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.
