"I'm from the Harper Hall, bronze-rider S'bran," Robie replied.
"Oh, my fine friend here's been chatting with you that you know my name?" S'bran hunkered down on a level with Robie. His blue eyes were twinkling. "Hall or Hold, you're a right one. Want to be a dragonrider when you grow up?"
"I'd like to, S'bran, but I'm to be a harper."
"Are you now?"
Robinton nodded his head emphatically. "My mother says I'll make the best harper ever. Can one be a harper and be a dragonrider, too?"
"C'gan is," S'bran laughed and Kilminth's eyes whirled slightly faster. Robinton's jaw dropped. Was that how dragons laughed?
No, we laugh like this, and the sound that came from Kilminth's throat was just like S'bran's.
Robinton was delighted and giggled. "I didn't know dragons laugh."
The infectiousness of his giggle made both rider and dragon laugh again, the rider's a full third higher than the dragon's.
Robinton was charmed by the harmony.
"C'mon, S'bran," another rider yelled. "We've three more stops to make today, you know."
"All right, all right, I'm coming," S'bran said. Unfolding from his crouch, he gave Robinton's hair a second friendly rubbing.
Then he leaped to the short forearm Kilminth raised and was lifted high enough to throw his leg over the next-to-last ridge on the dragon's neck. "Best stand back, laddie. This big fellow of mine will raise a lot of dust."
Robinton scurried to one side, but swerved the instant he heard the sound of wings beating. Raising his forearm to protect his face from the sand and grit, he lifted his other arm in a farewell salute.
Another time, young Harper, he heard Kilminth say, and then they had all spiralled high enough to go between. Once again Robinton felt the same sort of odd emptiness that had followed Cortath's departure. He sighed deeply. They hadn't told him that he couldn't be a harper and a dragonrider, since they already had one.
Which would please his mother. She had set her heart on him being a harper, and that would take a lot of hard work and many years.
He might even be too old the next time there were eggs on the Hatching Ground. There was only the one queen, and she didn't clutch that often.
Scuffing his way through the neat drifts that the dragon wings had made of the dirt on the courtyard, he returned to the Hall but not to the game. He wanted to be by himself and recall every word Kilminth had said to him. And every word Cortath had said to him as well. Those two incidents were so very, very special to him, and truly his alone.
"Did I see you out in the Fort yard when the dragons were there?" his mother asked when she joined him for supper. She'd been teaching during the Search.
"Yes. The bronze calls himself Kilminth," he said, but that was as much as he intended to say. He filled his mouth with beans so that he wouldn't be able to answer another question.
"That's nice," she said, nodding in approval of his eating so well.
Sometimes he didn't have much of an appetite, but he did tonight.
"Did you know they found two lads on Search? One from here and one from the Hold."
"Who went from here?" The sudden notion that a harper could be Searched startled Robinton so much that he spoke with his mouth full and his father reprimanded him.
"A second-year apprentice, Rulyar, from Nerat," his mother answered.
"He plays gitar and sings tenor," Robie said, secretly delighted.
Maybe he could be a dragonrider and a harper.
"Fancy Robinton knowing that," Petiron remarked, surprised.
"Oh, Rulyar's minded Rob a time or two during evening rehearsals," Merelan said off-handedly. "Told me that he missed his small brothers," she added, glancing at her son with the look that meant he wasn't to mention that Rulyar had been teaching him gitar fingering for the last few months. Robie would miss Rulyar; he hoped that his mother could find someone else to teach him.
That night he dreamed of dragons, sad and tired ones who were trying to tell him something, only he couldn't hear them. It was as if his ears were clogged with the sands of the courtyard. And they wanted so very much for him to hear what they were saying -something especially for him to know! Then he saw Rulyar, clear as day, on a brown dragon, and Rulyar waved at him, urgently trying to say something too, but the distance between them was too great for Robinton to hear.
He was somewhat amazed, a seven-day later, when he heard that Rulyar had Impressed a brown dragon who called himself Garanath. The Fort Hold boy had Impressed a green.
"That was to be expected," he heard his father say, but he didn't dare ask why that was expected.
CHAPTER FIVE
Robinton was nine when his father, looking for some musical score, came across those Merelan kept safely in her worktop drawer.
"Whose scribblings are these?" he demanded, pausing to read the top one. Without even noticing that his wife was speechless, he looked at two more before tossing the tight roll back in the drawer.
She seemed stuck in the doorway, an open message in one hand, a very odd expression on her face.
"What are you looking for in my desk?" she asked, fighting to keep her voice reasonable. She was furious with him for discarding the – to her – priceless examples of her son's musical genius, let alone going through her things.
"Any blank sheets. I've run out," he said, irritably pawing through the variety of objects, rather disgusted by the clutter. "You really ought to clean this out once in a while, Mere."
"I keep cleaned pieces there, in plain sight," she said, enunciating each word with angry clarity and pointing with a stiff finger to the box on top of her desk.
"Oh, yes." Lifting several out, he began to examine each one.
"Mind if I borrow these?"
"As long as you replace what you take." She was having difficulty remaining calm and had mangled the message into a ball.
"Well, no need to get huffy," he said, suddenly noticing her stiff posture and angry glare. I'll get more at lunch." He started out of the room and then turned back. "Who did write those tunes? You?" He smiled in an effort to appease her anger. "Not bad."
She was so angry at his condescending smile and tone that she blurted out the truth. "Your son wrote them."
Petiron blinked in astonishment. "Robie wrote those?" He started back to her worktop, but she moved swiftly from the door to stand in front of it. "My son is already writing music? You're helping him, of course," he added, as if that explained much.
"He writes them with no help from anyone."
"But he must have had some help," said Petiron, trying to reach around her for access to the drawer. "The scores were well written, even if the tunes are a trifle childish." Then his jaw dropped. "How long has he been writing tunes?"
"If you were any sort of a father to him, paid any attention to what he does, ever asked him a single question about his classes," Merelan said, letting rip all her long-bottled-up frustration, "you'd know he's been writing music' – she stressed the word – "for several years. You've even heard the apprentices singing some of the melodies."
"I have?" Petiron frowned, unable to understand either of his mate's shortcomings: not telling him about his own son's musical-ity and not informing him that apprentices were learning songs written by his own son. "I have!" he said, thinking back to the tunefulness he'd heard from Washell's classes. Of course, the songs were suitable to the abilities of the age group but ... He stared at Merelan, coming to grips with a sense of betrayal which he had never expected from her, his own spouse. "But why, Merelan? Why keep his abilities from me? His own father?"
"Oh, so now he's your son instead of mine," Merelan snapped back. "Now that he shows some prowess, he's all yours."