“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, Can.
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, around and around. 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 experi-mentally 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 Port 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. Comfortably, 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 resUessly.
“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 T’ton, Weyrleader at Fort.” T’ton 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,” T’ton 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?” T’ton 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.”