“Match!” Quin’s father, Briac Kincaid, called from across the room, signaling the end of the fight.
She heard cheers from John and Shinobu. Quin pulled her weapon away from Alistair’s leg, and it re-formed into its dagger shape. Alistair’s own blade was stuck six inches into the hard-packed barn floor. He flicked his wrist, collapsing the whipsword, which snaked out of the ground and back into a coil in his hand.
They’d been fighting in the center of the huge training barn, whose old stone walls rose around the dirt floor with its covering of straw. Sunlight streamed through four large skylights in the stone roof, and a breeze came in the open barn doors, through which a wide meadow was visible.
Quin’s father, their primary instructor, stepped to the center of the floor, and Quin realized her fight with Alistair had been only a warm-up. The whipsword Briac was carrying in his right hand was a child’s toy compared to the weapon he wore strapped across his chest. It was called a disruptor. Forged of an iridescent metal, it resembled the barrel of an enormous gun, almost like a small cannon. Quin kept her gaze locked upon it, watching the metal flash as Briac moved through a patch of sunlight.
She glanced at Shinobu and John. They seemed to understand what she was thinking: Brace yourselves. I have no idea what’s happening now.
“It is time,” her uncle Alistair said, addressing the three apprentices. “You’re old enough. Some of you”—here he looked at John—“are older than you should be.”
John was sixteen, a year older than Quin and Shinobu. He should have taken his oath already, by the normal schedule, but he had started his training late—he’d been twelve, while Quin and Shinobu had started at eight. This was a source of ongoing frustration to him, and his cheeks reddened at Alistair’s comment, an effect quite noticeable on his fair skin. John was handsome, with a finely carved face, blue eyes, and brown hair with the faintest tint of gold. He was strong and quick, and Quin had been in love with him for some time. He flicked his gaze to her and mouthed silently: Are you all right? She nodded.
“Today you must prove yourselves,” Alistair continued. “Are you Seekers? Or are you poxy lumps of horse dung we’ll have to shovel up off the floor?”
Shinobu raised his hand, and Quin suspected he was going to say, It happens I am a poxy lump of horse dung, sir…
“This is no joke, Son,” Alistair said, cutting Shinobu off before his quips could begin.
Shinobu was Quin’s cousin, the son of the giant red-haired man who had just attempted to decapitate her. Shinobu’s mother had been Japanese, and his face had taken the best features from the East and the West and combined them into something nearly perfect. He had straight, dark red hair and a wiry body that was already taller than that of the average Japanese male. He turned his eyes to the floor, as if to apologize for making light of the moment.
“For you and Quin, this may be your final practice fight,” Alistair explained to Shinobu. “And for you, John, your chance to prove you still belong here. Do you understand?”
They all nodded. John’s eyes, however, were fixed on the disruptor strapped across Briac’s upper body. Quin knew what he was thinking: Unfair. And it was unfair. John was the best fighter of the three of them…except when there was a disruptor involved.
“Does this bother you, John?” Briac asked, slapping the strange weapon on his chest. “Does it hurt your focus? It’s not even on yet. What will happen when it is?”
John wisely did not answer.
“Take your weapons out of practice mode,” Alistair ordered.
Quin looked down at the grip of her whipsword. At the end of the hilt was a tiny slot. Reaching into a pocket in the old leather of her right boot, she drew out a small object like a flattened cylinder, made of the same oily black material as her sword. She slid this into the slot on the handgrip, her fingers automatically adjusting the tiny dials on the attachment. As the last dial moved into place, the whipsword in her hand gave off a delicate vibration, and immediately it felt different, as if it were ready to do what it was made to do.
She grabbed the tip with her left hand and watched it melt and puddle around her skin. Even “live” it would not harm her flesh. But everyone else’s flesh was now fair game.
Quin’s heartbeat was speeding up as she watched her father and Alistair taking their own whipswords out of practice mode. A “live” fight was no easy task. But if she did well, she was minutes away from her father’s approval, from joining her ancestors in the noble duties of a Seeker. Since early childhood, she’d been listening to Alistair’s stories of Seekers using their skill to alter the world for the better. And since the age of eight, she’d been training to develop those skills. If she succeeded now, she would finally be one of them.
John and Shinobu had finished adjusting their own whipswords, and the barn was now filled with a different sort of energy, a sense of deadly anticipation. Quin’s eyes met John’s, and she gave him a look that said, We can do this. He nodded subtly back to her. Be ready, John, she thought. We’ll do this together, and we’ll be together…
A high-pitched noise cut through the barn, so piercing that Quin wondered for a moment if it was only in her head. The look on John’s face was enough to tell her different. The strange cannon-like gun her father wore, the disruptor, had come to life. The base of it covered her father’s whole chest and had to be held in place with straps over his shoulders and around his back. The barrel was ten inches wide, and instead of a single hole, there were hundreds of tiny openings in the iridescent metal. These openings were randomly placed and of different sizes, and somehow this made it look worse. As the disruptor came fully alive, the high-pitched whine faded, replaced by a crackle of electricity in the air around the weapon.
Shinobu shook his head like he was trying to get the sound out of his ears. “Isn’t that toy a bit dangerous with so many of us fighting?” he asked.
“If you fail in this fight, you are very likely to be injured,” Alistair said, “or even…disrupted. Anything is fair today. Take a moment to understand this.”
The three apprentices had seen the disruptor fired before, had even practiced avoiding it in one-on-one drill sessions, but they had never seen it used in a live fight. The disruptor was made to instill fear, and it was working. Our purpose is worthy, Quin repeated to herself. I will not be afraid. Our purpose is worthy; I will not be afraid…
With his whipsword, Alistair hooked something floating in a metal trough at one side of the barn. The object was a heavy iron circle, about six inches across, covered in thick canvas and soaked in pitch. He sent it flying up into the air.
As the iron circle arced high above him, Alistair lit a match. The disc fell toward him, and he caught it again with his whipsword. He touched the match to it, and the three apprentices watched as it burst into flames. Alistair twirled the disc around his sword, an evil glint in his eye.
“Five minutes,” he said, looking up at the clock high on the wall. “Let no flames spread, keep yourselves alive and sane, have the disc in your possession at the end.”
The apprentices glanced around the barn. There were bales of straw against the walls, loose straw across the floor, racks of old wood holding fighting equipment, climbing ropes hanging down from the ceiling, not to mention the barn itself, with its wooden beams and rafters supporting the stone walls. In short, they would be tossing around the burning disc in a room full of kindling.
“No flames!” Shinobu muttered. “We’ll be lucky if we don’t burn the place to the ground.”
“We can do it,” Quin and John both whispered at the same time. A quick smile passed between them, and she could feel John’s arm pressing against her own, warm and strong.
Alistair tossed the disc high up into the rafters.
“Prove yourselves!” Briac roared, cracking out his own whipsword. Then he and Alistair ran toward the apprentices with their weapons raised.
“I’ve got it!” yelled Shinobu, leaping out of Alistair’s way and run
ning for the center of the barn, where the disc was now spinning down toward the straw covering the floor.
Quin saw Briac heading straight for John. Flicking his whipsword into the shape of a scimitar, Briac swung it in a wide arc aimed to slice John in half. She watched John’s whipsword flash out to block, and then Alistair was upon her.
“I have it!” yelled Shinobu as he landed the burning disc on his whipsword. It slid down toward his hand, the flames burning his fingers, and he had to spin it back up to the tip of his sword.
Alistair slashed at Quin, and she moved to one side, changing her sword into a shorter blade and striking at his back. He was already pivoting to meet her attack, turning her weapon aside.
“Not fast enough, lass,” he said. “You hesitate when you strike. Why? You’ll have the most precious artifact in the history of mankind in your hands, won’t you? You can’t hesitate. And when you’re There, when you step between, hesitation will be fatal.” This was Alistair’s mantra, which he’d been drumming into their heads for years.
John and Briac were exchanging blows. Briac looked like he had every intention of killing John as soon as he got the chance. Yet John was keeping up with him—he was a superb fighter when he focused. But a glance told Quin that John was fighting angry, and he was terrified of the disruptor. Sometimes you could direct anger and fear into useful energy. But usually, emotion was a disadvantage. It scattered your mind, made you spend energy unwisely.
Suddenly Quin realized that Alistair had backed her right into John, and now he was fighting them both. Briac was freed to turn toward Shinobu. The hum of the disruptor intensified to an unbearable volume.
“I’m tossing the ring!” Shinobu shouted. In the same moment, the disruptor on Briac’s chest fired. Shinobu threw the disc high up toward the rafters above Quin and John as the barrel of the disruptor released a thousand angry sparks of electricity. These sparks rushed through the air toward Shinobu, buzzing like a swarm of bees.
Shinobu hurled himself down beneath the volley and rolled away. With no human target to strike, the sparks collided against the back wall of the gym in bursts of rainbow-colored light.
“Got it,” John yelled, leaping away from the fight with Alistair and hooking the falling disc onto his own sword. A glob of pitch oozed off the metal ring and onto a bale of hay, immediately setting it on fire. John stamped out the flames as the disc fell down upon his hand, burning him.
“Shinobu!” he called, flinging the ring back toward the rafters. He jumped in front of Quin, taking her place under Alistair’s punishing blows, as Shinobu caught the disc across the room.
Quin tried to rest her sword arm for a moment, but Briac was coming with the disruptor. Sparks launched toward her, crackling and buzzing.
If she let those sparks reach her, she would never be free of them. They would not kill, but they would be the end of her. A disruptor field is worse than dying— Quin stopped her thoughts. She was going to be a Seeker, a finder of hidden ways. There was only the fight; consequences did not exist.
She jumped to the side, grabbing a climbing rope and swinging out of reach. The sparks from the disruptor passed by and danced along the wall behind her, dispersing harmlessly.
She landed behind her father. He was already turning, flicking his sword out into a slender, evil blade. Before she’d regained her footing, he struck, his weapon slicing through her shirt at her forearm and cutting into the skin underneath.
Blood began trickling down her arm, and there might have been pain, but she had no time to think about it. The high whine of the disruptor was building again.
Shinobu was fighting Alistair now. John had the disc again, and he was spinning it around his whipsword to keep it from burning his hand as he stamped out another fire on a bale of hay.
Briac turned, fired the disruptor again, this time at John.
“John!” yelled Quin.
He tossed the ring blindly as he saw the sparks racing toward him. Quin expected him to leap out of the way, but instead he was frozen, staring at those sparks, suddenly lost.
“John!” she yelled again.
At the last moment, Shinobu leapt away from his fight with Alistair and tackled John. The two apprentices sprawled safely out of the disruptor’s path. The sparks struck the wall where John’s head had been, disappearing in flashes of light.
Quin had forgotten the disc in her concern for John, and the fiery circle was bouncing across the floor, setting the straw in its path alight.
The disruptor was at its full whine once more. Quin saw the enjoyment on her father’s face as he fired it at John again.
John turned, transfixed. He was staring at the sparks coming at him, hypnotized by their awful beauty. Permanent—that’s what the disruptor was. If the sparks reached you, they took your mind and didn’t leave. And John was waiting to be hit.
She saw Shinobu kick John to the side, sending him out of the disruptor’s path a second time.
John fell to the floor, and this time he stayed down.
Quin retrieved the burning disc and stamped out the flames it had left along the floor. For the first time in the fight, she was angry. Her father was specifically targeting John. It was unfair.
She tossed the disc to Shinobu, ran across the barn, and slammed her body into Briac, knocking him and the disruptor to the ground. Sparks shot up toward the ceiling and bounced among the rafters in a chaotic pattern.
Quin brought her sword down at her father’s face as hard as she could.
“Match!” Briac yelled, before she could strike him. Instantly Quin obeyed his order and collapsed her whipsword.
Shinobu caught the flaming disc for the last time. Quin looked at the clock, astonished to find that only five minutes had passed. It had felt like a year. John slowly stood up from the floor. Everyone was breathing hard.
Briac got to his feet. He and Alistair seemed to share a silent assessment of the fight. Alistair smiled. Then Briac turned and walked toward the equipment room, limping slightly.
“Quin and Shinobu, midnight,” he called, without turning around. “We meet at the standing stone. You will have a busy night.” He paused in the doorway of the equipment room. “John, you have bested the others and even me many times, but I saw no evidence of that skill here. You will meet me in the commons at dinnertime. We will speak frankly.”
With that, he shut the door firmly behind him.
Quin and Shinobu looked at each other. Quin’s anger had disappeared. Half of her wanted to scream in delight. She’d never fought like that before. Tonight she would take her oath. The life she had been anticipating since childhood would finally begin. But the other half of her was with John, who stood in the center of the barn, staring at the floor.
The sun was getting low in the sky over the Scottish estate as John walked away from the training barn. He and Quin had left the barn separately, as they always did, but he knew she would be waiting for him.
A thousand years ago, there had been a castle on the estate, which had belonged to some distant branch of Quin’s family. The castle was in ruins now, its crumbling towers perched above the wide river that encircled the land. As he walked, he could see the very highest point of the ruins in the distance.
Now the estate was made up of ancient cottages, most built over the centuries from stones carried off from the castle. The cottages were dotted around the edge of a huge meadow, called the commons. It was spring now, and the commons was full of wildflowers. Beyond the meadow, the woods began, a tall forest of oak and elm that crept right up to overshadow the houses and marched away to the ruins and beyond.
Barns lay at one end of the meadow. Some had animals in them, but others, like the enormous training barn, were where the apprentices practiced the skills they would need as Seekers.
John walked through the shadows at the edge of the woods, then headed deeper into the trees. Even with his tremendous failure on the practice floor hanging over him, he felt his pulse quickening. He was entering
another world, when he was in the woods with Quin, away from the parts of his life that usually overshadowed everything. He hadn’t been alone with her in days, and finding her seemed more important than anything else at this moment.
She never chose the same spot to wait, but he must be getting close now. He was in their favorite part of the woods, where the canopies of the great trees touched overhead, blocking the sun and leaving the forest floor dark and quiet. A moment later, he felt hands encircling his waist and a chin sliding onto his shoulder.
“Hello,” she whispered into his ear.
“Hello,” he whispered back, smiling.
“Look what I found…”
She slipped her hand into his. Quin had dark hair cut chin length and a lovely face with ivory skin and large, dark eyes. Those eyes flashed at him mischievously as he followed. She led him to a stand of oaks that had grown in such a way as to create a tiny, secluded space in their center. She stepped through an opening between two of the trees and pulled John after her.
In a moment they were standing together inside the thicket. “It’s not exactly the finest room at the village inn,” she murmured.
“It’s better,” he said. “At an inn, you might be standing farther away.”
There wasn’t really enough room for both of them, and John was forced to pull her up against him, which was all right with him. He leaned down to kiss her, but Quin stopped him, putting her hands on either side of his face.
“I’m worried,” she whispered.
He could tell. He could feel it coming off her in waves, like heat off asphalt in the summer. She was right to be worried, of course. The knowledge they were being taught was ancient, and highly protected. And in John’s case, only perfection in his assigned tasks would win him the privilege of learning it. He was hardly a favorite of Briac’s. His failure in today’s fight was surely the excuse Briac had been looking for.
“I’ve never heard my father say anything quite so…final to you,” she said quietly. “What if he means to kick you out?”
The Young Dread Page 4
