“K’tan and I would like you to work with us,” Kindan told her. “Your drawings
alone would be a great help.”
“My drawings?” Lorana asked in surprise.
“Yes,” Kindan agreed. He held up the drawing she’d made of the green
sputum Valla had coughed up. “K’tan said we dare not keep samples of the
actual infection, but with your drawings we can compare differences, and
track changes in the sick.
“Which is not to say that your understanding of herdbeasts won’t also be a
great help,” he added.
“Dragons aren’t herdbeasts,” Lorana protested.
“No,” Kindan agreed with a nod. “They’re not. But you’d be surprised at how
similar illnesses can be between man, beast, and dragon.”
Behind Lorana, Arith stirred in her slumber. Kindan noticed.
“I didn’t mean to disturb her,” he said. “In fact, I should leave you to
yourself. I’m sure you’ll want to wash up.”
Lorana forced herself to relax. “Yes, the ground was harder than I’d
thought,” she said.
“Have your dragon bespeak Drith, K’tan’s dragon,” Kindan said as he made
to leave.
Lorana nodded. “Is there a good time?”
He chuckled. “I suspect that your time will be more constrained than ours,”
he said, gesturing toward the sleeping hatchling. “Whenever you’re ready
and your dragon is asleep.”
“Which won’t be much longer,” Lorana said as Arith shifted position again.
“No it won’t,” Kindan said, agreeably shaking his head. “I’ve kept you too
long, I’m sorry. It’s just—”
“I understand,” Lorana replied.
Kindan made a half-bow and departed.
Arith awoke faint with hunger. Again. It had been three sevendays since
she’d hatched. In all those sevendays, Arith had eaten scraps brought by
the Weyrlingmaster. Lorana had been amazed at the dragonet’s appetite,
which rapidly grew from one large bucket, to two, then three, and finally
five.
Arith’s sleep was as erratic as any newborn’s, which slowed Lorana’s own
recovery from her exposure and exhaustion. It was all Lorana could do to
keep Arith fed, feed herself, and keep up with the constant oiling necessary
to keep the dragonet’s growing skin from cracking. She would wake up
bleary-eyed and go back to bed bleary-eyed, never quite sure what hour of
the day it was.
Fortunately, Arith’s newborn growth spurt was finally smoothing out and her
sleep pattern normalizing.
“She’s growing very fast,” P’gul, the Weyrlingmaster, had exclaimed the last
time he had come to check on her. “She’ll be ready for the Feeding
Grounds soon.”
He shook his head in amazement. “Catch her own food, too, I don’t doubt.”
Now, as Lorana guided the increasingly irritable dragonet out of their
quarters on the lowest level of the Weyr, she realized that she did not know
where the Feeding Grounds were. She stopped in confusion and stood in
the great Bowl of the Weyr, looking around desperately.
“Are you going to wait until she dies from hunger, or were you perhaps
hoping that her keening would disturb the whole Weyr?” a voice from
behind her demanded caustically.
Lorana spun around to come face-to-face with a woman not all that much
older than herself. The woman’s face had a pinched look, as if she had
been caught in a perpetual sneer. Her blue eyes were pallid and her lips
were pursed tight in a thin line. Blond hair was pulled together behind her
neck.
“I don’t know where the Feeding Grounds are,” Lorana said apologetically.
“Peh! Some Weyrwoman you’ll make!” the other returned. “Didn’t bother to
listen to the orientation, did you? Too high and mighty. Expect the rest of us
to look after you, do you?”
“No, I—”
“It’s not as though we all don’t have our own dragons to look after—” At this
point a large queen burst into air above them, hovering near the other
woman.
Arith took one fearful look up at the full-grown queen, gave a wistful chirp,
was answered by an encouraging bellow, and promptly disappeared
herself.
In a moment, Lorana could feel Arith’s pleasure as she made her first kill,
and she saw an image of the Feeding Grounds in her mind’s eye. She
looked up at the large queen, certain that she was the source of Arith’s
inspiration, and said with relief, “Thank you.”
My pleasure,
the queen responded, settling gently on the ground beside
her rider.
Your little one was quite agitated.
I’m sorry,
Lorana apologized.
I hadn’t expected to Impress her.
She got a
feeling of amused tolerance from the queen.
I’m Lorana.
I know,
the queen responded.
I am Minith.
“You talk to other dragons?” Minith’s rider asked, shocked.
“Oh, yes,” Lorana said, forgetting that this was not a common trait among
the weyrfolk. The look on the other rider’s face quickly disabused her.
Trying to be civil—after all, the queen
had
helped Arith to the Feeding
Grounds—Lorana stretched out her hand and said, “I’m Lorana.”
The other eyed her hand dubiously but did not take it. “Tullea, Weyrwoman
second,” she said, still looking like she’d just bitten into a bitterfruit. “Salina
asked me to check on you,” she added in a tone that made it clear what she
thought of that imposition.
“That was very kind of Salina,” Lorana replied, desperately trying to place
the name but failing. She knew she’d heard it before, but she was too
groggy to dredge up the memory.
“You don’t know who she is, do you?” Tullea asked accusingly.
“Her Breth is Arith’s dam,” Lorana temporized, feeling overwhelmed by the
other woman’s manner.
“Salina is the
senior
Weyrwoman,” Tullea snapped. “Don’t you know
anything?” She didn’t give Lorana time to respond before continuing, “Well,
obviously you don’t. I can’t see what sort of help you’ll ever be. Perhaps it
would be best if—”
Minith erupted in a loud disapproving roar, cutting Tullea off. Tullea looked
up at her dragon, her eyes softening somewhat.
“Now look what you’ve done, you’ve upset her.”
“I’m sorry,” Lorana muttered. Silently, she said to Minith,
My apologies,
gold dragon.
Minith gave Lorana a pert nod, eyes whirling red-green.
Lorana turned her attention to Arith, partly out of desperation.
Are you all
done?
One more, please!
The dragonet pleaded.
Lorana couldn’t help smiling. “Very well, silly,” she said aloud.
“If your dragon gorges, don’t come to me!” Tullea said, climbing up to
Minith’s neck. “I’ve better things to deal with.”
With a great bound of her hind legs, Minith leaped into the air and beat her
way up out of the Bowl. Once clear she blinked out of existence
between.
Lorana watched the maneuver with her eyes wide. The adult queen was so
graceful and her movements so beautiful.
Soon I’ll be able to do that, Lorana marveled to herself, her thoughts going
back to her splendid Arith. She had discovered with her fire-lizards that they
knew how to go
between
from the moment they were born. Training them
to come back, to go where she wanted, had taken many months of hard
work. She knew from the Teaching Ballads that Arith had the same innate
talent—in fact, she had just demonstrated it by going
between
to the
Feeding Grounds—but it would take careful training over several Turns for
Lorana to be able to ride her precious gold
between
to places of her own
choosing.
Still, she entertained visions of rising into the air, blinking into the cold
between
and out again—anywhere on Pern.
Her heart gave a lurch as she realized the vistas her newfound freedom
offered. She reached out with her mind to
her
dragon and made her
presence tenderly felt. A rebounding wave of affection swept back to her
from Arith. Lorana’s vision suddenly misted as her eyes brimmed with joyful
tears.
A moment later, she felt Arith quench her thirst with the hot blood of a
herdbeast, felt her dragonet rend the flesh of the small beast, and felt her
swallow without so much as a bite.
Chew!
Lorana told her sternly.
I’m hungry,
Arith complained. Lorana could feel the little gold’s hunger,
lessened by the two other herdbeasts she had consumed.
Greedy guts!
Lorana thought back. She felt Arith’s amusement and
self-satisfaction.
That’s your last one.
Lorana felt Arith tense up in nascent disobedience.
I
mean
it,
she warned the dragonet with the same fierce intensity she’d
used to her fire-lizards. Biting back a pang of grief over their loss, she sent
a second firm order to Arith.
All right,
Arith allowed.
A burst of cold above Lorana heralded the hatchling’s return through
between.
Arith landed quickly, stumbled just a bit, and immediately proceeded to
stroll nonchalantly up to Lorana with a very obvious I-meant-to-do-that
swagger. Lorana laughed at her, reaching down indulgently to scratch the
dragonet’s eye ridges.
Ah, that’s better,
Arith sighed.
“They’re not really supposed to go
between
until they’re much older,” a
voice said beside her. It was K’tan.
Lorana smiled fondly at her little queen and stood up to face the Weyr
healer.
“It’s all right, I knew where she was,” Lorana said.
“Even
between
?” he asked, eyebrows arched in surprise.
Still smarting from her encounter with Tullea, Lorana bit back her immediate
irritated response and settled for, “Well . . . yes.”
“Impressive,” K’tan remarked.
“Kindan told me that you needed to talk with me several sevendays ago,”
Lorana said hastily, “but I’m afraid with Arith—”
K’tan held up a hand, shaking his head. “No need to apologize.” He turned
toward Arith, then turned back inquiringly to Lorana. “May I look at her?”
Lorana nodded.
K’tan’s inspection was swift and gentle. He ran his hands from her head
down her neck, to her forelegs, across her distended belly, and on to her
withers and tail.
“She’s making her own kills already?” he asked, his face showing surprise.
“That’s not normal?” Lorana asked in response. “The fire-lizards usually
need several sevendays of hand-feeding, but I thought dragons—”
“Dragons are not so different,” he said. He stood up, backed away from the
young queen, and shook his head admiringly.
“She’s beautifully proportioned,” he announced at last, adding with a grin,
“barring her stomach.”
Lorana felt herself grinning back in relief. She arched her neck to scan the
weyrs around the Bowl, spotted one brown head looking down at them, and
waved at the dragon she knew was Drith. Drith twitched, startled that she
had recognized him, and nodded back at her.
“He’s quite a beauty,” Lorana said.
K’tan, who had followed her gaze, laughed. “Indeed he is,” he agreed, his
voice full of fondness for his dragon. Then he changed the subject back:
“You say you knew where she was?”
Lorana nodded.
“How do you do that?”
Lorana thought for a moment, then shrugged apologetically. “I don’t know
how; I just do,” she said.
“There she is!”
Lorana looked up. A tall, graceful, older woman was striding quickly toward
them, accompanied by M’tal, the Weyrleader.
“Is it true that you can talk to any dragon?” M’tal asked when they arrived.
Lorana nodded. “Yes, Weyrleader.”
“Excellent!” M’tal said.
“What is it like?” the woman asked. Lorana realized that this was Salina
herself, Breth’s rider and Benden’s Weyrwoman.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she began slowly. “I could talk to my
fire-lizards of course—” She made a sad face at their mention, but
continued on. “—so I guess I just didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be able
to talk to all dragons.”
Salina nodded encouragingly. Lorana groped for words, and found them.
“It’s like being in a room full of your best friends.”
Her eyes lit as she peered up at all the weyrs above and the dragons
looking back down at her.
“Sometimes I hear individual conversations, sometimes I don’t,” she said.
“I don’t pry,” she added hastily, “and would never eavesdrop. But most of
the time the dragons talk amongst themselves, you know.”
“They do?” Salina’s eyes widened in surprise. She glanced up to where her
Breth lay. “Well, I suppose I’d never thought about it, but they
do
have a lot
of time on their hands.”
“At least until Thread falls,” M’tal said. He asked Lorana, “Can you talk to
watch-whers, too?”
“Watch-whers?” Lorana repeated. She shrugged. “I don’t know, I’ve never
tried.”
“Hmm,” M’tal murmured thoughtfully.
“If she can talk to all dragons, I would be surprised if she couldn’t talk to all
watch-whers, too,” K’tan put in.
“ ‘A room full of your best friends,’ ” Salina repeated, mulling over Lorana’s
words. “Why are they your best friends?”
“Maybe they aren’t,” Lorana admitted with a frown. “But they seem like it.
They’re all so nice and courteous and always asking about me and Arith.”