Dragonsong Read Online Free

the fishing fleet docked and the Teaching eased the boredom.
    When the fleet was in, Yanus would stop by the Little Hall where Menolly held her class. He’d scowl at her from the back of the Hall. Fortunately, he’d only stay a little while because he made the children nervous. Once she actually saw his foot tapping the beat; he scowled when he realized what he was doing and then he left.
    He had sent the message sloop to Igen Hold three days after the burial. The crew brought back news of no interest to Menolly but the adults went around looking black: something about the Oldtimers and Menolly wasn’t to worry her head, so she didn’t. The crew also brought back a message slate addressed to Petiron and signed with the imprint of Masterharper Robinton.
    ‘Poor old Petiron,’ one of the aunties told Menolly, sighing and dabbing affectedly at her eyes. ‘He always looked forward to slates from Masterharper. Ah well, it’ll keep til the new Harper comes. He’ll know what to do with it.’
    It took Menolly a while to find out where the slate was: propped up conspicuously on the mantel in her father’s Records room. Menolly was positive that the message had something to do with her, with the songs that Petiron had said he’d sent to the Masterharper. The notion so obsessed her that she got bold enough to ask her mother why Yanus didn’t open the message.
    ‘Open a sealed message from the Masterharper to a man dead?’ Mavi stared at her daughter in shocked incredulity. ‘Your father would do no such thing. Harpers’ letters are for Harpers.’
    ‘I only remembered that Petiron had sent a slate to the Masterharper. I thought it might be about a replacement coming. I mean …’
    ‘I’ll be glad when the new Harper does come, m’girl. You’ve been getting above yourself with this Teaching.’
    The next few days were full of apprehension for Menolly: she conceived the idea that her mother would make Yanus replace her as Teacher. That was, of course, impossible for the same reasons that had forced Yanus to make her the teacher in the first place. But it was a fact that Mavi found all the smelliest, most boring or tedious jobs for Menolly once her teaching duty was done. And Yanus took it into his head to appear in the Little Hall more frequently.
    Then the weather settled down into a clear spell and the entire Sea Hold was kept at a run with fish. The children were excused from the Teaching to gather seaweeds blown up by the high tides and all the Hold women set to boiling the weed for the thick juice in the stalks: juice that kept back many sicknesses and bone ailments. Or so the old aunties said. But they’d find good out of any bad and the worst of any blessing. And the worst of the seaweed was its smell, thought Menolly, who had to stir the huge kettles.
    Threadfalls came and added some excitement: the fear in being Holdbound while the dragons swept the skies with their fiery breath, charring Thread to impotence. (Menolly wanted to see that grand sight one day, instead of just singing about it, or knowing it was taking place outside the thick stone walls and heavy metal shutters of the Hold’s windows.) Afterward she joined the flame-thrower crews that checked for any possible Thread that might have escaped dragon flame. Not that there was much for Thread to eat on the windswept bare marshes and bogs around Half-Circle Sea Hold. The barren rock palisades that made Half-Circle bore no greenery at all, winter or summer, but it was wise to check the marshes and beaches. Thread could burrow into the seagrass stalks, or slide down the marshberry and seabeachplum bushes, burrow into the roots, multiply and eat anything green and growing until the coast was as bare as rock.
    Flame-crewing was cold work, but it was a distinct pleasure for Menolly to be out of the Hold, in the rough air. Her team got as far as the Dragon Stones to the south. Petiron had told her that those stones, standing offshore in the treacherous