Free Dragon's Fire by Anne McCaffrey

nostalgia.”
    Zist frowned in thought for a moment and then nodded. “I’ll rate you journeyman, pending more classes back at the Harper Hall. By the time we’re done here, I’m sure you’ll have earned it.
    “Now,” he continued, briskly changing the topic, “tell me all your latest news.”
    It didn’t take Pellar long to bring Master Zist up to date with his observations of the past few days. He hesitated before telling Master Zist about the flowers he’d seen at the grave site—he hadn’t thought to mention his previous encounter, and he was afraid that Zist would be not angry but perhaps displeased at the omission.
    He was right. Zist pressed him for every detail and made him repeat the details about how his leather laces had been exchanged for twine.
    “You know you should have told me earlier,” Zist told him when Pellar had finished writing out his latest answer. Pellar grimaced and nodded sheepishly. Zist regarded him steadily and then added in a voice tinged with sympathy, “I can see, perhaps, why you kept this to yourself.”
    “I shouldn’t have,” Pellar wrote back on his slate.
    “I can understand the way you feel,” Zist said. “It must have seemed a bit of a betrayal when she took your laces.”
    Pellar thought for a moment and then rocked one hand in a side-to-side maybe-yes, maybe-no gesture.
    “She needed them,” he wrote in explanation.
    “I’m sure she did,” Zist agreed. “But more than you?”
    Pellar thought about that for a while before he answered with a shrug.
    Zist nodded absently and sat back in his chair, cupping one knee with his hands while engrossed in thought.
    “Winter will be coming soon,” he murmured after a long silence. He looked up at Pellar and sat forward. “I expect the Shunned will leave the area when the snows come. When that happens, I’ll want you to go back to the Harper Hall.”
    Pellar was disturbed at the notion of leaving Master Zist by himself, and his facial expression made it clear.
    “I’ll be safe enough,” Zist said, waving aside the objection. “Besides, I couldn’t live with myself if you froze to death on a fool’s errand.”
    “I could follow them,” Pellar suggested on his slate.
    “I think you’d be better employed back at the Harper Hall.”
    Pellar nodded, hiding his own thought that it would be months before winter and things could change.

    As the weather grew colder, Pellar grew bolder. He still avoided the area of the Shunned’s camp but he spent more of the daylight out of hiding. Partly it was from necessity—he felt a need for more fresh food than he could reasonably ask Chitter to carry from Master Zist’s. Partly it was to increase his woodcraft. Partly, also, it was to keep warm by constantly moving in the cold weather. Partly, Pellar admitted when he forced himself to be honest, it was to prove his abilities to himself.
    He carefully copied the traps and styles of Camp Natalon’s hunter, but avoided setting out any traps where the hunter might operate. If anyone other than Ima, the hunter, came across the traps, they’d attribute them to him rather than someone else.
    Pellar chose to seed his traps down the south side of his mountain, toward distant Crom Hold and away from both Camp Natalon and the Shunned.
    As the weather grew colder still and the first snows began to fall, Pellar decided that there might be some sense in Master Zist’s desire to send him back to the Harper Hall. The snow was not yet sticking but, even so, Pellar had to spend extra care to ensure that he left tracks neither in snow nor in the muddy ground that it produced when it melted.
    Pellar’s best traps were simple loop snares that, when sprung, hurled the quarry high up into the trees, out of sight of anyone that might later come along.
    Being cautious, Pellar always varied his routes, sometimes starting at one end of his line of traps, sometimes the other, sometimes in the middle—he never took the same route on any given