heavy sigh. “All right. I might as well tell you everything, though I wonder why you don’t just read my mind and find out for yourself.”

  I glanced around uneasily, but no one was close enough to have heard what she was saying.

  She looked up at me with sudden pathetic appeal, and for a second I saw the old Rosamunde. “You know, we were so happy in the beginning, before he found out what he was. It didn’t matter about us being orphans, because soon we would get Normalcy Certificates. Then the boy came. Harald.” The deadness returned to her features.

  “Who was he?” I prompted.

  “Just a boy, but somehow he was different from the rest of us. Nobody liked him much, because he would speak when he ought to have stayed silent, or he would refuse to do something or argue with a Herder. You could see he would never get a Certificate. Jes didn’t like him any more than I did, to begin with. Then all of a sudden, they were the greatest friends. I couldn’t understand it. But when I asked Jes about it, he just changed the subject. He became secretive and evasive. I did not see him as often, and there was a barrier between us when we were together.

  “One day, he broke down and told me. He said, ‘I have been afraid to tell you, but I love you and I must tell you the truth. I am a Misfit by birth.’ I thought he was joking, and I laughed. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t!” This last was almost a sob. “He said Harald had shown him what he was. He said he could talk to people inside their minds and hear what people were thinking. He kept saying you were right about having to use the powers once you knew they were there. I knew then that you must have been the same.

  “He showed me.” Her voice had risen and again I looked around uneasily and saw that a number of curious glances were being directed toward us. I longed to coerce Rosamunde into calmness, but I dared not use my powers so close to where the machine had caught hold of me before. Rosamunde got control of herself and went on more calmly. “He said he had not wanted a rift to grow between us but that Harald had not wanted me to be told. But he told Harald that he trusted me with his life. I was terrified he would read my mind and learn that I had denounced you to save him. I made him promise never to invade my mind.

  “Jes started to talk about escaping
. He said that Harald knew others like them, in Kinraide and in nearby towns, and that we could all run away and live somewhere where no one would find us. If he had said just the two of us, I would even have gone, but a group of us? There would have been a massive search. He didn’t care. He said the Herders knew something about Misfits like them and that they wanted to know more. He said the boy claimed some Misfits had been taken to Herder Isle because they had given themselves away.”

  She fell silent for a while, and I did not prompt her. Now that she had begun, I knew she would say it all.

  “Jes told me one day that a group of orphans from the home in Berrioc had been uncovered and betrayed. Those taken were friends of Harald’s. They had been taken to the Herder cloister in Kinraide to be interrogated, and Jes said he and Harald were going to escape and try to help them. It was madness. A nightmare! How could two orphans break into a Herder Cloister?

  “Jes said I would never understand because I was not like them. He said he and Harald had heard the others calling out for help as they were taken to the cloister.” She paused with deep sadness in her eyes. “I guess I knew then what I had really known since the whole thing started. Jes loved me, but it was as if I came from another race. In some ways, Jes was hard like a stone. He told me he had rejected you because you were different. He regretted that, yet now he did the same to me because I was different in another way.

  “The night they meant to go, he came to ask me to leave with them. I loved him so much that I almost said yes. But I knew it would be no good. I refused, and he climbed out the window. Harald was waiting in the garden. And that is when the soldierguards got them.”

  My heart froze.

  “They killed Harald. Then I saw Jes shot in the chest with an arrow. He tried to run, but he was too badly hurt. One of the soldierguards ran to where he had fallen. I heard him tell Jes the Herders would be pleased to hear they had taken him alive, for they knew there were others at Kinraide and he would be made to tell their names. That was when Jes did something to the soldierguard. I don’t know what. The man just stopped laughing and fell down dead. Then another soldierguard shot Jes through the throat.”

  Rosamunde’s voice was like cold death, and I wondered numbly if that was the end of her dreadful tale. But she went on. “I wanted to die, too. They knew he had been with me, and at first they thought I was like Jes. They wanted me to tell them who the others were, but Jes had never told me. I kept telling them I didn’t know. But they didn’t believe me. They took me to Sutrium. They tortured me. They wanted to know all about Jes. All he could do. I told them everything, and in the end I wanted to die. I tried to make myself die. Then they sent me here.”

  She saw the question in my eyes and shook her head. “I didn’t tell them about you. Not because I was trying to save you. It just didn’t occur to me. I would have told them if they asked. But I think they will figure it out in the end, and then they will come to question you as well.” Two tears slipped down her cheeks, and she did not wipe them away. “They will come for you, because they are frightened of Misfits like Jes,” she said. “Because of what he could do, and because he could pass for normal.”

  I stood up without a word and walked stiffly into the barn. It was empty, and I threw myself into a loose bale of hay and wept. I cried for the pity of Jes’s end, and for all that had been done to Rosamunde, and for Jes’s friends, who must now be living in fear of discovery. I remembered my prediction on the day we had parted at Kinraide. I had been sure I would never see Jes again, but foolishly I had imagined the loss to be his, not mine.

  I sensed Sharna nearby, seeking entrance to my thoughts. “Sharna,” I cried bitterly to him, “why is life so full of pain and danger? There seems no end to it. Where are peace and safety in the world?”

  “It would take a wiser beast than me to answer that,” he told me, nuzzling my arm sweetly.

  “Then teach me to be wise, for I cannot bear this pain,” I sent, and looking into his sad shaggy face, I opened my mind so that he would see what I had learned.

  “It is a hard thing to lose a brother,” he sent, and oddly, I felt he really understood what I felt. Then he told me with compassion that wisdom was not something one could teach, but a thing each person must discover for himself.

  “I can’t bear that he died like that,” I sent.

  “Death comes in a thousand forms,” Sharna sent. “All who live, not only beasts, live with death riding on their back, though none knows what face it will show for them until the moment they face it. But beasts do not fear death or regard it as a burden. Only the funaga think death is evil. But it is nature. Evil exists only in life. There is much good and evil allotted to each life, and there is much that is neither good nor bad. Death is such a thing as that.” He licked me roughly, then left me alone with my grief.

  “What has happened?” came Rushton’s voice.

  I knew that I ought to get up and make some excuse for my tears. But anger flowed through me at the thought of him reporting to Madam Vega that I had made friends, and my pain became a raging fury.

  I sat up and glared at him through swollen eyes. “Nothing has happened that you need to report to your mistress,” I hissed. “I am not planning to kill anyone or burn down your precious farms. There is no dire plot in hand. Nothing … of any importance has happened. I have just heard my brother has been murdered.” My rage died as quickly as it had begun, and I lay my head down and wept anew.

  After a long moment, I heard the hay rustle and opened my eyes to see Rushton kneeling in the hay beside me. He reached out and touched my arm as gently as he had ever touched a hurt animal. “I suppose you will not believe it, but I am no informant,” he said. “I am sorry about the death of your brother. You must think badly of me to imagine I have no compassion, though it’s true I have cared for few since the death of my mother.”

  I was so astonished by his gentleness and his words that my tears stopped. Rushton went on in the same soft, low voice. “My life since my mother’s death has been given to anger and cold purpose. I could almost envy your affection for your brother, though now it brings you pain.…”

  His voice faded, and for a long moment he said nothing, only staring into my eyes with his searching gaze. Then he bent closer until his breath fanned my face, his eyes probing.

  “Why do you plague me?” he whispered, as if I were a dream or a wraith.

  I shook my head, bewildered by the tenderness in his tone, and he sat back abruptly.

  “Come now. You must return to work,” he said gruffly but not unkindly. “It is not wise to grieve too long. I am no tattletale, but there are many who are.”

  He was as brisk as ever, but strangely his manner no longer offended me. I rose, feeling empty of all emotion. Rushton sent me to a distant field alone to check the foot of a horse he said might be going lame and bade me walk him very slowly back to the stables.

  As I walked, I realized that I believed Rushton when he had said he was not an informant. Any number of Misfits knew of my friendships and might have spoken of them to Madam Vega; Rushton had only warned me that it was dangerous making friends too openly. It was my resentment of him that had made me jump to the conclusion that he had spoken to Madam Vega.

  Remembering that he was Enoch’s friend, I considered asking him to inquire about Maruman. But even if my fear and hatred of Rushton were misplaced, I could not believe there was true friendship between us or any kind of easiness that would allow me to ask for his help.

  Perhaps it was only because Maruman was so much on my mind, and I was still raw at the news of Jes’s death, but the next morning I awoke with Maruman’s dear grizzled face in my mind, his golden eyes clearly reflecting the jagged mountain range that lay between us. I told myself it was only the wisp of a dream, but what if I was wrong? What if Maruman was gazing at the mountains and longing for me as I was for him? What if he decided to try to find me?

  19

  THE FINAL WEEKS of harvest passed swiftly as e
veryone worked hard and long to complete preparations for the wintertime. The pain I had felt at learning of Jes’s death had faded all too quickly; it was as if a memory had died rather than a person, because I had already accepted that I would never see him again. I had been nervous that Rosamunde would say something that would reach the ears of Madam Vega, but after that one conversation, she seemed to retreat into the silent blankness that I supposed was the reason she was sent to Obernewtyn.

  I had finally, and with some trepidation, told Matthew and Dameon what Rosamunde had told me about Jes. Like me, they felt the soldierguard’s death could not have happened as she had described. I could exert force enough to open a lock, and I had at last confessed my ability to coerce. But I could not possibly exert a force powerful enough to stop a person’s heart or breathing. Most likely, having witnessed Jes’s death and suffered torture, Rosamunde’s crumbling mind had invented the vision of Jes destroying his tormentor.

  No matter what had transpired that night, I feared it would eventually be discovered that Jes had a sister who had been convicted as a Misfit and sent to Obernewtyn. I was determined to escape before that happened.

  But in the meantime, the doctor or Alexi seemed to have lost interest in Cameo. She no longer disappeared, she slept more peacefully, and she grew stronger physically. A sly relationship grew between her and Matthew, and he and Dameon spoke less urgently of escape.

  One midmeal, Dameon said, “It has occurred to me that if we organize our escape for the end of wintertime, just before the pass thaws, we would not have to survive the whole wintertime. I don’t know how we would steal or carry enough food to sustain us for the entire season. And this way, we would only have to contend with Ariel and his wolves. With Elspeth’s ability to speak with beasts and her coercion, I think we could manage to evade them.”