The Young Dread (5 page)

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 anticipation of meeting her in the forest had pushed aside John's dread for a few minutes, but now it came back in full force. He was the strongest fighter of the three, yet he'd failed in the fight. He'd failed at the moment when he'd most needed to succeed.

He let his head fall back against a tree trunk. For a moment, he fought the sensation of a large stone pulling him to the bottom of the ocean.
No,
he thought,
I can't fail. I won't.

His whole life was wrapped up in taking this oath. He was John Hart. He would get back what was taken and be at no one's mercy again. He had promised, and he would keep the promise.

“Briac has to take this seriously,” he told Quin, working hard to sound reassuring, both to her and to himself. He must pull himself up from despair. “I was…horrible in that fight, wasn't I? He's got to be strict. He's the ‘protector of hidden ways' and all that. But he's spent years training me. I'm almost there. It would be wrong to kick me out now.”

“Of course it would be wrong. It would be completely wrong. But he's saying—”

“Your father's an honorable man, isn't he? He's going to do what's right. I'm not worried. And you shouldn't be either.”

Quin nodded, but her dark eyes were full of doubt. He couldn't blame her. John didn't believe the things he was saying about Briac either. He knew very well the kind of man Quin's father was, but he clung to the hope that Briac would keep his promises. There had been witnesses to those promises, and Briac must honor his commitments. If he didn't…

He forced the thought away. Life had been good here on the estate with Quin—as good as his life had ever been, much better than he'd dared to hope for—and he didn't want that to change.

Quin had made friends with John on the day he arrived. They'd been kids then—John only twelve—but even so, his first thought had been of how pretty she was.

In that first year, she and Shinobu both came to visit John in his own cottage frequently, but it was Quin's visits alone he liked the most. She was fascinated with his descriptions of London, and eager to show him all of the estate.

When John's mother had been alive, she'd warned him to keep up his guard around everyone, and he did. But he liked to hear about Quin's family, about the lore of the estate. And Quin seemed to enjoy his company—not because he was wealthy or because his family was important but because she liked him. Just him. He'd never experienced that before. Even at twelve, John refused to let this move him—her interest might have been a trick, a way to get past his defenses and learn his secrets. Still, he spent time with her. With Shinobu he would practice fighting. With Quin he would take walks.

And she began to get…curves. He hadn't realized how distracting curves could be. He knew he was in trouble when he was fourteen, sitting in their languages class, and he found himself examining the way Quin's slender waist twisted into her hips. They were being asked to read aloud in Dutch, but he was imagining his hand tracing the line of her body. He tried to keep her from his mind, to stay as clear and calculating as his mother would have wanted him to be, but he couldn't believe that Quin's friendliness was false.

Then, when she was nearly fifteen, they were paired in an especially difficult practice match in the training barn. Alistair was sending them against each other again and again, demanding that they fight at the extreme limits of their strength.

“Come on, John. Strike her!” Alistair yelled, apparently thinking John was taking it easy on Quin.

Maybe he
was
taking it easy on her. It was winter, and her cheeks were flushed, her dark eyes bright with the exertion of the fight as she moved nimbly with her sword.

She struck him hard and he fell. Perhaps he'd let her hit him, because he didn't mind falling. He imagined tumbling onto the floor with her…Then the fight was over and they were both breathing hard, staring at each other across the practice area.

Alistair dismissed them, and John found himself walking outside the training barn in a daze, trying to carry himself as far away from her as he could. He could not see where he was going. He could only see Quin. The desire to be with her was overwhelming.

He stopped around the back of the barn, hiding himself behind the trunks of the barren winter trees. There he leaned against the stone wall, his breath filling the air with steam.

He didn't want to feel what he was feeling. His mother had warned him against love so many times.
When you love, you open yourself to a dagger,
she had told him all those years ago.
When you love deeply, you have thrust the dagger into your own heart.
Love did not fit into any of his plans. But how could you plan for this? It wasn't just her beauty he wanted. It was all of her: the girl who talked to him, the girl who would bite her bottom lip when she was concentrating intensely, the girl who smiled when they walked through the woods together.

He pressed his cheek against the cold stone of the barn, feeling his heart beating wildly, trying to rid himself of the image of her.

Then Quin was there, walking past the end of the barn, only a few feet from him. She was staring ahead, into the woods, also dazed. Their eyes met, and suddenly he knew—he knew she had come looking for him.

John reached out his hand and grabbed the sleeve of her coat, pulling her toward him. And then her arms were around him. Neither of them had ever kissed anyone before, but all at once, he was kissing her. She was warm and soft, and she was kissing him back.

“I was hoping you would do that,” she whispered.

He'd meant to say something romantic and controlled, like
You're very beautiful,
but instead the deeper truth came tumbling out of him. “I need you,” he whispered to her. “I don't want to be alone…I love you, Quin…”

Then they were kissing again.

There were heavy footsteps approaching, twigs breaking. It was Alistair; they could recognize his tread anywhere.

Suddenly they were apart, pushing away from each other. And by the time Alistair reached the end of the barn, Quin had disappeared around the other side, with a final glance at John.

That began their forest meetings. Quin was quite sure her parents wouldn't approve, so they kept their feelings for each other secret. But eventually it was obvious that everyone on the estate knew of their changed relationship—after a while, John sensed something colder in Briac's stare, and a subtle irritation in Shinobu's attitude.

John had tried to justify his feelings. Perhaps it
was
love he felt, but couldn't love also be an advantage? Wouldn't Briac have to care more about him when he understood how much he and Quin cared for each other? If he could eventually convince Briac to let her marry him, it would create an alliance, wouldn't it? An alliance with Briac wouldn't be pleasant, but it might be a way to fulfill his own promise, at least for a time.

Surely a feeling that made John so happy could not be bad.

Now, between the trees with his arms around Quin, he marveled at how right it felt. When they were alone, he could imagine that she would be by his side for everything to come. Eventually she would understand, even about her own father…

“I don't want you to worry,” he told her, making her look into his eyes. “I'll be a Seeker, just like you. Even if it takes me a little while to get there. It's meant to be, the two of us together.”

The trouble cleared from Quin's face a little. She almost smiled. “It's meant to be,” she agreed. “Of course it is.” Her certainty gave him heart. “Look,” she went on. “You're stronger than Shinobu. You're a lot stronger than I am. You might be smarter than either of us. There are just some things you don't do quite as well.”

“If you mean the disruptor—”

“I do mean the disruptor. We're all scared of it.”

“I wasn't just scared,” John answered, reliving the moment in his mind. “I couldn't move, Quin. I imagined those sparks covering me—”

“Stop.” She said it firmly, and John realized his despair was rising again. He must focus, especially today. “You don't want to end up in agony with your mind turning on itself,” she continued. “Of course you don't. But you have to think of the disruptor as a weapon like any other weapon. We use our mental control to avoid it in a fight.”

“ ‘My mind is a muscle that's always slightly tensed,' ” John responded, quoting Alistair, who was their favorite instructor. “Only—I'm not sure that works for me when there's a disruptor involved.”