Through the window of her burning home, Quin could see flames consuming their kitchen table and licking up from the seams in the wooden floor. The sitting room walls, with their old display cases of weapons, were fully ablaze, as were the timber beams of the roof. The house was throwing off so much heat she couldn’t get close to it. Any guns that might have been hidden inside were as good as gone.
Shinobu had gone separately to search his own home, so Quin was alone as she scanned the area around her cottage. A short distance away was a stone shed that had not yet been reached by the fire. Even so, waves of heat came at her as she grabbed the old lock on the shed door and twisted the combination into it. Quin threw the door open, exposing their weapons.
Her whipsword was already at her waist, but she grabbed knives and her cloak. She felt carefully around the shed’s walls, trying to locate a hidden compartment where Briac might keep other weapons. It would be very like her father to hide things from her, yet she found nothing.
A loud crack, almost like a shotgun going off, cut through the roar of the fire. Quin backed away from the shed in time to see the cottage roof caving in. The huge crossbeam beneath it had split, and enormous sheets of slate were tumbling inward.
The chimney fell sideways as the roof gave way below it. Quin leapt backward as the entire column of masonry crashed into the shed, leveling it as though it were made of paper. She staggered out of the way as hot stones rained down around her.
But as the falling masonry settled, she discovered something flat, hard, and painted now visible below the rubble of the shed. She dropped to her knees and dug. There was metal. She covered her face as fresh air poured into the house fire and a new blast of heat hit her. Then she grabbed handfuls of earth and stones to uncover a vault, sunk into concrete beneath the soil.
There was no obvious way to open the vault. It must have been designed to be accessed only by Briac’s touch. This chamber was more secure than necessary for guns. There was only one item on the estate precious enough for this sort of hiding place.
The temperature was getting unbearable. She drew her whipsword and flicked her wrist a few times, shaping the weapon into a thick dagger that tapered to a needle point. Then she smashed the sharp tip straight down onto the edge of the vault, where the hinges for the door must be. The sword bounced off, leaving a tiny dent.
She set the tip of the dagger back into that dent. The material of a whipsword could be manipulated down to the molecular level, if you could master the subtle motions required. Quin cleared her mind and focused, ignoring the waves of heat that threatened to light her hair on fire. She put her wrist through a series of minute movements, ordering the sword to narrow its tip and extend farther.
The wind changed, and smoke buffeted her. She closed her eyes and shifted her wrist again, envisioning the tip extending farther, drawing itself out into a point so narrow, it could cut its way through metal.
She felt the sword move down through the surface of the vault, almost imperceptibly. She manipulated it again, tapering the edges so they were just as sharp as the point. As she did, the sword began to travel downward in a steady, continuous cut. It had pierced the metal. She dragged the weapon along the seam slowly, slicing as she went. A hinge gave beneath her hands, and then a second hinge. All at once, the cover came loose. Prying it up with the whipsword, she threw it aside.
The athame and lightning rod were there, waiting for a Seeker, their master, to pick them up and use them.
If she and Shinobu really meant to abandon the estate and everything on it, Quin knew she should not take the athame. She could leave it for her father and he would continue to use it as he always had. Or … or she could give it to John, who so desperately wanted it.
She covered her face against the heat and tried to locate John through the smoke, but the air was black around her.
She turned back to the vault. She could give the athame to John and ask him to release her mother. Or she could give it to him, calm him down, and ride off with him on the back of his horse. They would be together. His anger, this attack, they were only the result of Briac’s unjust treatment.
But words came back to her from that afternoon in the barn by the cliff. What if we were to decide, Quin? John had whispered. We’d do a better job. We’d make the right choices. Good choices. It was easy to think you’d make the right choices when given power, but John didn’t understand what it was to hold life and death in your hands and to decide which one you would deliver.
And if he did get the athame, he would need Quin to train him to use it. She would be helping him take his first steps There and beyond. She would be leading the way.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she took the stone dagger and rod from the vault and concealed them in her cloak. “I won’t be the one who turns you into Briac.”
There was something else inside the metal box. It was a thick book with a leather cover and a leather tie around it. The cover was worn and shiny, as though many hands had touched it lovingly over many years. She flipped through the pages, discovering it was a journal of some kind. Much of it contained a neat, girlish script, but numerous other hands had left their mark as well. Some of the early pages held the sort of cramped script that had been in style long ago. And there were other pages written in beautiful copperplate, marred only by ink stains from a leaky fountain pen. There were also loose sheets of a fine, soft parchment—vellum, she thought, recalling one of her mother’s history lessons. These loose sheets were elaborately decorated, folded carefully, and tucked among the other pages.
In her quick examination, she noted dozens of hand-drawn illustrations, many of them crude animal forms. Her eye was caught by one in particular, a diagram in an upper corner of one page: three interlocking ovals. Like a simplified drawing of an atom.
There was a yell in the distance. Quin carefully tucked the book into a pocket of her cloak, and she was away, running from the cottage toward the trees.
Shinobu had gone to his own house, to see if he could find the stash of guns. When she arrived at his cottage, however, she found that it too was a bonfire, falling in upon itself. Shinobu was not there.
Across the commons to the south, there was a loud boom, as of something large and heavy falling to the ground. Quin turned, but there was too much smoke to find the source of the noise. She could, however, see as far as her own cottage, and there she spotted her father. He was emerging from the trees to the east of her location and making his way toward their burning house, ducking low to keep out of sight.
Briac wore ordinary street clothes, and Quin realized that her father had been off the estate on one of his frequent trips—trips that usually led, a short time later, to another assignment that she and Shinobu would be asked to carry out. She didn’t know the secret means by which her father was contacted for these assignments, but clearly he had long ago established a method for the right sort of people to find him.
Briac stopped some distance from their family cottage and looked south across the commons. The changeable wind had blown the smoke clear for a moment. Briac, and Quin as well, from her vantage by Shinobu’s burning home, could now see John’s group of horsemen gathered by the workshop. It was difficult to make out details at this distance, but one horse was carrying two people, one of whom had long, red hair. Her father watched the horsemen briefly, then continued on toward his cottage, without another look in her mother’s direction. He doesn’t even care, she realized.
Briac would be searching for the athame and lightning rod when he reached their house, and Quin planned to be well away from him before he noticed they were gone.
She and Shinobu had agreed, should they get separated, to follow Fiona. Quin began to move in that direction as the smoke closed in thickly again, hiding her from sight.
