CHAPTER 3

NEAR CAMP NATALON,
AL 492.7–493.4

Following Master Zist’s instructions, Pellar snuck onto one of the trader’s drays and hid behind the barrels of goods intended for Camp Natalon. To increase his chances of avoiding detection, Pellar sent Chitter ahead to Zist.

The trip up to the camp took a sevenday. Zist could only manage to sneak him food twice. Fortunately, Pellar had filled his pack wisely and had planned on surviving on his own for at least two sevendays. He left the trader caravan the night before it was due to arrive at the camp and took off into the mountains.

The weather was chillier than at Fort Hold and the Harper Hall. Pellar was dressed well and kept up a hard pace, knowing that his exertions would keep him warm. He pressed on through the night, only looking for a spot to sleep as the sun crested the horizon.

He found the spot in a clearing on an eastern plateau of the mountains that rose up toward Camp Natalon. The plateau was wide, with a thick canopy of trees and lush undergrowth. Grass grew in wide swathes.

Pellar paused before he entered the plateau, scanning it carefully for any signs of life. A tingling feeling, some strange sense of unease, disturbed him and he shrank back tight against a boulder. He waited, taking the time to pull a piece of jerked beef from his tunic, chewing on the tough strip of meat slowly both from necessity and to force himself to maintain his composure as Mikal had trained him.

He peered around the boulder much later and scanned the plateau again. It took him a moment to spot what had first disturbed him—a darker spot of brown underneath one of the trees. He peered at it suspiciously. A breeze blowing up the side of the mountain, fanned by the warming air of the morning sun, caused something bright on the dark mound to flicker. Pellar shrank back against his boulder and waited again.

Finally, he peered back around, examining the whole plateau until he was certain that it was abandoned. He moved around the boulder that had hidden him and walked briskly onto the plateau. He still suspiciously searched the area, stopping to check the ground and scan the areas beyond the plateau that had been out of his sight, resting himself against a tree or crouching down by a boulder. Satisfied, he made a roundabout circle to the brown spot.

The bright something he’d seen earlier resolved itself to a bundle of yellow flowers. Pellar paused, his throat suddenly tight and dry.

The mound was a grave, newly dug—and it was too small for an adult.

He took a deep breath and worked his way closer to the mound, keeping a careful eye out for any signs of footprints. At first he thought he’d found none, then, as he looked near where the flowers had been left, he made out faint signs of disturbed ground. Curious, he got on his hands and knees, and bent close to the ground. The markings didn’t look like footprints until he got close enough to see the straight thin lines of bindings and realized that the strange markings around them were those of bark being pressed into the ground. The prints were small, another child.

A child wearing sandals made of bark tied on to the feet with twine.

“You can make shoes out of anything,” Mikal had once told him. “Wherhide’s the best, of course. But I once made a pair out of bark.” He’d shaken his head. “They’re brittle, hard to keep on, and don’t last long, but they’re better than going barefoot, particularly in the cold.”

Pellar made a wide circle around the far side of the grave, trying to intersect the bark-sandal tracks as they moved away. He found them. He got down on the ground again, carefully, checking for signs of others. He was about to give up when he noticed some disturbed grass. He smiled to himself.

Someone had very carefully erased his or her tracks. If the small child hadn’t felt compelled to put some flowers on the grave site, Pellar doubted if he would have spotted the tracks at all. Now that he knew what to look for, it would be easy to find—the tracks were less than a day old.

A small child had died and been buried here in an unmarked grave without even flowers to mark the passing. Another child—maybe a sister or a brother—had sneaked back to put flowers on the grave before joining the rest of the troop as they headed north toward Camp Natalon.

If he moved quickly, Pellar thought, he could trail the group right to their camp. Pellar was certain that they were Shunned. Tightening his jaw in determination, Pellar hiked his pack farther up his shoulders. But he had not gone forty paces when he spotted the broken stems of flowers snatched along the pathway. They were taken in ones and twos from a clump, so that only someone looking would have seen them. Pellar wondered for a moment if the child who had picked them had done that deliberately or had merely been picking the nicest flowers he or she could find. He looked down at the clump and stopped, his face clouded.

He unshouldered his pack, pulled out a small shovel, and carefully dug up a small outcropping of the flowers.

Carrying them in his hands, he returned to the grave site and firmly planted them on it, going so far as to pour a bit of his precious water over them. Images of Carissa were mingled in his mind with those of another child, older and faceless but another innocent lost because of the Shunned and those who Shunned them.

Nodding to the dead child’s ghost, Pellar stood back up from his planting, dusted himself off, and turned back resolutely to his tracking. How long, he wondered, could a child who wore bark shoes survive in the northern cold?

He turned back to face the direction of the tracks and peered into the distance, spotting landmarks and guessing at their general destination. Satisfied that he could pick up the trail again, Pellar turned back the way he came. If he went back to the road, he thought, he could make better time and get in front of the slow-moving band.

Pellar arrived at Camp Natalon in the middle of the night, silently moving through the trees on the plain to the west before breaking out into the camp’s clearing and striding boldly, as if he belonged, to the small stone cot that Zist occupied.

The entire camp was sleeping; not even a night shift was working the mine, for that evening there had been a great celebration. Pellar had observed it all from across the lake. When the last of the festivities had died down, he had started his roundabout journey, going west around the far side of the lake, crossing the stream that fed it, and picking his way through the forest.

By the time Pellar reached Master Zist’s doorstep, the evening had turned so cold that Pellar could be seen clearly even in the dim light of the lesser of Pern’s two moons. As he knocked on the door, his stomach grumbled loudly.

The door opened quickly and Zist stood back, blinking away sleep, to let Pellar in to the warmth.

“Your lips are blue,” Zist told him. Pellar could only nod in agreement. Zist grabbed him by the shoulder, turned him, and gave him a gentle shove. “The fire’s over there.”

Pellar scented succulent smells in the air. “I saved you some food from the feast,” Zist said, and Pellar picked up his pace.

He was surprised and grateful when Master Zist thrust a cup of warm klah into his frozen hands and pushed him into a chair, making it clear that Pellar was to eat before discussing their business.

As Pellar avidly ate and drank, Zist sat and leaned back in his chair, eyeing the youngster worriedly. Pellar caught the look and interpreted it correctly. He reached under his cloak and pulled out his slate, sliding it over to Master Zist before returning to the excellent food on his plate.

Zist frowned until he saw that the slate was covered with a stiff piece of cloth. He folded the cloth aside and saw that Pellar had written a long missive in carefully precise, tiny letters.

As Zist read, his eyebrows went up.

“You found their camp?” he said in surprise, looking up to Pellar for confirmation. The young harper nodded, grinned, and waved for his Master to continue reading. Zist grunted in assent and bent over the slate once more. He did not read for long before he looked up again. “Mostly children? How are they dressed?”

Pellar pointed to the slate again and once more Zist returned to his reading. The next time he looked up, ready to ask a question, Pellar merely smiled and pointed back down to the slate.

“There’s nothing more there!” Zist protested. Pellar nodded in agreement. “So that’s all you know?”

Pellar nodded again.

“Winter’s coming on,” Zist muttered to himself. “Those children will freeze.”

Pellar made a grimace in agreement and then emphatically rubbed his belly.

“And starve,” Zist agreed. “But I don’t understand why they’re here. Why weren’t they left somewhere else? What use are they up here?”

Pellar stood up, waving his arms to attract the harper’s attention and, when he got it, pointed his thumb at himself, put his hand flat over his head, and then lowered it down to his waist while making big and cute eyes.

“They’re small and cute.”

Pellar nodded and waved a hand, palm up in a general arc, pointed toward the miners’ cottages at the edge of the lake, and then gave Zist the same small-child look.

“Well, of course there are children the same age here, but everyone must know all the children in the camp by now.”

Pellar gestured for his slate and Zist passed it to him, waiting patiently until the young man passed it back with the new message, “Not at night.”

“They’re stealing coal at night?” Zist asked, frowning. After a moment’s thought he declared, “They couldn’t take much, being so small.”

Pellar shook his head and dramatically raised a hand to his forehead, turning back and forth, scanning the room intently.

“They keep watch,” Zist surmised. He nodded in agreement. “And, at night, if one of them saw someone he didn’t recognize, he could shout a warning or act lost and no one would be the wiser.”

Zist leaned back in his chair and gestured for Pellar to sit down. Pellar knew the old harper well: He filled his plate again and nibbled at its contents while occasionally eyeing Master Zist as if hoping to see what the harper was thinking.

“Do you know how much they’re taking?” Zist asked after a long, thoughtful silence. Pellar looked up from his plate and shrugged. Zist gave him a small nod of thanks and resumed his musings.

A long while later, Pellar finished his dinner and reached for his slate again.

“Tell me about the feast,” he wrote.

Master Zist reached for the slate, read it in a quick glance and grunted in assent. “It was quite interesting,” he replied. “Illuminating, really.”

Zist proceeded to describe the wedding between Silstra, the daughter of Danil, one of the miners—in fact, the sole remaining wherhandler at Camp Natalon—and a Smithcrafter named Terregar. He went on at length about the singing ability of one of Danil’s younger sons and the strains he’d noticed between Natalon, the camp’s founder, and Tarik, his uncle.

“And the strangest thing was the watch-wher,” Zist added, shaking his head in awe. “It flew over the ceremony, carrying a basket of glows in its claws.”

Pellar jerked his head up in surprise. He tucked his thumbs under his shoulders and flapped his arms awkwardly, disbelief clear on his face.

“I know, I know,” Zist said, raising a hand to fend off Pellar’s skepticism, “it’s hard to believe a watch-wher flying and no one’s ever reported such a thing before. But then, no one really pays much attention to watch-whers.

“I had a long talk with Danil about it afterward and he claims that he even rode the beast once at night.” Zist shook his head at the notion. “Said that the air was thicker at night.”

Pellar shrugged, then wrote on his slate, “Not as good as dragons.”

“No, certainly not,” Zist agreed. “It’s one thing for a beast to go where it wants, and quite another to train it to go where you want it to go.”

Pellar nodded emphatically, recalling his efforts to train Chitter. Zist smiled and shook his head fondly. “There’s no love lost between Tarik and Natalon, that much is obvious,” he continued. “And I’m afraid in my first few days here I also created some stress between Kindan and Kaylek.” He glanced at Pellar, saw his confusion, and explained. “They’re two of Danil’s boys. The younger one has got the makings of a good singer, while the older—well, he’ll do well in the mines.

“Kaylek’s got the makings of a bully,” Zist added after a moment spent with his lips pursed in thought. “And I’m afraid he may take his anger out on Kindan. I’d hate to have the youngster too scared by his big brother to sing from now on.”

Pellar thought, then wrote, “Mentor.”

Zist glanced at the word and nodded.

“I suppose that might work,” he agreed. It was an old Harper Hall trick to assign some of the more difficult personalities the job of mentoring a younger person. Sometimes the responsibility and the assumption of a mantle of authority succeeded in teaching the “mentor” more than the youngster.

“But who?” Zist asked himself, leaning back once more in his chair.

A yawn escaped from Pellar before he could clamp his jaws shut against it. Master Zist looked up and smiled, shaking his head. “There’s no need for you to stay. I can ponder on this by myself.” He rose from his chair and gestured to the kitchen. Pellar smiled and charged forward eagerly, opening his carisak as he moved. After twenty minutes of rummaging through Zist’s stores, Pellar pulled the strings on the carisak tightly closed and put it on his shoulders. Master Zist smiled, asking, “Did you get your fill of supplies?”

Pellar patted his carisak and nodded. He retrieved his slate, hung it back around his neck, and settled it under his tunic.

“Chitter’s guarding your camp?” Zist guessed as they headed for the door, Pellar leading the way. “You can send him here if you need more supplies.”

Pellar turned back to the harper, surprised.

“Oh,” Zist said with a laugh, “if he’s seen I’ll just say that he’s here on harper business.” He winked at Pellar. “And it’ll be true, won’t it?”

Suddenly, as if on cue, a fire-lizard exploded into the hallway, searching desperately for Pellar and screeching anxiously.

“What is this, is he hungry?” Zist asked. Pellar reached out and coaxed the skittish fire-lizard into his arms, stroking him gently with one hand. Once Chitter had settled, Pellar lifted him away from his body in order to look the fire-lizard in the eye. Zist stood by quietly, still marveling at the way Pellar had learned to commune with the creature.

After a moment, Pellar drew Chitter close to his side again and stroked him softly with a finger. Then he launched the fire-lizard into the air and Chitter went between again, leaving only a cold patch of air behind.

Pellar turned to the door with an unmistakable air of urgency.

“Pellar, what is it?”

The youngster turned back, pulling his slate from under his tunic at the same time and quickly writing, “Someone found my camp.”

Pellar didn’t return to his camp. Instead he spent the night cold and restless crouched nearby, waiting for dawn.

As the sun rose high enough to spread its rays into the deep valley where he’d made his camp, Pellar willed himself to be calm and motionless, doing his best not to give away his position to anyone who might be looking for him.

He had sent Chitter back to Master Zist with a note to say that he was safe and had told the fire-lizard to wait with the harper until he called for him.

Pellar waited an hour before he was satisfied that no one was lurking near his camp, then he slowly made his way toward it. Someone had found his pack, examined it, and carefully rehidden it.

Except—there was a small bouquet of flowers on top of it.

Pellar smiled. It didn’t take him long to spot the tracks of bark-soled shoes. He was sure that whoever had found his camp was the same person—a little girl?—who had left the flowers at the grave site.

Quickly he gathered his things, careful to leave his campsite no more disturbed than before. Then he shrugged on his backpack and strode away, determined to find a better campsite, resolved to leave no more clues of his presence.

Pellar found his new hiding place high up in the mountains to the east of Camp Natalon. The site itself was a cave whose narrow entrance looked like it was nothing more than a crevice. Inside, the crevice widened out again. Pellar imagined that part of the mountain had split a long time ago to make the hollow he found. A steady, chilling breeze blew through the crevice and up the natural chimney formed by the mountain’s split. Fortunately, part of the hollow was wider and provided a relatively sheltered spot out of the worst of the breeze.

That was just as well, for Pellar was shivering with a bone-deep chill when he finally crawled into the widening part of the crevice and decided to make it his camp. The last rays of the evening sun only partially lit his new hiding place.

He carefully scouted out a collection of small rocks and set them out in a circle, in the center of which he placed the bundle of dead twigs and branches he’d gathered along his way. From one pocket he pulled some dead leaves and from another his precious flint stones.

With the fire going, Pellar rolled out his bedding and pulled off his boots. He made a face when one of the leather laces broke, and made yet another when he reached into his pack for his spare and found only dirtied twine instead. He stared at it dumbly for a moment and then shook his head in chagrin—apparently his flower giver had made him a trade, taking his good leather lace strips for her bark-soled shoes and leaving him her worn-out twine in their place.

With a sigh, Pellar found the least worn, least dirty piece of the twine and cut it off of the rest, carefully knotted it onto his broken lace and laid his boots near the fire to dry. He placed his wet socks on a nearby rock but, mindful of a time early in his training with Master Zist, not so near that they would catch fire.

His feet, socks, and boots were wet not just from the sweat of his exertion in climbing into this new place but also from his trek through a number of streambeds as he worked to hide his trail. Master Zist had told him about the burned-out Shunned wagon that he’d found on his ill-fated sojourn with Cayla and Carissa, and that tale, along with so many others regarding the Shunned, left Pellar certain that at least some of them would think nothing of killing him for his belongings—or even just out of simple spite.

Pellar clenched his jaw as he thought of the little flower girl in the company of such rough men. His thoughts grew darker and he found himself thinking about Moran, Zist’s lost apprentice, imagining him tortured and worse after being unmasked by the Shunned. For a moment, Pellar shook in cold fear, but then got control of himself. He had Chitter and he was better, much better, at tracking and fieldcraft than Moran had ever been—Master Zist had said so repeatedly.

Pellar took a deep calming breath and stared at the fire. With a start he realized that some of the cold he felt was from letting the fire burn low. He smiled at his silliness and gently fed some smaller twigs to the fire until it was strong enough to take another branch.

Satisfied, he searched through his pack for some more jerked beef and chewed on it slowly, doing his best not to think of bubbly pies or sliced roast wherry. When his stomach felt fuller, he put the rest of the jerky away.

He stared at the fire, then craned his head around to get a good look at his surroundings.

Chitter, he thought, concentrating on the image of the fire-lizard and sending a mental image of his hiding place.

A rush of cold air burst on him and suddenly the hollow was full of ecstatic fire-lizard, warbling in pride at having found Pellar.

Pellar burst into a wide grin and held out an arm for the small creature to perch on.

You are the best, Pellar thought to him. Chitter preened and stroked his face against Pellar’s.

Pellar soon fell into a routine, meeting every other sevenday with Master Zist while the rest of the time keeping a distant eye on the spot he’d noted at the camp’s coal dump where the Shunned were stealing their coal.

Their depradations were small and carefully timed, occurring when fresh coal had been deposited by a night shift but before the coal could be bagged, making it harder for the theft to be noticed.

Pellar was glad of his visits, not only for the warmth and the food, but also for the chance to hear Zist’s observations of the miners. He was glad to hear that the harper had taken his suggestion regarding Kaylek and pleasantly surprised to learn that it had worked—Kaylek and Cristov had formed a pleasant attachment, the elder Kaylek learning more restraint and the younger Cristov becoming more outgoing and assured by Kaylek’s teachings.

Aside from those visits, Pellar ventured no farther from his cave than he needed, ensuring that he left few tracks. Those tracks he did leave always headed first south before circling back around to the north, and he was careful to break his tracks whenever he could, whether by walking in the middle of stream or by climbing across several trees.

He never used the same observation point two days in a row, and chose each one so that he could observe his previous observation point from his current one, in case someone had spotted him the day before.

He stayed at his observation point only long enough to see what the Shunned had taken from the coal dump the night before. Because he moved when they were sleeping, Pellar was less worried about being discovered by the Shunned than he was about being discovered by Ima, Camp Natalon’s hunter. But his caution worked just as well in keeping him from her sight as it did from the Shunned.

Still, he made it a point to arrive at his day’s observation point an hour or two before dawn, and left as quickly as he could.

He had learned in his two months of observations that the night shift, which included the light-sensitive watch-wher, usually finished before the sun crested the horizon, and he kept a careful eye for when they left the mine, not certain how good the watch-wher’s sight was and whether it might spot him.

He was surprised one morning when the sky seemed to have gotten lighter than usual and still the night shift hadn’t departed the mine shaft. In fact, the sun was now over the horizon and others in the camp were beginning to stir. Pellar smiled as he spotted a distant figure walking sedately from the Harper’s cot to Natalon’s stone house: Master Zist on his way to teach the children of the camp.

Not long after, his surprise turned to alarm when he noticed a trickle of dark smoke—coal dust—rising out of the mine shaft’s mouth. The trickle grew to a torrent and Pellar, with a sinking feeling, realized that something terrible had happened.

He could think of no way to send a warning to Master Zist, nor any of the miners. The torrent of coal was its own alarm, darkening the sky above the camp, marking it in shadow. Miners in the camp noticed the smoke and moved quickly.

Soon the camp was a swarm of activity around the mine entrance. Pellar watched in horror as the tragedy played itself out in the distance. He saw how the women in the camp set up an aid station, saw one boy, about ten or so, rush out of the mine, grab some bandages, and rush back while one of the nurses waved her arms after him scoldingly. Pellar guessed that the boy was one of the victim’s sons.

A knot formed in Pellar’s throat as he imagined how the youngster must feel and he wished fervently, as if his hopes could change the past, that the boy’s father was not too badly injured.

Or perhaps the victim was another boy, Pellar thought as he suddenly remembered that Kaylek was supposed to have been on that shift for the first time. Was Kaylek among the injured?

Feeling an indistinct bond with the lad, who was near his own age, Pellar strained through the distance for any sign of him.

For hours Pellar watched the tragedy, saw the few injured brought up out of the mine, caught sight of a red-haired boy being brought up. Hours later, Pellar gasped in relief as he spotted a youngster emerge from the mine shaft. His relief was short-lived: He saw the figure find the red-haired boy and realized that the other boy was not Kaylek but his little brother.

He kept looking and hoping until he saw one of the women throw a blanket over the two boys and realized that they were the only children in the aid station.

There was no sign of the watch-wher, Dask, of his handler, Danil, or of any of the sons of Danil that had were assigned to that shift. Nor was there any sign of the red-haired boy’s father.

Chitter arrived with a cryptic note from Master Zist later the next day: “He can’t stay here for a while.”

Pellar considered the notion of sending the brown fire-lizard back to the Harper Hall, but he was not at all sure that Chitter would go, nor that he could recall the fire-lizard from such a distance.

Pellar waited several days before making his way circuitously to the camp. He’d seen the shrouded bodies of the dead miners brought up—there were nine.

He’d started his journey at the first of the dark, so there was a chance that the Shunned might also be moving. He sent Chitter ahead to the miners’ graveyard to reconnoiter and followed more slowly, going down the southern side of his mountain, around west below the lake, crossing the stream that fed it at the far side before going east again toward the camp. The night was noisy with the light winds that carried the cold mountain air down into the cooling valley.

The graveyard was in a clearing beside a waterfall that gushed down the cliffside a kilometer west of the miners’ camp.

It was a peaceful place with thankfully few graves—most of them, sadly, the nine new ones from this latest accident.

Pellar had picked some yellow flowers on his way and wasn’t surprised to see, among other large floral bouquets, small bunches of yellow flowers already at the graves, each bunch tied together with a blade of grass. Even though it was possible that the yellow flowers had been left by one of the miners’ children, Pellar was certain that the little girl had left them.

He wondered if the little girl who had left the flowers did so because she felt somehow responsible. Or was it just because she was remembering her own dead, and honoring them by honoring these—as Pellar was honoring Cayla and Carissa.

Pellar’s musings were interrupted as Chitter suddenly ruffled his wings loudly and disappeared between. It was a warning. Pellar pushed himself tight against a tree, motionless.

A figure appeared near the grave site, not three meters from Pellar. The figure made its way to the graves. Pellar caught sight of a strand of blond hair around the person’s face. It was a youngster—a girl, Pellar thought—perhaps two years younger than himself. Definitely not the flower girl, who was much smaller and probably younger, too.

Something alarmed her, and she turned toward Pellar’s hiding place, reached down, and searched the ground with her hand, coming up with a large rock.

“Who’s there?” she called—definitely a girl. “I’ve got a rock.”

Pellar pressed closer against the tree, though he was positive that she couldn’t see him in the darkness.

Strangely, the girl sniffed the air. “I can tell you’re not from the camp,” she called over the breeze. “If you don’t identify yourself, I’ll—I’ll tell Master Zist about you.”

Pellar allowed himself a smile; Master Zist would be the least of his worries. But he wondered how the girl could tell he wasn’t from the camp, and why she had sniffed the air? The breeze was blowing to her from his direction and he knew that a good bath would not be amiss, but he was certain that no one could smell him at such a distance, particularly in a clearing full of fresh-cut flowers. Perhaps she could see him. But if so, why hadn’t she thrown her rock?

The girl stayed motionless for a minute more, then dropped her rock and turned back to the camp. She paused once, turned back quickly, perhaps hoping to catch Pellar leaving his hiding place, and called, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you! Master Zist has quite a temper and won’t give up until he finds you.”

Pellar stifled a snort of laughter; he was certain that he was more familiar with both Master Zist’s temper and tenaciousness than the girl was.

He waited until his feet and fingers were numb before he sent the thought to Chitter to check the way to the camp. Chitter responded instantly, letting him know that the way was clear.

Thirty minutes later, well past midnight, Pellar was ushered into Master Zist’s kitchen and handed a mug of warm klah. Affectionately, the Master also tossed some small rolls in Chitter’s direction; they were caught midair by the hungry fire-lizard.

“Was that you that Nuella ran into at the grave site?” Zist asked as soon as he saw Pellar rest his mug on the kitchen table and pull out his slate.

Pellar didn’t pick up his slate but instead drew two curves in the air with his hands and then brought one hand, palm flat, against his chest at the height of the girl he’d encountered.

“Yes,” Zist agreed drolly, “that would be Nuella. She thought she’d frightened you away.”

Pellar smiled and shook his head.

“I’d prefer it if she didn’t find you again.”

Pellar nodded emphatically in agreement.

“And I think we should be very careful about your future visits,” Zist said. He jerked his head toward the front of the cottage. “I’ve got a new houseguest.”

Pellar raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“Kindan,” Zist explained. “One of Danil’s sons. He wanted to stay on at the Camp and as none of his kin could take him, I”—the harper waved a hand—“agreed to take him in.”

Pellar tried his best to hide his dismay, but Zist knew him too well.

“My predecessor, Harper Jofri, thought highly of him,” Zist continued. “His notes show that Kindan has potential as a harper.”

Pellar was afraid he knew what was coming next.

“I’m thinking of taking him as my apprentice.”

Pellar burst up from his chair, his anger and sense of betrayal overwhelming him and he pointed emphatically at his chest. “Me! Me!” he wanted to shout.

“Shh!” Zist hissed, waving Pellar back down into his chair. “He’s got good ears—he’ll hear you and we don’t want that.”

Pellar’s eyes flashed in an obvious response. Let him! he thought.

“Jofri has gone back for his Mastery,” Zist said, looking sternly at Pellar. “And while it’s possible for a Master to have two apprentices—though rare—it’s more common to promote one to journeyman.”

The color drained as abruptly from Pellar’s face as his anger did from his heart and he sat down loudly in his seat.

“Better,” Zist said. He cocked his head at Pellar and waggled a finger in his direction. “Although after an outburst like that—” He broke off abruptly and shook his head.

“The truth is that you’re still a bit too young to be rated a journeyman,” Zist admitted with a sigh. “You need two, maybe even four, more Turns of experience.” He caught Pellar’s eyes squarely with his own. “But you know everything you need to know—”

Pellar interrupted with a wave of his hands, pointing to his throat.

“Singing, or even speaking, isn’t everything,” Zist answered waspishly. He glanced back to the rooms at the front of the cottage and added, “In fact, I rather suspect in a short while I’ll come to regard your quiet ways with more than a little nostalgia.”

Zist frowned in thought for a moment and then nodded. “I’ll rate you journeyman, pending more classes back at the Harper Hall. By the time we’re done here, I’m sure you’ll have earned it.

“Now,” he continued, briskly changing the topic, “tell me all your latest news.”

It didn’t take Pellar long to bring Master Zist up to date with his observations of the past few days. He hesitated before telling Master Zist about the flowers he’d seen at the grave site—he hadn’t thought to mention his previous encounter, and he was afraid that Zist would be not angry but perhaps displeased at the omission.

He was right. Zist pressed him for every detail and made him repeat the details about how his leather laces had been exchanged for twine.

“You know you should have told me earlier,” Zist told him when Pellar had finished writing out his latest answer. Pellar grimaced and nodded sheepishly. Zist regarded him steadily and then added in a voice tinged with sympathy, “I can see, perhaps, why you kept this to yourself.”

“I shouldn’t have,” Pellar wrote back on his slate.

“I can understand the way you feel,” Zist said. “It must have seemed a bit of a betrayal when she took your laces.”

Pellar thought for a moment and then rocked one hand in a side-to-side maybe-yes, maybe-no gesture.

“She needed them,” he wrote in explanation.

“I’m sure she did,” Zist agreed. “But more than you?”

Pellar thought about that for a while before he answered with a shrug.

Zist nodded absently and sat back in his chair, cupping one knee with his hands while engrossed in thought.

“Winter will be coming soon,” he murmured after a long silence. He looked up at Pellar and sat forward. “I expect the Shunned will leave the area when the snows come. When that happens, I’ll want you to go back to the Harper Hall.”

Pellar was disturbed at the notion of leaving Master Zist by himself, and his facial expression made it clear.

“I’ll be safe enough,” Zist said, waving aside the objection. “Besides, I couldn’t live with myself if you froze to death on a fool’s errand.”

“I could follow them,” Pellar suggested on his slate.

“I think you’d be better employed back at the Harper Hall.”

Pellar nodded, hiding his own thought that it would be months before winter and things could change.

As the weather grew colder, Pellar grew bolder. He still avoided the area of the Shunned’s camp but he spent more of the daylight out of hiding. Partly it was from necessity—he felt a need for more fresh food than he could reasonably ask Chitter to carry from Master Zist’s. Partly it was to increase his woodcraft. Partly, also, it was to keep warm by constantly moving in the cold weather. Partly, Pellar admitted when he forced himself to be honest, it was to prove his abilities to himself.

He carefully copied the traps and styles of Camp Natalon’s hunter, but avoided setting out any traps where the hunter might operate. If anyone other than Ima, the hunter, came across the traps, they’d attribute them to him rather than someone else.

Pellar chose to seed his traps down the south side of his mountain, toward distant Crom Hold and away from both Camp Natalon and the Shunned.

As the weather grew colder still and the first snows began to fall, Pellar decided that there might be some sense in Master Zist’s desire to send him back to the Harper Hall. The snow was not yet sticking but, even so, Pellar had to spend extra care to ensure that he left tracks neither in snow nor in the muddy ground that it produced when it melted.

Pellar’s best traps were simple loop snares that, when sprung, hurled the quarry high up into the trees, out of sight of anyone that might later come along.

Being cautious, Pellar always varied his routes, sometimes starting at one end of his line of traps, sometimes the other, sometimes in the middle—he never took the same route on any given day and he never repeated his pattern.

This day, nearly three months since he’d visited the graveyard, he had decided to work from the highest traps to lowest. The first four traps were all empty. He made a note to consider moving them but decided not to do it just then.

As he approached his fifth trap something disturbed him—something seemed out of place. He stopped, crouching against the ground, listening carefully.

Someone was out there.

He slowly started scanning the ground below him, working his way carefully left to right, bottom to top. He spotted a disturbance of the ground near his trap. He looked up—and suddenly started. Someone was caught in his trap!

It was a little girl, no more than nine Turns old. She was staring back at him, her brown eyes locked intently on him as she hung upside down, one foot caught in the loop of his rope snare. One hand feebly held her tunic up to protect her torso from the cold wind but it flopped down enough on the other side that he could see her bulging belly and bare ribs; her legs were little more than sticks. It was also obvious, from her heaving chest and her bitter look of despair, that she’d exhausted herself in efforts to get free of the trap. On the ground below her, Pellar noted a small knife and guessed that she’d lost it when the trap had sprung. Her clothing—small, patched, and threadbare—merely confirmed his guess that she was one of the Shunned.

Pellar remained motionless for several moments, trying to decide what to do. But when he finally made up his mind to help her and stood up, she waved him down.

No sooner had he crouched back down than he heard the sound of others approaching. They came without talking but not silently, moving in a way that any tracker would be quick to notice. Pellar counted five, including a tall, wiry youth who was probably in his late teens, maybe older.

“Halla!” one of the younger ones called as they caught sight of her. “What are you doing up there?”

“Don’t ask silly questions,” the little girl snapped back, “just get me down.”

“I don’t know why,” the teenager replied. “You got yourself caught, you should get yourself down.”

In that instant, Pellar decided that he hated the young man. It wasn’t just his words, or his tone, it was the youth’s body language: Pellar knew that this teen would have no compunction, nor feel any guilt, about leaving the little girl stuck in the trap to die.

“Tenim, get me down,” Halla commanded, her irritation tinged with just the slightest hint of fear.

“I warned you to be careful about where you set your traps. It’s a pity you didn’t get your neck caught in the thing,” Tenim said. “Then you’d be dead by now.” He turned back the way he came.

“But Tenim, she’s our best tracker,” one of the younger children protested. “And Moran—”

“Leave Moran out of this,” Tenim snapped to the speaker. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him any.”

“Anyway,” and here Tenim raised one arm straight out in front of him, “she’s not our best tracker.”

Pellar was no more than five meters from Tenim and the group. Silently, he felt for the hunting knife he kept sheathed at the top of his boot, still keeping his eyes on the scene in front of him. Would they just leave her to die? Would he?

He heard a strange sound in the sky above him and noticed that Tenim’s upraised arm was covered with rough bindings of leather.

Suddenly something swooped down from the sky. For a moment Pellar feared it was Chitter come to protect him, but then he realized that the creature had none of Chitter’s sleekness, nor his thin, membranous wings.

This creature was a bird.

“She is the best tracker,” Tenim said as the bird landed on his arm. His other hand dipped into one of the pouches hung at his side and brought up a thin sliver of meat, which the bird devoured quickly. “Grief, here, is.”

“What about the food I got you?” Halla called from the tree, her tone growing desperate. “Can Grief feed you all?”

Tenim’s features hardened. “At least she doesn’t get caught.”

“Moran’ll know something’s wrong when I don’t come back,” Halla said, trying a different tack.

“So?” Tenim replied, unimpressed. “What makes you think what Moran says matters to me?”

Halla had no answer for that. Her lips quivered and she looked ready to cry.

Tenim glanced from her and back to the bird on his arm, a wicked smile on his face. With a quick command, he flung his arm upward and the bird took flight.

Pellar tensed, ready to spring, as the bird swooped onto the trapped girl, but any noise his movements made was drowned out by Halla’s fearful scream. Then, just as Pellar decided to attack Tenim, bird or no bird, Halla’s scream turned to one of surprise, followed by a yelp as the bird’s beak sliced the rope snare and she fell hard to the ground, curled into a ball and rolling to absorb the worst of the fall.

She was up again in an instant, her arms in a fighting stance.

“Thanks for nothing, Tenim,” she snarled, racing up to him. But she recoiled as Grief dropped again from the sky, screeching in her face.

“You owe me, Halla,” Tenim told her, a cold smile on his face. The smile changed to a leer as he added, “When the time comes, I’ll collect.”

The color drained from Halla’s face as his words registered. She regained her composure, saying, “If you’re still alive.”

Tenim smiled but said nothing, instead reaching up once more to retrieve his bird and feed it. He turned away from Halla, muttering soothing sounds to the bird, waved with his other hand for the troop to follow him, and started away up the hill.

Pellar stayed in his hiding place, frozen in thought and anger, with one unanswered question burning in his brain: Why hadn’t the girl turned him in?

“You’re certain that they said Moran?” Zist asked days later. Pellar had waited until he was certain that his hiding place wasn’t in danger and then, taking all his gear with him, had set off carefully, using a route he’d never before used to get to miners’ camp.

Pellar nodded firmly.

“So…” Zist’s voice drifted off as he frowned, deep in thought.

Pellar knew that Moran had been Zist’s apprentice. He dimly remembered a young man full of song and pretensions but Pellar had been still little when Moran had left on his mission to find the Shunned. Turns had passed and no one had heard from him. Zist and Murenny had sadly given him up for dead.

But rumors of a harper named Moran had cropped up in conversations at various Gathers, particularly those of Crom and Telgar Holds. In fact, Zist had chosen Crom Hold partly in the dim hope that he might find Moran, or, at least, find out more about his fate.

Pellar had heard the rumors, too, and had noted that this “harper” seemed surrounded by children, Shunned or orphaned.

When Pellar had brought it up with Master Zist, the harper had waved the issue aside dismissively. “It could be him,” he’d said. “Or it could be someone pretending to be him. We’ll never know until we find him.”

And now Pellar waited patiently, nursing his klah, and refilling it in the long silence while Master Zist reviewed his memories. It was a long while before he looked up at Pellar again.

“And only the girl saw you, you’re certain?”

Again, Pellar nodded.

“Hmm…” Zist’s attention drifted away again.

Pellar took the opportunity to refill his bowl with warm stew and had finished it, offering spare tidbits to Chitter, long before Master Zist disturbed him with another question.

“And you’re certain that this Tenim thought that the girl was the one who set the traps?”

Pellar nodded fervently.

Zist pursed his lips and stroked his chin, picking up Pellar’s stack of slates and reviewing them again.

“There were seven in the troop. Did that include the boy and the girl?”

Pellar nodded.

Zist lapsed into his longest silence. Pellar had two helpings of dessert before the harper looked up at him once more.

“I can’t ask you to stay on,” Zist began, but Pellar held up a hand, shaking his head. He pointed to Zist, then to himself, and then grasped both his hands firmly: We stay together.

“It’s too dangerous,” Zist protested.

Pellar grabbed for a slate and quickly wrote, “More dangerous alone.”

He examined the older man anxiously, saw the look of determination forming in Zist’s countenance, and wrote, “Find out about Moran.”

Master Zist looked unconvinced, so Pellar swiftly wrote, “Got old sheets?”

Zist read the slate and repeated quizzically, “Old sheets?”

“To hide in the snow,” Pellar wrote back. Taking advantage of Zist’s surprise, he wrote on another slate, “I could get close to their camp, get a real count, see what they’re doing. You know I can, Mikal said I was the best.”

“What about the girl?”

Pellar’s face took on a bleak look and he gently drew the slate back and wrote slowly, “She’s small, not fed well. May not last the winter.”

Zist sat long in silence after he read Pellar’s reply. Finally he said, “I’ve two worn sheets you can use.”

The Shunned’s camp was exactly where Pellar had guessed—a kilometer north and east of the miners’ coal dump, and past a line of suspiciously small mounds. The mounds were covered with snow so Pellar had no way of knowing how long they had been there.

Master Zist had insisted that he wait until after the first heavy snowfall and Pellar had decided that journeying as more snow was falling would further hide him and neatly erase his tracks.

He paused for a long moment beside the mounds, trying hard to convince himself that none were long enough for the bright-eyed girl, and in the end grimly continued his trek.

His first signs of the Shunned’s camp came in the form of footprints in the snow. He examined them carefully. There were two sets of prints, heading away from him, roughly paralleling his own journey from the coal dump. Both sets of prints were those of adults, both wore shoes, and both were carrying heavy loads.

Coal.

Pellar followed the backtrail far enough to see where the footprints disappeared in the snow and judged that he was half an hour behind.

He took a bearing on the tracks, then he paused for a moment, thinking. From what little he had seen of the youth, Tenim, Pellar guessed that he would be very wary and cautious. That was one reason that Pellar had decided to wait until the second heavy snowfall before he tried to find the Shunned’s camp.

The other reason was the bird, Grief. While Chitter was quite willing to pop between from a warm hiding place at Master Zist’s to a cold snowfall, he doubted that the bird would be up for scouting in the midst of a snowstorm. So, he reasoned, not only would the falling snow make it easier for him to remain hidden but he would have fewer eyes trying to spy him out.

Without the bird to watch out for him, Pellar guessed that Tenim would be extra cautious. Nodding to himself, he decided that Tenim would take a sharp turn to his camp but also double back to it. So first Pellar had to find where the two had turned, then he had to turn back to find their camp. He also had to be very careful—it was just as possible that the two would turn toward him as away from him.

He started forward, cautiously flitting from tree to tree, and then suddenly stopped.

He heard voices.

“I thought I saw someone.”

Pellar froze.

“Shards, why don’t you shout it,” another voice growled in response. It was Tenim.

“Shh,” the first speaker hissed urgently.

Pellar held his breath, letting it out again as slowly and quietly as he could. The voices were too near for his comfort.

“There’s nothing out there,” Tenim pronounced after minutes of silence. “It’s just your guilty conscience getting you, Tarik.”

“When you said I’d get rich, you never said that I’d have to haul your coal for you,” Tarik grumbled in response. “What happened to all those brats of yours?”

“If you’re complaining, why don’t you bring your own brat along?” Tenim replied. “Not that he’d be able for more than a stone or two.”

“You leave Cristov out of it,” Tarik warned. “He knows nothing of this.”

Tenim laughed cruelly. “He wouldn’t think so much of you if he knew what his father was doing.”

“It’s for him I’m doing this,” Tarik replied. “The lad has a right to expect his father to do right by him. The way Natalon’s moaning, we’ll never earn enough at this mine.”

“Not enough for you,” Tenim agreed nastily.

“All I want is a place of my own and a chance to rest at the end of my days, not always slaving away for someone,” Tarik protested. “I’ve earned it. I would have had it, too, if it hadn’t been for you and the Shunned.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about them,” Tenim said. “And I said I’d take care of you.”

Pellar shuddered, wondering how Tenim planned to take care of Tarik.

“Come on,” Tenim said. Pellar heard groaning and the sound of something heavy being lifted. “Oh, stop groaning, this is the last load. We have to get you back while it’s still dark and snowing.”

“And you’ll want me again the next night it snows,” Tarik predicted with a grumble. His voice was farther away than it had been, they were moving.

“Exactly,” Tenim agreed viciously. “After all, you want to set something by for the end of your days.”

“Why are we hiding the coal way out here? How are you going to get it to market?” Tarik grumbled.

“Don’t you worry about that,” Tenim said. “When the time comes, this’ll fetch a pretty price from the right people.”

“How can the Shunned pay for anything?”

The last words Pellar heard was Tenim’s response: “Who said anything about the Shunned?”

“I’d thought that they would have to have help from someone at the camp,” Zist remarked when Pellar reported back days later. Pellar nodded. “Tarik was my first guess,” Zist added, “although I would have preferred being wrong.”

“What now?” Pellar wrote on his slate.

Zist didn’t look at the note immediately. He acknowledged it with a wave of his hand but sat back, staring off thoughtfully into the distance.

“The boy will have to make his choice,” he murmured finally. He glanced at Pellar’s note and then at Pellar.

“It would be nice to know what this Tenim plans to do with the coal,” Zist observed.

“I could follow him,” Pellar offered.

Zist wagged a finger at him. “Only when it’s dark and there’s snow on the ground. I don’t want you caught. In the between times, you’ll have to hide here, I’m afraid.”

Pellar frowned but Zist didn’t notice, once again lost in thought.

“No sign of the younger ones?” the harper asked after a moment. Pellar shook his head.

“A pity,” Zist said. “This Crom winter is vicious.”

It was awkward, having to hide in the cottage from Kindan, Natalon, Dalor, Nuella, and even Cristov, who was occasionally assigned evening lessons with Master Zist.

When Kindan tripped up Cristov one day, Zist assigned the youngster the job of discovering three of Cristov’s virtues. Pellar had found the whole situation amusing, from his position of greater age—two whole Turns—until Master Zist challenged him to do the same when they spoke about it two days later.

“I hardly know him,” Pellar wrote in protest.

“You’ve heard enough about him, haven’t you?” Zist asked, arching an eyebrow at him challengingly.

“Words aren’t truth,” Pellar wrote back.

“Too true!” Zist agreed. “Wiser heads than yours have yet to learn that, you know.”

“I listen,” Pellar wrote in modest reply.

“Then you should know all about Cristov,” Zist replied, returning to his challenge with a twinkle in his eyes.

Pellar was about to write a response when a knock on the side door—the one nearest Natalon’s stone house—interrupted him.

“That will be my lesson,” Zist said, motioning Pellar into hiding once more.

Swallowing his unhappiness, for he had hoped that Kindan’s absence would give him more time to spend with his adoptive father, Pellar retreated to his hiding place in Zist’s study. In moments the air was filled with the sound of someone practicing on the pipes. Pellar listened, imagining the fingering and scales while hearing Zist’s patient corrections and the young piper’s self-deprecating remarks.

Pellar mentally replayed his conversation with Zist and what he’d overheard about Cristov to see if he could rise to his Master’s challenge. What did he know about the boy?

He recalled Kindan complaining about how Cristov bragged about sleeping in Kindan’s old room and wondered if perhaps Kindan hadn’t mistaken Cristov’s intent; perhaps Tarik’s son was seeking a common ground, some mutual point of interest on which to build a friendship. Pellar knew from what little he’d heard that Cristov had felt very close to Kaylek before his untimely death; perhaps the boy had hoped in a similar way to kindle a friendship with Kaylek’s little brother.

It was clear that Cristov respected and honored his father—in fact, most fights Cristov had been involved in had begun over comments about his father. Pellar couldn’t blame the lad for being loyal.

Noise of a door opening and voices speaking interrupted Pellar’s musings; Zist’s lesson had left. Before Pellar came out of hiding, he heard quick steps approaching the front door and the noises of Kindan returning.

He heard Zist quiz Kindan on what he’d learned and was pleased to hear that Kindan listed loyalty as one of Cristov’s strengths. Pellar shook his head wryly when Zist demanded that Kindan recount the contents of the cottage—he could have guessed that Master Zist would have had more than one lesson for the lad to learn.

When Zist told Kindan that there’d be a Winter’s End celebration the next evening, Pellar fought down a feeling of betrayal, for he hadn’t heard of it before and knew that he couldn’t possibly attend.

When Kindan had gone to bed, Zist brought Pellar back out of his hiding place, holding a finger to his lips for silence. Pellar gave him a sardonic look and pointed to his lips, shaking his head to remind Zist that there was no fear of him talking too loud. Master Zist glared back at him and Pellar’s teasing look faded on his face. He knew full well what Zist wanted.

“What did you think?” Zist asked quietly.

“About the house?” Pellar wrote back, referring to Kindan’s enumeration of the contents of Tarik’s house. Zist nodded. “No surprises, no more than most.”

Zist nodded in agreement.

Pellar wiped his slate and quickly added, “A sack full of marks is not hard to hide.”

“If he had one,” Zist said. Pellar gave him a questioning look, so Zist added, “I don’t see why he’d be working here if he already had enough set aside.”

“Snow’s melting, traders will be here soon,” Pellar wrote in response.

“But with the mud and patches of snow on the ground, tracks will be easy to follow,” Zist said. “Some traders might wait until later.”

“Or Tenim might create a distraction,” Pellar suggested.

“That,” Zist replied, “is a disturbing notion.”

“I could keep watch,” Pellar wrote back.

Zist mulled the suggestion over for a long time before he nodded in agreement. “Just don’t get caught.”

Pellar responded with an indignant look.

“When will you leave?” Zist asked, ignoring the look.

In response, Pellar grabbed his pack.

“It’s late enough,” Zist said by way of agreement. “Just be careful.”

Pellar would have never found Tenim if the other hadn’t been with Tarik. It was Tarik’s clumsy, irritated motion that had alerted him. Tenim slid through the trees like a wisp of smoke. At the first sign of motion, Pellar froze and slowly pressed himself against the nearest cover.

“Traders will be here soon, and then what?” Tarik muttered angrily as they walked by. “If Natalon finds out that I’ve been mining the pillars, he’ll guess—”

A raised hand from Tenim halted Tarik’s tirade.

“What?” Tarik demanded after the barest moment’s silence.

Tenim ignored him, turning slowly in a circle where he stood, carefully examining every bit of the terrain.

Pellar desperately wondered if Tenim could sight his trail; he’d been careful to take an oblique approach.

“Nothing,” Tenim said after a moment, clearly still nervous. He motioned Tarik onward. “So you’re afraid of your nephew, are you?”

“He’s too much like his father,” Tarik said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Slow, methodical, never willing to cut corners, but he always gets there in the end.”

“What has this got to do with the Traders?”

“He’ll figure that someone’s been stealing coal, that’s what,” Tarik growled back.

“Only if he finds out you’ve been mining the pillars,” Tenim observed. “Otherwise he’ll think he’s only got the coal you and the other shift leaders have reported mining.”

“It was easier when it was my own mine I was stealing from,” Tarik muttered darkly.

“You still would have had it if it hadn’t been for the accident that collapsed the roof,” Tenim replied.

“Accidents happen,” Tarik said dismissively. “Masterminer Britell’s board of inquiry never accused me of anything.”

Tenim paused mid-stride and gave Tarik a very piercing look.

“What?” Tarik demanded, sounding just a bit frightened.

“Nothing,” Tenim answered with a shrug, gesturing for Tarik to precede him. “Just, as you said, accidents happen.”

Tarik looked nervously back over his shoulder. “I’ve been good for you.”

“Indeed you have,” Tenim agreed. “In fact, I think we’ve hauled enough for this evening. Why don’t you go back home before your wife and son begin to wonder where you are?”

Tarik glared at the young man. Tenim took the glare with no change of expression, merely leaning down to tie his boots tighter, his hand casually brushing the knife hidden at the boot top. Tarik’s anger cooled visibly when he caught sight of the knife hilt and he nodded. “Perhaps I’d better, at that.”

“Good,” Tenim answered with an unpleasant smile. “You said that there’d be Winter’s End festivities tonight? In Natalon’s big house?” He didn’t wait for Tarik’s answer. “I could do with some diversion. Maybe I’ll attend—”

“You’d be recognized!”

“—from a safe distance,” Tenim finished, his eyes flashing in amusement at the other’s blatant terror.

“Don’t get caught.”

“Have I ever?”

“I found you, didn’t I?” Tarik responded.

“Yes, you did,” Tenim agreed, lowering his eyes. Considering Tenim’s woodcraft, Pellar seriously doubted that Tarik had really found the youth; probably Tenim had let himself be found.

“So be careful.”

“And you,” Tenim replied with a wave as the other turned off toward the camp. Tenim waited several minutes before starting off again—toward the camp.

Pellar followed him cautiously from far behind.

Tenim passed Zist’s cottage and then went, more slowly, beyond Natalon’s stone “hold.” The Shunned youth passed by the camp’s cemetery before heading up into the hills and circling back toward the camp.

Pellar waited until he was certain that Tenim was far away before he followed. It took a quarter of an hour of stealthy movement before Pellar reached the top of the cliff and could reinitiate his cautious trailing of the crafty young man.

A sound from the valley below startled Pellar and he froze. The noise sounded like a small rock hitting something more solid. Carefully, Pellar inched to the edge of the cliff, and peered into the valley below.

A glint of white fell—no, was thrown!—from the cliff nearby and landed with a clack on the roof of Natalon’s stone house.

What was Tenim doing?

Another stone was thrown, landing at the top of the chimney. And another, and another. The stones ricocheted off the roof, landing silently on the soft ground below. A larger stone, big enough to be a rock, was thrown. The impact made a different noise, a sliding noise.

Tenim was trying to block up the chimney! If he succeeded, the fumes from the great hearth fire would quickly overcome anyone inside, including Natalon. And then Tarik would be able to take over the camp, all because of an “accident.”

Pellar’s response was instant and unthinking. He launched himself from his hiding place and raced along the cliff edge to hurl himself wordlessly upon Tenim.

Even though Tenim was a head taller than him, and twenty kilos heavier, Pellar’s mad dive toppled Tenim off balance. They grappled for a moment and then both toppled over the cliff to fall, hard, on the muddy ground behind Natalon’s hold.

Tenim recovered first, wrapping his fists around Pellar’s throat and squeezing with a manic energy. Pellar, stunned by the fall and the ferocity of Tenim’s attack, responded slowly. He strained to pull Tenim’s hands off his neck, bucked to try to dislodge the heavier youth, tried vainly to twist to one side or the other—but all to no avail.

Spots appeared before his eyes and his vision turned gray.

Chitter, Pellar thought desperately, wondering what would happen to the fire-lizard without him. Master Zist! And then he remembered no more.