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apprentices and he gave as good as he got, but
that
was hardly a harperly calling, and beyond that, Kindan could think of no talent in which he had a gift.
    Except perhaps the drums. Drums on Pern were more than a way to keep a beat; they were the vital lifeblood of news between Holds and Crafts. Only a dragonrider could travel more swiftly than a drum message and, as drum messages were available to all, only the drums carried the full news of Pern.
    Kindan took to drumming like he’d taken to the coal caves where he’d grown up. He would listen to the “First Call” of morning and the “Last Call” of night; he loved being the first one to decipher the codes; he loved wagering how long it would take Vaxoram who, like Kindan, seemed particularly good at nothing, to decipher the latest messages; and he loved how the words from distant places gave him the feel of a world-traveler, of someone connected with all the people of Pern.
    He was worse at making drums than drumming on them. In fact, he couldn’t imagine how he could be worse at making things.
    “You’ll get the hang of it, just keep trying,” Nonala had told him staunchly the day Kindan had mentioned it.
    “You will,” Verilan had agreed, although Kindan felt that his agreement had been more out of loyalty than conviction. “And you’re so good at the codes.” Verilan had frowned; the drum codes were simply beyond him. He was built slightly and didn’t have the strength to make the big drums rebound with the volume needed to traverse outside of Fort Hold’s main valley, and his slow methodical ways made it difficult for him to decipher the multi-beat codes. By the time he’d deciphered the first beat, the second beat had already come and gone, lost forever.
    Vaxoram took great pains to taunt Kindan on his failures. Kindan sometimes wondered if Vaxoram didn’t gloat over the lackings of others to distract himself from his own weaknesses, but the older apprentice’s relentless ways never gave much time to consider the ramifications.
    The one thing that Vaxoram was good at was fencing. Finesse, naturally, was not the older apprentice’s forte, but his reach, endurance, and sheer brutality usually ensured his victory.
    “You’ve no subtlety,” Master Detallor said to him at one of their practice sessions. He motioned to Kindan. “You should learn from this youngster. He seems to understand what I’m saying.”
    Almost immediately Kindan wished that the Master hadn’t singled him out so; Vaxoram chose Kindan as his opponent for the next bout. It started well enough. Kindan got first touch, but then Vaxoram charged forward and—to Kindan’s utter astonishment—changed hands mid-strike, feinting with an empty right hand and striking a telling blow with the foil now in his left hand.
    “Better,” Detallor said as Kindan staggered and grunted in pain. “But fighting left-handed won’t win against another left-hander,” Detallor warned, grabbing up a foil himself. “Here, let me show you.”
    And he proceeded to administer a left-handed drubbing to Vaxoram that was so ferocious that Kindan forgot the bruise Vaxoram had made on his own chest.
    Still, if it weren’t that Kindan wouldn’t give up on his dream of being a harper, and a Weyr harper at that, he would have left the Harper Hall to free himself from Vaxoram’s incessant prodding.
    The autumn weather at Fort Hold was not as bitter as the biting cold Kindan had experienced at Camp Natalon in Crom Hold, but the rains seemed to last longer, the fogs of the morning were thicker and colder—sometimes lasting all day—and the miserable weather matched his miserable mood.
    Two months after his return from High Reaches Weyr, Kindan found himself at the tail end of a wet morning run accompanied, as usual, by Verilan and Nonala. Verilan was coughing more than usual, a sure sign that he would be in the infirmary with a nasty cough before the end of the sevenday.
    The rain had turned the path