Read Online Dragon's Kin by Anne McCaffrey - Free Book Online

their good-byes; Silstra had never had time for the surly miner.
    And finally, the caravan was assembled. Veran waved farewell to the miners and a “move-out” to the traders, and the caravan began its slow way down the path curving down the hillside and around the lake on the way to Crom Hold.
    Kindan watched until the caravans were lost to sight and only the dust marked their passage.
    “Well,” Danil said softly, “that’s that.”
    Natalon clapped him on the shoulder. “It is.”
    Danil turned to him and said solemnly, “Miner Natalon, I want to thank you for the magnificent way you provided for the wedding of my daughter.”
    Natalon nodded, equally full of the formality of the moment. “Danil, it was my pleasure.” He paused a moment, then added, “And now, we’ve got coal to mine.”

CHAPTER III

    Watch-wher, watch-wher in the night,
Guard our Hold, keep it right.
When the morning sun does come,
Watch-wher, then your job is done.
    As the days turned into months, it seemed to Kindan that nothing much had changed. He still had chores to do. He still had to attend classes with the Harper. He still was bullied by Kaylek. His turns on watch or as runner for the camp were the same as always.
    But in truth things
had
changed. He was now the first up in the morning and was always sure to have
klah
and breakfast ready for his family. His father asked him to check in on Dask in the mornings, and that was new, too.
    In class with the Harper, Kindan started to notice that he saw less of Zenor in class and more of Dalor. In times past, it had always seemed that Dalor was either a very sickly child or that he was being overworked by his father. Either way, he used to miss at least two classes every sevenday, sometimes more.
    Now it seemed like Dalor was in classes every day but one each sevenday.
    Perhaps that change was explained by the other change: Master Zist. If Kindan had thought that Master Zist was a hard taskmaster when it came to singing, it was nothing compared to how hard he was when it came to teaching. No one could ever do anything well enough for the Master.
    “Look at that! Do you call those letters?” Zist growled at little Sula one day. “How are you going to write a new recipe and share it with anyone, hmm?”
    Sula had wilted under the interrogation. Everyone knew that she was hoping to join her mother, Milla, as a baker.
    Another day, the Master reduced Kaylek to a red-faced gibbering wreck just by a series of probing questions on multiplication. “And how, young Kaylek, are you going to calculate the load a mine’s supports must bear if you can’t even figure out the area of the ceiling?”
    Dalor got off no easier because he was the head miner’s son. All the same, Kindan noticed that whenever the Master had been hard on Dalor before the lunch break, he would take special care to soothe Dalor’s nervousness in the afternoon.
    Kindan was the most obvious exception to Master Zist’s hard teachings. When Cristov and Kaylek began to notice it, Kindan started to wish that the Harper would treat him as roughly as the rest of the camp’s children.
    “What is it with you?” Cristov sneered at him one day at break time. “Is it just because you can sing so well?”
    “Can’t be for much else,” Kaylek decided.
    But Kindan knew exactly why Master Zist never bore down too harshly on him. Early on, not long after Silstra’s wedding, Master Zist and he had had another contest of wills similar to the heated exchange they’d had on the day they’d met. As before, neither had truly won the argument, but Kindan had recognized something in Master Zist’s stubborn insistence that his students try their hardest and not be afraid to ask for help—and Kindan had decided to accept the challenge.
    It had been difficult at first, but soon Kindan found himself relishing his time with the surly Master. He discovered that, by exercising a level of diplomacy that he had never attained before, he could