into the corridor. Through the break was a dark space. Maud pushed the loose piece of corridor wall aside and peered into what must be John’s grandmother’s closet, which had mostly collapsed in the ship’s crash. Its jumbled contents lay in a heap, and among the tangled scarves and shoes, something large and metal caught the light. When the Young Dread wrested this item out through the break in the wall, she recognized its familiar weight and size immediately.
It was a metal shield, such as a sword fighter might wear on his arm. The shield’s face was made of several concentric circles that spun independently of each other. She knew what it was at once—a disruptor shield. Though they had been common among Seekers in the past, the Young hadn’t seen one for at least two hundred years. Her master, the Old Dread, did not put much faith in such tools—he believed one should rely more on swift reflexes—but Maud had occasionally trained with such a shield when the Middle Dread was instructing her.
She ran her hands over the concentric circles on the shield’s face and set them spinning. When rotating, the rings created the disorienting illusion that the shield surface was spiraling toward you and away from you at the same time. The shield was designed to withstand the direct onslaught of disruptor sparks, and when used skillfully could do many interesting things with those sparks.
If John gets a bit better, perhaps I will allow him to try this, she thought.
There was something else inside the closet, visible now that she had removed the shield. Maud thought her eyes might be deceiving her, and so she reached in quickly to snatch the object out. It was another tool she hadn’t seen in generations: an iridescent metal helmet, a focal.
The Young Dread studied the helmet and the shield, and began to make plans for John’s further instruction. When she heard John speaking quietly in the cabin a few minutes later, she set down the objects and moved inside.
The bed was covered in a chaos of images, all of them of death. The warped floor shifted as she moved closer to him. The Young Dread had no desire to participate in John’s revenge—or even to acknowledge it—but she found herself picking up a few of the photographs to study. Many were in black and white, which she understood indicated great age. But many others were in full color, with the deep red of blood the most prominent hue. Even in the black-and-white photographs, she could feel the red hidden within the great pools of black: A man, a woman, and four children, cut to pieces, the adults pinned to the wall by long knives, the children crumpled on the floor, their clothing dark with blood. People dead from beatings, from shootings. People killed, with unmistakable exuberance, by whipswords. There were so many.
“Were you there?” John asked quietly.
It took Maud a few moments to understand what he meant. He was asking her if she’d participated in killing these people, who were members of his family. It bothered the Young Dread deeply that John thought she would be capable of such evil action, and yet that was how he had been raised—to see threats and killers on every hand.
She looked through more of the photographs. In truth she recognized most of the faces. She had seen these men, these women, even some of their children. She had watched them train, she had given them their oaths. But she had never seen them like this.
The Young Dread shook her head. “No.”
Her eyes lit on one of the more recent pictures. A lovely young woman clutched a yawning wound in her abdomen, her blue eyes staring, fixed in death. There was a deep gash across one cheek that, despite its gruesome aspect, took little away from her fine features. Catherine, Maud thought. I was there when Catherine died.
But on closer inspection, she realized this was not Catherine Renart. This was Catherine’s older sister. The girls were very alike, but the one in this photograph had different wounds. Catherine’s fatal injury had been to her leg, not her belly. And she hadn’t died, of course, not until years later. The Middle and Briac had insisted on disrupting Catherine and keeping her alive. In that way, Briac could honestly say he hadn’t taken her life—though clearly there was nothing honest about Briac’s handling of Catherine.