“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 drug-onrider, 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.