"Your dad got musicians?" Pasco asked, goosebumps crawling over his back and arms. "For me?" He'll blame me when it doesn't work, Pasco thought, panicked. He'll say I promised I could dance a catch for him, and want me to pay these people!

"It's only my uncle and my cousin," Osa told him patiently. "Calm down. You jump worse than a landed cod."

Pasco made a face at his friend. The closer they got to the beach, the more he wished he'd said no when Osa first spoke of doing this.

You wanted to be paid for dancing, Pasco thought woefully, his breakfast a lead weight in his belly. Paid like a real dancer, like' the ones who dance at festivals and for the duke, instead of just dancing at parties with your cousins and, friends. And now it'll go bad, because you. didn't' have: the backbone to refuse!

His mother had said it time after time, "You never think of consequences, Pasco. You just think about right now. One of these days the consequences will take you, blind side: in an alley, and you'll, wonder how things got so bad. He pressed his face to his knees shivering.

Soon enough he felt the scrape of bottom under their keel. Strong hands grabbed the sides of the boat and dragged it up onto the beach.

"Come on, boy," a voice told him. Pasco looked up into the flinty eyes of Osa's grandmother. She wrapped a big-knuckled hand around his arm. "Take off your shoon. You got to learn this net-dance fast if you're to do it before we sail."

Men were working next to the flute player and drummer, laying something on the beach a corner at a time and securing it by staking it down. It was a real net, Pasco saw, one with bigger holes than most fishing nets. Hurriedly he stepped out of his shoes. Men and women left the boats to stand along the edges of the spread net, the lantern light rippling over their faces. They looked grim and forbidding, like statues of stern old gods.

"Two months 'thout enough fish to cover the deck," one of them muttered. "This better work."