"Especially if you aren't even preggers," Jess Patrick said, with a slightly hopeful leer, for he was quite friendly with his fellow student.

"Of course I'm not," she replied firmly, although a blush colored her face under her tan. Then her expression clouded. "But she was so young and dragons are so… strong."

"I'm delighted to hear that opinion expressed in this hold," Red said firmly. "Without the dragons and those who ride them, we wouldn't be here today."

"How did Sean get those bullocks to move?" Kes asked. "It was too bloody dark to see anything by then."

Red laughed, glad to be able to turn the evening's conversation to a lighter vein. "The oxen may be stubborn, but stupid they're not. They made tracks as fast as they could from the dragon behind them!"

"How did Sean get them to go in the right direction then?" Peter Chernoff asked. "I could barely keep up with them, much less keep them left or right."

"As I said, Sean was behind them, but slightly to their right, so of course they stampeded left," Red replied. "And we are here, safe and sound. Pat, son, run get my fiddle and your mother's bodhran. D'you know where your flute is, Akis? I know your dad taught you."

"I've got a good jug," Ozzie said, and rose from the table as Pat, getting explicit directions from his mother on where to find the instruments, ran from the hall, Akis following.

It took no time at all to clear and dismantle the tables and set the chairs and benches along the walls and provide a happy ending to the first official day in Red Hanrahan's Hold.

The next morning was different. Red was up at first light, rousing Betty, Jess, Fyodor, and Deccie to feed the animals. By the time they returned to the kitchen, Licia Dook, Emily Schultz, and Sal Wang were starting breakfast under the watchful eyes of Madeleine.

With breakfast eaten and a fresh mug of klah, Red called a meeting of the various supervisors and discussed the day's priorities. That set the pattern for the spring weeks to come, establishing pastures, crops, and garden, but still making the most use of the heavy equipment that would improve and enlarge the cave system. Hanrahan had never shirked hard work and did as much time on the stonecutters or the borer—the hardest of the machines to use—as he did in the fields or the breeding yard. He could and did leave a lot of the general management of his precious stock to Brian, Jess, and Betty, with whichever fosterlings could be spared from building. But he was sensible that reasonable rest and relaxation were as vital as a good day's work.

Even that he used somewhat to his own advantage, since he made outings to map the holding a special treat—certainly a change from the unremitting labor of turning a cliff into a human habitation or the sheer drudgery of plowing, sowing, and weeding. First he had to be assured by the Weyr that there were a few safe days in hand; then he set directions and goals for his teams. The extent of his legitimate stake, combined with the acreage of those who had joined him in the enterprise, added up to a considerable hunk of real estate, as Brian put it. Now what had been delineated on probe cartographic surveys had to be thoroughly explored, posted, and assessed for potential.

In form, the Hold land was slightly pie-shaped, the most northern point the thinnest part of the wedge, and the high and very cold mountain tarn lake the blunt point. The holding widened out from the lake, bordered on both sides by river: on the southern side, the river they had so perilously crossed; on the northeast, the next large one, two days' steady ride from the first riverine boundary. Red needed to know how many more possible cave sites were available for when his present population multiplied itself out of these facilities.

With material excised from the interior, stone cottages were to be erected along the foot of the ramp all the way to the animal accommodations. In his master plan, those ultimately would be workshops for the various crafts needed in a large and prospering community.

He was fond of Brian, got along well with him, and hoped to do the same with the younger ones, but his sons would need land of their own, where the da wasn't sitting over every decision. And the stake was large enough to support many separate establishments. There should be room for future generations to expand, too. When this Fall was past, even though Red might not live to see that glorious time, his kin could spread out, all over the Hold. In his mind's eye, Red saw that even more clearly now, as magnificent a dream as he had ever envisioned when he and Mairi had decided to join the Pern colony.

So, whenever possible, he sent scouts out to find what other riches—accommodation being the main one – the stake could provide. Sometimes he went himself to check on possible ore sites, for they'd need more coal than the one seam they'd found nearby to run the hypocaust system that Egend had devised for warming the living quarters of caves.

Egend was an ingenious engineer. He'd been successful at Fort Weyr in drilling into the old, still-hot magma chamber that provided delightful quantities of heat, especially for the hardening of dragon eggs on the sandy floor of the Hatching Ground. It had taken the dragons weeks of hard work hauling in the appropriate sands from the beaches near Boll, but the Weyr now had an approximation of the conditions Kitti Ping had felt the dragons would require. Not that there hadn't been clutches successfully hatched on makeshift warm beds, but the sand flooring appealed to the queens. Like the babies appearing so continuously at Fort, dragon eggs seemed to be continually in one stage of maturity or another at the Weyr.

Whenever his duties had permitted him, Red had attended the happy occasions of Hatchings, but Mairi managed to get to them all, and was quite an expert on what color dragon would emerge from what shell.

Egend had seen no problem in heating Red's Hold by hypocaust and such hearths as could safely be extended up to the heights. He had unearthed some solar paneling among Joel's supplies, which would do for heating water. There was nothing like a good bath to soothe a body after a hard day's work. And, after having to put up with other people's dirt and grime for so long, having a bath, much less clean clothes when one wanted them, was a real luxury in the new Hold, made possible by the use of the solar panels.

Of Red's fostered youngsters, young Ali Arthied had studied enough engineering under his father that he could set up and monitor that system with Jonti Greene's assistance. They were very clever in adapting and contriving mechanicals, that pair. He planned to send both back to sit their exams with Fulmar Stone, who had been monitoring their studies.

Educating the young had become a race between the jobs that had to be done to survive and the studies that had to be done to keep skills from dying out.

Well, maybe, Red thought as he rose the morning they were finally going to hang the airlock door, when that chore was done, they could stop moving at such a hectic pace. Success in their first year here was crucial for many reasons, not the least of which was proving it could be done expeditiously. Grass was up in three of the seeded paddocks; the first shoots of alfalfa, the last of his seed allowance, were pushing through the assiduously fertilized earth. The fruit trees, puny as they were, had been planted in the walled orchard, which could be covered against Threadfall by translucent plastic sheets. The vegetable garden, also walled, was coming on with few failures, and the rows could be quickly covered with plastic shields.

It was a bright, sunny spring morning, too, Red was happy to notice: auspicious, especially since he had coaxed Paul Benden and a few other special guests from the Fort to gather for this momentous occasion—the Dooring of…