“Mark ‘em with their colors!” was Brekke’s quick reply. “Mark ‘em and teach them to speak their name and origin the way dragons do. They’re quite capable of learning courtesy. At least the ones who come to Benden by order.”
“Have them report to you, Brekke, or Mirrim,” Robinton suggested.
“Just keep them away from Ramoth and me!” Lessa peered in at Ramoth and then whipped around. “And someone bring up that wherry that Ramoth didn’t eat. She’ll be the better for something in her belly right now. We’ll discuss this violation of our Weyr later. In detail.”
F’lar ordered several dragonmen to get the wherry and then courteously thanked the rest of the assembled for their prompt reply to his summons. He gestured to several of the Weyrleaders and Robinton to join him in the weyr above.
“There’s not a firelizard in sight,” Menolly said to Jaxom. “I told Beauty to stay away. She’s answered me scared to her bones.”
“So’s Ruth,” Jaxom said as they crossed the Bowl to him. “He’s turned almost gray.”
Ruth was more than scared, he was trembling with anxiety.
Something is wrong. Something is not right, he told his rider, his eyes whirling erratically with gray tones.
“Your wing was injured?”
No. Not my wing. Something is wrong in my head. I don’t feel right. Ruth shifted from all four legs to his hindquarters, and then back again to all four, rustling his wings.
“Is it because all the firelizards have gone? Or the excitement about Ramoth’s egg?”
Ruth said it was both and neither. The firelizards were all frightened; they remembered something which frightened them.
“Remembered? Huh!” Jaxom felt exasperated with firelizards and their associative memories, and their ridiculous images which were making his sensible Ruth miserable.
“Jaxom?” Menolly had detoured to the Lower Caverns and shared with him the handful of meatrolls, she’d cadged from the cooks. “Finder says Robinton wants me to go back to the Harpercrafthall and let them and Fort Hold know what’s been happening. I’m also to start marking my firelizards. Look!” She pointed to the Weyr rim and the Star Stones. “The watch dragon is chewing firestone. Oh, Jaxom!”
“Dragon against dragon.” He shuddered violently.
“Jaxom, it can’t come to that,” she said in a choked voice.
Neither of them could finish their meatrolls.
Silently they mounted Ruth, who took them aloft.
As Robinton climbed the steps to the queen’s weyr, he was thinking faster than he had ever done. Too much was going to depend on what happened now-the whole future course of the planet, if he read reactions correctly. He knew more than he ought about conditions in the Southern Weyr but his knowledge had done him no service today. He berated himself for being so naive, as unseeingly obtuse as any dragonrider for assuming that the Weyrs were inviolable and a Hatching Ground untouchable. He had had warnings from Piemur; but he simply hadn’t correlated the information properly. Yet, in light of today’s occurrence, he ought to have arrived at the logical conclusion that the desperate Southerners would make this prodigious attempt to revive their failing Weyr with the blood of a new and viable queen. Even if he had reached the proper conclusion, Robinton thought ruefully, how ever would he have been able to persuade Lessa and F’lar that that was what the Southerners planned today. The Weyrleaders would have been properly scornful of such a ridiculous notion.
No one was laughing today. No one at all. Strange that so many people had assumed that the Oldtimers would meekly accept their exile and remain docilely on their continent. They had not been cramped in their accommodation, merely in their hope of a future. T’kul must have been the motivating force-T’ron had lost all his vigor and initiative after that duel with F’lar. Robinton was reasonably certain that the two Weyrwomen, Merika and Mardra, had had no part in the plan; they wouldn’t wish to be deposed by a young queen and her rider. Had one of them returned the egg?
No, thought Robinton, it had to be someone with an intimate knowledge of the Benden Weyr Hatching Ground … or someone possessed of the blindest good luck and skill to go between into and out of the cavern.