Seeker

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  Quin started to go after her, but Shinobu put a hand on her shoulder, holding her still.

  “They see her too!” he whispered.

  He was right. Three of the men on horseback were galloping after Fiona.

  “Look,” Shinobu said.

  The lead horseman was now clearly visible. He wore a mask, but they would have recognized him anywhere.

  It was John. She had known it would be him, but actually seeing him in a mask, burning the estate, was a different matter. And he was riding straight for Fiona.

  “It’s Briac he hates,” Quin said quickly. “He’s always hated him. He won’t hurt my mother. I know he won’t. Should we help him, Shinobu? He only wants …”

  She trailed off as the three horsemen caught up with Fiona. Two men grabbed her and pulled her roughly into a saddle. All the way across the meadow, she could hear her mother cursing at them.

  Quin was on her feet. Shinobu seized her arm and pulled her back down again. “What are you doing?”

  In the distance, Fiona screamed. One of the men had slapped her, and now her hands were being tied.

  “I—I have to go talk to him.”

  “No!” hissed Shinobu, keeping a tight grip on Quin’s arm. “He’s attacking us. He’s burning the estate. He might do anything, do you understand? Hurt your mother, hurt you. He’s not your boyfriend now. He’s different! If we want to get away with Fiona, we need better weapons.”

  Quin stilled, Shinobu’s words sinking in. “You’re … you’re right.” With great effort, she turned away from John. He was … She didn’t know what he was at this moment. Was he against her, or only against Briac? Would he truly hurt them?

  She watched Fiona still struggling with the men across the commons. They were plainly willing to injure her, and Quin was determined to get her mother off the estate alive.

  “Do you know where they keep the guns?” Shinobu asked. “Are they at your house?”

  “They weren’t in the training barn?”

  Shinobu shook his head. “Come on. We’ll check both houses.”

  He took her hand, and together they ran toward the burning cottages, still keeping to the trees. They passed the cabin that had been John’s. It too had been set alight, and very recently. The furniture inside was burning, and smoke poured out the door. There was no reason to burn everything. It was an act of pure hatred.

  At the edge of the forest, they sprinted across an open space to Quin’s cottage. But it was hardly a cottage anymore. By the time they reached it, Quin’s home was completely engulfed in flames.

  CHAPTER 13

  MAUD

  The Young Dread stood with the Middle Dread far from the cottages and the barns. They were atop a small hill within the forest, their backs against tree trunks, their cloaks wrapped around them, all but invisible. From her vantage point she could see the homes burning—all of them, except the cabins of the Dreads.

  There was a dull throbbing in her cheek where the Middle had struck her. She’d arrived at his cottage after her furious run, but before her mouth could open to form the words explaining that they were under attack, his fist had found her cheek. She’d begun her explanation anyway. Within moments, at the Middle Dread’s orders, they had gathered up every one of their weapons and melted into the forest.

  A woman was yelling down on the commons. It was the woman with red hair—Fiona was her name. The Young Dread watched as two men beat out the fire in her hair and lifted her onto one of the horses. Maud threw her sight and hearing, watched closely as one of the men struck Fiona, and the young man she recognized—despite his mask and the harsh metallic sound of his altered voice—tied up her hands.

  “Don’t hit her!” that one said in his strange voice. “I don’t want to hurt her!” Then to Fiona, “Please, please stop struggling. I only need Briac.”

  “I wish to help them,” the Young Dread said. The words came out of her rhythmically, sedately, just as her body walked and her mind thought. Her voice did not seem to carry emotion, even though she felt it. “Several of them are sworn Seekers.”

  The Middle’s arm swung around and slapped her other cheek. She had known he would do this. In her altered time sense, she had watched his arm coming toward her like a storm in the distance. She could have moved out of the way, but there was no reason. He would find another time to hit her, and more severely, if she did not accept his slap now.

  She desired to help the inhabitants of the estate—especially if she could do so without harming the apprentice in the mask. But this was not their duty, in fact. Sworn Seekers were meant to have autonomy. The duty of the Dreads was to observe, to oversee the oaths of new Seekers, and only in certain circumstances to become involved. What was happening now—a squabble over control of the athame by two families who could make equal claims—was not their domain. Even her old master would agree with the Middle on that. Their duty was only to protect the athame of the Dreads, which hung safely inside her companion’s cloak, close to the hand he had just used to strike her.

  It was not their duty to interfere. Yet they had interfered in the past. A thought came to the surface slowly: A woman with light brown hair, a boy hiding under the floor … They were not supposed to interfere, and yet they had. And look what happens. Out on the commons, the young apprentice in the mask was yelling orders to the others. The boy becomes a man, and the man is angry …

  CHAPTER 14

  QUIN

  Through the window of her burning home, Quin could see flames consuming their kitchen table and licking up from the seams in the wooden floor. The sitting room walls, with their old display cases of weapons, were fully ablaze, as were the timber beams of the roof. The house was throwing off so much heat she couldn’t get close to it. Any guns that might have been hidden inside were as good as gone.

  Shinobu had gone separately to search his own home, so Quin was alone as she scanned the area around her cottage. A short distance away was a stone shed that had not yet been reached by the fire. Even so, waves of heat came at her as she grabbed the old lock on the shed door and twisted the combination into it. Quin threw the door open, exposing their weapons.

  Her whipsword was already at her waist, but she grabbed knives and her cloak. She felt carefully around the shed’s walls, trying to locate a hidden compartment where Briac might keep other weapons. It would be very like her father to hide things from her, yet she found nothing.

  A loud crack, almost like a shotgun going off, cut through the roar of the fire. Quin backed away from the shed in time to see the cottage roof caving in. The huge crossbeam beneath it had split, and enormous sheets of slate were tumbling inward.

  The chimney fell sideways as the roof gave way below it. Quin leapt backward as the entire column of masonry crashed into the shed, leveling it as though it were made of paper. She staggered out of the way as hot stones rained down around her.

  But as the falling masonry settled, she discovered something flat, hard, and painted now visible below the rubble of the shed. She dropped to her knees and dug. There was metal. She covered her face as fresh air poured into the house fire and a new blast of heat hit her. Then she grabbed handfuls of earth and stones to uncover a vault, sunk into concrete beneath the soil.

  There was no obvious way to open the vault. It must have been designed to be accessed only by Briac’s touch. This chamber was more secure than necessary for guns. There was only one item on the estate precious enough for this sort of hiding place.

  The temperature was getting unbearable. She drew her whipsword and flicked her wrist a few times, shaping the weapon into a thick dagger that tapered to a needle point. Then she smashed the sharp tip straight down onto the edge of the vault, where the hinges for the door must be. The sword bounced off, leaving a tiny dent.

  She set the tip of the dagger back into that dent. The material of a whipsword could be manipulated down to the molecular level, if you could master the subtle motions required. Quin cleared her mind and focused, ignoring
the waves of heat that threatened to light her hair on fire. She put her wrist through a series of minute movements, ordering the sword to narrow its tip and extend farther.

  The wind changed, and smoke buffeted her. She closed her eyes and shifted her wrist again, envisioning the tip extending farther, drawing itself out into a point so narrow, it could cut its way through metal.

  She felt the sword move down through the surface of the vault, almost imperceptibly. She manipulated it again, tapering the edges so they were just as sharp as the point. As she did, the sword began to travel downward in a steady, continuous cut. It had pierced the metal. She dragged the weapon along the seam slowly, slicing as she went. A hinge gave beneath her hands, and then a second hinge. All at once, the cover came loose. Prying it up with the whipsword, she threw it aside.

  The athame and lightning rod were there, waiting for a Seeker, their master, to pick them up and use them.

  If she and Shinobu really meant to abandon the estate and everything on it, Quin knew she should not take the athame. She could leave it for her father and he would continue to use it as he always had. Or … or she could give it to John, who so desperately wanted it.

  She covered her face against the heat and tried to locate John through the smoke, but the air was black around her.

  She turned back to the vault. She could give the athame to John and ask him to release her mother. Or she could give it to him, calm him down, and ride off with him on the back of his horse. They would be together. His anger, this attack, they were only the result of Briac’s unjust treatment.

  But words came back to her from that afternoon in the barn by the cliff. What if we were to decide, Quin? John had whispered. We’d do a better job. We’d make the right choices. Good choices. It was easy to think you’d make the right choices when given power, but John didn’t understand what it was to hold life and death in your hands and to decide which one you would deliver.

  And if he did get the athame, he would need Quin to train him to use it. She would be helping him take his first steps There and beyond. She would be leading the way.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered as she took the stone dagger and rod from the vault and concealed them in her cloak. “I won’t be the one who turns you into Briac.”

  There was something else inside the metal box. It was a thick book with a leather cover and a leather tie around it. The cover was worn and shiny, as though many hands had touched it lovingly over many years. She flipped through the pages, discovering it was a journal of some kind. Much of it contained a neat, girlish script, but numerous other hands had left their mark as well. Some of the early pages held the sort of cramped script that had been in style long ago. And there were other pages written in beautiful copperplate, marred only by ink stains from a leaky fountain pen. There were also loose sheets of a fine, soft parchment—vellum, she thought, recalling one of her mother’s history lessons. These loose sheets were elaborately decorated, folded carefully, and tucked among the other pages.

  In her quick examination, she noted dozens of hand-drawn illustrations, many of them crude animal forms. Her eye was caught by one in particular, a diagram in an upper corner of one page: three interlocking ovals. Like a simplified drawing of an atom.

  There was a yell in the distance. Quin carefully tucked the book into a pocket of her cloak, and she was away, running from the cottage toward the trees.

  Shinobu had gone to his own house, to see if he could find the stash of guns. When she arrived at his cottage, however, she found that it too was a bonfire, falling in upon itself. Shinobu was not there.

  Across the commons to the south, there was a loud boom, as of something large and heavy falling to the ground. Quin turned, but there was too much smoke to find the source of the noise. She could, however, see as far as her own cottage, and there she spotted her father. He was emerging from the trees to the east of her location and making his way toward their burning house, ducking low to keep out of sight.

  Briac wore ordinary street clothes, and Quin realized that her father had been off the estate on one of his frequent trips—trips that usually led, a short time later, to another assignment that she and Shinobu would be asked to carry out. She didn’t know the secret means by which her father was contacted for these assignments, but clearly he had long ago established a method for the right sort of people to find him.

  Briac stopped some distance from their family cottage and looked south across the commons. The changeable wind had blown the smoke clear for a moment. Briac, and Quin as well, from her vantage by Shinobu’s burning home, could now see John’s group of horsemen gathered by the workshop. It was difficult to make out details at this distance, but one horse was carrying two people, one of whom had long, red hair. Her father watched the horsemen briefly, then continued on toward his cottage, without another look in her mother’s direction. He doesn’t even care, she realized.

  Briac would be searching for the athame and lightning rod when he reached their house, and Quin planned to be well away from him before he noticed they were gone.

  She and Shinobu had agreed, should they get separated, to follow Fiona. Quin began to move in that direction as the smoke closed in thickly again, hiding her from sight.

  CHAPTER 15

  JOHN

  The door exploded outward from the workshop, pulled off by ropes attached to running horses. Inside, John and his men found Alistair MacBain huddled over a workbench, headphones over his ears as he concentrated on a small mechanical device. A deep vibration emanated from this device, reaching well past the workshop itself. John could feel it in his own lungs.

  As the doors crashed onto the ground, the big man jumped to his feet in surprise, then turned to face the six of them. Alistair’s eyes quickly found the man with the disruptor and then took in Fiona being held on the farthest horse. He turned to John as he removed his headphones.

  “You need a mask to fight me?” he asked. “Where’s your honesty?”

  “I should ask you the same question,” John said, the small box strapped to his throat altering his voice into something demonic.

  “Cannae use your own voice, even?” Alistair asked. “Did I train a coward all those years?”

  John had known they would all recognize him, and still he couldn’t bring himself to enter the estate undisguised. He was here to get what was rightfully his. He knew he would have to terrify the inhabitants of the estate to do that, and it was easier to face them, to scare them, to order them, in a mask.

  And the mask was liberating. He’d kept his hatred of Briac under strict control for so long, but now, disguised, he could allow it to the surface. He’d set fire to his own cabin, deep in the woods. Briac had kept him there for years, isolated, like a stray animal allowed to sit at the edge of camp, close enough to see the campfire but not to feel its warmth. It was frightening how good it felt to let the hatred out, to watch that structure burn.

  His men had set fire to the other cottages before he’d been able to stop them, and he’d found it was a relief to watch them all burn, to destroy Briac’s home entirely. They were just houses, after all—his men had made sure they were empty before setting them alight. Though John didn’t mind the idea of hurting Briac, the others on the estate were a different matter. He wanted to keep them safe.

  He was relieved that he hadn’t seen Quin anywhere. She must have gone, as she’d told him she would do when they’d last been together. She was somewhere far away and safe.

  Now, sitting astride his horse outside the workshop, his eyes turned to the device on the table behind Alistair. It was like a vise grip, but instead of metal it was made of the same oily black substance as a whipsword. Held tightly inside it was an athame.

  John had never been allowed in the workshop before, had never seen this device. He looked again at the headphones, which were now hanging around Alistair’s neck. The vibration, he realized, was coming not from the vise but from the athame itself. Alistair was doing something to the dag
ger, tuning it, maybe, and the headphones provided protection for his ears.

  “Whose athame is it?” John asked in his distorted voice.

  “It happens it’s mine,” Alistair said. Then, more softly: “You were wondering if it was hers?”

  John slid off his horse and moved into the workshop, nodding to the man with the disruptor as he did so. This man ran his hand down the side of the weapon, and it crackled to life with a high whine.

  “Careful now,” Alistair said to the man. “That wee toy is dangerous. I bet he has not told you how dangerous.”

  John studied the athame inside the device. On the pommel was a tiny carving in the shape of an eagle—it was the symbol of Alistair and Shinobu’s family. It was not the carving he’d hoped to find, but any athame was better than none.

  “I told you, it’s mine,” Alistair repeated.

  John studied the vise itself. It was more complicated than it had seemed at first glance. The stone dagger was held tightly in several places. And there was a sort of razor hovering over the athame’s surface that could be used, John guessed, to shave off minute amounts of stone in order to make the dagger’s vibration perfect. Used incorrectly, though, the razor could likely cause harm. John reached a hand toward one of the levers, then stopped. He didn’t want to risk damaging the athame.

  “How do I get it out?” he asked, keeping his voice quiet, which made the words sound like a growl.

  “Can’t tell you that,” the big man said, keeping his eyes on the disruptor.

  It was hard not to like Alistair, who had, at one time, tried to help John’s mother. But John reminded himself that the big man had also been a faithful ally of Briac Kincaid for years. John was not going to leave without an athame; if Alistair helped him, everything would be easy and no one would be hurt. Slowly, keeping his hand steady, he raised his gun to Alistair’s head. “You can tell me. I know you can.”