Dragon's Fire by Anne McCaffrey

nodded.
    Zist lapsed into his longest silence. Pellar had two helpings of dessert before the harper looked up at him once more.
    “I can’t ask you to stay on,” Zist began, but Pellar held up a hand, shaking his head. He pointed to Zist, then to himself, and then grasped both his hands firmly:
We stay together.
    “It’s too dangerous,” Zist protested.
    Pellar grabbed for a slate and quickly wrote, “More dangerous alone.”
    He examined the older man anxiously, saw the look of determination forming in Zist’s countenance, and wrote, “Find out about Moran.”
    Master Zist looked unconvinced, so Pellar swiftly wrote, “Got old sheets?”
    Zist read the slate and repeated quizzically, “Old sheets?”
    “To hide in the snow,” Pellar wrote back. Taking advantage of Zist’s surprise, he wrote on another slate, “I could get close to their camp, get a real count, see what they’re doing. You know I can, Mikal said I was the best.”
    “What about the girl?”
    Pellar’s face took on a bleak look and he gently drew the slate back and wrote slowly, “She’s small, not fed well. May not last the winter.”
    Zist sat long in silence after he read Pellar’s reply. Finally he said, “I’ve two worn sheets you can use.”

    The Shunned’s camp was exactly where Pellar had guessed—a kilometer north and east of the miners’ coal dump, and past a line of suspiciously small mounds. The mounds were covered with snow so Pellar had no way of knowing how long they had been there.
    Master Zist had insisted that he wait until after the first heavy snowfall and Pellar had decided that journeying as more snow was falling would further hide him and neatly erase his tracks.
    He paused for a long moment beside the mounds, trying hard to convince himself that none were long enough for the bright-eyed girl, and in the end grimly continued his trek.
    His first signs of the Shunned’s camp came in the form of footprints in the snow. He examined them carefully. There were two sets of prints, heading away from him, roughly paralleling his own journey from the coal dump. Both sets of prints were those of adults, both wore shoes, and both were carrying heavy loads.
    Coal.
    Pellar followed the backtrail far enough to see where the footprints disappeared in the snow and judged that he was half an hour behind.
    He took a bearing on the tracks, then he paused for a moment, thinking. From what little he had seen of the youth, Tenim, Pellar guessed that he would be very wary and cautious. That was one reason that Pellar had decided to wait until the second heavy snowfall before he tried to find the Shunned’s camp.
    The other reason was the bird, Grief. While Chitter was quite willing to pop
between
from a warm hiding place at Master Zist’s to a cold snowfall, he doubted that the bird would be up for scouting in the midst of a snowstorm. So, he reasoned, not only would the falling snow make it easier for him to remain hidden but he would have fewer eyes trying to spy him out.
    Without the bird to watch out for him, Pellar guessed that Tenim would be extra cautious. Nodding to himself, he decided that Tenim would take a sharp turn to his camp but also double back to it. So first Pellar had to find where the two had turned, then he had to turn back to find their camp. He also had to be very careful—it was just as possible that the two would turn toward him as away from him.
    He started forward, cautiously flitting from tree to tree, and then suddenly stopped.
    He heard voices.
    “I thought I saw someone.”
    Pellar froze.
    “Shards, why don’t you shout it,” another voice growled in response. It was Tenim.
    “Shh,” the first speaker hissed urgently.
    Pellar held his breath, letting it out again as slowly and quietly as he could. The voices were too near for his comfort.
    “There’s nothing out there,” Tenim pronounced after minutes of silence. “It’s just your guilty conscience getting you, Tarik.”
    “When you said