her.
She sensed his unease and turned her back to him, stretching her neck
from side to side to get out the kinks. She reached behind her and said to
him, “Could you?”
Kindan stifled a laugh and began to gently massage her tense shoulder
blades and upper back. He took his time and was thorough.
Partway through, Lorana gasped and Arith jerked awake, eyes opening
quickly. The little queen keened softly beside her rider, and Kindan didn’t
need to see Lorana’s face to know that she was crying with the pain of
dragons forever lost.
In the end, Kindan couldn’t say who was more distraught: Lorana, Arith, or
himself. Through the course of the evening—the length of the Fall as it
traveled from Igen Weyr southwest, over the Ista Strait and onto the
southern tip of Ista Island—Lorana shuddered as though beaten down by a
miner’s hammer, and Arith keened, sometimes so often that it almost
seemed as if the small dragon was chanting. The pain and anguish that
both rider and dragon were suffering hurt Kindan even more because he
did not feel it except through them and could not anticipate the next loss.
All through the long Fall he stayed by them, gently massaging Lorana’s
tense back, softly patting Arith’s hide. Kiyary or Mikkala must have come to
check on them several times, for Kindan remembered nodding thankfully to
them at various points in the night and resisting the same wine he tried to
force unsuccessfully on Lorana.
In the end, Kindan had started to count when either Lorana or Arith gasped
or shuddered with the pain of dragons and riders far away. He stopped
when he reached seventy. Ista Weyr had some one hundred and twenty
dragons or more able to fight Thread; if seventy were injured or lost, it was
just as Verilan had said: Ista would not be able to fight another Threadfall.
Two Falls like that and Benden Weyr would not be able to fight Thread
either.
And then Thread would fall—unchecked—and leach all the life from the
land. And even if the Holders survived, locked in their Holds, how long
would it be before they starved in a lifeless and barren land?
J’lantir surveyed the surviving Wingleaders as they gathered in the Council
Room at Ista Weyr.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said to M’kir, barring the brown rider as he tried
to enter. M’kir’s left arm was in a sling, his shoulder heavily bandaged where
Thread had gouged it, the left side of his head bandaged to hide the gaping
hole that had once held a fierce blue eye.
M’kir opened his mouth to protest but stopped as J’lantir swayed in the
doorway.
“You need to get some rest,” the brown rider told his Weyrleader, sliding
past him.
J’lantir turned to face the others in the room. S’maj was the only Wingleader
left besides himself. B’lon was favoring his left leg, wrapped in a bandage
placed over his now-useless flying pants—a long thin line of blood showed
where Thread had eaten through it and into his leg, but the score was not
deep; B’lon’s Lareth had been able to take them quickly
between,
where
the Thread had frozen, shriveled, and cracked off.
A sound from behind him caused J’lantir to swivel his head. His eyes went
unfocused for a bit as the movement caused the world to wobble.
You must rest too,
Lolanth chided him. J’lantir knew his dragon was right,
just as he knew he had to ignore the advice.
Dalia entered, smoothing her features as she surveyed the occupants of
the room.
“How bad is it?” M’kir asked her urgently.
“It’s bad,” B’lon predicted.
“Perhaps we should let our Weyrwoman tell us,” J’lantir said with a tone of
reproval in his voice. He inclined his head toward her—a mistake, his
stomach informed him.
I’ll feed you later,
J’lantir growled back at his
stomach.
Dalia raised an eyebrow at J’lantir, clearly recognizing that he was suffering,
but stopped herself from commenting as she caught the pleading look on
his face.
“Fourteen dragons went
between,
” she told the others. “Twenty were
severely injured, and it will be more than three months before they will fly
again.”
A groan went around the table.
“Another thirty-one have lesser injuries but will need at least several weeks
to recuperate.” She took a breath before finishing. “And we’ve identified
another eleven sick dragons.”
“So how many dragons will be able to fly Thread over Ista Hold in three
days’ time?” J’lantir asked, dreading the answer.
“Forty-eight,” Dalia answered, unable to keep the pain out of her voice.
Kindan woke the next morning to Arith’s coughing. It took him a moment to
realize that he was leaning against her back and that Lorana was sleeping in
his lap. Arith turned her head to give Kindan an apologetic look.
“Think nothing of it,” he responded with a courteous nod of his head. At that
moment Arith sneezed, covering him with green mist.
Lorana twitched and sat upright, blinking the morning into focus.
“Shh, it’s all right,” Kindan said soothingly.
Lorana focused on his face. “She sneezed again, didn’t she? You’re all
covered in green.”
Arith gave an apologetic
bleek.
“So are you,” Kindan told Lorana. Then he frowned consideringly. “Well,
maybe not quite as much.”
Are you hungry?
Lorana asked Arith.
Thirsty,
Arith replied after a moment’s reflection.
“Arith’s thirsty,” Lorana announced, standing up. Kindan followed her
action.
“We’d best clean up before we go anywhere,” he said, peeling off his
stained tunic. “Or people will think that
we’re
sick.”
Lorana gave no reaction to his attempt at humor. With a polite nod to the
humans, Arith stood up, stretched, took a few quick steps to the ledge of
her lair, and blithely jumped off it, gliding surely toward the lake in the Weyr
Bowl.
“You know,” Kindan said, gesturing fondly after the departing gold, “I’ve
never seen a dragon so young act so self-assured.”
Lorana’s lips twisted up in the ghost of a smile. “She
is
agile, isn’t she?”
They met Arith again as she splashed about on the shoreline of the lake.
“Well,” someone behind them drawled, “now that you two have deigned to
join the rest of us, perhaps you’d care to look for these special rooms I’ve
heard so much about.”
They turned to see Tullea leaning indolently against Minith’s foreleg. B’nik
stood beside her.
“Arith was sick,” Lorana explained, turning back to catch sight of the young
queen as she splashed back to the shore.
“All the more reason to search, then,” Tullea responded. “Unless you two
are more inclined to
cavorting
?” She cast a disdainful look at Kindan’s bare
chest. “And get some clothes on.”
With that, Tullea turned away from them and headed back to her weyr, B’nik
following, stony-faced.
“I’ll go on,” Kindan said to Lorana. “I’ve got to get a clean shirt from my
room anyway.”
Passing by the Kitchen Cavern on the way to his room, Kindan was hailed
by Kiyary.
“Tullea giving out to you, was she?” Kiyary asked, smiling evilly. “I can see
why, too—your bare chest is enough to make a dragon swoon.”
Kindan, who knew full well that most dragonriders were, of necessity, more
muscled than he, took Kiyary’s mocking in the well-intentioned manner it
was delivered. “It’s all that hard work with my guitar,” he said, grinning.
“And those drums up on the heights don’t hurt either,” Kiyary responded,
giving him a more thorough appraisal than when she’d been teasing him.
“Come to think of it, maybe Tullea has a point.”
Kindan snorted and headed off with a backward wave over his shoulder. In
his room, he pulled out a fresh shirt and hastily donned it. He paused, as he
was tucking it in his pants, to look over the map of the Weyr he’d drawn in
chalk on a slate board. He’d marked the map with X’s to show where they’d
searched already. He pursed his lips sourly; he couldn’t see an unmarked
spot.
He spun around at a noise from the doorway behind him. It was B’nik.
Kindan lifted up the map and showed it to the Weyrleader.
“I can’t think of anywhere else to look,” he said.
B’nik entered the room and peered closely at the map. “Perhaps the
Records at Fort were wrong,” he said after a long moment.
Kindan shook his head. “If they are, then we have no hope.”
“I can’t see what could be so special in those rooms,” B’nik said. “Nor why
they were built here at Benden.”
“Fort would have made more sense,” Kindan agreed abstractedly.
Something in the Weyrleader’s comment nagged at the edge of his
consciousness.
“I came to tell you that K’tan says the new riding harnesses have arrived,”
B’nik said, obviously not at all clear why the information was important to the
harper.
“They have?” Kindan answered excitedly, looking toward the door. He
caught B’nik’s questioning look and explained, “Salina had me order
Lorana’s riding brightware a while back, and now there’s leather to attach it
to.”
B’nik smiled. “I can see how that’d cheer her up,” he agreed. “What sort of
design did you get?”
Kindan searched around in a drawer and pulled out a small sack. He
opened it, searched for a moment, then pulled out one of the smaller
pieces of brightware and handed it to B’nik.
“Silver, is it?” B’nik asked as he took the proffered piece and examined it. It
was a small circular piece, meant to be attached over one of the standard
steel buckles on the riding leathers. That way, as the leathers and
metalwork wore out, it could be removed and placed on a replacement
riding harness.
“I can make out the Benden Weyr symbol, but what sort of symbol is this?”
B’nik asked, pointing at one of the images. “That’s a healer mark!
And—there’s an animal beside it.”
“Salina made me order them soon after Lorana Impressed,” Kindan said.
“So I used what I’d learned about Lorana. Apparently, that’s about the same
as the mark she used for her fire-lizard’s harness.”
“She had fire-lizards?” B’nik asked, looking up from the silver brightwork.
“Two,” Kindan told him. “They were lost at sea in a storm.”
B’nik digested this information with discomfort. “Her fire-lizards weren’t sick,
were they?”
“I believe they were,” Kindan responded. “She doesn’t talk about them
much.”
B’nik acknowledged Kindan’s reply with a grunt, absently fingering the
brightwork with his thumb. With a start, he pulled himself out of his musings
and handed the silver circle back to Kindan.
“I’m sure she’ll be pleased at the thought,” he said. “Why don’t you get the
leathers for her and present the whole array?”
“Thank you,” Kindan said. “I’ll do that.”
“When you’re done, come find me and we’ll talk some more,” B’nik told him
as he turned to leave.
“Very well, Weyrleader,” Kindan said. “Where will you be?”
“Practicing,” B’nik called back over his shoulder. “You might ask Lorana if
Arith would talk to Caranth when you need me.”
“Thank you, I will.”
D
oes this mean we’ll ride together soon?
Arith asked excitedly as Kindan
and K’tan helped Lorana put on the flying gear.
“She wants to know when I’ll ride her,” Lorana said out loud.
“It will be many months yet,” K’tan said with a shake of his head. “Arith’s
bigger than all the other hatchlings of her clutch—she’s the queen so you’d
expect her to be—but she’s still got a lot of growth before she’s ready to
carry even your light weight.”
Arith made a plaintive sound and Lorana laughed. “Never you mind. First
you need to get used to wearing the riding gear,” she said out loud.
“Indeed she does,” K’tan agreed emphatically. “In fact, if she gets used to
it soon enough she might try flying with it some.”
Could I?
Arith asked wistfully.
Now? I could go eat.
“She wants to eat with it on,” Lorana told the others.
“The riding harness will need to be oiled first,” K’tan said, shaking his head
again. “It would be better, young queen, if you waited until you’d had the
harness on for a day or two, so we know that we’ve got it adjusted right.”
Arith blew a dejected sigh through her nose, which turned into an
open-mouthed cough.
Sorry.
Kindan and K’tan exchanged concerned looks.
“Maybe this was a bad idea,” Kindan said.
“No,” Lorana responded emphatically. Beside her, Arith made a similar
noise, though quieter, for fear of exacerbating her cough. “And I love the
brightwork, Kindan. It’s very well done.”
“A friend of mine,” Kindan told her.
“Well, please thank her for me.”
“Him,”
Kindan corrected with a grin. “But I’ll pass the thanks on.”
“How’s the search going?” she asked, feeling awkward and wanting to
change the topic. Seeing the worried looks exchanged by the other two,
she regretted the question instantly. “Not well?”
“No,” Kindan said. “I can’t think of anywhere else to look.”
“That’s because you’re not weyrbred,” K’tan said, clapping the harper on
the back. “Why don’t we talk about it while we check on the injured?”