“Some of us never can,” F’lar replied in a wry tone.
Menolly gave Piemur a sharp jab in the ribs, but F’lar only laughed when Piemur suddenly realized the tactlessness of his remark.
“This is a most amazing development,” Robinton said, his eyes sweeping the night sky as if more mysteries were to be revealed. “To see the very vehicles that brought our ancestors to this world.”
“A good topic for some quiet reflections, eh, Master Robinton?” Oldive asked, with a sly grin on his face and an emphasis on the quiet.
The Harper made an impatient dismissal of that suggestion.
“Well, sir, you could hardly go there,” the Healer said.
“I cannot,” Master Robinton agreed. Then startling everyone, he suddenly thrust his right arm in the direction of the Three Sisters. “Zair, the round objects in the sky? Can you go there?”
Jaxom held his breath, felt the rigidity of Menolly’s body beside him and knew she wasn’t breathing either. He heard Brekke’s sharp, quickly muffled cry. Everyone watched Zair.
The little bronze stretched his head toward Robinton’s lips and made a soft quizzical noise in his throat.
“Zair? The Dawn Sisters?” Robinton repeated his words. “Would you go there?”
Now Zair cocked his head at his friend, clearly not understanding what was asked of him.
“Zair? The Red Star?”
The effect of that question was instantaneous. Zair vanished with a squawk of angry fear, and the firelizards nestling by Ruth woke and followed his lead.
“That does seem to answer both questions,” F’lar said.
“What does Ruth say?” Menolly whispered in Jaxom’s ear.
“About the Dawn Sisters? Or Zair?”
“Either.”
“He’s been asleep,” Jaxom replied after consulting his dragon.
“He would be!”
“So? What did Beauty image before she winked out?”
“Nothing!”
Despite an evening of earnest debate and discussion, the humans solved nothing either. Robinton and Wansor would probably have kept the conversation up all night if Master Oldive hadn’t slipped something into Robinton’s wine. No one had actually seen him, but one moment Master Robinton was arguing forcefully with Wansor, the next he had wilted at the table. No sooner was his head down than he began to snore.
“He cannot neglect his health for talking’s sake,” Master Oldive remarked, signaling to the dragonriders to help him carry the Harper to his bed.
That effectively ended the evening. The dragonriders returned to their Weyrs, Oldive and Fandarel to their respective Halls. Wansor remained. A full wing of dragons could not have dragged him from Cove Hold.
It had been tactfully decided not to broadcast the true nature of the Dawn Sisters, at least until such time as Wansor and other interested starcrafters had had a chance to study the phenomenon and reach some conclusion that would not alarm people. There’d been enough shocks of late, F’lar commented. Some might construe those harmless objects to be a danger, much as the Red Star was.
“Danger?” Fandarel had exclaimed. “Were there any danger from those things, we should have known it many Turns past.”
To that, F’lar agreed readily enough but, with everyone conditioned to believe that disaster fell from skyborne things, it was better to be discreet.
F’lar did agree to send anyone who could be spared from Benden to help search. It was, the Weyrleader felt, more important than ever to discover just what this land contained.
As Jaxom pushed his legs into his sleeping blanket, he tried not to be annoyed with the thought of another invasion in Cove Hold, just when he thought he and Sharra would be left alone for a while.
Had she been avoiding him? Or was it simply that circumstances had intervened? Such as Piemur’s premature arrival in Cove Hold? The worry over Master Robinton, the need to explore which left them too tired to do more than crawl into their furs, the arrival of half of Pern to complete the Hold for the Harper, then his arrival, and now this! No, Sharra had not been avoiding him. She seemed … there. Her beautiful rich laugh, a tone below Menolly’s, her face often hidden by the strands of dark hair which kept escaping thong and clip…
He wished, intensely, that Cove Hold would not be overrun again-a wish that did him little good since he had no control over what was going to happen here. He was Lord of Ruatha, not of the Cove. If the place belonged to anyone, it was Master Robinton’s and Menolly’s by virtue of their being storm-swept into it.