burning bright orange as John roasted their dinner.
On the wall near the hearth were drying racks where they cured the skins of the animals they hunted together. Several pelts were stretched there, and Maud and John were both wearing vests of fox fur against the cold of the evening.
Along the back wall of the workshop were old shelves and racks of knives and swords that had been rescued from the other destroyed buildings on the estate. They used everything for training.
The Young, who was usually so motionless except when action was required, was pacing back and forth in front of the cooking fire, unable to sit down. He’d never seen her like this, but she hadn’t chosen to explain her state of mind, so he was waiting for her to speak. He hoped she wasn’t still angry about his earlier disobedience, when he’d chased after Briac Kincaid. If she chose not to teach him anymore, he didn’t know what he would do.
John forced himself to look away from her. He had his mother’s journal in his lap, which he’d been studying by the light of the fire. He’d done this each night since he’d recovered the journal from a pocket in Quin’s cloak, as they all plummeted to the ground on board Traveler. Quin had given it back to him. Even if she hadn’t meant to, she’d helped him.
Maud stopped at the doorway of the workshop and looked out at the absolute darkness the night had become. It was perhaps three in the morning and very foggy.
“Do you want to speak?” John asked at last.
She turned toward him, her features outlined in the glow of the firelight. Her expression was as calm and clear as it always was; only something in her eyes matched the restlessness of her body. She didn’t answer.
John skewered the pieces of rabbit meat and turned them over on the metal grate. The bullet wound near his shoulder was throbbing, though it hurt him much less in recent days. His eyes slid back to the journal.
His mother’s notebook was both self-explanatory and very difficult to make out. The first half seemed to be a page-by-page recounting of the Middle Dread’s misdeeds and the justice he’d handed out to unruly Seekers. Those pages were written in ancient hands and were very difficult to read. However, John’s grandmother Maggie had often made him read aloud to her from very old books, many of them handwritten, so he’d had practice with archaic English and could decipher much in those early journal pages. He’d asked Maud for help translating what he couldn’t understand, but she’d refused. In fact, she’d refused to give the journal anything more than a casual glance.
I have rid the world of the Middle, she’d told him the first time he’d tried to show her the book and explain what he thought it contained. I have no wish to read an accounting of what he’s done. His crimes were many, though most were long ago. I should have killed him sooner.
John wasn’t much interested in the Middle’s crimes or justice either, so he hadn’t asked for help again. His interest lay in the second half of the book, where his mother—and others—had cataloged the last known appearances of Seekers and athames from the various houses.
According to the journal, there were originally ten Seeker families and each had once possessed an athame. But most of these athames hadn’t been seen since twenty years, fifty years, a hundred years before John had been born. Where they were now and why they had disappeared were both mysteries—at least to Catherine and her journal. But she’d been looking for them. Or, perhaps, she’d been looking for some of them—the houses that had done harm to her own house.
For generations, other Seeker houses had targeted and killed his family. Someday you will destroy the houses who have harmed us, his grandmother Maggie had told him after his mother’s death. You will become what we were in the beginning, powerful but good. She had been echoing his mother’s own words: Our house will rise again, and the others will fall.
When he touched the book’s pages, he thought of his mother’s hands, handling the same leaves, filling them with her clear, feminine writing. And he thought of Quin, though he didn’t want to. She’d had this journal in her possession. Her hands had touched it as well. When his eyes ran down a line of text, he could feel her eyes doing the same.
What