Then the weather settled down into a clear spell and the entire Sea Hold was kept at a run with fish. The children were excused from the Teaching to gather seaweeds blown up by the high tides and all the Hold women set to boiling the weed for the thick juice in the stalks: juice that kept back many sicknesses and bone ailments. Or so the old aunties said. But they’d find good out of any bad and the worst of any blessing. And the worst of the seaweed was its smell, thought Menolly, who had to stir the huge kettles.

Threadfalls came and added some excitement: the fear in being Holdbound while the dragons swept the skies with their fiery breath, charring Thread to impotence. (Menolly wanted to see that grand sight one day, instead of just singing about it, or knowing it was taking place outside the thick stone walls and heavy metal shutters of the Hold’s windows.) Afterward she joined the flamethrower crews that checked for any possible Thread that might have escaped dragon flame. Not that there was much for Thread to eat on the windswept bare marshes and bogs around Half-Circle Sea Hold. The barren rock palisades that made Half-Circle bore no greenery at all, winter or summer, but it was wise to check the marshes and beaches. Thread could burrow into the seagrass stalks, or slide down the marshberry and seabeachplum bushes, burrow into the roots, multiply and eat anything green and growing until the coast was as bare as rock.

Flame-crewing was cold work, but it was a distinct pleasure for Menolly to be out of the Hold, in the rough air. Her team got as far as the Dragon Stones to the south. Petiron had told her that those stones, standing offshore in the treacherous waters, had once been part of the palisade, probably hollowed with caves like all this stretch of cliff.

The crowning treat for Menolly was when the Weyrleader, F’lar, himself, on bronze Mnementh, circled in for a chat with Yanus. Of course, Menolly wasn’t near enough to hear what the two men said, but she was close enough to smell the firestone reek of the giant bronze dragon. Close enough to see his beautiful eyes catching all colors in the pale wintry sunlight: to see his muscles knot and smooth under the soft hide. Menolly stood, as was properly respectful, with the other flamethrower crews. But once, when the dragon turned his head in a lazy fashion to peer in her direction, his eyes whirled slowly with their changing colors and she was certain that Mnementh looked at her. She didn’t dare breathe, he was so beautiful!

Then, suddenly, the magic moment was over. F’lar gave a graceful leap to the dragon’s shoulder, caught the fighting straps and pulled himself into place on the neck ridges. Air whooshed around Menolly and the others as the great bronze opened his fragile-looking wings. The next moment, he seemed to be in the air, catching the updraft, beating steadily higher. Abruptly the dragon winked from view. Menolly was not the only one to sigh deeply. To see a dragonrider in the sky was always an occurrence: to be on the same ground with a dragon and his rider, to witness his graceful takeoff and exit between was a marvel.

All the songs about dragonriders and dragons seemed inadequate to Menolly. She stole up to the little cubicle in the women’s dormitory that she shared with Sella. She wanted to be alone. She’d a little pipe among her things, a soft, whispery reedpipe, and she began to play it: a little whistle composed of her excitement and her response to the day’s lovely event.

“So there you are!” Sella flounced into the room, her face reddened, her breath rough. She’d obviously run up the steep stairs. “Told Mavi you’d be here.” Sella grabbed the little pipe from Menolly’s fingers. “And tuning, too.”

“Oh, Sella. It’s an old tune!” Menolly said mendaciously and grabbed her pipe back.

Sella’s jaw worked with anger. “Old, my foot! I know your ways, girl. And you’re dodging work. You get back to the kitchen. You’re needed now.”

“I am not dodging work. I taught this morning during Threadfall and then I had to go with the crews.”

“Your crew’s been in this past half-day or more and you still in smelly, sandy clothes, mucking up the room I have to sleep in. You get below or I’ll tell Yanus you’ve been tuning.”

“Ha! You wouldn’t know a tune if you had your nose rubbed in it.”

But Menolly was shedding her work clothes as fast as she could. Sella was just likely to slip the word to Mavi (her sister was as wary of Yanus as Menolly) about Menolly piping in her room—a suspicious action on its own. Though Menolly hadn’t sworn not to tune at all; only not to do it in front of people.

However, everyone was in a good mood that night: Yanus, because he’d spoken to F’lar the Weyrleader and because there’d be good fishing on the morrow if the weather held. Fish always rose to feed from drowned Thread, and half the Fall had been over Nerat Bay. The Deep would be thick with schools. With Yanus in a good mood, the rest of the sea holders could also rejoice because there’d been no Thread on the ground at all.

So it wasn’t any wonder that they called on Menolly to play for them. She sang two of the longer Sagas about dragons; and then did the Name-Song for the current wingleaders of Benden Weyr so her Sea Hold would know their dragonmen. She wondered if there’d been a recent Hatching that Half-Circle mightn’t have heard about, being so isolated. But she was certain that F’lar would have told Yanus if that were so. But would Yanus have told Menolly? She wasn’t the Harper to be told such things as courtesy.

The sea holders wanted more singing, but her throat was tired. So she played them a song they could sing, bellowing out the words in voices roughened by wind and salt. She saw her father scowling at her, though he was singing along with the rest of them, and she wondered if he didn’t want her—a mere girl—to play men’s songs. It galled her because she’d played them often enough when Petiron was alive. She sighed at this injustice. And then wondered what F’lar would have said if he’d known that Half-Circle Sea Hold was dependent on a mere girl for their harpering. She’d heard everyone say that F’lar was a fair man, a farseeing man, and a fine dragonrider. There were even songs about him and his Weyrwoman, Lessa.

So she sang them, in honor of the Weyrleader’s visit, and her father’s expression lightened. She sang on until her throat was so tight that not a squeak would come out. She wished that someone else could play to give her a rest but, as she scanned the faces of the holders, there wasn’t any of them who could beat a drum properly, much less finger a gitar or pipe.

That was why the next day it seemed only logical for her to start one of the children learning the drum rolls. Plenty of songs could be sung just to drumbeat. And one of Soreel’s two children still in Teaching was sensitive enough to learn to pipe.

Someone, Sella perhaps, Menolly thought bitterly, informed Mavi of Menolly’s activity.

“You were told no tuning…”

“Teaching someone drum beats is not tuning…”

“Teaching anyone to play is Harper business, not yours, m’girl. Just your good fortune Sea Holder is out in the Deep or you’d have the belt across your shoulders, so you would. No more nonsense!”

“But it’s not nonsense, Mavi. Last night another drummer or piper would have…”

Her mother raised her hand in warning, and Menolly bit shut her lips.

“No tuning, Menolly!”

And that was that.

“Now girl, see to the glows before the fleet gets back.”

That job took Menolly inexorably to the Harper’s room: swept clean of everything that had been personal to Petiron. She was also reminded of the sealed message on the Record room mantel. What if the Masterharper were expecting a message from Petiron about the songmaker? Menolly was so very sure that part of that unopened message was about her. Not that thinking about it did Menolly any good. Even knowing it for a fact would be no help, Menolly decided gloomily. But that didn’t stop her from going past Yanus’s Record room and peering in at the tempting package on the mantel.