Nevertheless, the problem of Ruth’s maturity cropped up in Jaxom’s mind at inconvenient times during his waking hours and had to be rigidly suppressed before a hint of his anxiety reached his dragon.
Twice at Fort Weyr, to intensify the problem, a proddy green had taken off on a flight, pursued by such browns and blues as felt able to rise to her. The first time, Jaxom was in the middle of drill sequence and only happened to notice the flight above and beyond the weyrlings’ wing. His attention was abruptly diverted from them as a most unconcerned Ruth continued in the wing’s maneuver. Jaxom had to grab at the fighting straps to remain in place.
The second time, Jaxom and Ruth were aground when the mating shrieks of a green blooding her kill startled the Weyr. The other weyrlings were immature enough to be disinterested but the weyrlingmaster looked in Jaxom’s direction for a long moment. All at once, Jaxom realized that K’nebel was apparently wondering if Jaxom and Ruth were going to join those waiting for the green to launch herself.
Jaxom was assailed by such a gamut of emotions—anxiety, shame, expectation, reluctance, and pure terror-that Ruth reared, wings wide, in alarm.
What has upset you? Ruth demanded, settling to the ground and curving his neck about to regard his rider, his eyes whirling in quick response to Jaxom’s emotions.
“I’m all right. I’m all right,” Jaxom said hastily, stroking Ruth’s head, desperately wanting to ask if Ruth felt at all like flying the green and hoping in a muted whisper deep inside him that Ruth did not!
With a challenging snarl, the green dragon was airborne, the blues and browns after her while she repeated her taunting challenge. Quicker, lighter than any of her prospective mates, her facility strengthened by her sexual readiness, she achieved a conspicuous distance before the first male had become airborne. Then they were all after her. On the killing ground, their riders closed into a knot about the green’s rider. All too quickly, challenger and pursuers dwindled to specks in the sky. The riders half-ran, half-stumbled to the Lower Caverns and the chamber reserved there.
Jaxom had never witnessed a mating flight of dragons. He swallowed, trying to moisten his dry throat. He felt heart and blood thudding and a tension that he usually experienced only as he held Corana’s slender body against him. He suddenly wondered which dragon had flown Mirrim’s Path, which rider had…The touch on his shoulder made him Jump and cry out.
“Well, if Ruth isn’t ready to fly, you certainly are, Jaxom,” K’nebel said. The weyrlingmaster glanced up at far-distant specks in the sky. “Even a green’s mating can be unsettling.” K’nebel’s expression was understanding. He nodded at Ruth. “He wasn’t interested? No, well, give him time! You’d better be off. Drill was all but over today, anyhow. I’ve just got to keep these younger ones occupied someplace else when that green gets caught.”
Then Jaxom realized that the rest of the wing had dispersed. With a second encouraging clap on Jaxom’s back, K’nebel walked off toward his bronze, agilely mounting and urging the beast up toward their weyr.
Jaxom thought of the skyborne beasts. Unwillingly he thought of their riders in the inner room, linked to their dragons in an emotional struggle that was resolved in a strengthening and fusing of the links between dragons and riders. Jaxom thought of Mirrim. And of Corana.
With a groan, he sprang on Ruth’s neck, fleeing the emotional atmosphere of Fort Weyr, trying to flee from his sudden realization of what he had probably always known about riders but had only this very morning assimilated.
He had intended to go to the lake to immerse himself in the cold waters and let that icy shock cure his body and chill the torment in his mind. But Ruth took him instead to the Plateau Hold.
“Ruth! The lake. Take me to the lake!”
It is better for you to be here right now, was Ruth’s astonishing reply. The firelizard says the girl is in the upper field. Once again Ruth seized the initiative, gliding toward the field where young grain waved, brilliantly green in the noonday sun, where Corana was diligently hoeing away the tenacious creeper vine that grew from the borders of the field and threatened to strangle the crop.