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again?”
    “Yes. Perhaps rather quickly. We shall see.”
    His gaze had retreated, as though he were looking at a landscape within his own mind. She wondered what he saw in there. Did he look at the past? Or was it the future? If he was able to see ahead, would he ever tell her what he saw? Maud wondered how long her own life would be, and how strange. Did he know?
    In time, his eyes came back to the woods and the sunlight. He said, “What else have you learned, child?”
    “I can stretch time when I must, and make my heart and my lungs and my muscles follow.”
    “I’ve seen you do that. But what else? Has he taken you with him to administer the Seeker oaths to apprentices?”
    The Young Dread shook her head. “I’ve observed an oath ceremony from afar, but I have not taken part.”
    “Ah. You shall take part now. You and the Middle Dread and I will together administer the oaths this year. You will learn to properly judge a Seeker apprentice and deem him worthy of becoming a Seeker. I will show you that, and I will teach you all that remains to take your place truly as the Young Dread.”
    “Will you teach me all you know, Master?”
    She eyed the many bulging pockets of his cloak, and thought of the mysteries contained in them.
    His face was solemn, but his eyes were friendly as he answered. “Perhaps not all. Not yet. But I will teach you what you must know until the next time we meet.” He squeezed her shoulder.
    It was enough. The Young Dread, who was perhaps thirteen years old, though she’d been alive for nearly three hundred years, who was once a girl called Maud, was satisfied. For the moment, she was not alone. Her old master was with her, and in his presence, she felt content. He would teach her what she must know, he would make her a better fighter, and she would learn other things in his presence besides—kindness, fairness, justice.
    Perhaps he would slow down again soon, become the old and tired man she’d seen at the end of his last waking. But for now, he was his true self, the man who’d taken her from her home when she was seven years old, and promised to teach her about the hum of the universe.
    He was still keeping that promise. The Young Dread, for a short while, at least, would allow herself to be happy.

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    Excerpt copyright © 2015 by Arwen Elys Dayton. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

It would be nice to make it through alive,
Quin thought. She ducked to the right as her opponent’s sword came whistling past the left side of her body, nearly slicing off her arm. Quin’s own whipsword was coiled in her hand in its whip form. With a crack, she flicked it out, and it solidified into a long sword.
It’d be a shame if he split my head open now. I’m so close to success.
The enormous man she was fighting looked delighted at the thought of killing her.
    The sunlight was in Quin’s eyes, but on reflex she raised her weapon over her head and stopped her opponent’s next strike before it cut her skull in two. The force of his blow against her sword was like a tree trunk falling upon her, and her legs buckled.
    “Got you, haven’t I?” her adversary roared. Alistair MacBain was the biggest man she knew. He stood over her, his red hair glowing like an evil Scottish halo in the dusty sunbeams coming through the skylight. He was also her uncle, but that didn’t mean anything at the moment.
    Quin scuttled backward. Alistair’s huge arm swung his oversized weapon as if it were no more than a conductor’s baton.
He really intends to kill me,
she realized.
    Her eyes swept the room. John and Shinobu were staring at her from where they sat on the barn floor, both clutching their whipswords like life preservers but neither able to help. This was her fight.
    “Useless, aren’t they?” her