“I’m glad you didn’t,” Terin murmured beside her, her eyes carefully fixed on her glass.
“He’s cute but he’s not my kind,” Fiona admitted, dimly becoming aware that she was missing something from Terin’s response.
“Tell me more about F’jian,” Zenor said to Terin. She blushed but, under his gentle questioning, proceeded to regale them with tales about his kindness, his smile, his strong arms—
“I’ll say!” Fiona agreed, earning a scowl from her friend. Again feeling that she was missing something, Fiona turned to Zenor appealingly, but the goldcrafter only cut his eyes toward Terin, indicating that she should keep listening.
“What does he think of you?” Zenor asked Terin softly.
“I don’t think he knows I exist,” Terin said morosely.
“He likes your cooking,” Fiona told her, earning herself another glower from Terin.
“I think she’s looking for more than that,” Zenor told Fiona quietly.
“Oh,” Fiona said, suddenly understanding. Her face split into a broad grin and she turned to Terin. “You fancy him!”
“He seems like a good choice to me,” Zenor observed smoothly, smiling at Terin. He refilled Fiona’s glass and nodded for her to have some more wine while he said to Terin, “And if he likes you, he’ll show excellent sense.”
“But I’ve not yet thirteen Turns!”
“Age has nothing to do with it,” Zenor told her kindly. He smiled fondly as he continued, “Nuella hadn’t more than twelve Turns when she first kissed me.”
“What was it like?” Fiona asked in wonder.
Zenor blushed bright red. “It was marvelous.”
Terin let out a deep sympathetic sigh and Fiona found herself following, although in her mind’s eye it wasn’t F’jian she thought of kissing—the person was a nebulous image, taller, older, but no one she could quite identify with certainty.
“Maybe you should just kiss him,” Fiona suggested to Terin. “Like Nuella.”
Terin’s eyes grew huge at the notion and she shook her head in mute denial.
“From what I’ve heard,” Zenor began, “from Fiona—” He nodded to the Weyrwoman. “—and T’mar and countless others, you’re the sort of woman that any dragonrider would be proud to call his mate—”
“Ew!” Terin exclaimed, scrunching up her face. “I don’t want to . . .” She trailed off uncomfortably.
“Well, you want to kiss him, don’t you?” Fiona demanded matter-of-factly. Reluctantly Terin nodded, and Fiona’s face took on a triumphant expression, but before she could speak, Zenor said, “Kissing is a good thing.” Fiona glanced at him sharply, but he persisted, “A kiss is good enough by itself for most people I know.”
Fiona closed her mouth, considering his words.
“And a kiss isn’t such a big thing that it would of itself cause anyone to talk too much,” Zenor continued, topping off Terin’s glass and passing it to her. She sipped reflexively. Zenor turned the conversation to Fiona, asking, “And who would you kiss, Weyrwoman?”
It was Fiona’s turn to blush then. Sometime later she felt the warmth of Terin’s head resting on her shoulder and realized that the younger woman had fallen asleep.
Zenor seemed not to notice, as he was engaged in a lengthy account of Silstra’s wedding and Kindan’s part in it, a topic which Fiona found quite engaging.
“M’tal said that he’s with Lorana now,” Fiona broke in as Zenor paused to sip his wine.
“I don’t know who that is,” Zenor told her and raised a hand to stop her from telling him, saying, “And if she’s from the future, I think it best if I know nothing more.”
Fiona stopped, frustrated, until Zenor asked if she would share her memories of Kindan, which she gladly did. Somehow her memories reminded her of her flight to Fort Hold with T’mar and that got her talking about T’mar.
“ . . . he’s so demanding, always saying, ‘Do it three times, then you’ll know!’ ” she exclaimed, shaking her head and suddenly wishing she hadn’t. The room started spinning. Zenor was instantly at her side, deftly removing the glass from her hand and steadying her, offering her a drink from a glass of water and talking soothingly all the while.
When she recovered, she shrugged off Zenor’s suggestion that she get some rest. She had to tell him something, she was certain, but she couldn’t think what. It took him a while to realize that something was troubling her but the moment he did, he peered directly into her eyes and asked her quietly, “Are you in love with him?”
“Kindan?” Fiona asked in response. “Or T’mar?”
“Or both?”
“A Lady Holder doesn’t—” Fiona responded instantly, her face set in a frown.
“A Weyrwoman can,” Zenor told her kindly.
“But he has Lorana!” Fiona objected.
“And you would never come between him and the one he loves,” Zenor observed respectfully. “But you don’t have to tear your heart apart to save his, no more than you have to avoid kissing T’mar.”
“Why would I want to kiss T’mar?” Fiona had asked, suddenly feeling very tired and very confused.
“I wouldn’t know,” Zenor admitted with a slight shake of his head. He rubbed the back of his neck wearily. “Perhaps I was seeing things where they weren’t.” He gestured to Terin. “I think we should get her to a proper bed before she gets a crick in her neck.”
Fiona turned to gaze down at her friend, stroking her dark hair fondly. “She is such a good one.”
“She is at that,” Zenor agreed, rising as he extended an arm toward Fiona. With some effort, she found her feet and helped Terin to hers, and somehow they found their bed and slipped into it.
It was no surprise to Fiona to find that she had slept in her clothes, nor that Terin’s breath was foul. She suspected hers was just as bad and turned her head away to spare the young headwoman from it.
They returned to the Weyr much later than Fiona had expected, both somewhat relieved and somewhat subdued by their night’s festivities, seen off by a weary Zenor and a warm and wakeful Nuella.
“Don’t forget that you have a home here,” Nuella said, hugging each of them in turn.
“Next time, we’ll let you change the baby,” Zenor added with a grin.
“Deal,” Terin replied, rubbing her temples wearily, “as long as you don’t serve us any wine.”
“You might think now that you’ll never drink again,” Zenor warned her. “But I suspect you’ll be wrong.”
“Oh,” Terin replied, “I might drink again. Just never that much.”
Now, as Talenth was challenged by the watch dragon, Fiona felt a sense of relief to be back at Igen. Her questions and worries were not all resolved, but she felt certain that they would not overwhelm her.
T’mar greeted them with a mixture of relief and concern: glad to have them back but worried about their demeanor. “I take it you were not served Benden white.”
“How did you guess?” Terin wondered.
“You wouldn’t have such awful hangovers this late in the day,” T’mar replied with a humorous snort.
“Silstra was told that she wasn’t serving the Weyrwoman,” Terin replied, glancing over to Fiona with a grin.
“I’m glad to hear that,” T’mar said. “I’d hate to think that the Weyrwoman of Igen was being served second-class wine.”
“The Weyrwoman of Igen is not sure she wants to be served any wine for a long time,” Fiona told him.
“I understand,” T’mar said with feeling. “All the same, I’m glad that you two had some time to yourselves, away from all this . . .” He gestured to the gathering riders, groping for the right word.
“Maleness?” Fiona suggested.
“I was going for exuberance,” T’mar said, “but I think you’ve got the better word for it.” He paused a moment before adding solicitously, “Is it a great strain for you two?”
“Being the only women who came from our time?” Fiona asked in clarification
. At T’mar’s reluctant nod, she continued, “Yes, it is. A strain and a temptation, too.”
T’mar sighed. “I was afraid that it would come to that at some point.”
“But do you think that you could have managed without us?”
T’mar pondered the question for only a moment before shaking his head resolutely. “No.”
“So,” Fiona continued, “that being the case, we shall just have to persevere, shan’t we?”
“You’re old enough, and Talenth is old enough, that you two could go back to Fort Weyr—”
“Oh, no!” Fiona cut across him. “I’m Igen’s Weyrwoman, wingleader, and I will stay until we all go back!”
Wisely, T’mar said nothing in reply.
But if T’mar said nothing, he made up for it in his actions over the next several months. There wasn’t a day when the dragonriders weren’t drilling: flaming or practicing formations or practicing formations and flaming or practicing formations, flaming, and going between all at the same time. He drove everyone to exhaustion. Tempers flared, but no blows were exchanged until the beginning of the third month since Fiona’s visit to the wherhold.
Fiona and Terin, for their part, had found themselves often at the Wherhold—one of them was there at least one night every sevenday. Terin and Fiona both had experience changing Nalla’s diapers, feeding her, and wiping spittle and other bodily fluids off of her and themselves when things went wrong. Partly this was a consequence of Terin’s insistence that they provide Nuella and Zenor with time to themselves. Privately, Fiona was pretty certain that Zenor and Nuella had no lack of volunteers from among the remaining holders—after all, for all their humility, they were the Lord and Lady of the wherhold, and even if they found it strange, the rest of the holders from Silstra on down felt it not only their duty but their honor to treat them with the respect and deference that would be given any Lord Holder.
Terin’s services were more than simple repayment of a kindness: They were part of a trade she’d arranged with Zenor and Nuella—to help her find and fashion a suitable gold ring. Terin kept silent on her intent with the ring, but Fiona was willing to bet, in the silence of her mind at least, that the ring would be sized to fit a young man’s hand—probably that of a certain bronze rider. So it was a double shock when the riders returned that evening to land in the Weyr Bowl to see F’jian leap from his bronze Ladirth, race over to J’gerd’s brown Winurth, and bodily drag the brown rider down to the ground.
“How dare you!” F’jian shouted as he slammed J’gerd to the ground.
From her seat on the queen’s ledge beside Fiona, Terin let out a shriek.
“Hold!” Fiona cried, her voice echoing loudly around the Weyr, her power of command surging as she reached out to Talenth and, in an instant, stilled both riders and dragons as though they’d been frozen in the wastes.
T’mar raced over to the two as they stood grappled but unmoving, cast a mixed look of admiration and—fear?—toward Fiona, then gestured for her to release them.
Fiona did nothing of the sort, instead racing from her perch on her ledge to stand beside T’mar, gazing at the two riders as they stood breathing raggedly, fighting against her control.
Let them go, a voice urged her. Fiona glanced around in surprise for the source and found no one—all eyes were locked on the two riders. With a hiss, she released her hold on the two even as J’keran and J’nos reached for the two riders and drew them apart.
“What happened?” Fiona demanded, glancing from F’jian to J’gerd and then to T’mar. The wingleader shrugged.
“He accused me—” F’jian began hotly but broke off abruptly as he spotted Terin in the distance.
“You should know better—” T’mar began consolingly.
“Don’t talk to me, wingleader!” F’jian snapped back. “You have no command over me.”
“I do,” Fiona told him softly.
“A Weyrwoman is a Weyrwoman when her dragon rises,” F’jian retorted, the veins on his neck straining with his anger.
“No,” Fiona replied, her voice steady and cold. “A Weyrwoman becomes senior Weyrwoman when her queen is the first to mate in a new weyr.” She gestured around the Bowl. “Do you see any other queen dragons here?” F’jian swallowed and glanced away from her, and she continued, “So we know that if Talenth rises, I will be senior Weyrwoman.”
“It won’t happen here,” F’jian said in a snarl.
“No, it won’t,” Fiona agreed. She leaned in toward him, her eyes narrowed dangerously. “And it doesn’t matter. Because I am a Weyrwoman, here or at Fort Weyr in the future. And because I am, the dragons—and their riders—listen to me.”
F’jian’s eyes started in alarm, but he dropped his head, unwilling to meet her gaze.
Fiona felt herself in a strange place, in a moment in time where she knew that whatever she did was crucial, would alter not only her future but the future of everyone here—perhaps even all of Pern.
You can do it. The voice wasn’t the strange one, it was an echo of Nuella’s faith in her, of Tannaz’s eyes, of Aleesa’s confidence, of Mother Karina’s strength. Without looking, Fiona knew that the old trader woman was near, watching, unable and unwilling to interfere.
The moment was Fiona’s alone.
She walked closer to the young bronze rider, raised a hand under his chin, and forced his head up so that his eyes met hers. “What should we do, bronze rider?”
F’jian met her look with a mixture of shame and horror.
“I can imagine what J’gerd said to you,” Fiona told him calmly, ignoring the sudden shift of the brown rider beside her. “And I’m sure he regrets it.”
“Bronze rider,” J’gerd spoke slowly, miserably, “I apologize for insulting you and your intentions.”
“Pretty lame,” Fiona told him out of the corner of her mouth. “You’ve been teasing him unmercifully for at least a month, I’m sure.”
J’gerd’s reaction confirmed Fiona’s suspicions and she berated herself for not acting sooner. T’mar might be the oldest bronze rider here, but his power over the now-grown weyrlings had been fading every day. And, as it faded, the responsibility for the Weyr fell more and more on Fiona’s shoulders—shoulders that up until this moment she had felt too frail for the strain.
Now, as she felt Talenth’s silent love, approval, and strength, and as she felt something even more—the unspoken fealty not only of dragons to their queen but of their riders to their queen’s rider—now, Fiona knew she’d made a mistake. Risen or not, mated or not, Weyrwoman or not, hers was the responsibility and her shoulders—so much thinner than her father’s—had all the strength of Fort Hold and Fort Weyr supporting them.
“T’mar,” she ordered, “get the suits.” She paused, glancing at J’gerd and F’jian. “These two are going to get their chance to knock the stuffing out of each other.”
Fiona felt but did not see T’mar’s nod and heard him as he turned and delegated a group of riders to bring out the thick stuffing suits.
As the riders set up an impromptu circle, Fiona caught sight of Mother Karina and nodded to her. The old woman took the glance for an invitation and joined her.
“What are they doing?”
“I thought you would have seen this earlier,” Fiona said in surprise. Four riders struggled in, two each to the heavily padded suits that they carried between them. “If riders have a disagreement, we can’t let them fight to the death—their dragons would be lost with them.”
Karina nodded, then gestured to the suits. “And those . . . ?”
“They are heavily padded,” Fiona told her, adding with a smile, “and very restricting.”
The two riders were being helped to drag on the thick trousers and tunic, then were engulfed in fluffy helmets and huge, balled gloves.
“I’ve only seen one other fight myself,” Fiona said, shaking her head. “There is something about being back in time, by the First Egg, that makes riders more irritable.”
“Queen riders, too?” Karina asked softly.
Fiona nodded bleakly. “Queen riders, too.”
“So who knocks the stuffing out of you when you need it?” Karina wondered.
“Usually, I do,” Fiona admitted sourly.
“Hmm,” Karina murmured, her expression neutral.
“They’ll be exhausted before too long,” Fiona predicted as the two riders stood opposite each other and began the formal salute.
“How long will you let them fight?” Terin demanded from behind. Fiona turned to the younger woman and pursed her lips before answering, “Until one of them can’t fight anymore.”
“Won’t or can’t?” Terin persisted.
“Can’t,” Fiona told her firmly.
F’jian delivered the first blow, rocking J’gerd back on his heels. The brown rider kept his hands at his sides.
“You wanted this fight!” Fiona shouted at J’gerd angrily. J’gerd looked at her entreatingly, but Fiona shook her head, her anger growing. “You fight, brown rider.”
Reluctantly, J’gerd raised his hands to block F’jian’s blows, but the wiry bronze rider ducked around him and started pummeling the brown rider on his side, harmlessly.
“If you don’t fight now, J’gerd,” Fiona called to him, “I’ll have you fight again tomorrow and the next day until you do fight.”
“Why are you forcing him?” Terin demanded in horror.
“So that he will never want to fight again.”
“That’s stupid!”
“Yes, it is,” T’mar agreed as he crossed to Fiona’s side. “But it is the only way to get them to stop.”
F’jian landed a good blow on J’gerd’s face, bloodying the brown rider’s nose and suddenly J’gerd was fighting. He lunged into F’jian and landed one solid blow, but then the bronze rider dodged, slammed both gloved hands into J’gerd’s back, and sent the brown rider stumbling away.
When J’gerd turned back, F’jian caught him another doublefisted blow in the face, sending J’gerd reeling backward until he stumbled and fell down.
“Enough.” Fiona said the word quietly, but it traveled throughout the circle with a weight of its own. She rushed over to kneel beside J’gerd, eyeing his bruised face with muted sympathy before glancing up at F’jian. The bronze rider was breathing heavily and had a cut over his right eye, that Fiona judged painful but superficial.
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