He slapped her sharply across the cheeks, grabbing her, robe and all, to shake her. The stunned look in her eyes and the tragedy in her face alarmed him. His indignation over her willfulness disappeared. Her unruly independence of mind and spirit attracted him as much as her curious dark beauty. Infuriating as her fractious ways might be, they were too vital a part of her integrity to be exorcised. Her indomitable will had taken a grievous shock today, and her self-confidence had better be restored quickly.
“On the contrary, Lessa,” he said sternly, “Fax would still have murdered your family. He had planned it very carefully, even to scheduling his attack on the morning when the Tower guard was one who could be bribed. Remember, too, it was dawn and the watchwher, being a nocturnal beast, blind by daylight, is relieved of responsibility at dawn and knows it. Your presence, damnable as it may appear to you, was not the deciding factor by any means. It did, and I draw your attention to this very important fact, cause you to save yourself, by warning Lessa-the-child. Don’t you see that?”
“I could have called out,” she murmured, but the frantic look had left her eyes and there was a faint hint of normal color in her lips.
“If you wish to flail around in guilt, go right ahead,” he said with deliberate callousness.
Ramoth interjected a thought that, since the two of them had been there that previous time as Fax’s men had prepared to invade, it had already happened, so how could it be changed? The act was inevitable both that day and today. For how else could Lessa have lived to come to the Weyr and impress Ramoth at the hatching?
Mnementh relayed Ramoth’s message scrupulously, even to imitating Ramoth’s egocentric nuances. F’lar looked sharply at Lessa to see the effect of Ramoth’s astringent observation.
“Just like Ramoth to have the final word,” she said with a hint of her former droll humor.
F’lar felt the muscles along his neck and shoulders begin to relax. She’d be all right, he decided, but it might be wiser to make her talk it all out now, to put the whole experience into proper perspective.
“You said you were there twice?” He leaned back on the couch, watching her closely. “When was the second time?”
“Can’t you guess?” she asked sarcastically.
“No,” he lied.
“When else but the dawn I was awakened, feeling the Red Star was a menace to me? … Three days before you and Fax came out of the northeast.”
“It would seem,” he remarked dryly, “that you were your own premonition both times.”
She nodded.
“Have you had any more of these presentiments … or should I say reinforced warnings?”
She shuddered but answered him with more of her old spirit.
“No, but if I should, you go. I don’t want to.”
F’lar grinned maliciously.
“I would, however,” she added, “like to know why and how it could happen.”
“I’ve never run across a mention of it anywhere,” he told her candidly. “Of course, if you have done it and you undeniably have,” he assured her hastily at her indignant protest, “it obviously can be done. You say you thought of Ruatha, but you thought of it as it was on that particular day. Certainly a day to be remembered. You thought of spring, before dawn, no Red Star yes, I remember your mentioning that so one would have to remember references peculiar to a significant day to return to between times to the past.”
She nodded slowly, thoughtfully.
“You used the same method the second time, to get to the Ruatha of three Turns ago. Again, of course, it was spring.”
He rubbed his palms together, then brought his hands down on his knees with an emphatic slap and rose to his feet.
“I’ll be back,” he said and strode from the room, ignoring her half-articulated cry of warning.
Ramoth was curling up in the weyr as he passed her. He noticed that her color remained good in spite of the drain on her energies by the morning’s exercises. She glanced at him, her many-faceted eye already covered by the inner, protective lid.