Traveler

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  John could barely keep his eyes open in the glare of the sun. Like the Young Dread, he wore deer pelts over his clothing, against the frozen air, and their weight and warmth felt natural to him. The ice field stretched out around them on all sides, its flat white surface broken by tall columns of black rock. The footing was treacherous, deep fissures revealing themselves suddenly, just as John was about to set his foot down. Even so, he was running, using a hopping, leaping gait across the upward-sloping field. The focal helped, urging his thoughts into an expansive state that allowed him to see a dozen things where once he might have seen only one.

  “Faster!” the Young Dread called.

  In the distance, difficult to see because it meant looking directly into the sun, was the snow-covered slope of a high peak. Low on its flank was another cave, this one belonging to the house of the boar.

  The Young Dread had been right to bring him to confront Quin on the Bridge. Now Quin, Catherine, Maggie—all had receded in his thoughts to shadowy, distant figures. He was again running with the focal, sensing the ice, the sky, the cave ahead, and the distant ocean beating against the frozen shore miles away. He fixed his thoughts on what he wished to know: If my mother came to this cave, what did she find? And if she didn’t make it here, what had she hoped to discover?

  Maud ran parallel to him, her strides fast and light. She’d warned him this run across the ice would not be easy; she was going to push him to the edge of his capabilities.

  “Ready yourself!” she called. She was wearing the disruptor, and she’d given John the metal disruptor shield.

  A narrow crevasse showed itself, almost invisible in the shadow of a pillar of rock. John leapt the fissure as the disruptor began to whine. That sound filled him with trepidation, but for the first time ever, his fear of the disruptor didn’t change his focus.

  A few moments later, the Young Dread fired the weapon. Sparks came out of the barrel in a swarm, buzzing in the cold air as they raced toward him. John pivoted, swinging the shield to give him momentum. Then he held it in front of him and let the sparks burst into nothingness against it in a shower of rainbow light.

  Almost immediately, Maud fired again.

  John leapt forward and twisted behind another icy pillar, and when the swarm had passed, he continued to run.

  The sparks will come, John thought. Let them come. I will be ready.

  Before the Young Dread could fire the disruptor a third time, he drew the focal from his head and tossed it to her.

  “Take it!” he called.

  He nearly stumbled in a wave of disorientation, but in another few steps, the feeling was gone. My focus is mine, he thought. The helmet is only a crutch.

  Without the focal, the bullet wound near his shoulder began to throb, but the pain didn’t linger in his thoughts. It is only pain.

  The Young Dread fired the disruptor again. John turned to the side, nimbly jockeying around a series of deep, interconnected crevices. Almost as an afterthought, he raised the shield and warded off the sparks.

  “Careful, Apprentice,” Maud said in her slow and steady way—she was not even out of breath. “When you think too much of your own skills, that’s when they will fail you. Your mother’s mind was unsound, and she still thought well of herself. And that was when she was attacked and disrupted, John. Deservedly.”

  She was taunting him cruelly, but—

  They are only words. Sounds in the air. My focus is stronger.

  He glanced down at the shield on his left arm and comprehended its true purpose. His fingers found a lever on the underside. When he twisted it, the shield sprang to life. It hummed on his arm, and its interlocking rings began to spin, some clockwise, some counterclockwise, in a dizzying array.

  The Young Dread fired the disruptor. John turned the shield, and the sparks streamed into it, buzzing and crackling. And then the sound changed. The rings of the shield were spinning faster, and the crackle of electricity became louder. The shield strained against his arm, moving with gyroscopic force. The disruptor’s sparks were thrown from the shield like fireworks from a Catherine wheel, spraying back at the Young Dread. She dove for the ice and rolled as the swarm flew over her. John felt a glow of satisfaction—for once he had surprised Maud, not the other way around.

  The cave was close enough now to see it in detail, despite the sun’s glare. When the Young Dread had gracefully regained her feet, John tossed her the shield. It was a fascinating device, but it too was a crutch.

  She caught the shield with one hand and fired the disruptor at him again with the other. She wasn’t going to be easy with him just because he’d decided to give up his protection.

  Without focal or shield, John was completely exposed as the sparks rushed toward him. He let the fear come, without changing his concentration. He leapt onto a mound of broken ice and jumped from slab to slab, carrying himself upward. The sparks hit well below his feet, dispersing harmlessly against the ice. Then he leapt down and sprinted for the cave.

  He reached it before the Young Dread, the first time he’d ever beaten her in a footrace. He stood in the frozen interior, waiting for her and feeling a small sense of triumph. When she arrived a few moments later, there was something different in her presence. Maud did not smile at him, or pat him on the back or make any move out of the ordinary. But when she spoke, it was as though he were receiving the highest praise one person could offer another.

  “John,” she said, “that was very good.”

  The frozen cave was like something from a fairy story, a place Maud’s nurse would have described to her at bedtime, back in the long-ago past, when the Young Dread had still been an ordinary child. The cavern had a high roof of rock, with seams of ice branching through it, and from these seams hung vast, intricate icicles like handblown chandeliers or tiny enchanted cities. At the back of the cave was a smaller tunnel leading deeper into the mountain, but the sun had already set, and exploration would have to wait for morning.

  There was no wood here, but the Young Dread built them a fire with the charcoal from John’s pack. It was John’s duty to make their fires and cook their food, but she was content tonight to let him wander the cavern in the twilight for a few more minutes.

  Maud felt an upwelling of satisfaction as she watched him staring at the hanging icicles. When she’d first begun his training, she gauged his progress by the intensity of her own irritation—if she’d felt slightly less vexed after a training session, she’d counted that as success. But pride was an entirely new sensation. John’s run across the ice field had been impressive, and the Young Dread could see the elation of that run still surrounding him like an airy mantle.

  When he came to sit by the fire, however, his manner had entirely changed and the elation had all bled away. By then, the fire was burning red, and John stared into it pensively as he began to heat the dried strips of rabbit that would be their dinner.

  “Have you been here before?” he asked her at last. His quiet voice echoed in the enormous space.

  “Yes,” Maud replied. “I came once, when the Seekers from the house of the boar held a ceremony welcoming two new children to their family. That was a very long time ago, when these caves were still in use.”

  John nodded, but he didn’t appear to be listening very attentively. His mind was elsewhere as he handed her the food.

  They ate, and guessing at the source of his current mood, the Young Dread told him, “I taunt you when we train, John. I try to break your focus. But I don’t believe the things I say about your mother.”

  He glanced up at her, and she was reminded of how he’d looked as a child, on that night in Catherine’s apartment, small and lost.

  “That’s just it,” he said. “What if she was mad?” He was wrestling with something. Maud remained quiet as he looked back into the heart of the fire, as though an answer might be waiting there for him. “I don’t feel it,” he told her after a long while, and his voice was pained. “Before we came here, I was certain. My moth
er was hunting down the houses who had harmed us. She came here—or she intended to come here—to find the boar Seekers and make them pay. And I was doing the same. But…I don’t feel it.”

  His eyes sought hers, and there was dismay in his countenance. He whispered, “On the ice, you were firing the disruptor at me, and I was running for my life. I was scared of the disruptor, but fear wasn’t what I felt, not really. I felt something else. And I still feel it. I feel my mother’s hope. I feel her curiosity.” He paused, then said, “I know she hated the other houses. I was with her until I was seven years old, and she was full of hate. But…that’s not the Catherine I see in her journal. And now it’s not the Catherine I see in my mind. I feel the other Catherine. The real one.”

  A strong emotion came over Maud, one she didn’t quite know how to categorize, though it was, perhaps, camaraderie. She’d experienced the very same thoughts about Catherine as they ran across the ice; perhaps she and John had shared those thoughts between them. The Young Dread had seen who Catherine really was and what she’d intended—before Catherine changed, before she’d become cruel and violent and fixed on revenge.

  “I feel her too,” Maud told him. “She wasn’t mad, not at first. Not for a long while.” She thought of Catherine on the estate as an apprentice, and she thought of Catherine later. Of all the Seekers the Young Dread had known in recent times, Catherine had been perhaps the least mad, the most aware—in the beginning, at any rate. If you put all this effort to other use, Catherine had said on that night, her last true night alive, imagine how different things could be. “Your mother was a Seeker in the noble sense of the word,” she told him.

  “I think she was,” he whispered.

  Then John’s head dropped into his hands, and his shoulders began to tremble. This was so unexpected that it took Maud some time to understand that he was crying. Then the grief came like a storm and he sobbed helplessly.

  Eventually, when the squall blew itself out, he spoke with his face still in his hands. “I’ve done so many terrible things…to Alistair, to Shinobu…but mostly to Quin.” He lifted his head and looked across the fire at the Young Dread, his face vulnerable. “She should hate me, Maud. I deserve her hate. My mind’s been so narrow and so wrong…”

  The Young Dread let silence fall between them. Then she said, “We have all done things we regret, John. The question is how to change.”

  “Can I change?” he asked her.

  The Young Dread studied the coals for a while, watching the pulse and dance of the heat. Their sprint to the cave had changed not only John’s mind, it had changed her own. When she spoke, it was in her steady way, but she felt the words more deeply than most she’d uttered.

  “I have realized something about your mother today,” she told him. “She asked me, many years ago, about the Dreads, about the Middle Dread. She wanted to be rid of him—to help other Seekers and to help me, though I brushed her off and ordered her away. She wanted to be rid of him, and she wanted to become a Dread.”

  John’s tears had stopped, and he was watching her closely. “To become a Dread?”

  She considered her words before she spoke again. She said, “I do not wish to be called the Middle Dread. That name has been ruined. And yet I cannot be the only Dread in the world. We Dreads must take turns moving through time, often one stretched out while the other is awake. To make this possible, I must train another, just as I was trained. And with that other, I must learn the purpose and use of all of my master’s tools. Whoever I train must help me learn everything I must know.”

  He was looking at her almost as if in a trance.

  “John,” she said, “I can train you enough to be sworn as a Seeker. You will make it to your oath, I am certain. But I believe you could be more than a Seeker.”

  His voice was scarcely a whisper as he asked, “Do you mean me? Train me to be a Dread?”

  “I cannot say that you would succeed. But it is possible.”

  She watched him absorb her words. After some time, he asked, “My mother…wanted this?”

  “I believe she did.”

  He was quiet, and Maud watched the dance of orange light across his face. John didn’t look sad anymore; he looked as though he stood at the edge of a cliff and was deciding whether or not he would jump.

  At last, he asked, “Do you feel…human? After spending so much time There? Or do you lose your humanity?”

  It was nearly the same question Catherine had asked her years ago, in the woods on the estate: Would it be hard for someone like me? A life like yours? Catherine’s question had stayed with her, and Maud knew she had no answer for it. Had she lost her humanity? If you became different from every other person who had ever lived on the earth, were you still one of them? Or did you become something else?

  Eventually she said, “I’ve felt happiness and hatred. And compassion, John—I have felt compassion for you and for your mother, and others. But Dreads must stand apart.”

  “Would I…would I ever be able to love a girl? Or become a father?”

  “We Dreads do not…become intimate,” she answered. She heard the steadiness of her voice and wondered if that very steadiness was arguing to him against becoming a Dread. From what she’d glimpsed of men and women, or boys and girls, they didn’t want perfect steadiness from each other. They wanted passion. She had a sense of what that word meant, but no experience of it.

  “But who is ‘we’?” he asked. “If you are the only active Dread, can’t you decide what it means to be a Dread?”

  For a fraction of a second, Maud took offense at the insolence of his question. But why shouldn’t he ask? She was suggesting he do far more than be her student. She was suggesting he change himself in a fundamental manner.

  In a flash of clarity, the Young Dread saw him differently, and herself differently as well, as though she were seeing through John’s eyes. She looked down at her hands and extended them in front of her, marveling at the very ordinariness of them, their similarity to the hands of every other person alive.

  “Is that sort of feeling…that sort of love…is it so very important?” she asked him. She could almost hear herself saying, It is only love, in the way she often said It is only pain.

  “I don’t know,” John whispered. “Maybe. I—”

  But she rose to her feet, cutting him off. There was noise in the dark tunnel at the back of the cave. “Extend your hearing,” she told him quietly.

  John was still very much a novice, but he was getting better at this skill. “Someone’s coming through the tunnel,” he said after a moment.

  The Young Dread nodded. It was what she’d heard as well.

  They waited a long while as the dragging gait got closer and closer, pausing frequently and moving in irregular bursts. They were hearing the footsteps of someone forcing himself on when his body didn’t wish to comply. And it was someone small, Maud thought, judging by the lightness of the tread. She let her hands rest on the weapons at her waist.

  At last the footsteps were only yards away, and then a figure shuffled around the final bend of the icy tunnel and stood bathed in the weak glow of their coal fire. The apparition raised an arm against the light as though it were so bright as to be blinding. The figure wore two cloaks and so many clothes that its body disappeared inside them, and yet it managed to convey the impression of being half frozen.

  Maud recognized the visitor. It was the youngest Watcher, the one who looked perhaps twelve years old. He lowered his arm as his eyes became accustomed to the light in the cavern, revealing a dirty, swollen, freckled face. He looked from Maud to John and then back again. If he knew them from their earlier encounters, he gave them no indication.

  After he’d stood in the mouth of the tunnel for a long while, he suddenly plunged a hand inside his layers of clothing. He drew out a small dark shape and hurled it viciously onto the ground at Maud’s feet.

  It was a rat, frozen solid.

  “What’s the point!” the boy yelled. “It d
ied in the cold! I was supposed to die here in my cave with it.”

  His eyes swept the chamber and grew wide when he spotted something behind the Young Dread. Without warning, the boy threw himself across the cave at a run, knocking past her as he went. He seized upon their pile of supplies like a jackal onto a freshly killed carcass.

  In two quick leaps, the Young Dread got hold of him. She grabbed fistfuls of his clothing and pulled him well off the ground. His dirty fingers were groping for the focal, but she nudged it away with her foot.

  “I need it!” he cried. “I need the helm! Please! Please!”

  And then, suspended in Maud’s grasp, the focal out of reach on the floor, he burst into tears.

  When Shinobu woke up again, it was nearly evening. The rain had stopped, and the setting sunlight lit the heavy clouds from below, dividing the world into a gray heavens and a radiant underworld of pink and orange and blue. Quin lay wrapped in his arms, and the two of them lay wrapped in his cloak on a bed of straw, and Shinobu thought he would be happy to never sleep any other way ever again.

  “Quin,” he whispered.

  He felt her hand tighten around his arm, but otherwise she didn’t move. She was really rather small, when he held her like this. And yet Quin wanted to change the course of all Seekers. Shinobu wanted that also, but he knew that, if left to his own devices, he would probably choose less noble ways to spend his time. It was Quin who inspired him to be better. It had always been that way.

  He propped himself up on an elbow and looked at her, asleep and using his sweater for a pillow. The otherworldly light from the sky touched her skin, and he thought it was fitting. There was something so determined and unafraid about this small girl, Quin Kincaid, that she was otherworldly to him. He made a vow to himself: I will live up to her. And I will protect her.

  It bothered him that even in this moment he was still thinking about the focal. He was aware of its exact physical distance from him (under the pallet on which they were lying, about a foot from the edge), and if he let his mind linger on it, he began to feel a visceral urge to pick it up and put it on.