Seeker

Quin was on all fours next to the fire, retching onto the ground. Shinobu was on his knees next to her, gasping for breath.

They were back in the clearing now, but it was impossible to tell how much time had passed. Was it an hour since they’d left the estate? A day? A year? Any of those seemed possible.

Beside her, Shinobu collapsed onto the ground, his face in the dirt and dead leaves.

The embers of the fire still glowed red, so they couldn’t have been gone longer than an hour. The Young Dread was adding more wood, bringing the blaze back to life.

Quin could not get her breath. She looked down at her arm. Blood covered it from elbow to fingers and was now drying to a sticky paste, but she couldn’t see a wound. She’d been cut earlier, she remembered, in the practice fight. But that had been the other arm. This was not her blood.

Shinobu, his face still in the dirt, was sucking in deep breaths like a drowning man, though on quick inspection, he didn’t seem to be injured either.

Quin suddenly noticed a patch of long blond hairs stuck in the drying blood on her arm. She retched again. Then she scrubbed at her skin with a handful of dead leaves, trying to clean those hairs off her. She’d had a gun, but it was gone now.

Briac pushed her over with his foot, sending her to the ground. “Stop it,” he said, his voice tinged with irritation. “Both of you.”

Next to her, Shinobu tried to slow his desperate breathing. He had taken off his helmet. His red hair was plastered across his forehead, and his face looked pale, even in the warm light of the fire.

Alistair was standing nearby, but he was not looking at Shinobu or Quin. Instead he was staring into the coals.

Briac turned to the two Dreads, who stood again on the other side of the flames in their formal position. They looked as steady, as calm, as they had before they’d left the estate. In fact, if Quin had not seen them walking in their deliberate, graceful way across the grounds of that manor house, if she had not seen them standing silently in the great room inside that house as it had echoed with screams, she could have believed the Dreads had never left this clearing. The Young Dread still wore her blank look, as though her mind were mostly somewhere else, far away from these dark woods.

“Have the standards been met?” Briac asked them.

The Big Dread stepped forward.

“The standards have been met. Their skills, in body and mind, are sufficient to use the athame.” His voice was strange, with an odd emphasis on each syllable, as though English were not his native language. As if speech itself were unusual for him.

Briac bowed his head, accepting their judgment.

“Bring the brand,” he ordered.

The Young Dread pulled on thick leather gloves and removed the long piece of metal from the fire. The end of it, the end that had been resting among the hot embers all this time, bore the shape of a small athame.

Briac lifted Shinobu upright so he was kneeling before the fire.

“Shinobu MacBain, I invite you to say your oath and become a sworn Seeker.”

As he looked into Briac’s eyes, Shinobu was wearing an expression Quin had never before seen on his perfect face: hatred.

Then Briac moved to Quin, pulling her up next to Shinobu so she too was kneeling.

“Quin Kincaid, I invite you to say your oath and become a sworn Seeker.”

She stared at her father, his dark eyes and hair, his fair skin, so like her own. But he was nothing like her. She felt the same hatred she had seen on Shinobu’s face. All her life, he had been lying to her. The existence she’d imagined for herself was an illusion.

“Say your oaths,” Briac commanded.

Neither of them spoke. The smell of the blood on her arm was in her nose, and she retched again, this time bringing up the remains of her dinner.

Briac slapped her.

“Say your oaths.”

They did not speak.

Briac nodded to the Dreads. The Big Dread came up behind Shinobu, put a knife to his throat. The Young Dread moved to Quin, and she felt a blade at her own neck. From the corner of her eye she could see Alistair. He had retreated to the edge of the clearing and was looking away.

“Say your oaths,” Briac commanded again.

The Young Dread pressed the knife harder against Quin’s skin. She could feel the edge of the blade, unyielding against her throat as she swallowed. I was blind, Quin told herself, feeling hot tears well up in her eyes, but I have done these things with my own hands. She could see in her father’s expression that he was willing to kill her if necessary. Once she had gone There, she must take her oath or die.

She could refuse; she could let this fourteen-year-old monster of a girl kill her. Was Quin willing to end it now, to never see her mother again, to never see John again?

The knife was cutting her skin. Blood was trickling down her neck.

“Say your oaths!”

She had been trained to obey Briac. She began to speak the oath.

Once she started, Shinobu’s voice joined in and they were saying it together, as they had always imagined they would.

“All that I am

I dedicate to the holy secrets of my craft,

Which I shall never speak

To one who is not sworn.

Not fear, nor love, nor even death

Will shake my loyalty to the hidden ways between

Rising darkly to meet me.

I will seek the proper path until time does end.”

Briac held out the stone athame. Quin noticed the tiny carving of a fox on its handgrip, a delicate detail in this moment of barbarity. The emblem of her family was a ram, the emblem of Shinobu’s family an eagle—why, then, did this athame bear a fox? And then Briac was pushing their heads toward the dull blade of the stone dagger, forcing them to plant a kiss on its cool surface.

Quin had always known her father was hard, but she’d clung to the certainty that his purpose was noble. Now she understood that there was nothing noble here; perhaps there never had been. And Briac was not merely hard; he was brutal.

The Dreads were holding them down. Quin felt the Young Dread’s small, strong hands pulling her left arm forward and holding it in place. Then Briac pressed the brand into Quin’s left wrist, burning into her flesh the shape of an athame. She cried out as he held the metal to her skin. She was a Seeker now, marked for life.

She had thought this brand would be an emblem of pride, but now it meant something entirely different. She was damned.