Seeker Read Free

fire on a bale of hay.
    Briac turned, fired the disruptor again, this time at John.
    “John!” yelled Quin.
    He tossed the ring blindly as he saw the sparks racing toward him.Quin expected him to leap out of the way, but instead he was frozen, staring at those sparks, suddenly lost.
    “John!” she yelled again.
    At the last moment, Shinobu leapt away from his fight with Alistair and tackled John. The two apprentices sprawled safely out of the disruptor’s path. The sparks struck the wall where John’s head had been, disappearing in flashes of light.
    Quin had forgotten the disc in her concern for John, and the fiery circle was bouncing across the floor, setting the straw in its path alight.
    The disruptor was at its full whine once more. Quin saw the enjoyment on her father’s face as he fired it at John again.
    John turned, transfixed. He was staring at the sparks coming at him, hypnotized by their awful beauty. Permanent—that’s what the disruptor was. If the sparks reached you, they took your mind and didn’t leave. And John was waiting to be hit.
    She saw Shinobu kick John to the side, sending him out of the disruptor’s path a second time.
    John fell to the floor, and this time he stayed down.
    Quin retrieved the burning disc and stamped out the flames it had left along the floor. For the first time in the fight, she was angry. Her father was specifically targeting John. It was unfair.
    She tossed the disc to Shinobu, ran across the barn, and slammed her body into Briac, knocking him and the disruptor to the ground. Sparks shot up toward the ceiling and bounced among the rafters in a chaotic pattern.
    Quin brought her sword down at her father’s face as hard as she could.
    “Match!” Briac yelled, before she could strike him. Instantly Quin obeyed his order and collapsed her whipsword.
    Shinobu caught the flaming disc for the last time. Quin lookedat the clock, astonished to find that only five minutes had passed. It had felt like a year. John slowly stood up from the floor. Everyone was breathing hard.
    Briac got to his feet. He and Alistair seemed to share a silent assessment of the fight. Alistair smiled. Then Briac turned and walked toward the equipment room, limping slightly.
    “Quin and Shinobu, midnight,” he called, without turning around. “We meet at the standing stone. You will have a busy night.” He paused in the doorway of the equipment room. “John, you have bested the others and even me many times, but I saw no evidence of that skill here. You will meet me in the commons at dinnertime. We will speak frankly.”
    With that, he shut the door firmly behind him.
    Quin and Shinobu looked at each other. Quin’s anger had disappeared. Half of her wanted to scream in delight. She’d never fought like that before. Tonight she would take her oath. The life she had been anticipating since childhood would finally begin. But the other half of her was with John, who stood in the center of the barn, staring at the floor.

CHAPTER 2

J OHN
    The sun was getting low in the sky over the Scottish estate as John walked away from the training barn. He and Quin had left the barn separately, as they always did, but he knew she would be waiting for him.
    A thousand years ago, there had been a castle on the estate, which had belonged to some distant branch of Quin’s family. The castle was in ruins now, its crumbling towers perched above the wide river that encircled the land. As he walked, he could see the very highest point of the ruins in the distance.
    Now the estate was made up of ancient cottages, most built over the centuries from stones carried off from the castle. The cottages were dotted around the edge of a huge meadow, called the commons. It was spring now, and the commons was full of wildflowers. Beyond the meadow, the woods began, a tall forest of oak and elm that crept right up to overshadow the houses and marched away to the ruins and beyond.
    Barns lay at one end of the meadow. Some had