Free Dragon's Fire by Anne McCaffrey Page A

day and he never repeated his pattern.
    This day, nearly three months since he’d visited the graveyard, he had decided to work from the highest traps to lowest. The first four traps were all empty. He made a note to consider moving them but decided not to do it just then.
    As he approached his fifth trap something disturbed him—something seemed out of place. He stopped, crouching against the ground, listening carefully.
    Someone was out there.
    He slowly started scanning the ground below him, working his way carefully left to right, bottom to top. He spotted a disturbance of the ground near his trap. He looked up—and suddenly started. Someone was caught in his trap!
    It was a little girl, no more than nine Turns old. She was staring back at him, her brown eyes locked intently on him as she hung upside down, one foot caught in the loop of his rope snare. One hand feebly held her tunic up to protect her torso from the cold wind but it flopped down enough on the other side that he could see her bulging belly and bare ribs; her legs were little more than sticks. It was also obvious, from her heaving chest and her bitter look of despair, that she’d exhausted herself in efforts to get free of the trap. On the ground below her, Pellar noted a small knife and guessed that she’d lost it when the trap had sprung. Her clothing—small, patched, and threadbare—merely confirmed his guess that she was one of the Shunned.
    Pellar remained motionless for several moments, trying to decide what to do. But when he finally made up his mind to help her and stood up, she waved him down.
    No sooner had he crouched back down than he heard the sound of others approaching. They came without talking but not silently, moving in a way that any tracker would be quick to notice. Pellar counted five, including a tall, wiry youth who was probably in his late teens, maybe older.
    “Halla!” one of the younger ones called as they caught sight of her. “What are you doing up there?”
    “Don’t ask silly questions,” the little girl snapped back, “just get me down.”
    “I don’t know why,” the teenager replied. “You got yourself caught, you should get yourself down.”
    In that instant, Pellar decided that he hated the young man. It wasn’t just his words, or his tone, it was the youth’s body language: Pellar
knew
that this teen would have no compunction, nor feel any guilt, about leaving the little girl stuck in the trap to die.
    “Tenim, get me down,” Halla commanded, her irritation tinged with just the slightest hint of fear.
    “I warned you to be careful about where you set your traps. It’s a pity you didn’t get your neck caught in the thing,” Tenim said. “Then you’d be dead by now.” He turned back the way he came.
    “But Tenim, she’s our best tracker,” one of the younger children protested. “And Moran—”
    “Leave Moran out of this,” Tenim snapped to the speaker. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him any.”
    “Anyway,” and here Tenim raised one arm straight out in front of him, “she’s not our best tracker.”
    Pellar was no more than five meters from Tenim and the group. Silently, he felt for the hunting knife he kept sheathed at the top of his boot, still keeping his eyes on the scene in front of him. Would they just leave her to die? Would he?
    He heard a strange sound in the sky above him and noticed that Tenim’s upraised arm was covered with rough bindings of leather.
    Suddenly something swooped down from the sky. For a moment Pellar feared it was Chitter come to protect him, but then he realized that the creature had none of Chitter’s sleekness, nor his thin, membranous wings.
    This creature was a bird.
    “
She
is the best tracker,” Tenim said as the bird landed on his arm. His other hand dipped into one of the pouches hung at his side and brought up a thin sliver of meat, which the bird devoured quickly. “Grief, here, is.”
    “What about the food
I
got you?” Halla