acting of his own volition. The Middle Dread had spurred him to do it. She must have ruined the Middle’s plans by taking the fox athame from the chamber beneath Mont Saint-Michel. The Middle had sent Anthony to Hong Kong to find her athame and maybe also to get rid of her, and she’d obstructed his plans even further.
And now the Middle Dread had followed her here. If she’d seen inside his head, was he seeing inside hers? Had her years of searching out his misdeeds made a connection between them?
“We have to go,” she said.
“You want to go to Norway right now?”
“No—take me home. Please.” She was leaning over, clutching her belly. “I need to see the doctor…”
Archie’s face fell. With no further words, he slipped an arm around Catherine’s back and walked briskly with her away from the village square.
John could barely keep his eyes open in the glare of the sun. Like the Young Dread, he wore deer pelts over his clothing, against the frozen air, and their weight and warmth felt natural to him. The ice field stretched out around them on all sides, its flat white surface broken by tall columns of black rock. The footing was treacherous, deep fissures revealing themselves suddenly, just as John was about to set his foot down. Even so, he was running, using a hopping, leaping gait across the upward-sloping field. The focal helped, urging his thoughts into an expansive state that allowed him to see a dozen things where once he might have seen only one.
“Faster!” the Young Dread called.
In the distance, difficult to see because it meant looking directly into the sun, was the snow-covered slope of a high peak. Low on its flank was another cave, this one belonging to the house of the boar.
The Young Dread had been right to bring him to confront Quin on the Bridge. Now Quin, Catherine, Maggie—all had receded in his thoughts to shadowy, distant figures. He was again running with the focal, sensing the ice, the sky, the cave ahead, and the distant ocean beating against the frozen shore miles away. He fixed his thoughts on what he wished to know: If my mother came to this cave, what did she find? And if she didn’t make it here, what had she hoped to discover?
Maud ran parallel to him, her strides fast and light. She’d warned him this run across the ice would not be easy; she was going to push him to the edge of his capabilities.
“Ready yourself!” she called. She was wearing the disruptor, and she’d given John the metal disruptor shield.
A narrow crevasse showed itself, almost invisible in the shadow of a pillar of rock. John leapt the fissure as the disruptor began to whine. That sound filled him with trepidation, but for the first time ever, his fear of the disruptor didn’t change his focus.
A few moments later, the Young Dread fired the weapon. Sparks came out of the barrel in a swarm, buzzing in the cold air as they raced toward him. John pivoted, swinging the shield to give him momentum. Then he held it in front of him and let the sparks burst into nothingness against it in a shower of rainbow light.
Almost immediately, Maud fired again.
John leapt forward and twisted behind another icy pillar, and when the swarm had passed, he continued to run.
The sparks will come, John thought. Let them come. I will be ready.
Before the Young Dread could fire the disruptor a third time, he drew the focal from his head and tossed it to her.
“Take it!” he called.
He nearly stumbled in a wave of disorientation, but in another few steps, the feeling was gone. My focus is mine, he thought. The helmet is only a crutch.
Without the focal, the bullet wound near his shoulder began to throb, but the pain didn’t linger in his thoughts. It is only pain.
The Young Dread fired the disruptor again. John turned to the side, nimbly jockeying around a series of deep, interconnected crevices. Almost as an afterthought, he raised the shield and warded off the sparks.
“Careful, Apprentice,” Maud said in her slow and steady way—she was not even out of breath. “When you think too much of your own skills, that’s when they will fail you. Your mother’s mind was unsound, and she still thought well of herself. And that was when she was attacked and disrupted, John. Deservedly.”
She was taunting him cruelly, but—
They are only words. Sounds in the air. My focus