A Gift of Dragons Read Online Free Page B

Threadfall, the family could travel with some impunity. It was this talent, until just recently considered the family’s most valuable asset, that the Lady Holdless Thella wished to pervert to her unlawful ends.
    Aramina shifted her sleeping sister once more, for both shoulders ached, and Nexa, like other inanimate objects, appeared to grow heavier. Pell had awakened; his initial outburst muffled by Dowell’s large hand, he now trotted beside his father, burdened by the shawl bundle, and complained in a low undertone. Aramina came abreast of him.

    “If you hadn’t blabbed to show off, we wouldn’t
be
running away,” she said to him in a tone for his ears only.
    “We aren’t running,” Pell snapped back, grunting as the shawl bundle cracked him on the right shin. “We don’t run away. We change camps!” He was taunting her now with her own words, used on previous occasions to ease the stigma of their holdlessness. “But where can we go,” and his voice became a frightened wail, “that Thella can’t find us?”
    “It’s me she wants, and she won’t find me. You’ll be safe.”
    “I don’t want to be safe,” Pell replied stoutly, “if you have to run because of me and my big mouth.”
    “Hush!” said Dowell in a sharp voice. The children trudged the rest of the way in silence.
    Their dray beasts, Nudge and Shove, turned their heads, lowing softly at the approach of familiar people; Dowell had left them with sufficient grain in their feed bags to content them. Barla climbed into the rear of the hide-covered wagon, took the sleeping Nexa from Aramina, the bundle from Pell, and gestured the children to the fore where Dowell was untying ring reins from the tether stone. Aramina and Pell reclaimed their goods from the wagon and took their positions, one on either side of the team, ready to encourage them into the river and up the bank on the far side. Dowell and Barla would walk behind to push should the wagon founder.
    Despite the hour and the circumstances of their departure, Aramina felt a tremendous relief as they moved off. Two Turns ago she had been inexpressibly relieved not to have to plod at the pace of Nudge and Shove day after weary day. But now traveling was a far more palatable alternative to being part of Thella’s vindictive schemes.
    “We are not holdless by choice, Aramina,” Barla had often abjured her daughter, “for your father held well under Lord Kale of Ruatha Hold. Oh,” and Barla would bow her head and press her hands to her mouth in anguish over terrible memories, “the perfidy, the treachery of that terrible, ruthless man! To murder all Ruatha blood in one pitiless hour!” Barla would gather herself then, lifting her head proudly. “Nor would your father serve Lord Fax of the High Reaches.” Barla was not an extravagant person in word or deed, retaining a quiet and unobtrusive dignity despite all the slights and pettiness that came the way of the holdless. Her acrimony was therefore the more memorable, and Aramina, as well as her surviving brother and sister, knew Fax as the villain, despoiler, and tyrant, possessed of no single redeeming virtue. “We had pride enough to leave when he made his unspeakable order . . .” Barla would often color and then pale when reciting this part of their exodus. “Your father had made this very wagon for us to attend Gathers.” Barla would sigh. “Attend Gathers as respected holders, not as wanderers, holdless and friendless. For other Lord Holders did not wish to antagonize Fax just then, and though your father had been so certain of a welcome elsewhere, there was none. But we are
not
like the others, children. We chose to retain our honor and would not submit to the incarnate evil of Fax.”
    Although Barla would never be specific about that, of late Aramina was beginning to get glimmerings, now that she had become a woman. For Barla, despite the depredations of fourteen Turns of nomadic life and endless pregnancies as tokens of