Traveler Read online

  When they’d arrived at the London hospital, it was obvious Briac had taken them to find their master’s athame, not their master himself. But once Wilkin had seen that athame, he’d been dead set on getting it back. Our master’s going to want this athame back, Nott. If he found out we saw it and didn’t retrieve it—well, he’d put us in our caves for that, wouldn’t he?

  As Nott sewed, Briac begged, “I can’t think straight. Put the helmet on me again…”

  Nott pulled the thread tight and tied off the final stitch, then whispered to Wilkin, “He wants to get his hands on our master’s athame and take it for himself, Wilkin. We should—”

  “I know what we should do,” Wilkin snapped. “We should do what I say we do, because I’m in charge.”

  Wilkin picked up his own rucksack and began digging through it. Nott realized his partner was going to put the helm back on the crazy man and then continue following his lunatic advice. Without warning, hot tears welled in Nott’s eyes and ran down his cheeks. He was aching for the cool touch of the helm as it slid over his head and the buzz of his thoughts as it started to work, but Wilkin wouldn’t let him wear it, and Wilkin wasn’t listening to sense and Nott would be the one punished. As the smallest, he was usually the one punished.

  Wilkin turned to Nott. “We don’t keep the helm in your pack, Nott. We keep it in mine.”

  “I know that. I never said we did. But you just said he wasn’t allowed to wear it anymore.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. He won’t be able to help us without it.”

  “He’s not helping us at all!”

  “Give me the helm, Nott!”

  Nott turned slowly toward Wilkin, finally understanding what his partner meant. The older boy’s dark eyes flashed impatiently in the light filtering through the fortress’s stunted trees. A twinge of sickness stabbed through Nott.

  “You have the helm,” Nott said slowly. “You took it off him in that city—Kong Kong.”

  The older boy looked taken aback. “I don’t have it. You have it! Where is it?”

  He crossed the broken floor and grabbed Nott, examining his head and roughly feeling his cloak and his small pack, as if Nott had the helm hidden somewhere and was lying about it.

  “You’ve lost it? You’ve lost our helm?” Nott asked. His nausea transformed into the sensation of outright terror. The helm was the one thing their master demanded they keep track of.

  “I have not lost it!”

  “Then where is it, Wilkin?”

  Nott remembered hunting with their master near Dun Tarm years before. They’d gone into the woods and killed a deer—the way their master liked to kill deer, which was very slowly. It’s all right to enjoy it, he’d explained. We are meant to enjoy putting creatures in their place.

  The hunting and killing had left their master in a good mood, but when they’d returned to the fortress, one of the older Watchers was waiting nervously by the entrance. That boy, shaking so much he was barely able to speak, had admitted to misplacing his own helm. Their master had flown into such a rage, the very memory of it still caused Nott’s heart to beat frantically in his chest. How can you have any value to me without your helm? their master had roared.

  Eventually all Watchers had been roused and that particular helm had been found. It hadn’t mattered. Their master had sent that careless Watcher to his cave anyway, and that had been the end of him.

  Wilkin was now tossing around his own things as though he might have overlooked the helm during his first inspection. When it did not magically present itself, he turned back to Nott.

  “You left it There, didn’t you?” Wilkin accused. “In the blackness? Where we’ll never find it!”

  “You had it!”

  “I did not—” A different look passed across Wilkin’s face. Nott guessed that Wilkin was remembering that he was, in fact, the one who’d had the helm last, when the two of them had been struggling in the trees with Briac, just before jumping into the anomaly.

  A moment later, Wilkin looked as sick as Nott felt.

  “It’s still your fault, Nott,” the older boy said weakly. “You were the one who took it out of the pack in Hong Kong.”

  “But you were the one who wanted to follow him”—Nott jabbed his finger at Briac—“instead of our orders.” They sat glaring at each other. Wilkin was rapidly deflating, and Nott pressed his advantage: “Did you drop it in the woods? Or did you drop it There, Wilkin?”

  Aside from the prospect of their master’s rage and their inability to carry out their orders, the idea of the helm lying somewhere where they might never find it made Nott desperately upset. It had already been such a long time since he’d gotten to wear it.

  “I—I think I dropped it in the woods,” said Wilkin. “In Hong Kong.”

  “Well, that’s something, at least.”

  Quin walked into the basement, letting the door shut behind her. She ran her hands over the nearest armoire, where mother-of-pearl dragons twined through forests and rivers. The basement was full of chests and cabinets with similar designs: samurai, lakes, villages, eagles.

  She turned back to find Mariko MacBain watching her closely from a spot by the basement door, her fine Japanese features full of concern. Mariko was Shinobu’s mother, who lived in this small, lovely home tucked into one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Hong Kong. Though Mariko had kicked Shinobu out—when his drug use had gotten unbearable—she still had his whipsword, because Shinobu had left it here, in hopes of forgetting it altogether. That had been nearly two years ago, when he’d tried to erase Seekers from his life, just as Quin herself had done.

  Now, lying in Hong Kong, recovering from his injuries, he’d asked Quin to get the whipsword back for him. They had decided they were still Seekers, and now, with Briac and those strange boys looking for them, they needed all of their Seeker tools.

  Several days had passed since the fight in London, and though Quin had been on the lookout for those boys at every moment, she was beginning to hope they didn’t know how to find her. Even so, she took only quick trips off the Bridge. She’d arrived at Mariko’s house quite suddenly, had given an abbreviated explanation of Shinobu’s injuries, and had asked for the whipsword.

  Quin had been in this basement once before, but only now did the meaning of all the inlaid designs occur to her. The most common decoration on the furniture was the eagle, which was, of course, the symbol of Alistair MacBain’s house, and was the emblem on his athame, which had been destroyed on the estate. But now she noticed the second most common motif: a dragon. The last time she’d been here, Quin had assumed that the dragons were merely a traditional Japanese theme, like rivers and lakes and villages, but now she’d learned from the journal that the dragon, like the eagle, was a symbol belonging to one of the ten Seeker houses. And these dragons looked curiously like the drawings in Catherine’s book.

  Mariko had lived on the Scottish estate when Quin was young, but Quin had always thought of her as an outsider, a woman who was there only because she’d married Shinobu’s father. The dichotomy between them—Mariko, small, delicate, refined; and Alistair, tall, broad, a redheaded Scot—had added to the sense of Mariko’s separateness. But what if she hadn’t been separate? A series of possibilities opened up before Quin.

  “You’re from a Seeker house too?” she asked.

  Mariko did not respond at first, but eventually she nodded. “House of the dragon. One of the first.”

  “You…you trained to be a Seeker? With Alistair and my parents?” The truth of it came upon Quin all at once. “You were an apprentice with them?”

  Mariko nodded again, a short, reluctant motion.

  “Did you take your oath?” Quin asked.

  She knew her own mother had done some of the Seeker training but had never taken the oath. But this woman…

  Mariko didn’t reply but instead moved deeper into the basement. She stopped at a cabinet up against the farthest wall. Quin followed, watching as Shinobu’s mother
entered a passcode, then pulled open the cabinet’s wooden doors. Inside were several hooded cloaks, a stack of dark-colored exercise clothing, like that worn by apprentice Seekers during training sessions, and three curled whipswords mounted on a rack.

  Mariko ran her hands over the hilts of the weapons.

  “Shinobu thought he was very clever, hiding his whipsword under the rug in his closet when he came to Hong Kong.” Despite her estrangement from her son, Mariko’s love was obvious when she spoke of him. “I found it and brought it down here, with the other family whipswords—mine and my father’s, which I’ve saved for Akio, though I don’t know if I will ever let him use it.”

  Shinobu’s mother had gotten away from the estate when she was pregnant with Akio, Shinobu’s much younger brother. Quin had seen him playing in Mariko’s yard just now, before they’d stepped down into the basement. He was eight or nine, with only a tint of the red hair Shinobu had gotten from their father. Probably the little boy knew nothing about these weapons or about Seekers; Mariko had escaped her previous life so thoroughly that even Shinobu had thought she was dead, until he was reunited with her in Hong Kong.

  Mariko lifted Shinobu’s whipsword off the rack and handed it to Quin. Then she took one of the others, a beautiful weapon with an inlaid mother-of-pearl grip. Quin took a step back, sensing the woman’s intention. In a smooth, expert motion, Mariko whipped the sword out into a solid form. Then she sent the weapon through a long series of blade formations, before flicking her wrist and letting it collapse back into a coil.

  Quin had been thinking of Shinobu’s elegant mother as some sort of rich, pampered businesswoman, with her tailored skirt suit and expensive high heels, but now she saw Mariko for what she was—a trained fighter who had given up that life, but who hadn’t entirely forgotten her roots.

  Mariko looked down at the curled whipsword in her hand. Her straight black hair was done up in an elaborate bun behind her head that now looked at odds with the hard expression on her face.

  “I did take my oath,” she said quietly. “I trained with both your father and your mother. And Alistair of course. And others.”

  “But you…”

  “I took my oath, I am a sworn Seeker,” Mariko said. “But I chose to spend my life as a mother, not…something else.”

  Quin nodded. It was a decision she understood quite well after the life her father had shown her.

  “And your athame, the athame with the dragon…” She’d looked through the pages of Catherine’s journal, studying what had been written about each Seeker house. According to Catherine’s records, only the athame with the fox and the athame with the eagle had been seen in the last few decades. But Catherine hadn’t known everything; she hadn’t described the athame of the Dreads, for example—now in Quin’s possession—with its insignia of three interlocking ovals in the shape of an atom.

  “Gone,” Mariko said, her gaze shifting away from her whipsword to look at Quin. “Our athame has been gone for a hundred years or more. My family still sent children to the estate for training—in hopes that one day we might recover our athame and be a great house again.”

  “Your athame isn’t the only one to disappear.”

  “No,” Mariko agreed. “We were not alone in that.”

  “Do you know where they’ve gone and why?”

  The woman shook her head. “No. And because I can see the question in your eyes, I will tell you that I don’t know the ‘why’ of many things. My family lived apart from other Seekers for many generations. I do not know why Seekers have become what they’ve become over the last hundred years. I only know I didn’t wish to be one of them.”

  Quin nodded again. Then she asked, “Mariko…did you ever see a strange sort of metal helmet? Something you can wear while training, maybe?”

  Mariko continued to look at Quin, but something in her gaze changed, became more cautious.

  “I left the estate after my oath, but I went back,” she said after a thoughtful moment. “Because I loved Alistair MacBain.”

  In Quin’s recollection, Mariko and Alistair had been happy together, though Quin had to admit that she’d paid very little attention to adults’ relationships when she was a child—she’d been blind to the way her own father had treated her mother, for example.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have returned,” Mariko went on slowly. “Alistair’s life and my own would have been easier if I hadn’t. But it wouldn’t have been much of a life.” She sighed and looked away from Quin at last. “Shinobu has always loved you, you know.”

  “I know,” she whispered. “I love him back.”

  “But perhaps it would be easier for both of you if you didn’t love each other…or if you didn’t wish to be Seekers.”

  The woman’s voice was so heavy with regret, Quin found herself incapable of responding. She thought of Mariko and Alistair MacBain, in love all those years but forced to live apart because of what Seekers had become—and in particular because of what Quin’s father, Briac Kincaid, had become.

  Eventually she stammered out, “I—I hope we’re trying to seek the right things.” This sounded weak, but it was the truth.

  After a moment of reflection, Mariko nodded, as if coming to a decision within herself. “You asked me a question. The answer is no, I’ve never seen a metal helmet like the one you described, not in person. But—”

  She reached into the cabinet and pushed all the hanging clothing to either side. The cabinet’s back wall was white. Over the white, in a deep red, someone had painted a detailed picture of a metal helmet exactly like the one Quin had taken from Briac and those strange boys. Beneath the helmet were several lines of Japanese text—a numbered list.

  “It’s called a focal. My family had one once, as you can see,” Mariko explained, gesturing at the painting. “A helpful ancestor decided to write down instructions for its use.”

  Quin’s eyes scanned the Japanese characters.

  “Can you translate it for me?”

  “Do you have such a helmet?” Mariko asked her. “I never saw one on the estate.”

  Quin didn’t respond at first. Mariko had left the world of Seekers. Did she really want to know the answer? Wasn’t it better if she stayed in the dark, safe in a separate life with her younger son, Akio?

  “What if I do?” Quin asked at last.

  “Then you should be careful with it,” Mariko told her. “Seeker tools are never toys. They are never to be taken lightly.”

  “I don’t take any of this lightly.”

  “No, I don’t think you do,” Mariko said meditatively. Her eyes were looking down at the whipsword still coiled in her hand. “But Shinobu might. He’s never been as serious as he should be.”

  “He’s saved my life several times,” Quin responded. “Those were serious enough to me.”

  The words came out quietly and sounded far too personal to be sharing.

  Mariko smiled unhappily. “Then maybe he’s grown up,” she said. “In any case, if you have a focal, you should know its proper use.”

  She opened the lower doors of the cabinet and brought out a small slip of paper that had been folded several times. With a sense of ceremony, she handed it to Quin.

  Quin carefully unfolded the delicate sheet to find a list written in a beautiful, foreign hand. It was the translation of the words inside the cabinet:

  1. Be firm in body, in good health.

  2. Clear your thoughts, begin from neutral mind.

  3. Focus upon the subject at hand.

  4. Place the helm upon your head.

  5. Follow these rules faithfully, lest the focal become a havoc helm.

  “I made the translation for a friend, many years ago, who had also come into possession of a focal,” Mariko explained.

  “Who?”

  “You have your secrets, Quin. Let me have mine. I don’t know what she used it for, just as I don’t know so many other things. But I can tell you that she was never the same again.” Her tone made it clear t
hat the change in her friend hadn’t been for the better.

  Quin looked back to the translated list. “Was that something to do with the words ‘havoc helm’? Do you know what that means?”

  Mariko shook her head. “It’s been so long since my family had a focal, I wasn’t taught anything about it. But it’s safe to assume there is danger. My father always reminded me that he was sending me to train on the estate despite the danger.”

  “Did he mean the danger of training? Or the danger of…your Seeker assignments after you took your oath?”

  Mariko held up her whipsword, examining the craftsmanship of the inlaid handle, before putting the weapon back in its spot on the rack inside the cabinet.

  “Maybe he meant the danger of training—the danger of tools like the whipsword or the focal—or maybe he meant the danger of assignments,” she said. She turned back to Quin. “But I think he also meant the other danger.” Mariko must have seen the confusion on Quin’s face, because she went on, “It’s not just athames that have been disappearing. Seekers themselves have been disappearing, Quin, for a long time, and no one could ever tell me why.” She was echoing what Catherine had written in the journal. “So…if you continue to be a Seeker, and if you choose to use the focal, please take care.”

  The Hong Kong Transit Bridge spanned Victoria Harbor from Kowloon on the mainland to Hong Kong Island, and it was a world of its own. It was ten stories high and topped with a graceful canopy that resembled a mass of ship sails. From far away an observer might think the Bridge was actually a series of enormously tall ships crossing the harbor in a stately procession. To Quin it had always represented a new life, a life away from her father and Scotland, a life she could choose for herself. She and her mother lived in a house on the Bridge’s main thoroughfare, where Quin had worked as a healer since arriving almost two years before.

  She entered the bridge now with Shinobu’s whipsword tucked beneath her jacket. As a resident, she was exempt from searches, and she passed through the security checkpoint with the weapon unnoticed.