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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.
    I am thinking, and it’s going to get me killed,
she told herself.
    Seekers did not
think
when they fought. And unless Quin stopped her mental chatter, Alistair was going to spill her brains all over the clean straw on the barn floor.
Which I just swept,
she thought. And then:
For God’s sake, Quin, stop it!
    Just as she would tense the muscles of her hand to form a fist, Quin focused her mind. At once, things became quiet.
    Alistair’s claymore was hurtling through the air toward her head. His eyes looked down on her as his arms swung the sword, his feet slightly apart, one in front of the other. Quin saw a tiny shake in his left leg, as if he were off balance just a bit. It was enough. He was vulnerable.
    In the moment before Alistair’s sword should have crashed through her forehead, Quin ducked, pivoted toward him. Her wrist was already twisting, commanding her whipsword into a new shape. It melted into itself, becoming an oily black liquid for a split second, then solidified into a thick dagger. Her uncle’s claymore missed her and made a heavy impact with the barn floor behind her. At the same moment, Quin launched forward, burying her weapon in Alistair’s left calf.
    “Ahh!” the big man screamed. “You’ve got me!”
    “I have, Uncle, haven’t I?” She felt a smile of satisfaction pulling at her lips.
    Instead of cutting flesh from bone, Quin’s whipsword puddled into itself as it touched Alistair’s flesh—it, like Alistair’s sword, was set for a training session and would not actually harm its opponent. But if this had been a real fight—and it had certainly felt real—Alistair would have been disabled.
    “Match!” Quin’s father, Briac Kincaid, called from across the room, signaling the end of the fight.
    She heard cheers from John and Shinobu. Quin pulled her weapon away from Alistair’s leg, and it re-formed into its dagger shape. Alistair’s own blade was stuck six inches into the hard-packed barn floor. He flicked his wrist, collapsing the whipsword, which snaked out of the ground and back into a coil in his hand.
    They’d been fighting in the center of the huge training barn, whose old stone walls rose around the dirt floor with its covering of straw. Sunlight streamed through four large skylights in the stone roof, and a breeze came in the open barn doors, through which a wide meadow was visible.
    Quin’s father, their primary instructor, stepped to the center of the floor, and Quin realized her fight with Alistair had been only a warm-up. The whipsword Briac was carrying in his right hand was a child’s toy compared to the weapon he wore strapped across his chest. It was called a
disruptor.
Forged of an iridescent metal, it resembled the barrel of an enormous gun, almost like a small cannon. Quin kept her gaze locked upon it, watching the metal flash as Briac moved through a patch of sunlight.
    She glanced at Shinobu and John. They seemed to understand what she was thinking:
Brace yourselves. I have no idea what’s happening now.
    “It is time,” her uncle Alistair said, addressing the three apprentices. “You’re old enough. Some of you”—here he looked at John—“are older than you should be.”
    John was sixteen, a year older than Quin and Shinobu. He should have taken his oath already, by the normal schedule, but he had started his training late—he’d been twelve, while Quin and Shinobu had started at eight. This was a source of ongoing frustration to him, and