“Nothing,” she answered, also in French. “It’s all right. Come with me.”
The boy was too frightened to move.
“Come with me,” she said again, more roughly now. There was no time to lose.
She pulled the covers off him and reached for his hands.
There was a louder scream from the other room. It might have been a woman’s voice, but it was hard to tell.
The boy started to cry.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll take you out of here.”
He didn’t want to go with her but didn’t know how to refuse. She took his hands and moved with him to the doorway. She could see the others, off in the larger room at the end of the hall. No one was looking in her direction at that moment.
She threw the edge of her cloak around the little boy. Holding him tight, she ran down the corridor, down the stairs. In a moment, they were out the side door and moving away.
She picked him up as she ran across the grass. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“Away from here,” she whispered into his ear. “I’ll keep you safe.”
As she ran with the boy in her arms, Quin knew she was dreaming. This was not real; this was not how it had happened. But for this one moment, she was making the right choice, the choice she should have made, and she was filled with happiness. It was not the truth, but it felt good to be brave and noble, even in a dream.
CHAPTER 33
JOHN
John stood against Quin’s closed bedroom door, watching her sleep. She was, at this moment, smiling into her pillow as though caught in the grip of a delightful dream. Is she dreaming about me, he wondered, as I have dreamed of her?
But many of his dreams about her hadn’t been pleasant. The last time he’d seen her, she had been on the other side of that strange portal, blood spreading across her chest. A stray bullet from his own gun had nearly killed her, and the memory of it was like an icicle to his gut. How could I have let that happen?
When he’d arrived in her office downstairs, he had expected her to scream and call for help, or to attack him—either would have been justified. Instead, though she seemed to know his face, she hadn’t even remembered his name at first. Somehow Quin had started her life over. Was it possible she didn’t remember the events of her last night on the estate? And if so, could that mean he was forgiven? That he had another chance with her?
“How did you manage to forget?” he asked her softly, returning to the bed.
Quin shifted in her sleep but didn’t wake up. Gently John unbuttoned the neck of her shirt and pulled it back. He didn’t want to look but felt compelled by guilt. By her left shoulder, he found the scar where his bullet had exited her body. The mark was round and puckered and still red. He guessed that it must bother her from time to time. A few inches closer to her heart, and she surely would have died.
“I thought I killed you,” he whispered, feeling again the horror of that moment. “I thought you were dead.”
He lay down next to Quin and closed his eyes. The smell of her brought back vivid memories of their last afternoon among the trees.
“I don’t want to be alone in this,” he whispered. “I need you back.”
“Need you,” she murmured. She was still asleep, the smile from her dream lingering on her face.
When he felt her hand against his cheek, he leaned forward and brushed her lips with his own. Quin pulled him closer and sleepily wrapped her arms around him.
“Why did we never …” she began, starting to wake up.
“I wanted to,” he whispered.
She moved her head into the crook of his neck. “John.” She said his name against his skin, like it was a foreign word she had just learned, “John.”
He put his arms around her, feeling the length of her against him. There will be many things that try to pull you from the path. Hatred is one, and love is another … He wanted to tell his mother and Maggie to be silent. Couldn’t he live a day or a week or a month in peace? Couldn’t he have Quin to himself for a while? But the promise he had made lay like a glowing ember at the center of his heart, and their words were always in his mind.
He needed Quin’s help. And there wasn’t even time to prepare her for what he was about to ask. There were signs of Fiona all over the house. Quin didn’t live here alone, and at some point, Fiona would be back. John had burned the estate and shot her daughter. He was quite certain Fiona would not give him a warm welcome.
In fact, it was even possible, if Fiona were clearheaded, that she had already sensed something amiss and was heading back to check on things. He must convince Quin now.
“Quin … will you help me?” he whispered. “I need your help.”
Quin’s lips were on his cheek. “Of course I’ll help you,” she whispered. “Anything.”
She might still have been half asleep, but he allowed himself to hope.
He sat up and shifted to the side, giving her a clear view of what was lying on the chair by the door to her bedroom: the athame.
Immediately the spell was broken.
Quin moved away from him and slid up into a sitting position, her back against the wall, her arms around her body.
“What is that?” she asked. “Why is it here?”
“Quin,” he said gently, “you know what it is. It might take you a moment to remember—like when you saw me downstairs. But you know what it is.”
“I don’t.”
“Please don’t be scared. It’s just us here—”
Without warning, Quin was on her feet, bolting for the door. John scrambled to get there first, blocking her path.
“Let me out,” she said. “Let me out of here!”
She pushed him, but John didn’t move aside. His back was pressed against the door, holding it shut.
“It’s just lying there,” he said. “We’re not even touching it. It’s all right, Quin. Please.”
But she was in a panic. “Get out of my way, John!” Louder, she called, “Ma! Fiona!”
“You don’t have to handle the dagger. You don’t even have to look at it. I only need you to teach me.”
She wasn’t listening. She swung at him, and her hand connected with his cheek. “Let me out of the room! Mother! Mother!”
Then her knees gave, as they had done downstairs. She fell to the floor. “That’s not me,” she whispered. “Not anymore. I do good things …”
John knelt down. “I’m not trying to hurt you. I want to be with you. I only—”
“I’m going to be sick … I’m going to be sick …” she was muttering. “Let me out, please.”
She really did look like she might throw up.
He pulled her gently to her feet and walked her out of the bedroom. When he took her into the bathroom, Quin dropped to the floor by the toilet, clutching her stomach. Away from the athame, however, she calmed a bit. He crouched next to her, trying to get her to look at him.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “I don’t want to feel what I feel around you.”
“You stayed on the estate. You know how to use the athame—”
“Don’t talk about it!” she whispered.
“I have to. Briac is gone. Alistair …” At the memory of Alistair, John fell silent for a moment, overcome by regret. It was an accident, he reminded himself. And he could have helped me. He could have done what was right. He pushed those thoughts from his mind and concentrated on Quin. “You’re the only one,” he told her. “Or Shinobu—is he here? Is he with you?” He hadn’t thought much about Shinobu, but the sudden idea that he might still be with her brought on a deep pang of jealously.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she breathed.
Maybe she’d forgotten Shinobu too. That was good. “Show me how to get There,” he told her. “Teach me. Then I’ll go, if—if you want me to go.”
“That’s not me anymore,” she told him. “I don’t do those things.”
“Teach me, and you—you never ha
ve to see me again.”
“John …”
“My grandfather can’t help me much longer. He can hardly help himself,” he said desperately. “I promised, Quin. I have it back now. Please show me—”
“Stop!” Her hands were over her ears, and she was rocking back and forth on the floor. “I don’t remember those things! I don’t remember them. They’re behind me.”
He gently took hold of her shoulders.
“Don’t you see that everything can be okay?” he whispered to her. “We’re here—just us. Together, we can get past all the bad things that have happened. Start deciding what’s right for ourselves.”
“Stop, please—”
“I love you.” He pulled her hands off her ears. “Will you please help me?”
He was holding her hands, kneeling in front of her. The look on her face was like that of a wild animal cornered in the woods.
“Come on,” he said softly. “Won’t it be nice to be together? Like we always imagined. Teach me about the athame.”
Quin’s eyes were frantic. Without warning, her head shot forward, slamming into John’s forehead, stunning him in a blossom of pain.
She scrambled to her feet, reeled against the bathroom doorframe, and then she was away from him and running down the stairs.
“Quin!”
He was on his feet. He grabbed the athame and moved down the stairs after her.
But she was already at the front door. She threw it open and flew out. He reached the doorway in time to see her push through a crowd of pedestrians, then crash into one of them, sending herself sprawling onto the Bridge thoroughfare.
John could still feel her lips against his, but he hadn’t been able to hold on to her. Again, he’d failed to convince her, and she was abandoning him.
He watched as she disentangled herself from the pedestrian and was back on her feet, running. She was getting away, but John was no longer seeing Quin or the Bridge. He was seeing the slumped figure of a five-year-old boy, lying by his dead sisters. He was seeing a dozen bodies, drowned, pinned to walls. He was seeing a young woman, so like his own mother, screaming as Briac Kincaid made her bleed to death. He had promised all of them.
Were there other Seekers who could teach him the secrets of the athame? Somewhere, John believed, there must be. But Quin was here, now. He needed her to help him, even if he had to force her. And he believed, deep down, she wanted to help. Wouldn’t she understand in the end and forgive him?
John brought his eyes back into focus on the Bridge. He gestured to the men outside Quin’s house—men he had brought, but whom he’d dearly hoped would not be necessary. They materialized around him from their hiding places and moved into the crowds, following Quin’s trail.
CHAPTER 34
MAUD
The Young Dread’s mind did not wander. It would travel in one direction as long as it needed to, and then it would travel in another. A single thought might linger indefinitely, if she were not yet done with it. The thought that had been holding her attention for a very long while was this: I am going to kill the Middle Dread.
Sometimes she imagined killing him in a sword fight, sometimes with poison, sometimes with a knife in his sleep. These were not daydreams—she was planning. For now, however, it was a plan without action. The Middle was far away, perhaps already training her replacement.
She had fed the cows and was now milking them. There were only two left, but these helped keep her alive. When the pail was full of milk, she carried it from the dairy barn across the commons toward the workshop. Like the dairy, it was one of the few buildings on the estate that had not been burned in the attack.
All along the commons, charred timber and piles of scorched stone stood in place of the warm cottages that had once dotted the landscape. At the edge of the forest, large swaths of trees had burned as well. The cottages of the Dreads had been left intact, but staying there seemed like sharing an intimate space with the Middle Dread, and so she had chosen the workshop instead.
Her stately stride was perfect for carrying milk, and the liquid hardly moved in the bucket. There was a dull ache in her left side, where the Middle Dread had cut her, but pain meant little. It was only the lack of training that bothered her. For a year and a half she had been here alone, aging.
Life without training is water poured on sand. The words ran through her head like a chant as she walked. No time is mine. No place is mine. No one is mine.
That night in the woods, when the Middle had left her and told her to die, she’d almost obeyed him. Her life had drained out of her injury, soaking into the forest floor. Her eyes had closed, and she’d wondered what happened to someone like her when death came. Would it come upon her in a single, clear moment, or would it be as it was when you were stretched out, suspended in an endless moment that lengthens into all of time?
On that night, hovering at the edge of death, she felt herself slowing down and realized her old master had trained her even for this. She brought her body almost to a stop, but not quite. Her heart still beat, once or twice a minute; air still came gradually into her lungs. She stopped dying and lay there in a state of near death.
In this way, she passed the whole night, and she was alive when the sun rose the following morning. Sometime that day, the farmworkers came to the estate, and eventually, in their search for survivors, they found her among the trees. They thought she was dead until she moved a hand to grab one of their ankles. She heard the men’s yells of surprise, and then they were lifting her and carrying her away.
She spent a month or more in a strange, tall building filled with doctors, where they did odd things to her blood and her skin and her bones. Her first language was the old speech they had used when she was a child. She had then learned English in its many forms as it changed over generations, but it was difficult to understand the new words of those men and women who hovered around her bed and poked at her with metal devices.
And then she was back on the estate, with a long red scar on her side, fending for herself. She could hunt, and there were the cows. Survival did not trouble her, but being alone did. She was not lonely—solitude was pleasant after so many years in the company of the Middle. It was the fact that there was no one to teach her and no one with whom she could practice. Even the Middle, as unpleasant as he was, had fulfilled his duty toward her some of the time and passed on the skills of the Dreads.
“Your own teacher did that to you?” the apprentice asked her when he returned to the estate.
He had been looking at her scar, visible beneath the edge of her shirt, and his attention disturbed her. This apprentice, the one who had worn the mask and who had attacked the estate—his standing among Seekers was unclear.
He had shown up a few months after the Young Dread returned from the hospital. She’d found him sitting in the workshop among her own weapons one evening when she arrived home with a pheasant for dinner. John. That was his name. And he was there, among her things.
“Are you all alone?” he asked her.
Without response, she went about her normal routine, building the cooking fire, plucking the bird. He helped her, without speaking much. The Young Dread found herself on guard around him, but he fascinated her as well. She’d caught glimpses of him at earlier ages, but now here he was, perhaps the same age as she was. What had those intervening years been like for him, after—after that night, when she’d seen the glint of his small eyes beneath the floor?
Her fascination was intensified by the fact that she’d spent almost no time with people her own age. True, it was hard to say exactly how old she was, but if she counted up her time spent in the ordinary world, she would be fifteen now, by the usual reckoning.
When they were sitting near each other, eating the pheasant, they finally began to converse.
“The athame Briac Kincaid used was stolen from my family,” he told her. “You know that, don’t you?”
In her slow way, she responded, “It is our law that an athame m
ust stay with its family, but Seeker families have become tangled things, apprentice. Within a family, we Dreads believe the athame ends up with whom it belongs.”
“And it will,” he said. “It will end up with me.”
She said nothing to this.
“When I have gotten it back,” he went on, “I will need training to use it properly. Don’t you think it would be fair for you to help me with that?”
She sat in silence for a while as a thought formed in her head. Finally she told him, “That is not my duty.”
It was then that he noticed her scar. She tried to hide it with her arm when she saw the direction of his eyes, but it was too late. He asked her how she’d received the injury, and she told him. She was not sure why she told him, other than her strange sense of obligation to him, which had begun on that night years ago.
“If your own companion left you to die, your duty to him is done, don’t you think?” he asked. “But if you believe you owe him your loyalty, couldn’t you teach me to use the athame, then return to him after I’ve learned the skill—if you wish to return to him?”
“If I wish,” she repeated, trying to understand the meaning of those words.
“Or you could stay with me,” he suggested. “Teach me. Be your own master.”
Her hand flashed out, grabbed his left arm, and turned it over, her fingers like a vise. She studied his wrist, which was perfectly smooth, with no athame burned into it.
“You have no mark. You are no Seeker,” she told him.
“Briac has done me an injustice.” He must have seen something in her face, because he added softly, “You’ve seen part of that injustice, haven’t you?” He looked down at the soft, old leather of her shoes. “I always wondered who the smaller person was. Until one day I realized I did know. It was you.”
She didn’t answer, but she recalled John as a young boy, huddled in that hiding place beneath the floor, closing his eyes tight as though that could stop the terrible things he was seeing. They had done too much then; they had done things that were not their duty at all. Could one do other things to make up for those?
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