Dragon's Fire (9 page)

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.