She laughed again, nervously, and took several deep, shuddering breaths.
“All right, my golden love,” she murmured. “You have the reference. You know when I want to go. Take me between, Ramoth, between four hundred Turns.”
The cold was intense, even more penetrating than she had imagined. Yet it was not a physical cold. It was the awareness of the absence of everything. No light. No sound. No touch. As they hovered, longer and longer, in this nothingness, Lessa recognized the full-blown panic of a kind that threatened to overwhelm her reason. She knew she sat on Ramoth’s neck yet she could not feel the great beast under her thighs, under her hands. She tried to cry out inadvertently and opened her mouth to…nothing…no sound in her own ears. She could not even feel the hands that she knew she had raised to her own cheeks.
I am here, she heard Ramoth say in her mind. We are together, and this reassurance was all that kept her from losing her grasp on sanity in that terrifying eon of unpassing, timeless nothingness.
SOMEONE HAD SENSE enough to call for Robinton. The Masterharper found F’lar sitting at the table, his face deathly pale, his eyes staring at the empty weyr. The Craftmaster’s entrance, his calm voice, reached F’lar in his shocked numbness. He sent the others out with a peremptory wave.
“She’s gone. She tried to go back four hundred Turns,” F’lar said in a tight, hard voice.
The Masterharper sank into the chair opposite the Weyrleader.
“She took the tapestry back to Ruatha,” F’lar continued in that same choked voice. “I’d told her about F’nor’s returns. I told her how dangerous this was. She didn’t argue very much and I know going between times had frightened her, if anything could frighten Lessa.” He banged the table with an impotent fist. “I should have suspected her. When she thinks she’s right, she doesn’t stop to analyze, to consider. She just does it!”
“But she’s not a foolish woman,” Robinton reminded him slowly. “Not even she would jump between times without a reference point. Would she?”
“‘Gone away, gone ahead’…that’s the only clue we have!”
“Now wait a moment,” Robinton cautioned him, then snapped his fingers. “Last night, when she walked upon the tapestry, she was uncommonly interested in the Hall door. She discussed it with Lytol.”
F’lar was on his feet and halfway down the passageway.
“Come on, man, we’ve got to get to Ruatha.”
Lytol lit every glow in the Hold for F’lar and Robinton to examine the tapestry clearly.
“She spent the afternoon just looking at it,” the Warder said, shaking his head. “You’re sure she has tried this incredible jump?”
“She must have. Mnementh can’t hear either her or Ramoth anywhere. Yet he says he can get an echo from Canth many Turns away and in the southern continent.” F’lar stalked past the tapestry. “What is it about the door, Lytol? Think, man!”
“It is much as it is now, save that there are no carved lintels, there is no outer Court, nor Tower…”
“That’s it. Oh, by the first Egg, it is so simple. Zurg said this tapestry is old. Lessa must have decided it was four hundred Turns and she has used it as the reference point to go back between times.”
“Why, then, she’s there and safe,” Robinton cried, sinking with relief in a chair.
“Oh, no, Harper. It is not as easy as that,” F’lar murmured.
Robinton caught his stricken look and the despair echoed in Lytol’s face. “What’s the matter?”
“There is nothing between,” F’lar said in a dead voice. “To go between places takes only as much time as for a man to cough three times. Between four hundred Turns…” his voice trailed off.
Who wills,
Cans.
Who tries,
Does.
Who loves,
Lives.
There were voices that first were roars in her aching ears and then hushed beyond the threshold of sound. She gasped as the whirling, nauseating sensation apparently spun her, and the bed which she felt beneath her, round and round. She clung to the sides of the bed as pain jabbed through her head, from somewhere directly in the middle of her skull. She screamed, as much in protest at the pain as from the terrifying, rolling, whirling, dropping, lack of a solid ground.
Yet some frightening necessity kept her trying to gabble out the message she had come to give. Sometimes she felt Ramoth trying to reach her in that vast swooping darkness that enveloped her. She would try to cling to Ramoth’s mind, hoping the golden queen could lead her out of this torturing nowhere. Exhausted she would sink down, down, only to be torn from oblivion by the desperate need to communicate.
She was finally aware of a soft, smooth hand upon her arm, of a liquid, warm and savory, in her mouth. She rolled it around her tongue and it trickled down her sore throat. A fit of coughing left her gasping and weak. Then she experimentally opened her eyes and the images before her did not lurch and spin.
“Who…are…you?” she managed to croak.
“Oh, my dear Lessa…”
“Is that who I am?” she asked, confused.
“So your Ramoth tells us,” she was assured. “I am Mardra of Fort Weyr.”
“Oh, F’lar will be so angry with me,” Lessa moaned as her memory came rushing back. “He will shake me and shake me. He always shakes me when I disobey him. But I was right. I was right. Mardra?…Oh, that…awful…nothingness,” and she felt herself drifting off into sleep, unable to resist that overwhelming urge. Comfortingly, her bed no longer rocked beneath her.
The room, dimly lit by wallglows, was both like her own at Benden Weyr and subtly different. Lessa lay still, trying to isolate that difference. Ah, the Weyr walls were very smooth here. The room was larger, too, the ceiling higher and curving. The furnishings, now that her eyes were used to the dim light and she could distinguish details, were more finely crafted. She stirred restlessly.
“Ah, you’re awake again, mystery lady,” a man said. Light beyond the parted curtain flooded in from the outer weyr. Lessa sensed rather than saw the presence of others in the room beyond.
A woman passed under the man’s arm, moving swiftly to the bedside.
“I remember you. You’re Mardra,” Lessa said with surprise.
“Indeed I am and here is M’ron, Weyrleader at Fort.”
M’ron was tossing more glows into the wallbasket, peering over his shoulder at Lessa to see if the light bothered her.
“Ramoth!” Lessa exclaimed, sitting upright, aware for the first time that it was not Ramoth’s mind she touched in the outer weyr.
“Oh, that one,” Mardra laughed with amused dismay. “She’ll eat us out of the Weyr and even my Loranth has had to call the other queens to restrain her.”
“She perches on the Star Stones as if she owned them and keens constantly,” M’ron added, less charitably. He cocked an ear. “Ha. She’s stopped.”
“You can come, can’t you?” Lessa blurted out.
“Come? Come where, my dear?” Mardra asked, confused. “You’ve been going on and on about our ‘coming,’ and Threads approaching, and the Red Star bracketed in the Eye Rock and…my dear, don’t you realize, the Red Star has been past Pern these two months?”
“No, no, they’ve started. That’s why I came back between times…”
“Back? Between times?” M’ron exclaimed, striding over to the bed, eyeing Lessa intently.
“Could I have some klah? I know I’m not making much sense and I’m not really awake yet. But I’m not mad or still sick and this is rather complicated.”