K’tan gave her a searching look and then nodded.
“Right now, you need your sleep.” He gestured for her to lie back down. “I’ll turn the glows down on the way out.”
After K’tan left, Lorana tried to get back to sleep. She couldn’t. She kept mulling over the events in her life. She felt sorry for Kindan and his sick fire-lizard. She felt responsible.
She knew, from her work with her father, how some herdbeasts would get sick and pass the sickness on to others. She knew from bitter experience that people could also pass sickness from one to another.
Her father had taught her that the best cure for sickness among herdbeasts was isolating the whole herd if one became ill.
“Even the healthy ones?” young Lorana had asked in amazement.
Her father had nodded. “They might be healthy today and sick tomorrow. That’s why the quarantine. We keep the sick from the healthy.”
“And if they don’t get sick?”
“Well, we leave the herd isolated long enough to be sure no more beasts are getting ill,” he’d told her.
When the first incidents of Plague had been reported, and worried rumors were flying thick amongst holders and crafters, Sannel had said confidently, “This is a human illness. It may affect the herdbeasts, but it won’t affect the dragons or fire-lizards.”
Lorana knew that had something to do with the differences between native organisms and those transplanted from Earth. Could it be, though, that humans or herdbeasts could carry an illness that would affect fire-lizards?
She tried to shake the worrying thoughts away, tried to find sleep, but she couldn’t. To distract herself, she tried searching once more for Garth and Grenn. The effort left her sweating; her failure left her crying.
Her tears were still wet on her cheeks when she caught sight of a light above, toward the entrance to her room. It was multifaceted, like a fire-lizard’s eye.
“Garth?” she called out. “Grenn?”
No answer. The light in the room was growing, and Lorana saw another glittering jewel in the room beyond.
The shapes were wrong for fire-lizard eyes. She frowned in concentration. Slowly the light grew and she realized that the faceted lights were always brighter than the light in the rest of the room.
She turned on her side, propped herself up on an elbow, and pushed herself upright in the bed, legs dangling over the floor.
She felt light-headed but not quite faint. The room threatened to twist drunkenly away from her, but she forced herself to concentrate on the faceted light and find the horizon above her.
Lips tightened in determination, she pushed herself to her feet.
She was shaky.
I should be resting, she told herself. But the lights tempted her.
Her first step was awkward and ungainly, but she found her feet and slowly walked toward the door.
Standing in the doorway, she could see the next room clearly. In the ceiling were more of the bright jewels. Lines of light stretched from jewel to jewel. One line of light seemed to be coming toward the jewel in her doorway from the jewel in the center of the room.
She gasped in amazement.
The jewels were some sort of glass, she realized, placed to mirror light into the rooms. The whole effect was beautiful.
She followed the line of light from her ceiling jewel to the one in the center of the room, pivoting around to see all the rays reflected from it to still more jewels.
Wind Rider had had something like these jewels to bring light from the deck down to the lower deck, but that glass had been fogged and green. The glass in these jewels practically shone with glistening clarity.
Tottering slightly, Lorana turned back to her own room to retrieve the paper and stylus Kindan had left behind for her.
Quickly she drew a sketch of the bejeweled ceiling. When she was done, she walked into the hallway, intent on following the line of jewels to their outside source. The hallway was anticlimactic, as the jewels and light path disappeared into the ceiling above.
Still, she followed the line of white light above her until she came out into the great Weyr Bowl and the warm morning light.
“Oh!” she gasped, looking up into the sky. “Oh!” Her eyes locked on the scene above her, she fell to her knees, laid the paper on them, and, fingers flying, tried to capture the images she was seeing.
The sky was full of dragons and fire-lizards cavorting like clouds of light brought to life in the early morning softness. Blue, green, bronze, brown, and gold. The fire-lizards flitted like swarms of dutiful attendants around the soaring dragons, who took in the attentions of their smaller cousins with the pleasure of elders for infants.
The chitters of the fire-lizards and bugles of the dragons were reflected in her head by the deep mental voices of the dragons and the flighty feelings of the fire-lizards-and Lorana thought that never had she seen a more beautiful dawn chorus or had a more enjoyable moment in her life.
The moment was shattered, horribly, in an instant as from somewhere in the swarm, Lorana heard an unmistakable cough. It was echoed, moments later, by another.
Dragons don’t get sick. J’trel’s words resounded horribly in Lorana’s mind.
It seemed that as Lorana’s strength grew, Valla’s strength ebbed. In a sevenday, Lorana was nearly back to her full health, while the little fire-lizard had become listless and nearly lifeless.
Lorana did everything she could to help Kindan and his fire-lizard. She and K’tan conferred often on herbal remedies, and K’tan even visited the Healer Hall at Fort Weyr in search of more suggestions, but nothing seemed to help.
At K’tan’s request, Lorana remained sequestered in her room, even though she was much mended.
“We don’t want you to wear yourself out and relapse,” K’tan had said with a wag of his finger.
But Lorana, recalling her father’s words about quarantine, suspected that was not his only reason for the injunction.
A hoarse, wracking cough woke her in the middle of the night. Sounds came from the large room outside her quarters. A shadow approached her.
“I brought you some colored pencils,” Kindan called out. “I was hoping you’d draw…”
Lorana sat up, found the glowbasket, and quickly turned it. The glow did not light the room brightly, but it was enough to see Kindan’s worried face and the limp fire-lizard he cradled in one arm.
He extended a bundle of colored pencils to her with his other arm.
“I’d be happy to draw Valla, Kindan,” Lorana told him.
“It’s not that-” Kindan began, but just then Valla coughed a long, rasping cough and spat out a gob of green, slimy mucus. Kindan made a face and pointed at the mucus. “It’s that.”
Lorana peered at the discharge for a moment and then took Kindan’s bundle, picked up her new sketchbook-a gift from K’tan-from the bedside table beside, and drew rapidly.
“I’ve seen that sort of discharge from sick herdbeasts,” she said as she finished her sketch and held it up to Kindan.
“Did they survive?” Kindan asked, looking down fondly at his fire-lizard.
Lorana quirked her lips. “Some of them.”
“K’tan’s still asleep and I’d hate to wake him. He was up all hours last night with a sick child,” Kindan said after a moment. He gestured to her drawing. “I can show him this drawing when he wakes. In the meantime, could you make some more of that herbal for Valla?”
“K’tan wants me to stay here,” Lorana protested.
“It’s just a short trip to the Kitchen Cavern and no one’s there-I checked,” Kindan said, his eyes pleading with her. “We’ll be back in no time.”
Reluctantly Lorana nodded, unable to tell him that no herdbeast needing a second dose of herbal had survived.