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 numbweed 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 bloody 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.

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, “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.