Author's Note: I had to take a break from A New Pern. Believe it or not, I have been working on it a lot, and have realized that I basically bug myself into a deep hole and I don't know how to get out. I'm starting to think I should just go back and revise the whole thing, but that is such a pain….
Anywho, this is me getting my mind off of that story. This one actually takes place on Pern, sometime after Aivas and the whole engine thing, but with some people still remembering Thread. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you'll have to read the book. I'm not spoiling it for you.) Oh, and I don't own Pern, any of Anne McCaffrey's books, yada yada, it's a fanfiction and garners no profit. If the name is in one of the books, (though I doubt any will,) it's not mine.
"Daya, where do think you're goin'?"
"I want to go see the egg, of course!" Daya informed the drudge as if it should have been obvious.
Daya knew she had been giving the poor lady a hard time lately, and she felt bad about it, but when her father had picked Arsla for the job, he knew that. It wasn't everyone who could keep a grip on the slippery Daya.
"Oh no you're not! Your father gave me sp'ific orders to keep you 'way from the poor lad. He doesn't want you distracting him from his job or otherwise bother him. It's hard to prove your worth to that queen, and even harder to actually take care 'uv the egg!"
"It's not that hard," Daya muttered under her breath, but dutifully walked away from the door. Her father was a MasterHerdsman, and he wouldn't hesitate to beat her for being disobedient. Besides, if Daya did escape Arsla, the drudge would be beaten, and Daya certainly didn't want that on her conscience.
After all, she thought maliciously, I can always sneak out tonight, while everyone else is asleep.
So Daya let the drudge follow her around as she went about her chores. They were simple around-the-house things, but she had escaped from most of them before. In the laundry room there was a window that was never locked, the kitchen had a door within running distance, and the barn was full of hiding places and escape routes, much too many to name.
The best way to leave the house undetected, however, was the secret passage in Daya's room. It still hadn't occurred to her parents that its existence could mean an easy escape, and most of the drudges were unaware of its existence at all. Daya had found it one day while playing with her best friend, Lyola.
In her closet, hidden by some dresses and coats, there was a small trap door that led into the crawlspace. The crawlspace then ran under the house, the barn, and even into a couple of the other houses, though there weren't anymore trap door that allowed Daya into them. She guessed they hadn't yet been built at the time the crawlspace was.
So Daya spent the day supervised by Arsla. After finishing up her chores, she managed to go play with her ramshackle group of friends. But being supervised prevented them from getting into their normal mischief, Daya's gang consisted of Lyola, and a bunch of rowdy boys, but they still managed to startle a few herdbeasts into stampede and set loose a runner or two during a game of hide-and-seek. Eventually, though non too soon for Daya's tastes, the dinner bells started ringing and the children scattered to their houses. Daya ate her supper silently, then headed out with everyone else to the Center Square of the Shardok Beast Hall, a relatively new Hall, to listen to the resident Harper. He played some old favorites, a new one or two, and then everyone went off to their own homes once more. Daya went straight to bed, and pretended to be asleep until her parents came and checked on her before heading off to their own beds.
Daya clambered out of bed as quietly as she could and slipped on her slippers to keep out the cold of the stone floor. Daya had asked her parents once why they still had a stone floor when they could stretch out with wood, but they simply said, "We feel safer in rock." They had only been children when the last Pass had ended, but apparently Thread scared people in more ways than one.
She slid her closet door open quietly, climbed in, and lifted the trap door open. She had oiled the hinges recently, so they barely made any sound at all as she closed the door back over her head. Daya had to blink once or twice to adjust her eyes to the dark, but then she set off towards the closest exit to the watchwher shed.
Though watchwhers were typically used for guarding a Hold of valuables, the Beast Halls had quickly discovered their other uses as well. With their exceptional seeing, they could easily guard the herdbeasts and runners from predators like wherries and the big cats that were so common in the South. They could also help find any of the animals that had escaped from the herd, and often warned their handlers of dangers in enough time for them to prepare. One such watchwher saved a whole herd from a tornado, the storm that surrounded it, and many of it's after affects. The result had been a higher demand in watchwher eggs.
So when the new, small Shardock Beast Hall had purchased their watchwher egg, it had both been big news and expensive. It had also been a great risk. They had paid about a year's worth of meat for the queen watchwher, marks, a couple of runners, and some odd other things all thrown in for a chance at watchwher. The queen had to first approve of the candidate before she would allow him to take an egg, and even then the egg wasn't guaranteed to hatch or bond to said candidate. Still, if it all turned out right, it would be worth it.
Daya knew this, which was part of the reason she was so excited about seeing the egg. The other part was that she wasn't allowed to, and her friends hadn't. It would give her something to brag about at the next meeting. With this in mind, she opened the next trap door, crawled out, and made her way over to the watchwher shed.
It was actually less of a shed and more of a cabin. It was about as big as a cabin, just with a heavy leather door instead of a wooden one so that the watchwher would more easily be able to exit. Inside, the egg was currently being incubated.
Daya, with stealth learned from her fifteen turns, slipped in through the leather door without the Candidate, as everyone had taken to calling him, waking. He was curled up on a mat of straw with furs thrown over it next to what Daya assumed to be the egg.
It was very dark in the shed. At the far end, the wall opposite to the door, there was a large fireplace with a few glowing embers keeping the place warm. Hanging over the embers was a big cauldron, with something vile smelling cooking inside. Scattered across the floor, so thickly that you couldn't even see that it was rock, was straw. In the middle, it rose slightly as if it were covering large, stone bricks, and then in the middle of that was another mound, covered by even more straw.
Daya tiptoed over to the mound and silently brushed away some of the straw. There, under the entire straw and quite warm to the touch, was the egg. It was near to impossible to see what color it was in the dim lighting, but it was defiantly an egg. It reminded Daya of a blanket she had once thrown on the floor that had collapsed in a wrinkly heap, for that was exactly was this egg looked like. She brushed her fingertips over its surprisingly hard surface, when she felt it move.
It was as if under that pile of blankets there was a creature, and the creature had given a great shudder. Daya's eyes widened, and she backed away from the egg, still uncovered. It gave another shake, and straw started spilling off. She knew what it meant. The egg was hatching.
How could it be hatching so early? Daya wondered. Of course, maybe it wasn't early after all. The egg had only been at the Hall for about three days, but who knows how long it had been hardening before that? Daya quickly hid in the shadows, and hoped the Candidate wouldn't notice. She wasn't about to leave just when everything got interesting!
The egg gave a loud crack, and the Candidate jumped into a sitting position. He immediately turned to the egg, as if by habit, and saw a large crack down its wrinkly side. Another one appeared, sprouting from the first. Then a third, and the whole thing shattered. Where an egg should have been, the ugly form of a small watchwher was crumpled; it's disgustingly huge eyes looking out at the boy.
Then it did the worst thing it could have done. It turned to Daya.
Daya tried to send a message to it telepathically, like she heard those with firelizards did. She told the hatchling to turn away, go to the Candidate, to bond with him so he would become the new watchwherhandler.
With a grunt, it turned its wrinkly head back to the Candidate, and let out a hungry shriek. He started feeding the creature spoonfuls of the revolting mixture from the cauldron, and Daya used the distraction to escape back to her own house. She silently slipped back into her own bed, as if nothing at all had happened.