Seeker
Authors: Arwen Elys Dayton
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2015 by Arwen Elys Dayton
Jacket art copyright © 2015 by Bose Collins
Jacket photograph copyright © 2015 by Charles Day/Shutterstock
Interior maps copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey L. Ward
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dayton, Arwen.
Seeker / Arwen Elys Dayton. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: After years of brutal training for what she thinks is the noble purpose of becoming a Seeker, Quin Kincaid, fifteen, learns that she will be using the ancient artifacts and sacred knowledge as an assassin.
ISBN 978-0-385-74407-2 (hc) — ISBN 978-0-375-99148-6 (glb) — ISBN 978-0-385-37857-4 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-553-53549-5 (intl. tr. pbk.)
[1. Assassins—Fiction. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 3. Antiquities—Fiction. 4. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.D338474See 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2013042886
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
T
O
F
INN
, E
MER, AND
I
MOGEN
,
the three terrors I have unleashed upon the world
“By now you should be convinced that our universe
may
have additional curled-up spatial dimensions; certainly, so long as they are small enough, nothing rules them out.”
—Brian Greene,
The Elegant Universe
COTLAND
UIN
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 uncle commented.
Quin got a knee beneath herself and saw Alistair’s wrist flick, changing his enormous whipsword from the long, slender form he’d been using to a thick and deadly claymore—the preferred sword for a Scotsman about to strike a death blow. The dark material of his weapon slid back upon itself like oil, then solidified. He raised it above his head and drove it straight down at her skull. Quin wondered how many of her ancestors had been turned to mincemeat by swords shaped like this one.