Sky Dragons: Dragonriders of Pern Page 28

  “Actually, you brought it on yourself,” Jepara had remarked when Xhinna had once let the strain show. Jepara, like Danirry, was a secret source of pride for Xhinna: The young queen rider had matured a lot and was often found at the forefront of Weyr activity. When Xhinna had groaned at her, Jepara had laughed, quoting, “ ‘What’s the reward for a job well done?’ ”

  Xhinna’s groan had become louder before she muttered, “I’ll get you for that.”

  Xhinna was sorry that Jepara’s Sarurth would probably not rise before they returned to the Northern Continent.

  Now she pulled herself out of her musings as she heard voices in the first of the rooms of the Stone Hold. She nodded to those working under the wide awnings spread from each side of the stone building and made her way into the entrance, following T’mar’s voice.

  “You sent for me?” Xhinna asked as she entered the room that most often served as the Sky Weyr council room.

  “I did,” T’mar said, rising from his chair on the opposite side of the table that filled the center of the room and extending his hand toward her. Xhinna took it in a quick grasp. With his other hand, T’mar gestured her toward a seat.

  Xhinna nodded to the others in the room, not surprised at the sight of X’lerin, H’nez, C’tov, K’dan, and Fiona. With T’mar present, she had expected nothing more than a full council of the Weyrleaders. They often met—that was no surprise. That they wanted her, however, was.

  “I understand you’ve been thrashing the Weyrwoman again,” T’mar began in a bantering tone.

  “I’m only trying to keep her fit, Weyrleader,” Xhinna had said in the same tone. “Far be it for me to say that she’s getting out of shape—”

  “Ha!” Fiona cried.

  “No, indeed not,” K’dan agreed blandly.

  “And who was it stopped our bout today?” Fiona asked with no rancor in her tone.

  The others chuckled, and then T’mar leaned forward in the manner that Xhinna had come to recognize as his “getting down to business” posture.

  “Getting down to business,” T’mar said, predictably, “we’re wondering if we can add to your duties.”

  “Weyrleader?” she said, glancing toward K’dan. His dragon was only now starting to flame—at half a Turn under three, perhaps a bit too soon—but his authority as Weyrleader had been firmly established from the moment T’mar had first thrust it upon him. As T’mar had said at the time, “If ever there’s a person able to lead this lot, it’s you.”

  K’dan, to Xhinna’s surprise, had seriously suggested her instead, but when she’d thrown her wholehearted support behind T’mar, the harper had smoothly bowed to the inevitable—which Xhinna had thought not only right but very diplomatic of him, given that Fiona would have added her voice to the argument if he hadn’t. And no one resisted Fiona for long.

  A flash of thought crossed Xhinna’s mind—did Jirana want Xhinna to learn how to resist Fiona? She shook the thought away even as K’dan said, “Actually, it was my idea.”

  “And if we let the men keep talking, we’ll all die before they get to it,” Fiona said in exasperation. “What they’re trying not to ask, is whether you’d be willing to start flying watch for us.”

  “Watch?”

  “Thread’s due soon,” T’mar said. “We don’t know when, and we don’t know where—on these isles—it will fall.”

  “We need to establish the pattern, so we can predict the Falls,” K’dan put in.

  “And,” H’nez added, clearly following an earlier conversation, “we don’t know if the first Falls will be dust like they were for us back home.”

  “I see,” Xhinna said. “But why me?”

  “That is my fault,” Fiona confessed, waving a hand at the Weyrleaders. “I told them that you’d jump at the chance to go back to the Dawn Sisters.” She leaned forward in her chair, her eyes never leaving Xhinna’s face as she added triumphantly, “And I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “The Dawn Sisters?” Taria repeated that evening as they gathered their food and found a cool place amongst the eggs in which to eat.

  “What about the Dawn Sisters?” Jepara demanded, following behind them with a plate of her own.

  “Dawn Sisters?” Mirressa echoed as she joined the others.

  “Wait a moment!” Jepara demanded, holding up a hand. “Let’s get the whole wing here, and then you can talk.”

  “It’s not our wing, Weyrwoman,” Meeya declared sternly. “Fiona—”

  “Gave us back to Xhinna,” Jepara reminded her. “If you recall, she said—”

  “ ‘You can learn a lot from her,’ ” Meeya quoted. Of all the riders, she had the best memory after Fiona. In fact, she had spent all her spare time with K’dan and Fiona learning Ballads and writing Records. She had a good voice and was often in demand, singing solo or duet with the harper.

  “So,” Jepara said, glancing around to assure herself that the whole extended wing was present, “teach.”

  “Wingleader?” Xhinna said.

  “I’d like to know myself,” M’gel, Turenth’s rider, allowed. He was one of the youngest of the fourteen bronze riders who had Impressed the only eggs to survive the Great Clutch of Eastern Weyr, but he was neither apologetic about his age nor jealous of the temporary rank he’d assumed. That was why, when the bronze riders had all completed their two-month duties, he had been selected as the first to take another month-long round.

  Xhinna held up a restraining hand to indicate that she was sorting out her thoughts, but Taria said, “Eat first, talk later!”

  When Xhinna started to protest, Taria reminded her, “You’ve a feeding coming up, and who knows how soon.”

  Xhinna nodded and bent her head to her plate, chewing slowly after the first growled warning from Jepara and thinking while she swallowed.

  What K’dan had said made sense. Of all the wings in Western, Xhinna’s was the oldest and most familiar with the landmarks of the island. Xhinna herself had been to the Dawn Sisters nearly five Turns earlier when the Telgar riders had retraced Lorana’s reasoning to discover the Great Isles.

  From the position of the Dawn Sisters, it was thought, it should be possible to track the fall of Thread and give early warning if the Isles were threatened.

  “Okay, now talk!” Jepara demanded as Xhinna cleared the last of her plate.

  “She might want seconds,” Taria muttered.

  “I’ll get them for her after,” Jepara promised, leaning closer to Xhinna. “Just tell us.”

  Xhinna shared a quick look with Taria—the queen rider looked so much like one of the beaming-faced weyrchildren they’d minded so many Turns before—and then she began, “We need to look for Thread.”

  “Of course,” Jepara said dismissively. “So what?”

  “They want us all to go to the Dawn Sisters?” Meeya broke in.

  Xhinna shook her head. “No, just us,” she said, waving toward the other blue and green riders.

  “What?” Jepara cried, glancing to her fellow queen riders for support. “Why not us?”

  “Because we can lose greens and blues, not queens,” Alimma replied. For all that she tried to sound bitter about it, Xhinna could hear the excitement in the young rider’s voice.

  “No! No, not by the Egg of Faranth!” Jepara cried. “We ride with you.”

  “You’ll have to take that up with Fiona,” Xhinna said.

  Jepara shot her a startled look. “Didn’t you ask her?”

  Xhinna shook her head. “The matter didn’t come up.”

  Jepara harrumphed and rose to her feet. “Well, then, I’ll bring it up right now!”

  As she stormed off, Taria and Alimma rose behind her, saying in chorus, “This I’ve got to see.”

  “Two Marks says she wins,” Xhinna ventured calmly.

  All eyes turned toward her. “Against Fiona?”

  Xhinna nodded slowly. She glanced around at the remainder of the wing—about half had trailed after Jepara. She raised her plate and a
sked pleadingly, “Anyone going for more?”

  M’gel offered, saying, as he scampered over to the cooking fires, “Call me when she comes back.”

  Fortunately, he was back and Xhinna had finished her seconds before they heard a triumphant shout and the sound of people racing back to their gathering.

  “She won!” Taria said to Xhinna in amazement.

  Xhinna smiled, laid her plate to one side, and held out a hand, palm up. “Pay up.”

  “The first Threadfall was over Benden Weyr and Bitra Hold on the first day of the new Turn,” K’dan said as he, M’gel, R’ney, Danirry, Xhinna, and Fiona were clustered around the Council table in the stone hall early the next morning.

  “So we’ve got about a bit under a month,” Fiona said. Colfet had been called upon to use his navigational skills in reading the night sky to verify that they currently were in the seventh day of the last month of the Turn, the five hundred and seventh Turn since Landing.

  “We know that Thread falls on a seventy-five day cycle,” K’dan continued. “So if we can match the Fall here with a Fall back home, we’ll be able to predict all the other Falls.”

  “Well, only after we’ve mapped the Falls here,” Fiona corrected.

  “True,” K’dan agreed. “Which is why we decided that sending watchers up to the Dawn Sisters was the best idea.”

  “I don’t understand,” M’gel said.

  “Are you saying, Weyrleader, that we use the location to spy Threadfalls and then use the difference in time to check for similar falls over the Great Isles?” R’ney asked.

  “Yes,” K’dan said, rewarding the brown rider with a grin.

  “But because of the time difference, Thread falling over Benden could be matched by Thread falling here the day before!” Danirry exclaimed with a horrified look.

  “Which is why we’ll need to send our watchers up in pairs,” Fiona said.

  “Two pairs,” Xhinna corrected.

  The Weyrwoman motioned for her to explain, so Xhinna said, “We’ll need one pair to watch on this side of Pern, another pair for the other side.”

  “Why pairs?” K’dan asked, his eyes narrowing.

  “We’re going to be up so high, we have to worry about our air,” Xhinna said. “So we’ll need—”

  “We’ll need more dragons,” Danirry interrupted, her brows puckered in thought. Before anyone could respond, she held up a hand begging for attention. “We’ll need to switch off quickly—say every ten minutes or so, and we’ll need, as Xhinna said, two pairs of watchers. And we’ll need a twenty-four-hour watch.

  “Until we try,” she continued, “we won’t know how long we can keep sending up pairs before we have to rest them—”

  “Certainly no more than six hours,” K’dan said. “As long as a Fall.”

  “I’d say less than that,” R’ney said. “We want the riders and dragons to be alert; we don’t know if we can even spot Thread at that height—”

  “And we can’t time it to find out, either,” Fiona interjected with a rueful look. “We’re too near the knot in time for us to try.”

  The knot between had been created when Fiona and the others from the Eastern Isle had jumped forward in time—only to find themselves trapped with the old dragonriders of Telgar Weyr in a trap or “knot” of fear. Lorana had broken the knot but it still existed between at that point in time, as Xhinna had discovered when she’d tried to jump forward to Telgar Weyr nearly three turns past. X’lerin and the other riders had volunteered to take the risky jump back in time to aid Xhinna. They had succeeded and discovered that the trap only snared those jumping forward in time through the time when the original “knot” was formed.

  Everyone agreed that the simplest way to avoid the “knot” was to wait until they were past the time when the knot had been formed.

  And that meant that they still had to wait. There was a risk in going between at all—that they might choose to go exactly when the “knot” had formed—but that risk was much less when going between places than it was going between times.

  “Let’s start with one hour and see how things work then,” Xhinna suggested. “I’d prefer to be more cautious than foolhardy.”

  “But with that, you’d want …” Danirry’s eyes took on an abstracted look at she worked the numbers in her head. “Ninety-six,” she said firmly.

  K’dan glanced at Fiona. “We’ll have to ask the other Weyrs, then.”

  “But the bronzes could—” M’gel began in protest.

  Fiona raised a hand to cut him off. “I think I’d prefer to have your bronzes full-grown rather than half-frozen.”

  M’gel sat back in his chair, reluctant to press his position further.

  “There will be plenty for us to do soon enough,” K’dan said. “And in the meantime, the best we can do is pretty good.”

  K’dan’s Lurenth was no older than M’gel’s Turenth, and he imposed upon his dragon the same restrictions he’d imposed on all the others, following the advice of T’mar and the other more experienced riders in allowing the younger bronzes to mature as much as possible before beginning their strenuous training.

  “If Thread falls here, Weyrleader, we may not have a choice,” Danirry said.

  “I know,” K’dan agreed. “Which is why we’re going to start drilling all the dragons who have two Turns or more with firestone.”

  “Firestone?” Xhinna exclaimed, thinking of Taria and her green.

  “Yes,” K’dan said. “We don’t have as much as we’d like, so we’ll be sparing, but T’mar has suggested that we’ll want to be sure that each Weyr is able to defend itself. And for that we’ll need more than the older dragons we have.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s about time we had the greens chewing firestone,” Fiona said. “Another set of mating flights and we couldn’t find enough Candidates to match on all Pern.”

  Xhinna flicked her eyes away so that the Weyrwoman wouldn’t guess her thoughts—for it was clear to her that Fiona was miffed that the greens had so outproduced the queens, going so far even as to produce six queens on their own. But there was no denying the truth in what Fiona had said—they were now at a point where another round of clutching would leave Western unable to support the increased dragon and human populations.

  In addition to the original 128 older dragons, there were another 1,558 who had two or more Turns of age.

  “We’ll start with the oldest wings and work down to the young ones,” K’dan said.

  “So in addition to everything else, we’ll be training with firestone?” M’gel asked.

  “Yes,” Fiona said. She turned to K’dan, who nodded in agreement to her unspoken question. A moment later a loud, long rustle of wings outside announced the arrival of a large number of dragons. K’dan and Fiona rose, heading to greet the newcomers, gesturing for the others to follow.

  Outside were the rest of their wing.

  “Can I have the bronzes over here?” K’dan said, indicating a spot to his right. Perplexed, the wing split, with the fourteen bronze riders moving to one side. K’dan waited until there was silence and then a moment longer, as though sad at what he was going to say. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to break up this wing.”

  The hiss of surprise came from every mouth.

  “It’s time,” Fiona said. She turned to Xhinna and smiled. “While we all know that blues aren’t supposed to lead wings, we’ve seen too many bad examples of the results of following Tradition too closely.” She looked toward M’gel as she added, “This is not to say that the current leadership is wanting in any way. But I’m sure it comes as no surprise to any of you when I say that the Weyrwoman and I were willing to let this wing continue in its present form because we recognized that most of its leadership came not from those riding bronzes but—”

  “A blue!” Danirry cried exultantly, patting Xhinna’s shoulder hard.

  “Indeed,” K’dan agreed, giving the wingsecond a quelling look.

  “But you said la
st night that the queens—,” M’gel protested, looking at Fiona.

  “The queens can continue with Xhinna,” K’dan said, cutting the bronze rider’s protest short. He grinned at M’gel. “But we need you—” He waved a hand at the collected bronze riders. “—to take charge of your own wings.”

  “They need you to learn to flame,” Xhinna said, raising her voice to carry over the growing sounds of protest.

  “Flaming?” J’sarte asked, intrigued.

  “Thread will come soon,” K’dan said. “And we’re going to need wings prepared to fight it.”

  “But … what about Xhinna?” M’gel asked, turning a troubled glance toward the blue rider.

  “And R’ney, and Danirry!” J’sarte added.

  “We’ve got a special task for them,” K’dan said. “They’ll be training with firestone, too, but for the moment we’re going to keep that much of the Sky wing intact.” He smiled at Xhinna, R’ney, and Danirry before turning back to the bronzes. “In the meantime, wingleaders, perhaps you’d care to join me in council?”

  “Except Xhinna, of course,” Fiona said, as the bronze riders eagerly filed through the doorway after K’dan.

  K’dan paused in the doorway and turned back, smiling. “Of course, Wingleader Xhinna will need to plan the details of her wing.”

  Xhinna opened her mouth to protest. She’d given up the position once already and had no desire to add to her duties, but Fiona caught her eye and waggled a finger at her.

  “No good deed goes unrewarded,” Danirry remarked in an aside to Xhinna.

  “Don’t think about trying to wiggle out of it,” R’ney added just as firmly.

  Xhinna nodded in resignation, but her eyes sought out Taria’s. The green rider met them with her own dark eyes and held her gaze for a long moment before her lips curved up in a smile.

  Coranth says that Taria won’t let you out of doing diapers, Tazith relayed. Xhinna’s blue eyes danced and she returned Taria’s grin with a small smile.

  Wingleader.