Seeker

The Young Dread and the Middle Dread were perched in the branches of a huge oak tree near the edge of the forest, watching the apprentice with the mask. He was holding a knife in his hand, approaching Briac, who lay wounded in the grass of the commons. Briac began to yell.

“You cannot stand aside! You cannot stand aside!”

Though her companion stood as still as stone, his breath so slow and soft that even she had difficulty hearing it, there was a tension about the Middle Dread as he watched Briac.

“You must help me!” Briac called.

He is speaking to us, the Young Dread realized. No, she corrected herself, he is speaking to the Middle. Those two have secrets.

And the Middle was listening. She moved her head slightly to observe him. His body was tensing. He was preparing to speed up.

“Sir,” she said, forming the word with great concentration, “as you have said, we are only observers here.”

He could not strike her from where he was perched in the tree, and this time he didn’t even seem to consider it. His mind was on Briac only.

Out on the commons, the masked apprentice had also become aware that Briac was speaking to the Dreads.

He stood up and yelled into the air, “You must—”

But the rest of his words were swept away by the inhuman screech of his false voice. He tried to yell again, but his words were nothing but noise. The device changing his voice was no longer working properly.

“If he cuts me,” Briac called out, “I don’t know what I may say. Or what he may find. The book …”

The Young’s eyes were on the Middle. He was poised between slow and fast, his feet at the edge of the branch. The Middle was scared of something Briac knew—of something he might reveal. And the book. She remembered the book, and the boy beneath the floor.

The apprentice ripped something from around his throat and yelled out with his true voice, “You must stand aside. You have rules. He has broken them first!”

The Young threw her sight at Briac. He was bleeding heavily from his leg and shoulder, visibly losing strength. If they waited long enough, he would certainly bleed to death.

“Sir, he is right,” she said. “Briac first took the athame—”

The Middle sprang into action. He reached across the tree trunk and yanked her from the branch, throwing her to the ground. It was only ten feet, and she rolled into the fall easily, but the Middle’s reprimand was unmistakable. From the ground, she looked up at him. He had a crossbow in his hands, and a bolt was already pulled into place.

“I decide,” he told her. “You must obey.”

“Help me!” Briac yelled again.

The Middle loosed the crossbow bolt, and one of John’s men toppled off his horse.

“Fire on them,” the Middle commanded her.

The Young Dread sped herself up, had her own bow in her hands, an arrow nocked almost instantly. She let the shaft fly and watched as it hit another of John’s men in the shoulder, as she had intended, sending him to the ground.

The apprentice and his remaining men—only two of them now—were in disarray. The Middle loosed another bolt as one of the men tried to gallop away. The horse was hit, and the man went tumbling.

The apprentice had only one man left now. They were scrambling to disappear, the apprentice on foot, the other man, the man with the disruptor, still mounted. The Young Dread followed the apprentice with her arrow. She could kill him easily. She had only to release her right hand. And yet this was not her duty, no matter what the Middle said. To avoid interfering, he had stopped her from helping the others on the estate. For the same reason, he could not rightly order her to kill John. They had done too much already. The boy who was a man now, who was running for his life, was not their jurisdiction.

The Middle had sprinted into the open and was dragging Briac back toward the trees. She met him inside the edge of the woods, her bow back across her shoulders. Still at high speed, the Middle set Briac down and lashed out at her. The Young ducked his arm, but he had a dagger in his other hand and he’d already buried it in the side of her abdomen.

She stepped back, feeling the blade of his knife slide out of her, her hand grabbing at the wound. Blood spilled through her fingers.

The Young’s own hand shot out with a knife and cut the Middle across his chest.

“You did not kill him,” the Middle said. His voice was still speeded up, but his motions were already settling back into their sedate rhythm. His chest was bleeding, but he ignored the injury. “You should have killed him.”

The Young Dread didn’t answer him. She was ripping off a piece of her cloak and using it to stop the flow of blood from her abdomen. She tied another piece around her waist to hold the first tightly in place. She sensed her body growing weak, but as her old master had taught her, weakness meant little. You kept going regardless.

“Tie his shoulder,” the Middle ordered. He knelt at Briac’s left leg to make a tourniquet above the bullet wound. The Young knelt on the other side, stopping the blood at Briac’s shoulder.

When they were finished, Briac had almost gone unconscious. The Middle leaned over him and pulled up an eyelid.

“Where is the book?” he asked. The wound on the Middle’s chest was dripping onto Briac’s shirt, but still the Middle paid no attention to the gash.

“Safe,” Briac mumbled. “As long as I am.”

“Where?” the Middle demanded.

“Safe …”

With that, consciousness left Briac. The Middle shook him violently, but he did not wake up.

As the Young Dread watched this, she fell over onto the ground. Throwing her mind into her wound, she saw that it was trickling slowly now, matching her own speed. When he’d first cut her, however, the blood had poured out, moving at the pace of her own battle motions. She could see an enormous puddle of it soaking into the ground nearby. Injury meant little, but with enough blood spilled, her body would simply stop working.

The Middle stood over her, tearing a strip from his cloak. As he did, he prodded the Young’s wound viciously with one of his feet. He was looking down at her as she’d seen him look at small animals—as though her pain was delightful to him. She could not move away, but neither would she cry out.

From a pocket of his cloak, the Middle drew out the athame of the Dreads. It was smaller than the other athames, more finely made. Lying on the ground, the Young could see the carving in the base of the handgrip: three interlocking ovals. The Middle slid the delicate lightning rod from where it lay concealed in a groove at the back of the athame. When he struck them together, the vibration washed over her.

Carving a circle in the air, the Middle cut through the fabric of the world and opened a doorway to There. He grabbed Briac around the chest and yanked him up into his arms.

“You may die now,” he said to Maud.

Then, holding Briac, he stepped across the threshold of the anomaly and into the darkness beyond.

The Young Dread could see the Middle through the doorway. He had set Briac down and was tying up his own bleeding chest wound with the strip he’d torn from his cloak. The Young grabbed at the earth, dragging herself toward that doorway, its border pulsing with energy flowing inward to that place. But her body would not follow her orders. She had moved only a few inches when the tendrils of dark and light began to lose their shape, seething into each other and collapsing. A moment later, the anomaly was gone, taking the Middle Dread with it.

He had promised not to harm her, but the chaos on the estate had given him an irresistible excuse. One day, when he had to explain to her master what had happened to her, he could blame her death on John’s attack.

She let her head rest on the ground. The forest floor was cool against her cheek. Slowly, her eyes closed.