“I’m sorry,” Lorana muttered. Silently, she said to Minith, My apologies, gold dragon.
Minith gave Lorana a pert nod, eyes whirling red-green.
Lorana turned her attention to Arith, partly out of desperation. Are you all done?
One more, please! The dragonet pleaded.
Lorana couldn’t help smiling. “Very well, silly,” she said aloud.
“If your dragon gorges, don’t come to me!” Tullea said, climbing up to Minith’s neck. “I’ve better things to deal with.”
With a great bound of her hind legs, Minith leaped into the air and beat her way up out of the Bowl. Once clear she blinked out of existence between.
Lorana watched the maneuver with her eyes wide. The adult queen was so graceful and her movements so beautiful.
Soon I’ll be able to do that, Lorana marveled to herself, her thoughts going back to her splendid Arith. She had discovered with her fire-lizards that they knew how to go between from the moment they were born. Training them to come back, to go where she wanted, had taken many months of hard work. She knew from the Teaching Ballads that Arith had the same innate talent-in fact, she had just demonstrated it by going between to the Feeding Grounds-but it would take careful training over several Turns for Lorana to be able to ride her precious gold between to places of her own choosing.
Still, she entertained visions of rising into the air, blinking into the cold between and out again-anywhere on Pern.
Her heart gave a lurch as she realized the vistas her newfound freedom offered. She reached out with her mind to her dragon and made her presence tenderly felt. A rebounding wave of affection swept back to her from Arith. Lorana’s vision suddenly misted as her eyes brimmed with joyful tears.
A moment later, she felt Arith quench her thirst with the hot blood of a herdbeast, felt her dragonet rend the flesh of the small beast, and felt her swallow without so much as a bite.
Chew! Lorana told her sternly.
I’m hungry, Arith complained. Lorana could feel the little gold’s hunger, lessened by the two other herdbeasts she had consumed.
Greedy guts! Lorana thought back. She felt Arith’s amusement and self-satisfaction. That’s your last one.
Lorana felt Arith tense up in nascent disobedience.
I mean it, she warned the dragonet with the same fierce intensity she’d used to her fire-lizards. Biting back a pang of grief over their loss, she sent a second firm order to Arith.
All right, Arith allowed.
A burst of cold above Lorana heralded the hatchling’s return through between.
Arith landed quickly, stumbled just a bit, and immediately proceeded to stroll nonchalantly up to Lorana with a very obvious I-meant-to-do-that swagger. Lorana laughed at her, reaching down indulgently to scratch the dragonet’s eye ridges.
Ah, that’s better, Arith sighed.
“They’re not really supposed to go between until they’re much older,” a voice said beside her. It was K’tan.
Lorana smiled fondly at her little queen and stood up to face the Weyr healer.
“It’s all right, I knew where she was,” Lorana said.
“Even between?” he asked, eyebrows arched in surprise.
Still smarting from her encounter with Tullea, Lorana bit back her immediate irritated response and settled for, “Well… yes.”
“Impressive,” K’tan remarked.
“Kindan told me that you needed to talk with me several sevendays ago,” Lorana said hastily, “but I’m afraid with Arith-”
K’tan held up a hand, shaking his head. “No need to apologize.” He turned toward Arith, then turned back inquiringly to Lorana. “May I look at her?”
Lorana nodded.
K’tan’s inspection was swift and gentle. He ran his hands from her head down her neck, to her forelegs, across her distended belly, and on to her withers and tail.
“She’s making her own kills already?” he asked, his face showing surprise.
“That’s not normal?” Lorana asked in response. “The fire-lizards usually need several sevendays of hand-feeding, but I thought dragons-”
“Dragons are not so different,” he said. He stood up, backed away from the young queen, and shook his head admiringly.
“She’s beautifully proportioned,” he announced at last, adding with a grin, “barring her stomach.”
Lorana felt herself grinning back in relief. She arched her neck to scan the weyrs around the Bowl, spotted one brown head looking down at them, and waved at the dragon she knew was Drith. Drith twitched, startled that she had recognized him, and nodded back at her.
“He’s quite a beauty,” Lorana said.
K’tan, who had followed her gaze, laughed. “Indeed he is,” he agreed, his voice full of fondness for his dragon. Then he changed the subject back: “You say you knew where she was?”
Lorana nodded.
“How do you do that?”
Lorana thought for a moment, then shrugged apologetically. “I don’t know how; I just do,” she said.
“There she is!”
Lorana looked up. A tall, graceful, older woman was striding quickly toward them, accompanied by M’tal, the Weyrleader.
“Is it true that you can talk to any dragon?” M’tal asked when they arrived.
Lorana nodded. “Yes, Weyrleader.”
“Excellent!” M’tal said.
“What is it like?” the woman asked. Lorana realized that this was Salina herself, Breth’s rider and Benden’s Weyrwoman.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she began slowly. “I could talk to my fire-lizards of course-” She made a sad face at their mention, but continued on. “-so I guess I just didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be able to talk to all dragons.”
Salina nodded encouragingly. Lorana groped for words, and found them. “It’s like being in a room full of your best friends.”
Her eyes lit as she peered up at all the weyrs above and the dragons looking back down at her.
“Sometimes I hear individual conversations, sometimes I don’t,” she said. “I don’t pry,” she added hastily, “and would never eavesdrop. But most of the time the dragons talk amongst themselves, you know.”
“They do?” Salina’s eyes widened in surprise. She glanced up to where her Breth lay. “Well, I suppose I’d never thought about it, but they do have a lot of time on their hands.”
“At least until Thread falls,” M’tal said. He asked Lorana, “Can you talk to watch-whers, too?”
“Watch-whers?” Lorana repeated. She shrugged. “I don’t know, I’ve never tried.”
“Hmm,” M’tal murmured thoughtfully.
“If she can talk to all dragons, I would be surprised if she couldn’t talk to all watch-whers, too,” K’tan put in.
“ ‘A room full of your best friends,’ ” Salina repeated, mulling over Lorana’s words. “Why are they your best friends?”
“Maybe they aren’t,” Lorana admitted with a frown. “But they seem like it. They’re all so nice and courteous and always asking about me and Arith.”
“Well, that’s to be expected-you’re a queen rider now,” Salina said, with a touch of tartness in her tone.
Lorana flushed. “It’s not quite like when my Garth rose to mate,” she said, her thoughts racing along lines similar to Salina’s.
“Garth?” M’tal asked.
“I had two fire-lizards,” Lorana explained. “Garth was my queen.”
“Oh,” M’tal responded, his tone both enlightened and relieved. “So you’ve been through a mating flight.”