‘Tell me,” she said after a long silence, “did the sun touch the Finger Rock before the Red Star was bracketed in the Eye Rock or after?”
“Matter of fact, I’m not sure, as I did not see it myself . The concurrence lasts only a few moments . but the two are supposed to be simultaneous.”
She frowned at him sourly. “Whom did you waste it on? R’gul?” She was provoked, her angry eyes looked everywhere but at him.
“I am Weyrleader,” he informed her curtly. She was unreasonable. She awarded him one long, hard look before she bent to finish her meal. She ate very little, quickly and neatly. Compared to Jora, she didn’t eat enough in the course of an entire day to nourish a sick child. But then, there was no point in ever comparing Lessa to Jora.
He finished his own breakfast, absently piling the mugs together on the empty tray. She rose silently and removed the dishes.
“As soon as the Weyr is free, we’ll go,” he told her.
“So you said.” She nodded toward the sleeping queen, visible through the open arch. “We still must wait upon Ramoth.”
“Isn’t she rousing? Her tail’s been twitching for an hour.”
“She always does that about this time of day.” .
F’lar leaned across the table, his brows drawn together thoughtfully as he watched the golden-forked tip of the queen’s tail jerk spasmodically from side to side.
“Mnementh, too. And always at dawn and early morning. As if somehow they associate that time of day with trouble …”
“Or the Red Star’s rising?” Lessa interjected.
Some subtle difference in her tone caused F’lar to glance quickly at her. It wasn’t anger now over having missed the morning’s phenomenon. Her eyes were fixed on nothing; her face, smooth at first, was soon wrinkled with a vaguely anxious frown as tiny lines formed between her arching, well-defined brows.
“Dawn … that’s when all warnings come,” she murmured.
“What kind of warnings?” he asked with quiet encouragement.
“There was that morning … a few days before … before you and Fax descended on Ruath Hold. Something woke me … a feeling, like a very heavy pressure … the sensation of some terrible danger threatening.” She was silent. “The Red Star was just rising.” The fingers of her left hand opened and closed. She gave a convulsive shudder. Her eyes re-focused on him.
“You and Fax did come out of the northeast from Crom,” she said sharply, ignoring the fact, F’lar noticed, that the Red Star also rises north of true east.
“Indeed we did,” he grinned at her, remembering that morning vividly. “Although,” he added, gesturing around the great cavern to emphasize, “I prefer to believe I served you well that day … you remember it with displeasure?”
The look she gave him was coldly inscrutable.
“Danger comes in many guises.”
“I agree,” he replied amiably, determined not to rise to her bait. “Had any other rude awakenings?” he inquired conversationally.
The absolute stillness in the room brought his attention back to her. Her face had drained of all color.
“The day Fax invaded Ruath Hold.” Her voice was a barely articulated whisper. Her eyes were wide and staring. Her hands clenched the edge of the table. She said nothing for such a long interval that F’lar became concerned. This was an unexpectedly violent reaction to a casual question.
“Tell me,” he suggested softly.
She spoke in unemotional, impersonal tones, as if she were reciting a Traditional Ballad or something that had happened to an entirely different person.
“I was a child. Just eleven. I woke at dawn …” Her voice trailed off. Her eyes remained focused on nothing, staring at a scene that had happened long ago.
F’lar was stirred by an irresistible desire to comfort her. It struck him forcibly, even as be was stirred by this unusual compassion, that he had never thought that Lessa, of all people, would be troubled by so old a terror.
Mnementh sharply informed his rider that Lessa was obviously bothered a good deal. Enough so that her mental anguish was rousing Ramoth from sleep. In less accusing tones Mnementh informed F’lar that R’gul had finally taken off with his weyriing pupils. His dragon, Hath, however, was in a fine state of disorientation due to R’gul’s state of mind. Must F’lar unsettle everyone in the Weyr …
“Oh, be quiet,” F’lar retorted under his breath.
“Why?” Lessa demanded in her normal voice.
“I didn’t mean you, my dear Weyrwoman,” he assured her, smiling pleasantly, as if the entranced interlude had never occurred. “Mnementh is full of advice these days.”
“Like rider, like dragon,” she replied tartly.
Ramoth yawned mightily. Lessa was instantly on her feet, running to her dragon’s side, her slight figure dwarfed by the six-foot dragon head. A tender, adoring expression flooded her face as she gazed into Ramoth’s gleaming opalescent eyes. F’lar clenched his teeth, envious, by the Egg, of a rider’s affection for her dragon.
In his mind he heard Mnementh’s dragon equivalent of laughter.
“She’s hungry,” Lessa informed F’lar, an echo of her love for Ramofh lingering in the soft line of her mouth, in the kindness of her gray eyes.
“She’s always hungry,” he observed and followed them out of the weyr.
Mnementh hovered courteously just beyond the ledge until Lessa and Ramoth had taken off. They glided down the Weyr Bowl, over the misty bathing lake, toward the feeding ground at the opposite end of the long oval that comprised the floor of Benden Weyr. The striated, precipitous walls were pierced with the black mouths of single weyr entrances, deserted at this time of day by the few dragons who might otherwise doze on their ledges in the wintry sun.
As F’lar vaulted to Mnementh’s smooth bronze neck, he hoped that Ramoth’s clutch would be spectacular, erasing the ignominy of the paltry dozen Nemorth had laid in each of her last few clutches. He had no serious doubts of the improvement after Ramoth’s remarkable mating flight with his Mnementh. The bronze dragon smugly echoed his rider’s certainty, and both looked on the queen possessively as she curved her wings to land. She was twice Nemorth’s size, for one thing; her wings were half-a-wing again longer than Mnementh’s, who was the biggest of the seven male bronzes. F’lar looked to Ramoth to repopulate the five empty Weyrs, even as he looked to himself and Lessa to rejuvenate the pride and faith of dragonriders and of Pern itself. He only hoped time enough remained to him to do what was necessary. The Red Star had been bracketed by the Eye Rock. The Threads would soon be falling. Somewhere, in one of the other Weyrs’ Records, must be the information he needed to ascertain when, exactly, Threads would fall.
Mnementh landed. F’lar jumped down from the curving neck to stand beside Lessa. The three watched as Ramoth, a buck grasped in each of her forefeet, rose to a feeding ledge.
“Will her appetite never taper off?” Lessa asked with affectionate dismay.
As a dragonet, Ramoth had been eating to grow. Her full stature attained, she was, of course, now eating for her young, and she applied herself conscientiously.
F’lar chuckled and squatted, hunter fashion. He picked up shale-flakes, skating them across the flat dry ground, counting the dust puffs boyishly.
“The time will come when she won’t eat everything in sight,” he assured Lessa. “But she’s young …”
“… and needs her strength,” Lessa interrupted, her voice a fair imitation of R’gul’s pedantic tones.
P’lar looked up at her, squinting against the wintry sun that slanted down at them.