She had nearly reached the first stands of trees surrounding the plain when Meer, describing lazy loops above her head, gave a hopeful chirp, a sound that indicated to Sharra that he had seen a gold. He was one of the randiest bronzes in the hold. Then his chirp altered briefly in surprise, and he returned to her shoulder. Talla took the other side, both of them alert. So when Sharra heard the sounds of someone stumbling about in the forest and the scolding of a queen fire-lizard, she was more annoyed at a possible curtailment of her ten-day holiday than she was surprised to find a stranger so far from the hold.
Her annoyance fled at the sight of a scruffy lad, hunkered down in the brush and peering at the activity of the camp, one arm about the neck of a runt runnerbeast while a young gold fire-lizard had her tail firmly wrapped about his sunburned neck. He seemed disgusted that his queen had not warned him of Sharra’s approach, but he was willing enough to talk. His name was Piemur, he said, and all on his own he had already survived three Threadfalls in Southern.
Sharra was impressed with his resourcefulness, and it occurred to her that here might be someone Toric could use. He was young and alone and clever—and she liked him. Resisting an impulse to ruffle his sun-streaked tangle of hair, Sharra felt a pang of sorrow for whatever mother had lost this young rascal. A heart-grabber, he was. Now, if she could find someone with his charm, say ten Turns older…
His cocky resilience decided her. She did not have to take him back to the shore yet. She could have her browse around and get the stuff Brekke had asked for—and she would have a chance to see just how capable a Southern holder he could be. Toric would listen to her evaluation. Maybe if she had a capable apprentice to take along, Toric would let her do some real explorations.
As if he could read her mind, Piemur offered to help her with her herb-gathering. Pleased, she motioned for him to follow her deeper into the forest.
By the time they returned to the coast, Sharra had formed a high but qualified opinion of Piemur. He was the born rogue and scoundrel she had suspected, and she was certain that a discreet enquiry to the North would prove that he was a Craft apprentice, absent—for a dare, she rather thought, that had gone badly wrong—without permission from his Hall. He had probably been in a major Hall or near a major Hold, because he was knowledgeable about attitudes and issues that the average boy was unlikely to know about. His mind was as quick as his tongue, and he had a wry sense of humor and fun. His voice had almost settled to an adult baritone, so he was older than he looked.
Piemur was also possessed of a finely tuned memory and never forgot her traveling lessons on herbs or travel safety. He had an instinct for self-preservation that rivaled that of his fire-lizard. And, like Sharra, he had an exploring turn of mind. They would have been halfway to the snowy mountains if they had not had to be back to make the voyage home. He was exactly the stuff of which good Southerners were made.
His main worry then was that his runnerbeast—whom he called Stupid and who was anything but—could not be accommodated on one of the ships. He had sworn he would walk back to the hold if he had to, but he would not just let Stupid loose. Sharra had eased his apprehensions on that score, promising that a couple of strong sailors could easily lift the little runnerbeast into one of the sloops, but on the hike back to the coast, Piemur had become more and more laconic. Something was worrying him, and to Sharra, it confirmed her notion that he had not been entirely truthful with her.
‘We don’t care what people left behind them, so long as they work hard here. It’s a great place to start all over, Piemur,’ she said when they were within hailing distance of the camp. She waved to Ramala, who had just noticed them. ‘I think we can even manage to get a message North—discreetly—if there’s someone who should know you’re alive and kicking here.’
Instead of appearing relieved, Piemur looked away. ‘Yeah, I’ll have to do something about a message, Sharra. Thanks.’ But he did not look at her, pretending to adjust a chin piece of the halter he had made for Stupid out of the varicolored grasses they had found in the swampland.
Sharra introduced him as the survivor of a shipwreck whom she had encountered in the wilderness. ‘Toric will love him as a prime example to the faint of heart in that latest group. If a kid can live rough, they can manage, too,’ she told Ramala.
‘He’ll need boots,’ Ramala commented. ‘Too bad his feet aren’t as tough as the rest of his hide.’
Sharra laughed. Piemur’s skin had taken a deep tan to the ragged waistband of his tattered pants. He had mended the worst rents with patches Sharra had in one of her pockets, but he desperately wanted a waistcoat like hers, with ‘sockets and pockets and gussets and gores where a fellow could store anything he needed on the trail.’
Though he sported a few scrapes and scratches, he was less marked than some of those who had gathered numb-weed bush. The stench of the cooked weed hovered like a miasma on the plain, but the tubs and buckets of the salve were already stored in the sloops. Fresh fish had been caught from the outer barrier reef, and roots and fruits had been gathered. There would be a good evening meal.
On the sail back, Sharra heard Piemur asking casual questions of the other youngsters. Somehow the questions always got around to the matter of the Oldtimers.
Whatever he really wanted to know, Sharra thought, he did not seem to have found out by the time he could see the Weyr cliff itself.
Sharra instantly recognized a small skiff riding at anchor, with its Harper Hall colors on the stern. It was not the first time that Menolly herself had come from the Fort Hold Healer Hall to collect Master Oldive’s share of Sharra’s medicinal gatherings. Menolly might be seahold bred, but she had never before made the journey alone. Could Sebell have come with her? Toric was standing, elbows cocked, on the stone wharf; they would have to unload the ships before she got a chance to see Menolly and her unidentified shipmate.
Getting Stupid unloaded and up the steps proved easier than Sharra had thought. Ramala helped distract Toric—Piemur could be introduced later when Toric had had time to count the large number of full tubs and see how much had been gathered. But when Sharra had gotten the boy safely to the entrance to the cavern, he had nearly dropped the load he was carrying.
‘A drum!’ He caressed the edge of it.
‘That’s an addition,’ Sharra said. She was surprised not only by the drum, a section of one of the huge mandamo trees that were large enough to shelter a fair of fire-lizards, but by the mixed emotions that rippled across Piemur’s expressive face: familiarity, yearning, and calculation.
He looked up and out, northwest across the sea. Then, before she could tell him not to, he pounded the drum in a complicated sequence. After that, he picked up the feather ferns he had dropped and looked politely at her for directions.
The two of them had just reached her workroom when they heard the shout, echoing down the cavern aisle. ‘Piemur report!’
‘Sebell?’ The look of utter astonishment on the boy’s face lasted no more than a fraction of a moment. He dashed from the chamber, Sharra hard on his heels. Her castaway boy knew Master Robinton’s messenger? When she got to the main hall of the hold, she found Piemur being embraced by Menolly and Sebell. Only after Toric had shouted them all quiet, demanding explanations, did Sharra hear an accurate account of Piemur’s adventure.
Piemur had gone with Sebell to Nabol Hold, trying to locate the source of so many fire-lizard eggs. It was believed that the deceased Lord Meron had had illicit dealings with the Oldtimers. Piemur had managed—and Sebell gave his apprentice a scowl for the worry he had caused the Harper Hall—to get into the Hold and audaciously steal one of the eggs hardening on Lord Meron’s hearth. Forced to hide in a sack to escape discovery, he had awakened in Southern, panicked at the sound of voices, and again escaped discovery.
‘There is no way under the sun that you will get me to admit to Mardra, Loranth’s rider,’ Toric said, his expression forbidding as he faced Sebell, ‘that someone really had been in her bl
oody sack!’ He scowled fiercely at Piemur, who looked alarmed.
‘Well, she’s forgotten the matter long since, I assure you,’ Ramala remarked calmly. ‘I think we should concentrate on this enterprising young fellow.’
‘He’s got the makings of a good Southerner, Toric,’ Sharra said.
IV
Lemos and Telgar Holds, Southern Continent, PP 12
It took Thella and her seventeen raiders seven days to make their way to her objective, Kadross Hold in the forested hills of Lemos. For four days they rode; then they left their runnerbeasts in a well-hidden cave with a guard and made the final leg of the journey to a cramped hole in the mountainside an hour’s climb from Kadross Hold.
As they ate cold travel rations—they would not risk smoke being sighted by Asgenar’s sharp-eyed foresters—she reviewed her plan once more. Some of the new men still resented her. That would end after they learned that a good plan meant good results. With her dagger, she sawed off a sliver of the smoked meat, but she did not sheathe the blade. Instead she began flipping it in her right hand as she walked. It never hurt to remind them all that she had acquired a convincing accuracy with any sort of knife, and she was not shy about displaying that skill to maintain discipline.
‘Resist the urge to take anything else that might come to your hand,’ she said, ‘or you’ll take a short walk with Dushik.’ She paused again, letting the significance of that threat sink in. ‘The raids I plan,’ she went on, thumping her chest with the hilt end of her dagger, ‘will secure us everything we need to make us quite comfortable and—’ she paused, letting her attention fall on Felleck until he looked at her, startled ‘—allow us to show our faces at most halls, holds, and Gathers,’ she finished.
One of her recruits, Readis, had contacts with traders, which Thella had made good use of. She generally knew what trains were moving where between Falls. She always knew what each was likely to carry—and had mapped the best places on every route to lay an ambush, snatch what she needed, and disappear. She had no hesitation about lifting Craft messages from couriers while they slept in the way-caves that were thought to be safe from robbery. Like most Bloodline Holderkin, she had been taught drum rolls and understood most of the messages she heard, pounding back and forth in the valleys. She had profited in very unexpected ways from her Turns in a major Hold.
‘Remember that?’ And she made a dramatic turn as she reached the back of the cave. ‘We can’t always rely on paid mouths to tell us what we need to know. Some of the holdless would sell their mothers and profit more by informing on us.
‘I don’t foresee any need for violence, either. Thread will fall early in the morning across Lord Asgenar’s prime forestry. As soon as leading Edge passes this cave, we move out.’ Some of the men muttered. She shot a look at Giron, the dragonless man, who had unexpectedly volunteered to come on the raid. It had been an encouraging change from his months of apathy; she had expected to get some use out of him a lot sooner. ‘We move into position and wait until the Kadross people leave on ground crew duty. Their track leads downhill. They always feed their stock before Threadfall, so we’re not likely to run into anyone coming out to check. There’re only elderlies and a few kids left. Asgenar doesn’t realize how helpful he’ll be tomorrow!’
The men laughed or smiled, as they were supposed to. She encouraged their disrespect of tradition and smiled to herself as she turned again. Her boot caught briefly against Readis’s flamethrower tank. He immediately shifted it. Readis was the link to too many sources of information for her to object to his obsession. She had seen the Thread scars on his back, so she permitted him to bring the flamer when they would be out in Fall. It was perhaps a wise enough precaution, and he never slowed them up, even lugging that deadweight.
‘Now, settle down. We all need sleep. Dushik, sleep over here. Then if you snore I can kick you off your back.’ She drew sour laughs from those who knew the big man’s habit. As usual he grinned at her as he arranged his blanket. She turned away, satisfied. ‘Readis, you’ll wake us all at dawn?’ The man nodded and took his place.
She lay down by the low opening to the cave, where she would not have to endure the smell of many bodies in a confined space. The others soon settled, Dushik breathing heavily. But tired as she was, Thella could not slow her mind sufficiently to fall asleep. She was always exhilarated just before a strike; anticipation was usually the best part as she waited to see her plans work, proving once more to her men just how good she was!
And to think that once she would have settled for having a Hold of her own, to be acknowledged by the Conclave as a Lady Holder in her own right. So much had changed since she met Dushik. She had found far more to excite her: the thrill of planning and executing a raid, and taking exactly what she had set out to acquire, but no more. Success inspired her to set more hazardous goals, more difficult puzzles. Dushik was beginning to snore, and she prodded him with her heel. He grunted and turned over.
Since that Gather day she had found a far more satisfying challenge: choosing victims instead of being one. When she and Dushik had returned to the Gather tents to hire some carefully selected holdless men and women, she had already begun to plan. There would be many laden runners and carts leaving the Gather, and if all went well—and why would it not?—not all of them would reach their original destinations. She and Dushik would choose what they needed to supply her mountain-hold—and the desperate holdless who hovered on the edges of Igen’s Gather would bear all the blame.
The success Thella had since achieved with successful, well-spaced raids across the eastern Holds gave her immense satisfaction. If brother Larad held any suspicions that it was his own sister who was plundering his prosperous minor holds, he certainly had not mentioned it to the other four Lord Holders. Not that those thickwits would have believed him or taken any punitive action. Yes, it was inordinately satisfying to plunder in Telgar. But not too often there, or anywhere else.
By bribery and threat, Thella had obtained copies of detailed maps of the Holds in which she wished to operate, just as she had taken Telgar’s master charts from her brother’s office. While those were useful to her, she became increasingly adept in drawing out information from unlikely sources, and in attracting valuable men like Readis—and Giron, now that he seemed to be recovering.
Four Turns earlier one of her men had brought her a copy of the Harper Records on Lord Fax’s activities in the Western Ranges. Now there had been a man whose vision and grasp she could admire! A real pity that the man had died so early in what had promised to be a spectacular Holding. With cunning, he had outrageously taken over seven holds. Several times she had used his surprise tactics, scaling the heights of well-positioned holds and coming stealthily in through upper windows just at dawn, when the watchwher’s night vision was useless. He had probably been tricked into the duel that had killed him. Or good judgment had deserted him—no one challenged a dragonrider. Dragons had unusual powers, and they did not let their riders get injured. She still hoped to learn exactly what dragons did for their riders, apart from going between and fighting Threadfall. Giron would not talk about Weyrlife—yet. She would have to encourage him.
The most depressing part of that harper account was that no one had attempted to take charge of what Fax had so ingeniously secured. Ruatha Hold had been given to a baby, Meron had taken hold only of Nabol, and the other five had been reclaimed by Bloodkin of those Fax had supplanted. Then Meron, who ought to have learned more from Fax, had become enamoured of Thella’s half-sister, Kylara. Well, Kylara had not been very smart in Thella’s estimation: she had lost her dragon queen. And Meron was dead, too.
Dushik’s crescendo of snores distracted her, and she kicked him twice.
In her ceaseless quest to reduce risks and improve the profit of her strikes, she had thought long and hard about acquiring some fire-lizards, as they were said to hear dragons. One constant threat to her plans was the possibility of sweepriders noticing unusual numbers of mounted men
and loaded animals on unfrequented tracks. If she had some way of knowing when dragons were approaching, she would have time to reach proper cover. But at her first encounter with fire-lizards at a Bitran Gather, she had realized that they were much too noisy for her purposes. The success of her raids very often depended on stealth.
She prided herself that she probably knew more about their Holds than the Lord Holders did themselves. Except perhaps Asgenar, Lord of Lemos. Word had come to her that he was beginning to see the seemingly unrelated thefts as a serious problem. Any attempt to infiltrate his Holding would be too risky, but Sifer, Lord Holder of Bitra, was a much poorer manager. Seeing her chance, she had sent Keita to live with one of his stewards. It was proving necessary to get the flirt away from camp because she would not leave off teasing the woman-hungry men. In Bitra she could satisfy her itch and listen to Thella’s advantage.
Dushik began to snore again, but before she could kick him, the man on the other side did. Finally she fell asleep.
The next morning Readis roused them at false dawn. They ate, washing down the dry rations with water fetched from a nearby stream. When the men slipped out to attend to private needs, she reminded Dushik to keep an eye on Felleck. Neither trusted the man who had complained throughout the entire trip, but he had proved to be an expert at snaring wherries and knew the most edible of tunnel and rock snakes, and had been chosen because of his strength.
Perschar would be at Giron’s elbow. Thella still had not figured out why the dragonless man had volunteered for the foray. Over the last months his awareness had increased, his disturbingly blank expression becoming more alert. Readis had found him in the Igen caverns where so many holdless sheltered, thinking that a former Weyrman might prove useful to Thella. Perschar, who was capable of patching wounds and setting bones, suggested that Giron’s vagueness was probably the result of the long head gash. And, of course, once he had entered her hold, even Thella would not be so cruel or stupid as to turn him out. Meanwhile his improvement had been steady, if slow. With more animation in his face, he was also rather attractive and quite intelligent, though he rarely offered information. As a dragonless man, he was held in a certain respect by the other men. She had resented that at first, but she was beginning to think that she could make use of it.
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