The Young Dread Read Online Free PDF Page A

insolence.
Old man?
    The Old Dread responded, unperturbed, “Perhaps not so old as you think. Or perhaps much older. But…if I were to die, then I would die. Simple.”
    “And yet…what else would die with you? Only this?” The Middle slapped the back of his hand against the Old’s shoulder to indicate his body as a whole. “Or would more go if you went?”
    The Old Dread smiled up at the larger man. “Ah,” the Old said, “that is certainly the question.”
    With a speed Maud had not yet seen, her master struck the Middle, twisted himself out from beneath, and was on his feet in a motion so graceful and sinuous that he looked to Maud like a column of dark smoke rising from a fire. In an instant, the roles were reversed, with the Middle Dread on the ground and the Old Dread over him.
    “I could take your medallion from you, and so take from you the ability to wake yourself,” the Old Dread told him. The words came smoothly, steadily, and yet there was no mistaking their particular weight.
    “Yes, you could take away my medallion, old man. You could take away everything.” The Middle’s voice was serious and respectful as he said, “I acknowledge that. And you will get only the truth from me.”
    The Old Dread softened, and the Young Dread thought he looked almost fatherly toward the Middle, much as he often looked toward her. He offered his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, the Middle took it, and the Old Dread pulled him up.
    “You gave me quite a fight,” he said softly.
    “And you,” the Middle said politely.
    Then the Old Dread turned to the tree in which Maud was hiding.
    “Come down now, child!” he commanded. “I have come to see you.”

Chapter 5
A Promise
    “It’s been a long time since I saw you move so quickly, Master,” the Young Dread said.
    She and the Old Dread were walking through the shaded woods, without the Middle.
    “That it has,” he agreed.
    He’d fully entered the time stream of the world by now. His gait was smooth and fluid, his tread silent.
    “How long has it been since we last saw each other, child?”
    “Nearly a hundred years, I think,” she answered. “Though I have only been awake a few times since. Have you woken in between?”
    “Once,” he told her. The word carried the burden of some unpleasant memory.
    Her master was not a tall man. The Young Dread reached the height of his nose, and so she was quite familiar with his long gray beard. It twitched now, thoughtfully.
    “I was awake once, and you were not,” he said eventually. “I saw the Middle Dread, and we had…words.” He tugged at the end of his beard in a meditative fashion. “They were angry words. But also good words, words of promise and change. Has he kept his promises, I wonder?”
    She looked up and found his gaze intently upon her. The Old Dread’s eyes had always been her favorite part of him. They were graymore than brown, and they shone with unexpected brightness. When he looked at her, she thought, her master saw to her heart, and this made her heart feel larger.
    “Kept his promise how, Master?”
    He wore his old gray cloak, the same cloak he’d worn every day that she’d known him, with many deep pockets that carried all manner of objects and weapons and scraps of parchment. Maud could only guess at the contents of her master’s cloak and also at its weight. And yet he wore it as though it weighed nothing at all.
    His hands bothwithdrew inside that cloak, then reappeared with several knives in each. If the Young Dread’s eyes had been slower, it would have looked as though the knives appeared all on their own.
    “I wonder—has he been training you well?” he asked her.
    “I—”
    Before she had a chance to answer, he threw one of the knives at her, so quickly it was only a ghostly glint across her view.
    The Young Dread slowed her sense of time, snatched the knife’s handle from the air. She let her body spin like a dancer, and then she sent the blade whistling