motion, Briac swung the rod into the athame that was still clutched tightly in the boy’s hands. The athame’s vibration spread out from the dagger, reaching Maud through the air and the forest floor.
“Stop, John!” she said again. Of course she could pull him to a halt, but that was not the point. He must learn to focus on her, to push other things aside—especially when he was most distracted. If he could not do that, he would never be a Seeker.
Both boys were yelling at Briac, but Briac was undeterred. He grabbed Wilkin’s arm—the arm holding the athame—and with all of his strength he forced that arm into a circle, cutting an anomaly into the air even as the older boy struggled to push him away.
“Go!” Briac yelled again. “Or she’ll kill you, she’ll kill you. You’ll die, I’ll die!”
“She’s so fast!” the younger boy said, pointing at the Young Dread, who had surged ahead of John and was bearing down on them with all the speed she could muster. “She’s like—”
“She’s deadly!” Briac spat.
Briac’s words had an effect. Wilkin and Briac both grabbed the younger one, Nott, and the three of them stepped quickly through the anomaly.
A knife flew by Maud’s head, thrown by John, as she raced toward the gaping doorway. When she reached the threshold of the darkness, she stopped. She didn’t intend to jump through, nor to fight Briac or the boys. Now that she’d seen their athame—an athame with a boar upon it—she merely wished to observe them at closer range before they disappeared.
From within the anomaly, the older boy stared out at her. He looked frightened; his mouth was open, revealing blackened teeth. The smaller boy had tears drying on his cheeks and eyes full of amazement. Briac was clutching his back where John’s thrown knife had cut him. As the doorway began to lose shape and collapse, she studied their faces, searching her mind for some memory of them.
By the time John arrived at her side, the anomaly had fallen shut. He stood next to her, panting and enraged.
“Why didn’t you stop them?” he demanded. “It would have been so easy for you!”
Maud turned, allowing herself to feel anger. She grabbed hold of John’s cloak and yanked him toward her, then pushed him firmly up against the stone wall of the training barn.
“He tortured my mother,” John said, his breath steaming in the freezing air, his blue eyes clear and furious in the moonlight. “For years. I should be allowed to kill him. He deserves to die.”
“Listen closely, John.” Her voice was even and slow, but she knew he would have no doubt about the fury beneath it. “If I am to train you, you will heed my orders.”
He stared at her, still breathing hard, but he didn’t struggle against her grasp.
“It is no concern of mine that Briac Kincaid appears on the estate. You are not in a position to pick a fight. Not while I train you. I do not help you so that you may attack others. I only give you the education Briac did not finish. That is all.” She waited until John met her gaze. “You will obey me,” she said, “or my help will end.”
She kept him pinned to the barn, pressing him hard into the stone, making her point. Finally John nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right.”
They tumbled through the dark doorway into cold, shallow water. Nott landed on his hands and knees, the tiny waves of the lake splashing his face, but even so the first thing he noticed was the smell. Dead animals. He and Wilkin had left a great pile of them outside the entrance to the fort, and there they were still on the shore, rotting in the moonlight.
Nott carried a strip of deer flesh in the pouch around his waist, so some portion of that smell was always with him. But here it was everywhere in the air, identifying this ruined fortress, Dun Tarm, as a place where he and Wilkin and other Watchers belonged. It was where their master had trained each of them and taught them to be so much more than the children they’d been.
Wilkin and Briac were splashing around in the water nearby. Wilkin had Briac in a headlock and was yelling, “Explain yerself!”
Back in the woods of that strange, distant city—Is it called Kong Kong?—Briac had almost managed to steal their helm and their athame. They’d gotten the helm off his head, but he’d jumped