It was the warmest night of the year, and the moon, though only a quarter full, hung low and huge in the sky. It was yellow more than white, with an orange halo. The Young Dread stood atop a crumbling tower of the castle—half of which was still intact and occupied, and half of which lay in ruins. From her vantage point, she had a view of the forest on three sides and the wild Scottish countryside beyond the river on the fourth. The world was both beautiful and ominous in the yellow moonlight.
It was well past midnight, which made the date June the twenty-first. That was the Young Dread’s birthday—Maud’s birthday, though no one called her Maud anymore—and by her reckoning she must be about thirteen years old, though it was now 1748, nearly three hundred years since the year of her birth. Birthdays meant little when she spent so much of her life separate from the world. But still, June the twenty-first was a date that meant something to her.
The Dreads spent much of their lives There, in that other place, outside the stream of time, where they were stretched asleep in the darkness. They were awake in the world for only short intervals, like this one, when they would train, brutally and constantly, and keep an eye on the new generation of Seekers.
The Young Dread wore only her shoes and her undergarments, but she’d long ago lost a sense of modesty when she trained. Maud stood apart from humanity, as all Dreads did. Such small personal details as bare legs were of no significance.
“Attend!” called the Middle Dread, her older companion and trainer.
He was concealed somewhere off to her right, outside the castle’s courtyard, and she suspected he was armed with a bow and a plentiful supply of blunt arrows.
The Young Dread stood straighter, ready for his commands.
“Helm!” called the Middle Dread.
Maud held a simple helmet of smooth metal, with two slight ridges from crown to back of neck and otherwise unadorned. It crackled faintly in her hands, alive with energy—electricity, the Old Dread called it, stolen from the sun. She slipped it over her head.
It took all of her skill not to lose her balance and go down on one knee. She remained on her feet, just barely, though she swayed as the helmet settled to her scalp. The helmet’s energy was now both sound and feel, a hiss and snap in her ears that traveled right through her skull. And there was a buzzing, as though she’d stuck her head up against a beehive and could hear the insects’ intimate conversations all around her.
When she surveyed the night with the helm upon her head, many separate elements became joined in a unified whole: The breeze came from the forest and the river, and she understood how far that breeze had traveled to reach her, how much land and ocean it had crossed, how many other faces it had touched. She sensed the Seekers and their apprentices in this very castle and in cottages throughout the estate, all asleep now. There were crickets at the edge of the woods, mice in the undergrowth and owls deeper among the oak trees. She was aware of the hunters and the hunted, a perfect chain of life. To the south and the west was her favorite hunter of all—the golden eagle she’d glimpsed a few times, in its aerie by the waterfall. She almost felt the night itself, crawling across the sphere of the world from east to west, darkening the land as it went.
Then she perceived it: something solid, disturbing the peace of the night, vibrating the tiny atmospheric particles—molecules, the Old Dread, her master, who knew so many things others didn’t, called them.
At the last moment she acted, pulling her body backward and sweeping her left arm up. She knocked the Middle’s arrow out of the air, sent it clattering down the stones below her.
Another arrow was already coming—a black bolt in the dark, seeking her head this time. Maud ducked, and it grazed the crown of her helm with a high-pitched ring.
“Now run!” called the Middle.
From the direction of his voice, she knew he’d changed his position. He was on the move.
The Young Dread glided down the ruined tower, leaping from loose stone to loose stone so quickly nothing had time to dislodge and send her sprawling. A new arrow hit the dirt by her feet as she reached the ground, and she felt the sting in her calf where the shaft had burned her as it went by.