Fearful, too, she reckoned, having seen her mother treat men for Threadbum. Why, Hie mark looked as if someone had drawn a point-deep groove with a red-hot poker on the man’s arm, leaving the edges black with singed skin. Torly would always beat that straight scar, puckered and red. Threadscore never healed neatly.
She had to stop miming. She’d begun to sweat heavily and her back was stinging. She loosened her tunic belt; flapping the soft runner-beast hide to send cooling draughts up between her shoulder blades.
Past the first marsh valley, up over the rocky hump hill into the next valley. Cautious going here: this was one of the deep, boggy places. No sign of yellow-veined grasses. TTiere had been a stand last summer two humpy hills over.
She heard them first, glancing up with a stab of terror at the unexpected sounds above. Dragons? She glanced wildly about for the tell tale gray glitter of sky-bome Thread in the east The greeny blue sky was clear of that dreaded fogging, but not of dragonwings. She heard dragons? It couldn’t be! They didn’t swarm like that Dragons always flew in ordered wings, a pattern against the sky. These were darting, dodging, then swooping and climbing. She shaded her eyes. Blue flashes, green, the odd brown and then … Of course, sun glinted golden off the leading, dartlike body. A queen! A queen that tiny?
She expelled the breath she’d been holding in her amazement A fire lizard queen? It had to be. Only fire
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lizards could be that small and look like dragons. Where certainly didn’t And whers didn’t mate midair. And thaf s what Menolly was seeing: the mating flight of a fire lizard queen, with her bronzes in close pursuit
So fire lizards weren’t boy talkl Awed, Menolty watched the swift, graceful flight The queen had led her swarm so high that the smaller ones, the blues and greens and browns, had been forced down. They circled now at a lower altitude, struggling to keep the same direction as the high fliers. They dipped and dashed in mimicry of the queen and bronzes.
They had to be fire lizards! thought Menolly, her heart almost stopping at the beauty and thrill of the sight Fire lizardsl And they were like dragons. Only much, much smaller. She didn’t know all the Teachings for nothing. A queen dragon was gold: she mated with the bronze who could outfly her. Which was exactly what was happening right now with the fire lizards.
Oh, they were beautiful to behold! The queen had turned sunward and Menolly, for all her eyes were very longsighted, could barely pick out that black mote and trailing cluster.
She walked on, following the main group of fire lizards. She’d bet anything that she’d end up on the coastline near the Dragon Stones. Last fall her brother Alemi had claimed he’d seen fire lizards there at dawn, feeding on fingertails in the shallows. His report had set off another rash of what Petiron had called “lizard-fever.” Every lad in the Sea Hold had burned with , plans to trap a fire lizard. They’d plagued Alemi to repeat his sighting.
\ It was just as well that the crags were unapproach-able. Not even an experienced boatman would brave those treacherous currents. But, if anyone had been ^*Ťre there were fire lizards there… Well no one would I taow from her.
Even if Petiron had been alive, Menolly decided, she
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would not have told him. He’d never seen a fire lizard, though he’d admitted to the children that the Records allowed that fire lizards did exist
“They’re seen,” Petiron had told her later, “but they can’t be captured.” He gave a wheezing chuckle. “Peo-ple’ve been trying to since the first shell was cracked.”
“Why can’t they be caught?”
“They don’t want to. They’re smart They just disappear …”
“They go between like dragons?”
“There’s no proof of that,” said Petiron, a trifle cross, as if she’d been too presumptuous in suggesting a comparison between fire lizards and the great dragons of Pern.
“Where else can you disappear to?” Menolly had wanted to know. “What is between?”
“Some place that isn’t” Petiron had shuddered. “You’re neither here nor there,” and he gestured first to one comer of the Hall and then towards the Sea Dock on the other side of the Harbor. “It’s cold, and if s nothing. No sight, no sound, no sensations.”