Traveler

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  Catherine had been nursing a hope that she would find Emile in the house with his parents, that he had been alive and safe all this time. But no, only his mother and father were living in the cottage. Madame Pernet sat in an armchair across from Catherine, darting looks at Catherine’s pregnant belly. Sunlight came in through the kitchen window, lighting the old stone walls in warm tones.

  “I always liked Emile,” Catherine ventured. “He was very good in training. We apprentices were surprised when he didn’t come back to the estate. Our instructors told us he quit.”

  Monsieur Pernet’s wide back shifted, and his wife coughed nervously.

  “You thought we were keeping him from the estate,” the wife said, “and we thought the estate was keeping him from us. But in reality he’d gone off without telling us where.”

  The husband shifted again.

  “Sit down, darling, please,” the woman said to her husband in French.

  The man lowered himself into the other armchair. He glanced at Catherine from beneath heavy brows, then looked away.

  “I’m sorry to show up unannounced,” Catherine told them. She turned her wrist so the athame brand was clearly visible again, to remind them both of the obligation that came with their Seeker oaths. “I only hope you will honor the code among Seekers and answer my questions. They’re asked in the spirit of fellowship with all Seekers.”

  The man made a gruff sound of agreement. The woman pulled an ancient cigarette from a box on the side table, lit it with a tarnished metal lighter, and took a long pull from it as she glanced out the kitchen window. She seemed to be watching Archie’s shadow, which stretched, long and thin, down the path toward the village.

  “My husband and I both trained on the estate when we were younger,” the woman said, her eyes flicking to Catherine, then away. Her French accent was light. “We were never the most active Seekers, but we did our part in a small way. We spent years finding and destroying the camps of men who created child soldiers. And smaller acts, closer to home as well…though for a long time we have kept to ourselves.

  “When Emile was old enough to train on the estate, he went. He was happy there for a while. But in that last year, he became…quieter. Perhaps he began to question the value of being a Seeker. I thought it was natural. The training gets harder, life is less like play and more like work. He had few friends there. He preferred the company of his cousins, who trained at home and not in Scotland.

  “My husband caught him at Christmas, that last year. Emile had found our family’s athame, even though it was very well hidden in our attic. He was”—the woman motioned with her hands, miming adjusting an athame’s dials—“preparing to use it.”

  The husband nodded slightly but still said nothing.

  “But…wasn’t he too young to know what the athame was then?” Catherine asked. She’d last seen Emile when he was fourteen, months before he would have been trained to use an athame.

  “Of course, yes,” his mother said. “But still he acted as though he knew how to use it. I assumed they had accelerated his training on the estate.” She inhaled deeply from her cigarette, her eyes still restlessly roving the room and the view outside. “They had a fight, my husband and my son. When Emile disappeared—with our athame—we thought he’d gone back to the estate to get away from his father and taken the athame. But of course he wasn’t there. We couldn’t find him anywhere.”

  “And on the estate, our instructors told us that you’d kept him from coming back.”

  “Perhaps they didn’t want to frighten you.”

  The woman had finished her cigarette. She crushed it out in an ashtray with a boar emblem stamped into it. Emile’s mother was not very old, Catherine realized, and once must have been very fit, but she seemed used up and frail, as though fear and the loss of her son had taken decades from her.

  Catherine asked, “Do you have some idea where he—”

  The woman shook her head emphatically, cutting Catherine off. She got to her feet and took a framed photograph from the mantel.

  “Emile is our only son, but my cousin has sons, Emile’s closest friends.”

  She took a seat again and handed the picture to Catherine. Catherine stopped breathing when she saw it. It was a photograph of Emile and four other boys. On Emile’s left was a young man with dark brown hair and an easy smile playing across his lips. She had seen that smile. His face had been covered in dark blue paint, but she’d seen those lips sneering at her. Where is the athame? he’d demanded, straddling her on the floor of the club bathroom in Hong Kong. Emile was just as slow, and things ended just as badly for him.

  Catherine tapped the boy’s face. “This…is Emile’s cousin?”

  The woman nodded. “Second cousin. There are four brothers. I would have told you to ask his oldest cousin, Anthony, where Emile went. But Anthony is missing now as well.”

  He’s not exactly missing, Catherine thought. She’d crawled out from under him as he bled to death in Hong Kong. She swallowed, attempting to push the memory from her mind.

  “He…Anthony was never on the estate,” Catherine said softly, trying to keep her voice even. “But he trained as a Seeker?”

  The woman nodded distractedly. “His father trained him and his brothers himself—though, why, I don’t know. They’d lost their family athame—house of the horse—three generations ago. And yet still Anthony has disappeared, like Emile disappeared, like many Seekers disappear. And one of his brothers was recently attacked and left injured.”

  That must have been Anna’s attacker, Catherine thought.

  Monsieur Pernet looked uncomfortable. He was shifting in his chair and staring at the floor.

  Hesitantly Catherine asked, “It’s only— Do you think it’s possible the cousin had something to do with Emile’s disappearance? If his family didn’t have an athame anymore…isn’t it possible he was after Emile’s?”

  “They were family,” the woman said in a harsh whisper, as though the very thought of what Catherine suggested was overwhelming. “Of course that’s not possible. They were the best of friends.”

  Emile’s father raised his eyes to watch Catherine closely. His face was red with some suppressed emotion, and Catherine wasn’t sure if he was on the verge of throwing her out of his house or if he was about to cry. At last the man drove one of his fists into the open palm of his other hand. “He can’t kill Seekers himself,” he said.

  The wife looked up at her husband quickly, her expression frightened.

  “Who can’t?” Catherine asked.

  “You must know who by now.”

  At once she understood. This man was trying to tell her something very like what Briac had hinted at. “You’re talking about the Middle Dread,” she said evenly.

  The man nodded his head once slowly.

  Catherine said, “But—of course a Dread wouldn’t kill a Seeker…unless a crime had been commit—”

  “You misunderstand me,” the man told her, cutting her off. Then, his voice rough with the weight of the subject, he said, “He wants them dead. He desires to kill them himself. But he can’t.”

  “Why would…A Dread has his oaths. He would never—”

  She was interrupted by a rumbling sound from the man’s barrel chest, which she recognized after a moment as a disgusted laugh. He said, “Oaths? No. You can’t think of him as a Dread. He is…his own creature. With his own plans. He desires to kill Seekers but he can’t do it himself.”

  Catherine stopped herself from speaking as she wrapped her mind around what Monsieur Pernet was telling her.

  At last she asked, “Why can’t he kill Seekers?”

  “That is a bit of a mystery,” the man answered gravely. “It is something between the Middle Dread and the Old Dread. I have my theory. Are you able to read another’s thoughts, Catherine?”

  Catherine was startled by the sudden question. “Not—not on purpose,” she answered him. She recalled the cold mind that had touched hers before she went to Mont
Saint-Michel. “But it’s happened a few times.”

  “So you know it is possible.”

  She nodded a bit reluctantly; it was a part of being a Seeker that she didn’t much care for.

  “I believe the Old Dread sees into the Middle Dread’s thoughts,” Emile’s father told her gravely. “He will know and come after the Middle if he kills Seekers himself, because the old man is just and would not tolerate such evil acts. But if the Middle gets others to do the deeds for him, perhaps the Old Dread doesn’t know.”

  “Stop!” his wife hissed, reaching to cover his mouth, like a small child shushing a larger one.

  He held her away and went on, “So he does not kill them himself. He gets them to kill each other instead.”

  “Be quiet!” His wife was frantic. “He will know.”

  “How will he know?” Monsieur Pernet asked her, raising his voice. “He doesn’t see into my mind.”

  In a low, terrified undertone, she said, “He will hear from someone what we’ve done—”

  “We’ve lost our athame. We’ve lost our son. We’re not Seekers anymore. He doesn’t care about us.”

  “We agreed we would say nothing,” she pleaded in a whisper.

  “I will tell her what we know,” Monsieur Pernet said. His wife was struggling in his grasp, but he continued to hold her patiently, like a lion holding an unruly cub. More gently he said, “If we cannot tell a good Seeker the truth, we serve no purpose at all.”

  Madame Pernet turned her head away, and Catherine suspected the woman would have cried if she’d had the energy for it.

  “He can’t kill Seekers himself, or the Old Dread will know what he’s done. So he gets Seekers to kill each other for him,” Catherine repeated.

  In a way, this was what Briac had been trying to tell her on the Tube. For a long while she sat still, thinking through the ramifications of this new information. How stupid and naive she’d been! All this time, she’d thought only that the Middle was a terrible Dread, failing to keep Seekers honest. But this made much, much more sense. The Middle was the one causing Seekers to do terrible things. That was why so very many terrible things had been done. She asked, “How does he get them to kill each other?” But she realized she already knew. “He…he promises them the athames of other houses?”

  “Sometimes, yes,” the man told her. “And other times he encourages them to take revenge on another family for past wrongs done.”

  “How did you learn this about him?” she asked.

  “The Middle hides his tracks well. Most Seekers who have been his victims have suspected nothing of his greater plan,” he said. “But the Middle does not hide his tracks perfectly. A friend, in my training days, he confided to me that he’d made a pact with the Middle Dread. He made me swear an oath that I would never tell another person. But this agreement with the Middle—my friend said it would secure an athame for his family, an athame belonging to another house. If you come from a family that is desperate enough to get their hands on an athame, you might be willing to make such a pact.”

  “And did he get an athame?”

  The man slowly shook his head. “I never saw him again. He disappeared, but not, I think, before killing someone else.” The man paused, and Catherine perceived how long the man had been holding his silence, how strange it was for him to speak now but what relief it brought. In a moment, he continued, “You see, the next year, on the estate, another friend of mine had become obsessed with taking revenge against the first friend’s family. Enemies had been made.”

  “But why?” Catherine asked. “Why does he want us dead?”

  The man shrugged, a heavy, exhausted motion. “He is his own creature, with his own plans. That is how you must think of him. One of his plans—maybe his only plan—is to get rid of Seekers.”

  “And you think that’s what happened to Emile?” she asked him. “The Middle Dread convinced someone to come after him for his athame?”

  After a moment’s careful thought, Emile’s father answered, “I believe someone came to Emile and made him doubt. Someone close to him”—Monsieur Pernet knew it had been Emile’s cousin Anthony, Catherine understood all at once, but he hadn’t shared that unpleasant truth with his wife—“offered to show him things about Seekers that he wouldn’t learn on the estate, things that were more true than what his instructors were teaching him. This person convinced Emile to come away with him. And then, yes, he killed Emile for his athame.”

  But why did Anthony need my athame, then? Catherine wondered. Wouldn’t this mean he’d had Emile’s already by that time?

  Emile’s mother leaned into Catherine and whispered, “Do you want all of our family to disappear?” She gestured at Catherine’s pregnant belly. “And yours as well?”

  Catherine was still holding the man’s gaze. “Do you know where Emile was going at the end? Where his killer took him?” she asked, sensing the answer would be different now.

  The man released his wife, who curled into herself, as though she could shrink away from their conversation.

  “I believe he went to a cave—a place that belongs to our family, to the house of the boar,” he said.

  Catherine’s breath caught in her throat. She was coming full circle, back to the hidden caves, which she’d been certain must hold traces of where the missing Seekers had gone.

  He took up a pen and a piece of paper and carefully wrote out a series of symbols. Beneath these, with a sure, quick hand, he sketched a landscape with a cave at its center.

  —

  “Have you ever been to Norway?” Catherine asked when she’d left the house and joined Archie outside.

  The day was fine and warm, and the slight breeze carried the scent of flowers and the distant ocean. From the Pernets’ house, they looked down a steep cobbled lane to the village spread out below them, and to vineyards and fields beyond that.

  “Why do I get the feeling it doesn’t matter how I answer that question?” Archie asked as they began to walk.

  “Look at this.”

  She held up the slip of paper with the coordinates Emile’s father had written out for her, and the drawing of the cave.

  “You know I can’t read those made-up hieroglyphics,” Archie said. He was teasing her, because he could read them, a bit; she was teaching him.

  “We have to go to Norway,” Catherine told him. She tucked the paper into her pocket and slipped a hand into Archie’s.

  “You can’t go to Norway now,” he said.

  “It will be all right, Archie. I came here, didn’t I? I’m fine.”

  He fell silent without agreeing, and Catherine was already thinking about ice fields and warm boots. If she could get proof of the Middle causing Seekers’ deaths, the Old Dread and the Young Dread would have to listen to her.

  When they reached the bottom of the lane and emerged into the open square of the medieval village, Catherine tumbled forward onto her knees and cried out.

  “What is it?” Archie asked, catching her and pulling her gently upright.

  She didn’t know how to answer him. She’d felt a warm wetness down her leg, which she knew immediately meant she’d started to bleed again. But there was something else that was harder to explain: The moment they’d emerged into the square, she’d had the strangest vision. She’d seen herself and Archie from afar, as though watching herself from the other side of the square. Along with that vision, she’d experienced such a surge of hatred and fury, her knees had given out.

  “Catherine?” he said urgently.

  “I’m seeing…He’s here…”

  She was peering inside the mind of another person. It was the same mind she’d touched once before, that morning when the words “Mont Saint-Michel” had fallen into her thoughts. The connection had disturbed her then, but now—now she grasped whose mind it was, and she was terrified.

  Archie held her up. “There’s a man looking at us,” he said. His eyes were on the other side of the square.

  “Where?” She
tried to follow the line of his gaze. It was summer, and great numbers of locals and tourists milled about the sidewalks. “Where?” she asked again.

  “That way, but he’s gone.”

  “Archie, what did he look like? Was he wearing a cloak? Was he tall?”

  “A cloak? Like something from the olden days? Of course not. He was wearing a T-shirt.”

  “Was he tall?”

  Archie shrugged. “Big, at any rate. Like a bull.”

  She didn’t need more description. This time, when their minds had touched, she’d recognized him. She hadn’t, as she’d thought before, heard the thoughts of a Seeker who was willing to kill; she’d stumbled into the mind of the Middle Dread himself.

  Though Catherine had been looking for proof against the Middle for a long time, she’d always felt protected by his role as a Dread. She’d believed he was a terrible judge of Seekers, but a judge nonetheless—a Dread and not someone who would target her. After her conversation with Monsieur Pernet, she had no such illusions.

  Past incidents appeared to her in new light. When Anthony had attacked her in Hong Kong, he hadn’t been acting of his own volition. The Middle Dread had spurred him to do it. She must have ruined the Middle’s plans by taking the fox athame from the chamber beneath Mont Saint-Michel. The Middle had sent Anthony to Hong Kong to find her athame and maybe also to get rid of her, and she’d obstructed his plans even further.

  And now the Middle Dread had followed her here. If she’d seen inside his head, was he seeing inside hers? Had her years of searching out his misdeeds made a connection between them?

  “We have to go,” she said.

  “You want to go to Norway right now?”

  “No—take me home. Please.” She was leaning over, clutching her belly. “I need to see the doctor…”

  Archie’s face fell. With no further words, he slipped an arm around Catherine’s back and walked briskly with her away from the village square.