Seeker (42 page)

Quin probably still loved John, but Shinobu would make her see. John was leaving. Briac was getting rid of him. She and Shinobu were the two who should be together. They could put last night behind
them, put the estate behind them, go somewhere where they would never look at their parents again. And one day, when they were safely away and alone together, she would turn to him and see him differently. And he would kiss her …

Reaching the barn doorway, he was startled to hear voices inside. He stopped at the threshold, listening. Quin was there and John was with her. John had gotten there first.

Moving silently, Shinobu stepped into the shadows of the barn. The two of them were up in the sleeping loft. They were speaking softly, but it sounded like they might be arguing. Shinobu thought they might be breaking up. He moved along the wall, and after a few moments, he could see John, standing by the round window up on that high platform.

He would wait in the shadows. She would send John out, and when he left, Shinobu would climb the ladder and convince her. Even if he were still just her cousin, that would be all right. The two of them could make a new life.

But John did not leave. As Shinobu watched, Quin stood up and moved over to him. In a moment, John’s lips were on hers and their arms were around each other.

Shinobu was in the manor house, on their first assignment. He saw Quin moving down the grand staircase, the two children from the nursery following close behind her. He knew immediately what she intended. He and Quin had already been forced to participate in killing the parents, but Quin was refusing to do more. She was taking the children away, she was helping them escape. She was defying Briac. The idea gave him strength.

Shinobu turned to look for his father. He could steal Alistair’s
athame and lightning rod and join Quin. With those, they could save the children and then go anywhere.

But when he looked, his father was nowhere to be found. And when he returned to the staircase, Quin was sitting with her head in her hands, and the children were gone.

Shinobu was in the commons, practicing with John. They were using ancient metal swords, and the clang of the blades echoed off the trees. Shinobu was twelve years old, and John thirteen.

Shinobu was a better fighter than John, but not by much—John had learned to fight even before coming to the estate.

John made a good parry, then struck out nicely at Shinobu. He blocked the blow, but its force was enough to drive him back a step.

“You’re learning,” Shinobu told him, a bit arrogantly.

“I’m stronger than you,” John replied.

“But I’m faster.”

He slapped John’s leg with the flat of his sword, causing him to jump backward.

“You grew up here,” John said. “Of course you’re faster.”

“My father says the estate is the best place for a Seeker to grow up. There’s something in the air, in the water, in the rocks.”

“Could be,” John said, “but my home’s safer.” At that age, John was always looking for ways to appear stronger, better, or more important—anything to make up for the fact that he’d come to his training four years late.

Shinobu neatly disarmed him and sent John’s sword flying into the grass. Then he let his own sword fall to his side.

“Why is your home safer?” he asked, curious now. “How could anything be safer than the estate?”

John got a look in his eyes like he’d made a mistake and wasn’t
supposed to be talking about this, but the temptation to brag was overwhelming.

“
Traveler
was made for me,” he said, searching through the grass to retrieve his sword. “A Seeker can’t get onto it. So I’ll always be safe from Seekers. Anyone could come onto your estate.”

“But they’d have to fight my father if they did,” Shinobu said, putting a hand to his chest. “And me.”

Then John found his sword and they were fighting again.

Shinobu was younger, in the commons again, sitting hidden at the edge of the meadow in grass that was nearly four feet tall. Bees were moving from flower to flower among the tall stalks, and there was a smell of honeysuckle in the air. Summer was beginning and the day was warm. Quin sat next to him cross-legged, her dark hair tied with a ribbon. They were nine years old.

Without warning, Shinobu leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek.

“Are you allowed to kiss me?” she asked, giggling.

“Why not?” he said. “Our parents are related, so we are too, and I always kiss my family. And we’ve started our training now, so we’re practically grown up.”

Quin thought about this, then leaned over and kissed him back.

“Och,” he said. “That’s disgusting.”

“Is not.”

“Aye, it is.”

He kissed her again. The two of them were eating bread and honey they had snuck from Fiona’s kitchen, so the kiss was a bit sticky.

Shinobu lay back, looking up at a sky framed by the tall grass. “My da says as long as there are two of you together, things are all right. My ma is dead, but there are still two of us, Father and me.
And we’re two,” he said, taking her hand. “You and I make two, so that’s all right.”

With that, Quin kissed him one more time, and this time her lips brushed against his own.

“You got my lips!” he exclaimed.

They broke apart, and each began spitting furiously on the ground.

“Why do grown-ups like it?” she asked.

“They’re strange.”

“Will we be strange when we grow up, do you think?”

“Definitely,” he said, and he kissed her again.

Shinobu’s arm struck something as he swam. He felt mud and silt squeezing through his fingers. He had reached the ocean floor. He’d arrived at the bottom of the harbor and at the beginning of his feelings for Quin.

His lungs were burning. In a few moments, his body would force him to gulp in seawater and he would drown. Yet his body had stopped shaking and his head was clear.

You bastard
, he thought,
that wasn’t poison at all!

At nine years old, lying in the commons with Quin, things had been good. Perfect, really. Between then and now, there had been a long list of very bad mistakes.

If I die now
, he thought,
they will always be mistakes
.

If he took in a lungful of water, he would freeze the past just as it was. But if he lived …

Shinobu brought his feet down against the harbor floor and pushed upward with as much force as his muscles would give. He struck up through the water, his arms pulling him, his legs kicking. His lungs were at the end of their tolerance. He would have to take a breath, even if it killed him. His body would inhale whatever was
available—seawater, silt, small fish, old diapers, anything. He must breathe, he must breathe.

And then he did. He drew in a great gulp and found that his face had broken the surface and he was sucking in the foggy night air of Hong Kong.

They left Briac Kincaid tied and blindfolded in what had once been the castle’s courtyard. The Young Dread’s master had packed Briac’s wounds with herbs again and given him valerian root to chew, which eased the pain a bit. He now lay half conscious beneath an overhanging bit of castle wall, moaning to himself in the morning light.

The Young Dread thought of Briac much as she thought of the Middle, and had difficulty feeling sorry for him. Even so, she was relieved when they passed down into the remains of the castle crypt, well below ground, and his cries were cut off from hearing by the earth above her.

The crypt, which still held the stone coffins of the ancient Scottish lords who had been her relatives, was half in ruins. Much of the castle floor above had crumbled, burying large portions of the space from sight. Their path, however, had been kept clear through the centuries, and this had been done by the Dreads. The Young herself had moved rocks aside a dozen times, yet she had never gone deeper than the crypt. Today she would.

The floor of the burial chamber slanted downward until it ended in what appeared to be a solid wall of rock. They followed this wall all the way to the right, and there the Middle Dread’s fingers felt along one of the natural folding seams in the uneven wall. After a moment, his hand slipped into a concealed channel—a handhold disguised within the pattern of the rock. The Old helped the Young place her own hands in the correct positions, and together the three Dreads, using all of their considerable strength, rotated a large slab of rock up and away from the wall.

Behind the slab were carved steps leading down into the earth. By the light of a burning torch, they descended far beneath the crypt, with the walls of rock pressing closer the deeper they went.

At last the steps opened on a larger space and the stairway ended. They passed through a long tunnel, its ceiling an arch of rough stones just above their heads. At the far end was another wall. Camouflaged between the stacked stones of the side wall and the smooth stone of the end wall was a jagged opening just large enough for a man to squeeze through.

Following her companions, the Young Dread slipped through the tiny gap to more stairs beyond. The walls of rock and soil were closer here, so close the men ahead of her were required to walk sideways. They continued down, soil brushing against their skin. The air was ancient and close, and their torch was filling it with smoke. But it was still possible to breathe.

At last, the stairs curved around in nearly a full circle. When the steps ended, the Dreads were let out into a space so large, it could only be called a cavern. It had the appearance of a natural formation, with a ceiling of rock hanging ten yards above their heads, its surface slick and wet in the firelight. Webs of tunnels branched off from the central chamber, but the torch showed only hints of how deep and far they might go.

As the Dreads moved into the cave and the Young’s eyes took in the enormous space for the first time, she became aware of a stretch of rock that had clearly been carved by human hands. There, the cavern’s natural uneven surface had been worked into a smooth wall. The other Dreads were heading toward it, and as they approached, the torchlight flickered over its even stone, revealing carvings along the surface. A group of images was chiseled so deeply into the rock that they would be visible for thousands of years. Perhaps they had been there for a thousand years already.

This place must belong to the Dreads
, the Young thought. She wondered how much of the Dread knowledge was still hidden from her, and then, suddenly, she thought,
How long has my master lived? He speaks of ancient things as if they were yesterday
. Was this cave his doing?

She counted ten carvings upon the wall, most depicting an animal. They were arranged in a circle, the topmost figure above her head, and the bottommost near her feet. Beneath each was a rectangular hole where a large piece of stone had been removed. Under each hole, chiseled painstakingly into the wall, was a diamond-shaped slot.

The wall threw off unexpected sparks of light when illuminated by the torch. This was not dull stone she was examining but something more precious. The torch cast an orange light, but the wall, she realized, was probably a grayish white, and luminous, like …

Like an athame
.

The carvings began to make sense. A horse, a fox, a ram, a boar, a stag, an eagle, a bear, and two creatures more fanciful: a dragon, and a wildcat with fangs. The final carving, the one at the very top of the circle, was not an animal but three ovals, interlocking. Like a flower perhaps, but more evenly shaped.

The Young Dread knew that symbol. It was carved on the pommel
of the athame of the Dreads, which at this moment was safely tucked into a pocket of her master’s cloak.

“The symbol?” her master asked.

They had been silent for so long, his voice came as a shock to her. It echoed off the distant ends of the cavern.

“A fox,” she replied.

“You are certain?” This from the Middle.

“I am certain. The other, the one with the eagle, was broken during the attack. I had many chances to study it.”
After you abandoned me to die on the estate
, she thought but did not add aloud.

Her master drew out the athame of the Dreads and slid it into the diamond-shaped slot beneath the carved image of a fox. The athame fit precisely into the hole, gliding in smoothly up to its hilt.

The other athames she had seen were all larger than her master’s, and so would not fit into the slots beneath the figures. These ten slots, then, must have been made only for this particular athame, the athame of the Dreads.

The Old and the Middle began to chant. As they did, her master drew a small metal rod from one of his many pockets. It was an object the Young had never seen before. Not for the first time, she wondered what treasures she would find if she were to empty out all the hidden contents of her master’s cloak.

The Old Dread tapped the metal rod rhythmically against the stone wall, next to the protruding hilt of his athame. As the metal hit the stone, the wall itself began to vibrate.

This went on for several minutes, the Old Dread tapping the wall in time to their chant. Soon the whole cave shook, as though the earth itself had taken up the tremor. When the vibration had become unbearable, and the Young was sure that rocks were about to start falling, the chant ended. The cavern steadied and the hum of the wall gradually died out.