“You can lean on me,” she told Xhinna, “I’ll hold you.”
R’ney raised an eyebrow and gave Xhinna a warning look but, unfortunately, the blue rider’s head and chest were almost exactly what Xhinna needed for her sore shoulder and she found herself leaning back ever so slightly.
“So, first you get your half wing of dragons to flame all the new growth back to char, then they dig grooves along the plateau, and then what?”
“We just wait,” R’ney said with a shrug. He lowered his brow once more and jerked his head at the girl behind her, but Xhinna ignored him.
“And while we’re waiting, brown rider, what do we eat?” Xhinna asked.
For a moment he looked thunderstruck, and Xhinna couldn’t help feeling delighted. But he recovered quickly, saying, “I thought I’d leave that to you and the Weyrleader.” He paused just long enough for her to see it coming, then added, “But I can see you’ve got enough on your shoulders, so I’ll have think on it myself.”
His stress on the word think wasn’t lost on her, and she stuck her tongue out at him in as dignified a wingleader manner as she could manage. R’ney paused for one moment, brought himself up to his full height, and stuck his tongue out in return.
“May all your problems be as easy as mine,” she told him with a glare.
“Honestly, Wingleader, I wouldn’t trade my problems for yours for all the gold on Pern,” R’ney said. His words seemed to startle him, and suddenly he looked as if he wanted to hug her.
“What?” Xhinna asked, wondering just how things could get worse.
“Gold!” he exclaimed, turning toward the burnt plateau and pointing.
“You found gold?” Xhinna asked. Danirry was wobbling a bit, so she straightened up. The girl might have her blue’s determination, but she still had none of his stamina. Xhinna hoped that would change.
“No,” R’ney said, shaking his head. “But we could!”
“How?”
“All that water,” he told her. She shook her head at him, confused. “We’ll be taking an entire plateau’s worth of soil! There’s got to be enough gold dust in there for—” He shook his head. “—I don’t know how many grams, maybe whole kilos.”
“Gold?” Xhinna repeated. “How do you know there’s gold there?”
“It’s the same type of soil where we found gold back home,” R’ney told her with a pitying look.
“But it takes time and effort to get gold,” Xhinna protested, recalling scatterings of conversations with Fiona.
R’ney raised his hands and shook them in disagreement. “No, no, no! You see, all we have to do is build the sluices right and we’ll get the gold coming straight out.”
“Especially if we did it in several places,” Danirry added. With Xhinna’s weight removed from her, she’d sidled around to stand on the wingleader’s left. “It would be easy then.”
“You’ve miner training?” R’ney asked, suddenly interested in her.
“No,” Danirry said, “but our old harper insisted we learn all about mining, as well as the Ballads and reading and writing.”
“Wise of him,” R’ney said, his expression dismissing her once more.
“You’d be better with a cyclone chute—it’ll fling the gold out,” she added. R’ney’s eyes boggled. “And if you build it right, the gold’ll fall down into a catchment and the dirt will continue on over it.”
“You, young rider, have just become my assistant!” R’ney declared. He glanced at Xhinna pleadingly. “I can have her, can’t I?”
“I was told to stay with the wingleader!” Danirry objected, moving back behind Xhinna as if for protection. “She needs someone to watch over her.”
“I do,” Xhinna agreed calmly, savoring the way R’ney’s eyebrows went up in disbelief and the set of his jaw as he prepared to argue with her. “But Mirressa’s also got that duty.” Behind her Danirry made a small noise of discontent, not quite a whimper. “What I really need are good eyes and ears that can go where I can’t and report back.”
She reached around and tugged Danirry in front of her. “Tell me, blue rider, would you like to ride Tazith?”
Danirry’s face lit with wonder and excitement. And again, for a moment, Xhinna could see the beautiful person behind the frightened eyes.
The match proved perfect, and under R’ney’s concerned guidance, Danirry began to blossom. They were both ecstatic at being allowed to fly Tazith and, between frequent races to oil their weyrlings, fought like children over who was rider and who passenger. That R’ney was neither threat nor competition was especially easy on the blue rider, and Xhinna was amazed to see near-daily transformations in the way Danirry acted and behaved.
Mirressa was a much easier person to handle, so, remembering R’ney’s sisters, Xhinna assigned Jepara to her.
“She’s a sop!” Jepara complained the next day. “She’ll do anything—anything—I tell her to.”
“And why does this bother you?” Xhinna asked.
“Because—because—oohhh!” Jepara threw her hands up in disgust, unable to find words to describe her feeling.
“So fix it,” Xhinna said quietly. Jepara stopped mid-tirade and turned to her with eyes wide in astonishment.
“You can’t be serious?” Jepara said. “The girl’s got no spine! You might as well put a puddle on her green’s back, instead of a rider.”
“The green chose her,” Xhinna said. Jepara started to say something, probably to castigate Mirressa’s green, but Xhinna forestalled her with a raised hand. “And I chose you.”
The queen rider stopped moving and stood, fuming, her eyes locked with Xhinna’s in a contest of wills.
“I think that behind all that puddle, there’s a real person who’s been hiding all this time, waiting for someone like her Valcanth to find her, to see her true worth.”
“Greens aren’t very smart,” Jepara snapped. She colored slightly as she remembered that Taria rode a green, but pressed on unrepentant. “They don’t always make the best choices.”
“Which is why they have riders,” Xhinna told her calmly. “And why their riders have Weyrwomen to guide them.”
“Well … how will I know when I’ve succeeded?” Jepara demanded. “How will I be able to tell when that puddle of mud grows a spine?”
“When that puddle of mud cuts off all your hair or turns your bottom red,” Xhinna told her, fighting back a grin.
Jepara’s jaw dropped and she raised a finger at the wingleader. “You—how did you—he told you! It was your idea!” One of her hands snaked around to her behind and she gave the Weyrleader a long, simmering look. “I couldn’t sit for a sevenday,” she said, growling.
Xhinna didn’t try to pretend ignorance and merely stood her ground.
“You—oh!” Jepara said, twirling around angrily, waving her hands in the air. She settled herself, then said in a controlled, icy voice, “Very well, Wingleader, it shall be as you order.”
Xhinna decided that silence was the best option and nodded at the queen rider, who walked off, chin in the air, toward where Mirressa was helping Javissa with chores.
Perhaps, Xhinna thought, things were looking up. All she had to do was find Taria and kill J’keran and all would be right with Sky Weyr. Well, maybe not kill, she corrected herself; even if the brown rider’s transgression warranted it, there had to be a better way. The man had been addled out of his wits, after all.
ELEVEN
A Cry in the Silence
Xhinna could tell immediately that something was wrong when she woke in the middle of the night. She’d been certain that she’d jinxed herself with the thought that things were going all right and now, she was certain, they were due to go wrong—seriously.