Dragon's Fire

by Anne McCaffrey

  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, P
ellar 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 hi
m 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.