the things I say about your mother.”
He glanced up at her, and she was reminded of how he’d looked as a child, on that night in Catherine’s apartment, small and lost.
“That’s just it,” he said. “What if she was mad?” He was wrestling with something. Maud remained quiet as he looked back into the heart of the fire, as though an answer might be waiting there for him. “I don’t feel it,” he told her after a long while, and his voice was pained. “Before we came here, I was certain. My mother was hunting down the houses who had harmed us. She came here—or she intended to come here—to find the boar Seekers and make them pay. And I was doing the same. But…I don’t feel it.”
His eyes sought hers, and there was dismay in his countenance. He whispered, “On the ice, you were firing the disruptor at me, and I was running for my life. I was scared of the disruptor, but fear wasn’t what I felt, not really. I felt something else. And I still feel it. I feel my mother’s hope. I feel her curiosity.” He paused, then said, “I know she hated the other houses. I was with her until I was seven years old, and she was full of hate. But…that’s not the Catherine I see in her journal. And now it’s not the Catherine I see in my mind. I feel the other Catherine. The real one.”
A strong emotion came over Maud, one she didn’t quite know how to categorize, though it was, perhaps, camaraderie. She’d experienced the very same thoughts about Catherine as they ran across the ice; perhaps she and John had shared those thoughts between them. The Young Dread had seen who Catherine really was and what she’d intended—before Catherine changed, before she’d become cruel and violent and fixed on revenge.
“I feel her too,” Maud told him. “She wasn’t mad, not at first. Not for a long while.” She thought of Catherine on the estate as an apprentice, and she thought of Catherine later. Of all the Seekers the Young Dread had known in recent times, Catherine had been perhaps the least mad, the most aware—in the beginning, at any rate. If you put all this effort to other use, Catherine had said on that night, her last true night alive, imagine how different things could be. “Your mother was a Seeker in the noble sense of the word,” she told him.
“I think she was,” he whispered.
Then John’s head dropped into his hands, and his shoulders began to tremble. This was so unexpected that it took Maud some time to understand that he was crying. Then the grief came like a storm and he sobbed helplessly.
Eventually, when the squall blew itself out, he spoke with his face still in his hands. “I’ve done so many terrible things…to Alistair, to Shinobu…but mostly to Quin.” He lifted his head and looked across the fire at the Young Dread, his face vulnerable. “She should hate me, Maud. I deserve her hate. My mind’s been so narrow and so wrong…”
The Young Dread let silence fall between them. Then she said, “We have all done things we regret, John. The question is how to change.”
“Can I change?” he asked her.
The Young Dread studied the coals for a while, watching the pulse and dance of the heat. Their sprint to the cave had changed not only John’s mind, it had changed her own. When she spoke, it was in her steady way, but she felt the words more deeply than most she’d uttered.
“I have realized something about your mother today,” she told him. “She asked me, many years ago, about the Dreads, about the Middle Dread. She wanted to be rid of him—to help other Seekers and to help me, though I brushed her off and ordered her away. She wanted to be rid of him, and she wanted to become a Dread.”
John’s tears had stopped, and he was watching her closely. “To become a Dread?”
She considered her words before she spoke again. She said, “I do not wish to be called the Middle Dread. That name has been ruined. And yet I cannot be the only Dread in the world. We Dreads must take turns moving through time, often one stretched out while the other is awake. To make this possible, I must train another, just as I was trained. And with that other, I must learn the purpose and use of all of my