for it. Her whole mind was wrapped up in the ancient implement she was carrying. It had been lost for a hundred years, maybe more. And here it was. Her heart beat against her chest. She’d found the athame of the fox. Of all her family in all its generations, she was the one to find it. They would be true Seekers again.
It was there in that dark chamber, a chamber that is supposed to belong to my family, waiting for…whom?
Mariko led them up more steps, until they were moving along the street in the shadow of the great abbey. Catherine wanted to walk more swiftly. “Whoever put it there might be watching us right now,” she whispered to Mariko. “We need to get out of here.”
But Mariko held her back with a hand on her arm, forcing them both into the meandering pace of tourists.
“If we’re being watched, Cat-chan, we should move slowly and not attract attention,” her friend reasoned. “But we aren’t being watched.”
“How do you know?”
“It would be an unbelievable coincidence,” Mariko whispered back. “I agree that someone must have put the athame and lightning rod there recently. But not right now. Think. You arrive here suddenly on the very day—”
Her friend stopped. She led Catherine to the low stone wall overlooking the village, a view of mainland France beyond.
“Look very carefully,” Mariko breathed, “by the steps up to the church doors. Moving down toward the beach stairs.”
Catherine looked. There were at least twenty other people between them and the abbey, but she saw immediately whom Mariko meant—a man walking through the shadows of the high, dark building, heading the way they had just come. He wore ordinary clothes and a hat, which left his face in shadow, but there was something about the way he moved, about the tightly controlled motions of his limbs.
“He moves like a Seeker,” Catherine said.
“Or an apprentice, at least,” Mariko agreed.
“Do you recognize him? Could it be Emile?” Catherine felt hopeful for a moment—how wonderful if she could discover Emile to be alive and well—but the feeling died out quickly. “No, it’s not him.”
Mariko shook her head. “Definitely not Emile. Too big. I don’t know him.” She grasped Catherine’s shoulder and studied her closely.
“What?” Catherine asked.
“Catherine, how did you figure out where that underground room was?” Mariko asked. “Tell me exactly.”
Catherine tried to compose her thoughts as she watched the man disappear down the path she and Mariko had taken. It was as if he were following the same set of instructions Catherine had used.
“I told you. I found that note from my great-grandfather’s grandfather…or some ancestor, at any rate—I have the family tree back home, which shows—”
“That part’s not important,” Mariko said.
“Right.” Catherine regrouped. “The note described how to find this place, that chamber—”
“Your ancestor’s note said the cave was beneath Mont Saint-Michel?”
“No. That was the missing piece. The note spoke about the cave, with instructions to find the tunnel once you were on the island, but he didn’t say where the island was. I only figured that out yesterday.”
“And how did you figure it out?” her friend pressed.
“There’s a picture of a small mountain—a hill, really—in my family crest. My whole life I’ve wondered where it was. No one in the family is quite sure—like the cave, it’s knowledge that’s been lost over time. But all at once I realized: the mountain in our crest is the outline of Mont Saint-Michel, minus some of the more modern buildings, and looking at it from the sea side, not the land side. And I wondered if these coordinates he wrote out were meant to bring someone here.”
“Catherine, you’ve stared at your family crest your whole life, and you suddenly realized this yesterday?” Mariko whispered, her Japanese accent surfacing the more quickly she spoke.
“I agree it sounds odd, now that I say it. I don’t know how to explain, except that the thought came into my head: Mont Saint-Michel. Mont Saint-Michel. The idea was there when I woke up, so strong it was almost frightening.” Catherine laughed nervously, recalling the strange mixture of excitement and terror that had overtaken her at that moment of realization. She continued: “I looked it up and found pictures, compared them to my family crest, and it was obvious.”
“So you thought we should hurry over to France immediately and look for this cave that belonged to your family hundreds of years ago?”
“The thought was so clear, I was excited to see if I was right,” Catherine whispered