A Beautiful Friendship-ARC Read Online Free PDF Page A

for now, for some of the other scouts would have laughed uproariously at them, and they might well have strengthened Broken Tooth’s suspicion that Climbs Quickly was not the best choice for his present duties. Sings Truly hadn’t laughed, but neither had she rushed to agree with him, and he knew she longed to travel in person to the Blue Mountain Dancing or Fire Runs Fast Clan’s range to receive the original song directly from their senior singers and not relayed over such a vast distance from one singer to another.
    But that was out of the question. Singers were the core of any clan, the storehouse of memory and dispensers of wisdom. They were always female, and their loss could not be risked, whatever Sings Truly might want. Unless a clan was fortunate enough to have a surplus of singers, it must protect its potential supply of replacements by denying them more dangerous tasks. Climbs Quickly understood that, but he found its implications a bit harder to live with than the clan’s other scouts and hunters did. There could be disadvantages to being a memory singer’s brother when she chose to sulk over the freedoms her role denied her . . . and allowed him .
    He bleeked softly with laughter at that thought.
     Shadow Hider asked.
     Climbs Quickly replied.
     Shadow Hider said dryly, and Climbs Quickly laughed again.
    It was true that his sister had a formidable temper, and the entire clan still recalled the day a much younger Shadow Hider, but little removed from kittenhood, had accidentally dropped a flint knife. It had fallen perhaps a twelve of People’s lengths and embedded itself in a net-wood limb . . . perhaps a double hand’s width behind Sings Truly’s tail.
    It would not have been humorous if it had fallen any closer, of course. Short Tail had lost the last hand width of his tail to a not dissimilar accident, and it could have injured Sings Truly seriously, even killed her. Shadow Hider’s reaction most definitely had been humorous, however. Indeed, he’d received his name for the way he had vanished into the shadows when Sings Truly began her furious scold at the very top of a memory singer’s mind-voice!
     Climbs Quickly said now, feeling unusually fond of the other scout.
     Shadow Hider replied with feeling.
     Climbs Quickly agreed, stretching out on his belly with a sigh of pleasure. He folded his true-hands under his chin and settled himself for a long wait, and Shadow Hider settled down beside him.
    Scouts learned early to be patient. If they needed help with that lesson, there were teachers aplenty—from falls to hungry death fangs—to drive it home. Climbs Quickly had never needed such instruction, which, even more than his relationship to Sings Truly, was why he was second only to Short Tail as Bright Water Clan’s chief scout, despite his own relative youth.
    So now he waited, motionless in the warm sunlight, and watched the sharp-topped living place the two-legs had built in the center of the clearing.

3
    “So why are you turning my shop into a mess thIS time?” Stephanie’s dad inquired politely, leaning against his basement workshop’s doorframe with a cup of coffee in one hand. His tone was one of weary resignation, but a laugh lurked in its depths, and Stephanie looked over her shoulder at him with a smile.
    “I’ve been thinking about what Mom said about the celery thieves,” she replied.
    She opened one of his neatly labeled drawers and found the circuit