said. “She and your mother were very alike.”
John pointed to the figure drawn on the girl’s blouse in blood—a crude ram.
“A ram,” the Young said quietly. “Someone drew a ram.”
“The killer drew the emblem of his house,” John told her in a whisper. “The ram is Quin’s house, but she wasn’t born yet. This was Briac.”
“Possibly,” Maud said. Though anyone might draw anything on a dead body, she thought.
Now that John had pointed this out, she saw similar figures drawn on many of the victims: the shape of a bear, drawn with a bloody finger on the shirt of a child; in another picture she saw the outline of a boar. The Young Dread tried to imagine Seekers signing their grisly deeds with the insignia of their houses, but she couldn’t quite envision it. Why would someone do such a thing? The only result would be to create lasting enmity between Seekers.
John had no such hesitation. He studied the photographs as if he were planning out a battle—which, Maud realized a moment later, he was.
“In my mother’s journal, she was recording the locations of different Seeker houses and their athames. But here you can see which houses have gone bad, which need to be stopped,” John explained. He pointed to three loose piles of photographs. “Looking at the signs drawn on the bodies, I count seven murders done by the house of the bear, five by the house of the boar, and two by the house of the ram. So the house of the bear…”
He trailed off, but Maud knew the words that would complete his sentence: the house of the bear is first on my list.
John asked for the journal back, and he leafed through it until he found the page with a bear drawn at the top. Beneath the animal was an illustration much like the one he’d shown Maud back on the estate. It was another drawing of a cave. This one was perched halfway up a hillside. Behind the hill was a line of other hills, with a distinctive pattern. Beneath the drawing was a set of coordinates.
“Here,” he said. “My mother last knew of the house of the bear in this location. The journal says the bear athame was last seen in southwest Africa, eighty years ago, in the possession of a Seeker called Delyth Priddy, house of the bear, who possibly had a companion with her. And here are the coordinates. She was gathering coordinates so she could go to these places.”
Maud understood his intent. He wanted her to take him to this place so he could retrace his mother’s path. The Young Dread recognized the location by the drawing and by the coordinates. It was a cave in Africa that was special to the house of the bear, just as each Seeker house had once had a special location for its own members—though most locations had fallen out of use long ago. It looked as though Catherine had been searching for those caves.
She explained none of this to John, because it suited her, for the moment, to let him draw his own conclusions. She moved back into the hall to retrieve the shield and the helmet.
“What are they?” he asked, looking up at the objects when she returned. “There’s a drawing of that one”—he gestured to the helmet—“in the journal.”
“This is a focal,” she answered, holding it up. “If used properly, it is a great tool. The shield is interesting but less important for training.”
“Is the helmet what you were talking about before?” he whispered. “To help me face a disruptor without falling apart?”
“Possibly,” she said. In truth, that was exactly what she intended to teach him. How to face the disruptor—and many other things—without falling apart. How to find the proper path.
She looked at the pictures of death strewn across the bed. John wanted to hunt down the house of the bear to avenge his mother and those dead people in the photographs. The fact that no one had seen a member of the house of the bear in about eighty years did not deter him. Nor did the fact that the house of the boar, the next house on John’s list, had been missing for a generation—since Emile Pernet had disappeared in Norway. John seemed to think his mother had discovered a secret trail leading to her enemies. The Young Dread was doubtful. If Seekers and athames had been missing for so long, she didn’t think they would be easily found.
She