Jayge was hauling in his net when he saw the dragon in the sky.
It came gliding in from the east. He watched it in awe for all of a minute as astonishment and then anxiety made him relax his grip on the full heavy net. As it slid from his grasp, he recovered enough sense to snap a buoy on the last strand so he could retrieve the valuable net later. In another moment, he had hoisted the skiff’s sail, seen the fresh offshore breeze fill it, and wondered if he could possibly beat the dragon to the shore.
Maybe, just maybe, Aramina was still asleep. He knew she only heard dragons when she was awake, and he had left both his wife and the boy fast asleep when he had crept out to catch the dawn run of fish. If he could just warn her. While she heard fire-lizards—they both did—and had laughed about their recent astonishing images, she generally found their meaningless chitter more amusing than disturbing.
The green dragon, an old beast to judge by her whitened muzzle and the puckering wing scars, carried three people. She appeared to be taking her time about landing, circling slowly down. It even seemed as if she had timed her landing with Jayge’s arrival at the strand. Just as Jayge hauled up the rudder-board, one of the passengers dismounted and came running down to the beach, unlatching his helmet. Piemur!
“Jayge, I’ve brought the Masterharper. P’ratan kindly conveyed us on Poranth.” Piemur spoke quickly, smiling to reassure Jayge about the unexpected visitors. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right for you and Ara,” he added, lending a hand to help Jayge pull the little skiff above the high-tide mark on the sand.
Movement on the verandah of the house attracted Jayge’s attention, and he caught just a glimpse of Ara collapsing in a faint.
“Ara!” he cried, and without even a nod in the direction of the two older men, he pelted up to the house and Ara’s unconscious body. Hearing a dragon after all those years must have given her a terrible fright.
He had laid her on her bed and Piemur was offering her a cup of Jayge’s brew by the time the Harper and the dragonrider had joined them in the house. Readis, bawling with fright at the sight of the strange faces, turned rigid in Piemur’s arms when the journeyman attempted to comfort him. Then he abruptly stopped his squawling. Piemur caught the direction of his look and saw Master Robinton making such absurd grimaces that the baby was too fascinated to howl, his tear-filled eyes fixed on the Harper.
When Ara regained consciousness, she stared white-faced at the visitors. Jayge felt her relax only a fraction, and somehow the pressure of her fingers on his arm suggested to him that she knew neither of them.
“Ara,” he told her in urgent reassurance, “P’ratan’s Poranth has brought Piemur and Master Robinton. They mean us to have what we’ve got here. It’ll be our hold. Our own hold!”
Ara kept staring at the men, who were attempting by their manner and smiles to reassure her.
“I can appreciate the shock, dear lady, to be confronted with visitors so unexpectedly,” Master Robinton said. “But today was really the first opportunity I’ve had to come.”
“Ara, it’s all right,” Jayge reassured her, stroking her hair and patting her fingers where they clutched frantically at his vest.
“Jayge,” she said in a low, constricted voice. “I didn’t hear her!”
“You didn’t?” Jayge thought to keep his voice low. “You didn’t?” he repeated with more confidence. “Then why did you faint?”
“Because I didn’t!” In that pained reply, Aramina managed to convey her conflicting emotions to Jayge.
He pulled her into his arms, rocking her gently and murmuring over and over that it was all right. It did not matter if she did not hear dragons anymore. She had no need to. And she must not be afraid. No one would censure her. She must relax and compose herself. Such a shock was not good for the baby.
“Here! This’ll help,” Piemur said, again offering the cup of fermented drink. “Believe me, Aramina, I know how it can be when you don’t see anyone else for Turns and suddenly you’ve got callers.”
At the use of his wife’s full name, Jayge looked up in wary surprise.
“I recognized you from a sketch that was circulated after your disappearance,” the Masterharper explained. kindly. He was jouncing Readis on his knee, and the toddler was gurgling with delight.
“My dear child,” he went on when Aramina had recovered sufficiently. “It will be the best of all possible news that you are alive and so well, here in this fine Southern Hold. We all thought you dead at the marauders’ hands!” There was a hint of rebuke in the glance he gave Jayge but none in his voice for Aramina. “I’ve had more surprises these past few weeks than ever in my lifetime. It’s going to take me Turns to absorb it all.”
“Master Robinton is very interested in ancient ruins, Jayge, Ara,” Piemur said. “And I think yours have more to offer than the empty ones up on the Plateau.”
Still amusing the baby, Master Robinton went on eagerly. “Piemur mentioned that you have found and are using articles of obvious antiquity, besides this most unusual dwelling. I saw the nets, boxes, and kegs, and I am amazed. The Plateau settlement will take us Turns to dig out, and so far we’ve found no more than a spoon, while you…” He gestured with his free hand to the various items he could see in the main room and included the dwelling itself.
“We haven’t been able to do much,” Ara said modestly, her courage restored. “Once we had the house finished—” she broke off apologetically and looked anxiously at Jayge. He was sitting beside her, one arm lightly around her shoulders, the other hand clasping hers.
“You’ve done marvels, my dear,” Robinton corrected her firmly. “A skiff, fishing; we saw the animal pens and your garden—the undergrowth you’ve cleared!”
“Haven’t you been troubled by Threadfall?” P’ratan asked anxiously, speaking for the first time.
“We stay out of it,” Jayge replied with a wry grin, then smiled apologetically at the startled dragonrider. “I’m of trader Blood and survived the first Telgar Fall. So I’m used to being holdless.”
“We never know just how our lives take shape, do we?” Master Robinton remarked, smiling with great good humor.
Jayge offered their guests klah and slices of fresh fruit, and bread Aramina had baked the previous day. She apologized for the texture, saying that she had not quite worked out the right grinding stones. Then she insisted on joining the Harper and the green rider on a tour of the other buildings on the river banks. Readis was persuaded to leave Master Robinton and go with his father and Piemur to salvage the nets and any fish they still contained.
“Impressive, truly impressive,” Robinton kept saying as they moved from one place to the next, touching a wall, checking a door’s closure, scuffing his boots on the floor. P’ratan said little, but his eyes were round, and he kept shaking his head in wonder, regarding Aramina with some awe. “Quite an extensive place. There must have been at least a hundred people living here, working the fields, fishing and—” He waved his hand distractedly. “—doing whatever else they did to create such durable materials.”
When they reached the shed that was being used as a beasthold, he leaned against the rail, another remnant of the ancients’ manufacture. “And you say you tamed all these animals yourselves?” He smiled at her as a little queen swooped gracefully to land on her shoulder. “Do you hear what they say?”
He spoke kindly, but Aramina flushed and ducked her head in momentary embarrassment. “They talk a lot of nonsense,” she said so disparagingly that the Harper sensed that recent fire-lizard conversations might have distressed her. “They are very good, minding Readis when we both have to be out of the hold. And Piemur showed us that they can be far more useful than we thought.” She slid open a high, wide door in the biggest of the buildings. “This is where we found most of the useful stuff,” she told them just as Jayge and Piemur rejoined them. With a brief apology, P’ratan wandered back to his green, who was basking on the sand.