Sky Dragons: Dragonriders of Pern Read online

  “She’s strong-willed.”

  “She’s spoiled and she toys with people,” Xhinna said. “She hasn’t yet begun to see them as real, as subject to pain, as worthy of love.”

  “But she’s Halla and Pellar’s daughter!”

  “And that’s the mistake everyone makes with her,” Xhinna said. “They think of her famous parents and they don’t see the child.” She recounted R’ney’s tale of his two sisters.

  “Oh, so she needs someone to cut her hair!” X’lerin said when she’d finished.

  “No, she needs someone to paddle her bottom until she can’t sit,” Xhinna said. “But for a reason so good that she can’t argue the punishment.”

  “I wouldn’t care to—” X’lerin began, shaking his head.

  “And that is why she’s so spoiled,” Xhinna cut him off. “Because no one cares to.”

  “In all honesty,” X’lerin told her in a quiet, sincere voice, “I’d really prefer if you rode a queen.”

  “Why, thank you!” Xhinna said, truly flattered. She changed her tone and smiled devilishly as she said, “And if I did, I’m sure that my queen would be happy to outfly you.”

  “Probably,” X’lerin agreed. “There certainly is one thing you’ve taught me already.”

  “One thing?”

  “Don’t judge a rider by his—or her—dragon’s color.”

  “Even gold,” Xhinna agreed.

  SIX

  A Knot on the Shoulder

  “No good deed goes unpunished” was an old saying—an Ancient-Timer saying according to some—and Xhinna realized, ruefully, that it was still valid when X’lerin gave her his latest surprise two days later.

  “Wingleader?” Xhinna echoed, eyes wide. “You want me to be a wingleader?”

  “And that’s an order,” X’lerin said to Xhinna, with a smug look. K’dan stood nearby, a huge grin spreading across his face as he, clearly forewarned, took delight in Xhinna’s amazement.

  “We’re only just making it official,” the harper told her. “After all, it’s either that or Weyrleader—”

  “But I ride a blue!”

  “And we’ve already told you that it’s not the dragon, it’s the rider,” K’dan reminded her.

  “So I’m to be wingleader and my wing is …,” Xhinna asked, hopeful that she’d found the glaring flaw in their—for K’dan was clearly as responsible for this as X’lerin—distracting plan.

  “Well, mostly you, Taria, and the queen weyrlings,” X’lerin said diffidently. “I’ll assign some others from time to time.”

  “And my duties?”

  “Not different from what you’ve already been doing,” X’lerin said. He eyed her shoulder. “But I want your rank knot on by nightfall.” In a smaller voice, he added, “And we want you to lead the queens.”

  “You’re serious?” Xhinna said. “You want me to lead the queens?”

  “Deadly,” X’lerin told her.

  “What about K’dan? He’s the Weyrlingmaster!”

  “I’ll have my hands full with the others,” K’dan said. “Not that I won’t be drilling the queens when the time comes, but we felt—”

  “We felt that they needed someone like you,” X’lerin interjected.

  “What?” Xhinna asked, brows high. “A girl?”

  “No, a leader,” X’lerin retorted. “I’ve got my hands full with my wing and the queens are too much on their own for any bronze rider.” He cut his eyes slyly toward K’dan as he added, “Even a harper.”

  “We’re merely recognizing your authority in a way that can’t be argued,” K’dan added. Xhinna turned to look at him—so they expected her to be challenged. Her thoughts turned immediately to Jepara. Apparently X’lerin had come up with a solution to her intransigence that kept him away from it. It was, she realized, not such a bad solution, especially given that X’lerin’s dragon was the only mature bronze in the small Weyr, which sometimes required him, as the authority of last resort, to delegate difficult tasks and distance himself from painful decisions.

  “Wingleader?” Xhinna repeated. “So I’ll be leading the queens and—what?”

  “You’re going to be scouting a lot and you’ll need help. This will make it easier all around.”

  “Some won’t like it,” Xhinna pointed out.

  “Do you mean J’keran?” X’lerin asked, raising an eyebrow. “I’ll manage him.”

  Actually, she’d been thinking of Jepara and the other young queen riders, but Xhinna could think of nothing else to say, glancing from young bronze rider to older harper until K’dan burst out in laughter.

  “You should see your face!”

  Xhinna glared at him.

  “Check with Javissa, I’m sure she can find you something from our stores to make a suitable rank knot,” X’lerin told her, his eyes twinkling with delight.

  She started to move off but stopped and turned back. “If I’m to be a wingleader, shouldn’t I have a wingsecond?”

  “Of course,” K’dan said at once.

  “Who do you have in mind?” X’lerin asked. “I’m afraid that I’ll need all the older dragons—”

  “And Coranth is guarding her eggs,” K’dan noted.

  “I was thinking of someone else,” Xhinna said. “Someone with his own authority.”

  “Oh!” X’lerin said, suddenly enlightened. “Excellent, a marvelous choice.” He nodded firmly. “Go for it.”

  Xhinna was already annoyed when she caught up to R’ney a sevenday later. She’d spent most of the past week dealing with various moans, groans, and whines from the young queen riders—not to mention no small amount of time dealing with the obstreperous Jepara. But when his brown weyrling threw clumps of dirt all over her clean clothes, her anger overheated.

  “Stop, stop!” she yelled. “By the First Egg, R’ney, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Xhinna!” R’ney cried, rushing around Rowerth’s hind legs and briskly brushing the damp soil off of her. In his haste, he only succeeded in grinding more in. “I didn’t hear you come—I’m sorry.”

  Xhinna let out a deep sigh, telling herself that, as K’dan had recently reminded her, the first duty of a leader is to control herself, particularly her temper. Xhinna’s protest that she wasn’t a leader, merely a blue rider, had been met by contemptuous snorts from both X’lerin and K’dan.

  “It isn’t the color of the dragon but the force of your personality,” K’dan had told her. X’lerin had nodded in firm agreement. They’d gone on to talk about what it meant to be a leader and how some, regardless of their dragons, were better suited than others—J’keran was the counterexample.

  Now Xhinna forced herself to ask more reasonably, “What are you doing?”

  “Digging.”

  “Digging—why?” Xhinna asked, tamping down more firmly on her temper.

  “To see how deep we need to go,” he replied, in a tone that implied that his answer should have been obvious.

  “How deep?” Xhinna repeated, wondering if the smither was entertaining some wild notion of making tunnels. If so, she’d remind him right quick about the tunnel snakes.

  “To the rock, of course,” R’ney replied. His enthusiasm faded enough for him to gauge the level of her confusion and he flushed. “I’m sorry, I was thinking that perhaps we could level the dirt off the top of the plateau and make our Weyr here.”

  “Take all the dirt off the plateau?” Xhinna asked in surprise. She thought for a moment. “How long would that take?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” R’ney told her. “I have to know how far down we need to go and how quickly a dragon can dig before I can do the calculations.” He smiled as if expecting praise for his resolution of two problems in the same operation.

  “And where are you supposed to be right now?” Xhinna asked.

  R’ney’s face fell. “Taria’s with Razz and Jirana.”

  “You left a pregnant mother and a child together with a Mrreow?” Xhinna roared, un
able to contain herself. Bekka had only needed one quick inspection of Taria before pronouncing her officially pregnant.

  R’ney wilted for a moment, then said mulishly, “The Meeyu is sleeping and they’re on the outside of the cage.”

  “Oh,” Xhinna said in an apologetic tone, “sorry.” In an attempt at further apology, she waved her hand at the hole that had provided the dirt still festooning her best riding gear and asked, “So what did you find?”

  “I’d only just started, blue rider,” R’ney replied. He was too gentle—mostly—to roar back at her. The few times he had, though, she’d thoroughly deserved it and had, as soon as she’d cooled down, been grateful for his criticism.

  “One of the duties of a second,” R’ney had said as he dismissed her apology back then, “is to have the courage to tell his leader when she’s wrong.”

  “Keep doing that, please,” Xhinna had told him.

  “Is this another of those times when I’m wrong and need to apologize?” she asked now, feeling humbled.

  R’ney thought about it for a moment and then shook his head. “No,” he said, “this is one of the times when you should bite my head off and feed it to the Mrreows for endangering our young.”

  “Okay,” Xhinna said. “By my count, then, we’re about even.”

  “I don’t keep count,” R’ney told her. “But if I did, I’d say that I was in your debt from the first.”

  “Well, then, I’d say that now we’re even because I was keeping count,” Xhinna told him drolly.

  The brown rider gave her a steady look, then snorted and shrugged, shaking his head.

  “But, digging out all the dirt, is that really possible?” she asked.

  “It’s certainly possible. It’s only a question of digging.”

  “But how much and for how long?”

  “I was trying to find out,” R’ney reminded her. Xhinna shrugged an apology and gestured for them to move to the front of the small brown dragon.

  “How’d you get Rowerth here, anyway?” Xhinna asked. “Coranth?”

  “Taria offered to ferry him in exchange for my supervision of her and Jirana when they were with the Meeyus,” R’ney said. “Rowerth wanted some exercise, and K’dan had mentioned that the dragons use their back legs to launch themselves, so I thought digging …”

  “It might be a good idea for the hatchlings to get out more,” Xhinna said. “And we’ve enough dragons now that we could bring them to the shore. They like prancing in the water.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” R’ney confessed. “I planned to ask Taria to have Coranth bring Rowerth to bathe when we were done. I figured we’d get dirty.” He glanced down at his own tunic and flicked a clod of dirt off it.

  “Could Tazith help dig? He’d be faster,” Xhinna asked.

  R’ney shook his head. “Not that I don’t appreciate the offer, but—” He paused as Rowerth began furiously scooping out more dirt with his hind legs. The little brown—not quite so little anymore—was clearly thrilled with the play he’d been asked to do.

  “I’d already calculated the baseline for Rowerth, and I’d have to recalibrate for Tazith,” R’ney said. Xhinna raised one eyebrow at him and shook her head slowly in the way she’d come to realize made the smith remember that she hadn’t his smithcraft training. R’ney sighed.

  “It’s easier this way,” he said simply. She shrugged and stood back, watching until she got bored.

  “I’ll check on the others,” she told him, heading off to the Mrreow cage. Tazith begged to stay behind, entranced by the little brown’s play.

  “Talk nicely with R’ney and he might let you join in later,” Xhinna called with a wave toward her blue. Tazith rumbled wistfully and craned his neck down by the brown rider, faceted eyes whirling a light green as he hoped to charm the smither.

  “Not yet, Tazith,” R’ney said, reaching up idly to scratch the blue’s eye ridges. “Let’s let Rowerth see what he can do first.”

  Jirana was awake when Xhinna got to the cage. She was just outside the bars, leaning in with one arm to pet the nearest Meeyu. Xhinna broke into a run when she saw her and tackled the child, scooping her up and rolling her out of the way.

  “Never do that!” Xhinna cried as Jirana burst into frightened tears. “You can’t trust the Mrreows!”

  “I was only petting it,” Jirana cried. Taria woke up at the commotion and looked over in alarm.

  “I must have dozed off,” she said in apology. Her eyes narrowed as she took in the tableau. “What are you doing with Jirana?”

  Xhinna explained quickly and Taria shook her head. “They wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “Not like Coranth,” Xhinna retorted hotly. “They’d maul her first, probably hamstring her, and then—” She broke off, seeing the growing terror in Jirana’s eyes. She took a deep breath and brought her worries under control. “Sweetie,” she told the young girl, “you can’t just think that every soft furry thing is going to be good all the time.”

  “She’s right,” Taria said, giving Xhinna a pointed look. “Sometimes you can’t be too careful.”

  “No,” Xhinna corrected, “you can never be too careful.” Taria had grown moodier and more worried as her pregnancy really took hold and the Hatching neared.

  “Shouldn’t you be off finding Candidates?” Taria asked. The eggs were due to hatch in another three weeks at most, as the old Teaching Ballads warned:

  Count three months and more,

  And five heated weeks,

  A day of glory, and

  In a month, who seeks?

  The three months were the time from mating to clutching, the “five heated weeks” the time on the usually warm Hatching Grounds at the great Weyrs. The “day of glory” was the Hatching and Impression itself, and then, as they’d recently discovered, “in a month, who seeks” meant that the month-old dragonets could actually go between from one place to another, even though they usually took between two and three Turns to reach their full growth.

  “Are you two fighting again?” Jirana asked, having recovered from her fright. She looked at Xhinna and then Taria. “I thought you loved each other.”

  “We do,” Xhinna told her. “But we can love each other and still disagree.”

  Taria snorted. “And people, even dragonriders, can be wrong,” she said. “The smart ones are those who admit it.”

  “I was coming to tell you that I’ve arranged to go Search,” Xhinna said as she released Jirana. She was surprised when the girl grabbed her hands and began to rub them.

  “I like your hands,” Jirana told her softly. “I feel safe in them.”

  Taria glanced sharply at the little girl, then up into Xhinna’s eyes. Her lips quivered for a moment, and then she confessed, “I do, too.”

  The tension seemed to drain out of the air as Xhinna met her eyes.

  “I get scared sometimes,” Xhinna said softly. She felt Jirana pause in her rubbing, then resume it again as though she were performing some sort of healing massage, like her brother J’riz.

  “I’m terrified all the time,” Taria replied. She glanced down at her belly, still flat, at the Meeyus in their cage and then, fleetingly, toward the sandy beach where Coranth’s eggs lay.

  “V’lex and Sarinth are with the eggs,” Xhinna reassured her.

  “I should bring Coranth back to her eggs,” Taria said, rising. She motioned for Jirana, but the girl ignored her, sitting firmly in Xhinna’s lap, rubbing her fingers in patterns around the backs of Xhinna’s hands.

  Tazith? Could you come here please? Xhinna called.

  Tazith flew in a moment later, landing nearby.

  “We’re ready now,” Jirana said, getting up from Xhinna’s lap and extending a hand to help her to her feet. Xhinna grinned at the little girl’s offer, but accepted it solemnly and used a bit of Jirana’s weight to help her to her feet. “Do you feel better now?”

  “Yes,” Xhinna told her, “I do.”

  “My mother gets mad when I f
ight,” Jirana said.

  “I get mad when I fight,” Xhinna admitted. “Sometimes it’s hard not to, though, isn’t it?”

  “You mean it doesn’t get easier when you get older?” Jirana asked in surprise.

  “It gets easier to stop being mad,” Xhinna told her. “And it gets easier to decide not to be mad. But sometimes you still get mad.”

  “Oh.” Jirana raised her hands for Xhinna to pick her up. Even at ten, the child was small enough that she was nothing to carry, and Xhinna slung her on one hip with the practice of a child-minder and walked toward Tazith. Jirana leaned in suddenly and kissed Xhinna’s cheek. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” Xhinna said, returning the kiss with a big, loud smack. Jirana giggled, then gestured for her to raise her up to Tazith. Xhinna complied and climbed up behind her, rigging the riding straps for the two of them before urging Tazith into the sky.

  Once they were airborne, Jirana leaned back and tilted her head so that her words could carry to Xhinna’s ears. “Can I come with you?”

  “I’m bringing you back to your mother,” Xhinna said, “isn’t that enough?”

  “I want to come with you,” Jirana said.

  “I don’t think your mother would like that,” Xhinna said. “It might be dangerous.”

  “Not with you,” Jirana replied confidently. “If my mother says it’s all right, will you let me?”

  Xhinna smiled. “We’ll see.”

  “It seems they can swim just fine,” K’dan said as he watched Lurenth prance in the waves. It had been an unanswered question as to whether the weyrlings could swim until K’dan had asked his bronze to try the water. Watching Lurenth cautiously approach and then just as anxiously retreat from the waves that lapped the shore had brought a smile to everyone’s lips. Lurenth had turned back to whuff at his rider before sternly braving his way into the waves and then out beyond them.

  I’m floating! Lurenth had declared, gamely turning onto his back and stretching his wings, sculling his way forward with his hind legs.