Fiona began spluttering in protest until T’mar said the one word that was certain to silence her. Rising from his chair, he nodded to her, his eyes twinkling. “Weyrwoman.”
Fiona forced her temper back under control, giving him a seething look as she nodded his dismissal.
“Until later, wingleader,” she replied, stressing the last word with a tone that hinted threat and revenge while emphasizing her superior position—a mannerism she’d learned from her father when he dealt with recalcitrant holders minor and lofty craftsfolk.
When Terin arrived later in the day, Fiona had her detail a work party to clear out the innermost supply room.
“And make sure that we can get in and out of it easily,” she added. “I’m off to check on the injured riders.”
“Say hello to K’rall for me,” Terin said in a waspish tone—the older bronze rider was a very bad patient who was completely unwilling to have young Terin tend to him and refused to accept that she was headwoman, even when Fiona had asked Talenth to relay the information to Seyorth, his dragon.
Fiona he treated with a mixture of awe and condescension, not forgetting for a moment that she was a queen rider but constantly harping on about her youth. As she got to know him more, Fiona started treating him like one of the old guards at Fort Hold: she was polite, deferential, but very definitely in charge.
And she was grateful that of all the older wingleaders, she had to deal with him rather than H’nez, whose manners brought out the worst of her famous Fort Hold temper.
She stopped in the kitchen long enough to prepare a light tray and grab a first-aid bag, then headed around the Bowl to K’rall’s weyr. She mused at this other difference in Igen Weyr living—at Fort Weyr, no one thought twice about walking directly from one side of the Bowl to the other, but here, in hot Igen, everyone was careful to use the interior corridors and the back entrances to the weyrs.
Fiona made a mental note to herself—again—to get canvas and fittings for awnings that could be placed above the weyrs to provide shade. She and Terin had seen the small indentations above either side of every weyr in Igen and had quickly divined their purpose, but a search for the corresponding poles and canvas had proven fruitless. She couldn’t imagine why the cooler Telgar Weyr clime would require such things, but perhaps the Igen weyrfolk had decided to bring this bit of familiarity with them.
Fiona imagined how the Weyr would look festooned with brightly colored canvases—from above it might look like a mini-Gather, quite colorful. She wondered if riders would insist on having the awning colors match their dragons’ colors or if they would go for more elaborate designs. In fact—and Fiona made another mental note—such work could easily be extended to tents that might be profitably traded with desert folk everywhere. Perhaps there was a new trade for the Fort riders, used as they were to knitting garments in their spare time. But first they’d have to trade for the fabric . . .
She stopped outside K’rall’s door, listening and gathering her breath and thoughts.
“K’rall?” she called when she was ready, and marched through the door.
“Are you decent?” she asked as she placed the tray on his dining table, keeping to the newly established ritual of asking a question that would both alarm and please the older man.
“K’rall?” she called again, looking around the room, her eyes narrowed. She went to the hanging glows and turned them up, glancing around the room. She heard a noise from the lavatory. “I’ll just wait outside,” she called. “Knock on the table when you’re ready.”
She went back outside and waited.
Talenth? Fiona asked her half-awake queen. Could you ask Seyorth how K’rall is this morning?
Seyorth says that K’rall wants to get the bandages off, Talenth told her. He says that K’rall is grumpy this morning.
Tell Seyorth that K’rall needs to keep the bandages on, Fiona replied. There was no point in telling a dragon that the bandages would have to be maintained for at least a month—dragons didn’t remember such lengths well. A month and forever were closely related in a dragon’s mind.
I’ve told him, Talenth replied a moment later. Why is it that all the bronzes are so polite to me?
It’s because you’re their queen, Fiona told her, smiling to herself; they had this discussion at least every other day. Talenth was both overjoyed by and slightly nervous about the apparent adulation showered upon her by her fellow dragons.
It’s good to be queen, Talenth decided. Fiona smiled and shook her head affectionately.
K’rall’s voice interrupted. “When she rises, make sure she doesn’t blood her kills.”
“You haven’t taken off your bandages have you?” Fiona demanded, bustling into the room. His strange reference to Talenth’s future rising made her wonder if he wasn’t also feverish. Although it was also possible that the older rider had said it merely to distract her.
“It itched,” K’rall said, turning to look at her. Fiona had to work hard to school the revulsion out of her expression—the right side of K’rall’s face was a mess.
“Shards!” she exclaimed. “Now we’ll have to redo the sutures.”
Talenth, have one of the weyrlings bring some fellis juice, Fiona ordered. Whoever’s on duty in the pharmacy.
Turning her attention back to K’rall, Fiona clenched her jaw and took the seat opposite him.
“You’ve got a nasty wound, K’rall,” Fiona told him, examining the mauled side of his face with all the detachment she could muster. “You didn’t suffer just a single burn, you know.”
K’rall lowered his eyes—he was lucky to still have the right one—unwilling to face either the truth or the Weyrwoman.
“If you behave, you’ll get back the full use of your jaw,” Fiona said. “If not, we’ll be feeding you porridge for the rest of your life.”
“I had to see,” K’rall said slowly, his words slurred. “I had to know.”
“You had to listen to your Weyrwoman!” Fiona shouted at him, losing her temper. Before K’rall could voice an angry retort, Fiona softened, and reached out to take his hand. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to see you disfigured.”
K’rall raised his other hand toward his face—Fiona grabbed it with her free hand and gently put it back on the table. She shushed him, saying, “You are a dragonrider, you bear your wounds with pride.” She nodded fiercely, feeling both the strength and truth of her words. Whatever her feelings about his personality, Fiona would never deny K’rall’s courage. “If you let me,” she continued, “I will see to it that the damage is slight.”
She saw his eyes light in disagreement and shook her head at him. “Your wounds are not so different from the others’,” she told him. “And I learned enough at the Hold and the Hall to know how to treat them.
“You need rest, you need to keep your muscles still, so that they can grow and recover, and you need to keep the bandages on until the skin has healed.” Fiona found herself marveling at her words and her tone of voice—where had she learned to speak like this? Then she realized: She was speaking like her father had, like Cisca did.
“We must play our part, Fiona,” Bemin had said to her once, on the sad day when they’d buried one of the old Fort guards. “Even when we don’t want to, we must act as though we know all the answers and can do whatever is asked of us.” He had smiled at her as he added, “And, after a while, it is no longer playing.”
Fiona now understood the meaning of those words. She was no longer playing.
She saw K’rall’s unspoken question lingering in his eyes. It was difficult for her to answer.
You must play your part.
“You are a handsome man, K’rall,” Fiona said, not surprised to hear his breath catch or see his eyes rise to meet hers. She met them squarely. “I’m of the age where I notice such things more and more”—she felt heat rising in her cheeks, but she persisted—“and I’ve seen the way some of the women back the Weyr watched you.” She smiled. “I think that won�
��t change when you get back.”
“You can’t know,” K’rall murmured.
“Nor can you,” Fiona told him firmly. She heard the scuttling of feet moving quickly toward them and heaved an internal sigh of relief that the weyrling from the pharmacy had arrived. “Now finish your breakfast and then lie back down—we’re going to have to redo those stitches and then dose you with fellis juice—you need to rest.” When K’rall opened his mouth again to protest, she threw up a hand. “One more word, bronze rider, and I’ll stitch your mouth shut. By the First Egg, you will recover fully and you will obey me!”
K’rall looked ready to protest once more—probably to say that he would never disobey a Weyrwoman—but he must have realized that speaking was just what Fiona had ordered him against doing, because he merely sighed and slowly ate his porridge.
At last Fiona left him, replacing herself with one of the nursing weyrlings under strict orders to let her or Terin know if there was any change in his condition and to keep a good eye on his breathing—she was a bit afraid that she’d been too liberal with the fellis juice.
Fiona felt it was her duty as Weyrwoman to check personally on the wingleaders every day—and she made certain that she checked up on every injured rider or dragon every two days—so her next visit was with N’jian.
The brown rider’s Threaded chest had been a particular worry for T’mar, who fretted that the cold of the long trip between times might have exposed N’jian to infection, so Fiona kept a careful eye on him during the first days at the Weyr. Fortunately, he seemed to have taken no ill from the journey, but his recovery would be slow and difficult. With the muscles of his chest and abdomen shredded by a strand of Thread that had been frozen just seconds before it would have devoured his innards, N’jian could only rest on his back or left side, and all movement was painful for him.
Fiona wondered if the rider wouldn’t be well-served by floating in a warm bath, perhaps with some healing salts, but she was still sufficiently worried by the state of his wound to want to hold off until he’d recovered more. As it was, he was starting to develop sores on the parts of his body that supported his weight.
Fiona had decided that he could stand long enough to eat breakfast—he didn’t need her to warn him against sitting as standing was a sufficiently painful procedure in itself.
He wore nothing more than a long, loose tunic over his bandages, partly because it was difficult for him to dress and also because that made it easier to tend his wounds.
Fiona schooled her expression into a smile as she decided to inspect his sores today.
“I’m going to want to look at the sores and see what we can do about them,” she said as she entered the room, glancing meaningfully at the weyrling who was already there. Without a word and no visible sign of relief—something that Fiona had had to drill the weyrlings on—the lad left them alone. Fiona had realized from her own thoughts that having wounds examined in private would be less embarrassing than in public, so unless she needed to consult with a weyrling or provide instruction, she conducted her examinations alone.
She went about the inspection with a sense of distraction that she worked to instill into all the weyrlings—they were to show no sign of embarrassment at tending naked flesh. It was hard enough to recover from wounds without being made to feel ashamed of it.
Fiona realized that she had learned some of this detachment from Cisca, some from her father, and also some from her brief time with Tintoval, who managed to profess such a passion for her duties that no one was bothered by her necessarily intimate examinations.
Still, Fiona would occasionally in the privacy of her thoughts marvel that she had been examining a grown man until she firmly told herself to get over it—these were people, with feelings and pride, people who had risked their lives and their beloved dragons protecting others; she would see them only as such.
“Let me get those cleaned up and bandaged and you’ll be good for the day,” she told N’jian cheerfully.
“I’m sorry to be such a burden—”
“You flew Thread, you’re not a burden,” Fiona said brusquely, cutting him off. “You get well; you’ll be fighting soon enough.”
N’jian accepted her assurances silently, wincing only when Fiona touched a particularly sore wound.
“If you feel the need, later, you might want to relax in the pool,” she told him when she was done and ready to leave. “Just let someone know and they’ll get the bandages back off.”
Since she had tackled her two most challenging patients first, the rest of the morning got easier once she’d finished with N’jian. Still, she was glad to finally find herself back in the Kitchen Cavern relaxing with a mug of klah in front of her.
With a contented sigh of her own, Terin sat beside her, helping herself to the pitcher of warm klah that she’d placed on the table along with a basket full of warm rolls.
“Mmm,” Fiona said as she bit into one of the rolls, “this is excellent.”
The sound of dragonwings caught her attention and she turned toward the entrance, expecting to see a glimpse of the returning dragonriders. But an overwhelming sense of alarm caused her to jump to her feet.
Come quick! T’mar needs you! Talenth cried.
Warn the weyrlings! Fiona called back. Have them meet me!
“Terin, come on, something’s wrong with T’mar!” she shouted over her shoulder as she dashed out into the Weyr Bowl.
She arrived just in time to catch T’mar as he slid off Zirenth’s neck.
“T’mar! What happened?” Fiona cried as she knelt over him, shading him from the sun. She felt his forehead to see if he was feverish, but it felt cool. She glanced up in time to see the older weyrlings being helped down from their mounts. Only a few could stand unaided.
“Weak,” T’mar murmured. “Dizzy.” Feebly he moved a hand, attracing Fiona’s attention to the carisak it held. “Go’ the ice.”
Fiona quickly organized parties to carry the riders into the Kitchen Cavern, lying them down on the ground all the while assuring their dragons that they would be okay.
“What happened?” F’jian asked as he directed another pair of boys carrying the last of the older weyrlings into the cavern.
“I don’t know,” Fiona said, still clutching the cold carisak that T’mar had given her. “They went to get ice.”
She looked around and saw that all the weyrlings had carisaks that bulged. “Get a party to put those carisaks in the storeroom,” she instructed F’jian. “Terin knows which one I mean.”
Talenth, who’s on watch? she asked, hoping that whoever it was was one of the responsible ones she could trust in this emergency.
J’per.
Shards! J’per was worse than any of the youngest weyrlings. No wonder T’mar had left him on watch.
Is he awake? Fiona asked acerbically, recalling how often J’per had been chided for sleeping on watch.
He is now. Talenth replied slyly. Fiona didn’t need to ask her queen to elucidate for Talenth expounded, I had Ginoth rustle his wings—that woke him!
Good! Fiona turned her attention back to T’mar. Was there something about the Snowy Wastes? Could it have frozen them all more than the cold of between? Or—Fiona shuddered—could it be that some illness lived in the Wastes, something that affected riders this quickly? If T’mar and the older weyrlings died, what would she do?
“T’mar,” Fiona said urgently to the listless rider. Zirenth, what happened?
Tired, the bronze dragon responded. They all got very tired.
Zirenth seemed unconcerned, which gave Fiona an immense sense of relief. She had Talenth check with the other dragons of the party and found the same thing—the riders had suddenly become overwhelmed with exhaustion, and none of the dragons were overly worried.
“Let’s get them to their weyrs,” Fiona said, rising from her knees. “They need rest; they’ve been pushing themselves too hard.”
F’jian and the other young weyrlings worked ha
rd to move the older riders to their weyrs, relieved to have something to do.
J’per reports dust in the distance, Talenth relayed when Fiona had finished settling T’mar in his weyr.
Traders?
I’ve sent J’per to find out, Talenth responded, seeming pleased with her action.
I need to know when they’ll arrive, Fiona told her.
I’ve told them, Talenth responded. In a few moments, she added, J’per thinks that they will be here at nightfall. He says that they look like they are camping in the shade.
Very good, Fiona said. Thank him and have him return to his post.
Distantly she heard the rustle of wings that heralded Ginoth’s return to his watch at the Star Stones. Fiona turned back to the sleeping T’mar for one final check. He was resting easily, so Fiona decided that she could leave him under Zirenth’s care.
Let me know if he wakes, she told the bronze dragon. Zirenth raised his sleepy head long enough to meet her eyes and nod, then he curled back up into a comfortable sleeping position.
Stifling a yawn of her own and feeling that she’d had too much excitement for one day, Fiona returned to the Kitchen Cavern.
“We have a fair bit of ice now,” Terin reported. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Use it to cool any of the injured that most need it,” Fiona said. She cocked her head questioningly. “How long will it keep frozen?”
Terin shrugged. “There wasn’t enough to fill the room, so I think it’ll melt faster.”
“Can you put it in pitchers or something so that we can collect the meltwater?”
“There’s a lot of ice for that,” Terin replied.
“I was just thinking that it’d be nice to serve Azeez and Karina some cold drinks,” Fiona said.
Terin’s eyes widened in appreciation. “I’m sure that the traders would enjoy that.” She grinned. “In fact, I think it’s our duty to see what such cold drinks might be like.”
Fiona shook her head. “Not for me,” she said, “I’m ready for my nap. Maybe later.”
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