master’s tools. Whoever I train must help me learn everything I must know.”
He was looking at her almost as if in a trance.
“John,” she said, “I can train you enough to be sworn as a Seeker. You will make it to your oath, I am certain. But I believe you could be more than a Seeker.”
His voice was scarcely a whisper as he asked, “Do you mean me? Train me to be a Dread?”
“I cannot say that you would succeed. But it is possible.”
She watched him absorb her words. After some time, he asked, “My mother…wanted this?”
“I believe she did.”
He was quiet, and Maud watched the dance of orange light across his face. John didn’t look sad anymore; he looked as though he stood at the edge of a cliff and was deciding whether or not he would jump.
At last, he asked, “Do you feel…human? After spending so much time There? Or do you lose your humanity?”
It was nearly the same question Catherine had asked her years ago, in the woods on the estate: Would it be hard for someone like me? A life like yours? Catherine’s question had stayed with her, and Maud knew she had no answer for it. Had she lost her humanity? If you became different from every other person who had ever lived on the earth, were you still one of them? Or did you become something else?
Eventually she said, “I’ve felt happiness and hatred. And compassion, John—I have felt compassion for you and for your mother, and others. But Dreads must stand apart.”
“Would I…would I ever be able to love a girl? Or become a father?”
“We Dreads do not…become intimate,” she answered. She heard the steadiness of her voice and wondered if that very steadiness was arguing to him against becoming a Dread. From what she’d glimpsed of men and women, or boys and girls, they didn’t want perfect steadiness from each other. They wanted passion. She had a sense of what that word meant, but no experience of it.
“But who is ‘we’?” he asked. “If you are the only active Dread, can’t you decide what it means to be a Dread?”
For a fraction of a second, Maud took offense at the insolence of his question. But why shouldn’t he ask? She was suggesting he do far more than be her student. She was suggesting he change himself in a fundamental manner.
In a flash of clarity, the Young Dread saw him differently, and herself differently as well, as though she were seeing through John’s eyes. She looked down at her hands and extended them in front of her, marveling at the very ordinariness of them, their similarity to the hands of every other person alive.
“Is that sort of feeling…that sort of love…is it so very important?” she asked him. She could almost hear herself saying, It is only love, in the way she often said It is only pain.
“I don’t know,” John whispered. “Maybe. I—”
But she rose to her feet, cutting him off. There was noise in the dark tunnel at the back of the cave. “Extend your hearing,” she told him quietly.
John was still very much a novice, but he was getting better at this skill. “Someone’s coming through the tunnel,” he said after a moment.
The Young Dread nodded. It was what she’d heard as well.
They waited a long while as the dragging gait got closer and closer, pausing frequently and moving in irregular bursts. They were hearing the footsteps of someone forcing himself on when his body didn’t wish to comply. And it was someone small, Maud thought, judging by the lightness of the tread. She let her hands rest on the weapons at her waist.
At last the footsteps were only yards away, and then a figure shuffled around the final bend of the icy tunnel and stood bathed in the weak glow of their coal fire. The apparition raised an arm against the light as though it were so bright as to be blinding. The figure wore two cloaks and so many clothes that its body disappeared inside them, and yet it managed to convey the impression of being half frozen.
Maud recognized the visitor. It was the youngest Watcher, the one who looked perhaps twelve years old. He lowered his arm as his eyes became accustomed to the light in the cavern, revealing a dirty, swollen, freckled face. He looked from Maud to John and then back again. If he knew them from their earlier encounters, he gave them no indication.
After