Seeker

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 must 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?”Belonging © NôvelDram/a.Org.

“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?

“He wouldn’t finish my training,” John went on, “but you can.” He was looking at her in that way ordinary people did, as though she would suddenly feel what he was feeling and understand what was important to him, just by looking into his eyes.

But she could not feel what John was feeling. She was the Young Dread. She had existed for hundreds of years in her fifteen-year life, and her duties were far different than his. She and the other Dreads took turns stretching out through time, waking to oversee the oaths of new Seekers, holding themselves apart from humanity, making just decisions. This apprentice was as new as a fresh shoot of grass. He could not possibly understand.

Except … her mind had responded. Except many decisions were not just. Justice has become a shadowy thing, and so many things were done while I was asleep.

She had moved away from John then and stood staring into the fire. Eventually he’d left.

After the apprentice had gone, she’d had one thought for a very long time: What am I?

Now, all alone on the estate, the Young Dread entered the workshop with her pail of milk. She had stopped thinking of ways to kill the Middle Dread and was thinking instead of what John had said. And when she had her small meal that afternoon, the thought in her mind was this: I wonder if John will come back. What will I do if he does?