“Just don’t let me hear you’ve warned “em about anything,
Robinton!” Shonagar repeated, bailing his hand into a fist.
“No. I’ll obey.”
Of course, Robinton realized he wouldn’t actually tell them anything, but he’d show them the matches and tinder he’d put in their pockets.
As they cantered towards the tunnel, Robinton looked up at the Star Stones, immense black dolmens against a lightening eastern sky. He caught a flick of something and wondered if the ghosts of departed dragons still kept a watch on the heights. Looking again, he saw a wherry wheeling down, probably from its nest in one of the upper weyrs.
Robinton really liked being an apprentice. In this he astonished his roommates and the other twenty in his class. They would come to him for his advice and, often, comfort, and he’d help the slow ones with their lessons.
“Going to take over from me, Rob?” Shonagar asked him once.
“Me?” Rob grinned back. “You can keep the responsibility – for now. And I’m just one of them, so it’s easier for them to ask me because I’m handy and know the place, that’s all.”
Tor all of that, you’ve not had it that easy,” Shonagar said with a wry smile. They’d just finished a long rehearsal for the Turn’s End concert: Rob, as usual, was singing the solo treble parts.
Halanna and Maizella were also soloists, but though Petiron remarked favourably on their performances, he had not so much as a nod for his son. The apprentices, being as astute as they were, did not fail to notice this. But if any complained, he’d shrug and remark that his father expected him to be note-perfect.
His mother kept up his vocal training, and he had now graduated to apprentice classes. He particularly enjoyed his stint in the Drum Tower, because at last he got to learn the meaning of the codes he had been hearing all his life. Like everyone else, he knew that the initial beats indicated the final destination of the message and who had sent it, but it took time to get the sense of the actual message.
In fact, he was on duty the day Feyrith, Carola’s queen, produced her final clutch – though no one knew at the time that it would be her last. The best news was that there was a queen egg, and the drum message added the extra beats for excitement and major news. A large clutch, too, with nine bronzes.
Robinton spent a few seven-days hoping that there would be a Search and he’d be found acceptable, and become a harper-dragonrider.
But no dragons came on Search to Fort Hold or the Harper Hall, and no other Hold reported the arrival of dragons looking for candidates. Robinton was bitterly disappointed. He had been so sure that the dragons liked him. Didn’t they like him enough to come and find him?
For fear of being ridiculed, he didn’t tell anyone about his thwarted desire. He did ask a few questions of his Masters, in case they knew how Searches were conducted, but the answers he got did nothing to assuage his anxiety or hopes. “That’s always up to the Weyr, lad,” or “Who knows what’s in dragon minds?” “Sometimes the dragons don’t Search. Don’t need to. Didn’t you tell me there were lots of lads your age at Benden Weyr?” Which was true enough, but it still didn’t keep him from searching the skies for a dragon, in case he could get one to speak to him. His distraction was noticed in class, and he was given extra duties to encourage him to “pay proper attention to your lessons and stop daydreaming’. He had time, while sweeping down the main court, to see the folly of his disappointment.
He was on Drum Tower duty again when the news of the
Hatching came in. Swallowing the final vestige of his own disappointment, Robinton just had to find out if Falloner had been Impressed. After all, Falloner had a real right to be Impressed.
Greatly daring, he asked permission of the journeyman in charge of the tower to find out.
“You see, I met a couple of the possible candidates. Falloner, he’s the weyrling who was at the Hold for Mother to teach.” Robinton was not above using what he needed to get to do something as important as this, and he knew that the journeyman liked his mother. “I know she’d like to know if Falloner Impressed…” He let his voice trail off.