Dragonsblood (10 page)

seems to have done well for you.” He grabbed her hand. “Let’s go

somewhere where we can sit—and drink.”

“I know just the place.” Lorana led him to a tent where they served cool

wine and crusty bread. They found a table apart from the others and

ordered their drinks.

“Where are your fire-lizards?” J’trel asked when he was sure they were out

of earshot. “I’ve got something for them.”

Lorana looked around to be sure no one was looking, then summoned the

fire-lizards. Garth appeared immediately and chirped happily at the

dragonrider. Lorana frowned as she concentrated on summoning Grenn.

When the brown fire-lizard finally appeared, he chattered loudly at the two

of them before Lorana could shush it.

“My! He’s in a mood!” J’trel remarked with a grin. He pulled forth two

packets from inside his jacket. “Get these on them, and let’s see how they

look.”

The packets turned out to contain beautifully strung bead harnesses.

Lorana gasped as she saw the markings. “What’s this?”

J’trel waved dismissively. “It was the beader’s idea. I told her about Grenn’s

wing.”

Lorana gave him an incredulous look. “Well, all right,” J’trel confessed, “I

did make some suggestions.”

“Animal Healer-in-training?” Lorana asked as she deciphered the patterns

in the beadwork. She got Garth’s harness on easily and smoothed it out, but

Grenn insisted upon fluttering about her.

“What’s got him so worked up?”

Lorana held out a hand to the fire-lizard and coaxed him close to her. She

concentrated, focusing to sort through his confused images.

“There was a fight,” she said at last. Then she looked accusingly at J’trel.

“You were in it! Why didn’t you say something?”

J’trel waved a hand. “A lout learned a lesson in manners. It was nothing.”

“Nothing! At your age!” Lorana started to say more but snapped her

attention back to the fire-lizard. Her eyes grew wide and her face paled as

she turned back to the dragonrider. “J’trel, Garth never saw the man get up

again. She watched for a long time.”

The color drained out of J’trel’s face. Before he could say anything, a man

approached him, clapping him on the back.

It was Baror. “Well done, dragonrider! I hear you put a lout in his place!” He

leered at the two of them, his eyes glazed with drink, “And I’d say, well in

his place!” He slapped his mug in front of the dragonrider. “Have a drink on

me!”

The seaman pulled up a chair close to the table. “I never knew you had it in

you, to be honest. Of course, I knew you dragonriders are a tough lot, but I

figured at your age—well, drink up!”

Ashen-faced, J’trel took a deep gulp from the cup Baror proffered. Baror

turned quickly away from the dragonrider toward his friend, hiding a smirk.

“So, Lorana, I’ll have to watch out for you as well, I’m sure! You keep sharp

company, and that’s no lie!

“Another round here!” he called out to the barman. “Drink up, dragonrider,

this one’s on me!”

Baror continued to ply the dragonrider with wine and offer

commiseration—“You wasn’t to know. And he did have it coming, didn’t he,

dragonrider?”—until even Lorana, who had been careful with her drink,

began to feel bleary.

J’trel was still upset over the fight and its outcome, but was finding it harder

and harder to raise his glass. “I should be going—”

Baror gave a grunt and stood bolt upright. “I think I see Captain Tanner over

there!” He looked at the two of them. “I’ll be right back.”

Lorana patted the distraught dragronrider on the shoulder, trying to think of

something to say.

Baror came back, bristling with purpose. “We’ve got to go now, Lorana! I

spoke with the captain, and we’re to set sail as soon as we can.”

“I’ll stay here,” Lorana replied, looking at J’trel.

“No, no, you’ve got to go!” J’trel said, heaving himself to his feet. “I’ve got

to get back to the Weyr and—” He staggered, leaning on the table for

support.

“You’ve got to get some rest and see a healer,” Lorana replied.

J’trel straightened up and pushed himself away from the table. “And I can

do that best at the Weyr,” he said. “Go on, get! I’ll be awhile mending. I’ll

look for you as soon as I’m done.”

Baror took in their words with a hidden sneer. “Stay if you want, I’m going.”

Lorana glanced at him, and back at J’trel. “Wait!” she called to the retreating

seaman. She gave the dragonrider a gentle hug and said, “I’ve told Talith to

watch out for you.”

J’trel forced a smile over the grimace of pain that her hug had caused him.

“He always does.”

In the distance, the blue dragon coughed. Lorana frowned, adding, “And

keep an eye on that cough!” She pursed her lips. “I swear it’s gotten

worse.”

With one last wave at him, she started after Baror.

The seaman carefully led her out the far side of the tent to avoid the crowd

that was slowly gathering around another seaman spread out on the ground,

knocked unconscious by a hard blow with a rock that lay nearby. Baror

wondered if he had killed Tanner with the blow, but he didn’t really care.

“My lord?” a voice whispered nervously into J’trel’s ear. “My lord, it’s very

late.”

J’trel stirred, and raised his head from the table even while wondering how it

had got there. Except for the light of the lantern the man carried, it was

pitch-dark.

Emboldened now that the dragonrider had stirred, the man said, “I’ve got to

close up now, my lord.”

Talith?
For a terrible instant J’trel feared that something had happened to

his dragon and that he’d find himself left all alone, with neither partner nor

dragon. The sense of loss for K’nad, which had engulfed him after Lorana

had rushed away, enveloped him like a thick shroud. His sense of dread

grew as he waited longer and longer for his dragon to respond.

J’trel?
Talith’s voice came back to him without its usual warmth and

strength.
I don’t feel right.

Instantly J’trel heard and felt his dragon’s distress. With a wordless cry, he

lurched to his feet, against the pain in his battered ribs, the drink-induced

nausea, and the muzziness of an incipient hangover.

“My lord, are you all right?” the tavern man asked, hands fluttering from

gestures of aid to gestures of entreaty.

“I’ve been better,” J’trel replied with a trace of his usual humor. “But I’m all

right.”

He swiveled blearily toward an exit.

Talith waited in a nearby clearing. J’trel bit off a gasp of pain as he climbed

up the dragon’s side. J’trel could hear his dragon’s breathing and noticed

how strained it sounded.

You’re hurt,
Talith noted compassionately.

And you’re—
J’trel was going to say
tired
but suddenly realized that he

meant
old
—and was shocked into silence. But Talith, from Turns of

intimacy, guessed both the original and substitute words J’trel had not

thought. The dragon rumbled softly in gentle agreement, and the rumble

turned into a sharp cough.

As the blue launched into the cold night air, J’trel reminisced on the past

several months. He had only planned to notify K’nad’s next of kin. The pain

of his partner’s loss and age itself had taken too much of a toll on the old

dragonrider.

There was too much pain—and his duties had been discharged. Some

dissenting thought crossed his mind, but he couldn’t focus on it. Talith

coughed again, painfully.

I have made you tarry too long, old friend,
J’trel said kindly to his life-long

mate.
You are tired.
I
am tired.
Talith rumbled soft agreement.
It is time.

For a moment longer J’trel reflected on his life.
Give Lorana my love, old

friend. She will carry on without us, I’m sure.

After a moment the blue dragon responded,
I have told her.

J’trel nodded. “Good. I am tired and it’s time to rest.”

Together, dragon and rider flashed one moment in the pale moonlight and

were gone.

FOUR

It is the duty of an Eridani Adept to preserve their assigned ‘-ome’.

—Excerpt from the Eridani Edicts

Fort Hold, First Pass, Year 48, AL 56

As the sound of breaking glass reached her ears over the booming of the

message drums, Wind Blossom paused in her slow, steady hunt. She

sighed and bid silent farewell to yet more precious glassware. I was never

good at this, she thought sadly to herself. The boy was worse than Emorra

had ever been.

Wind Blossom took a deep breath and turned toward the noise. Resolutely

she overrode the creaks of her joints and the complaints of her muscles.

Time—and medicine—on Pern were not what they had been: At

seventy-nine, she felt more like a doddering ninety.

The sounds of the drums died as the message was completed—and the

noise of breaking glass diminished, but not before Wind Blossom had

located its source. It came from her own room. She opened the door but

did not enter.

Hunched over the remains of a cabinet at one end of the room, Tieran

panted. Tears streamed down his face. Wind Blossom noticed with

sadness that his hands were bleeding in several places—again.

“Tieran?” Somehow she managed to modulate her voice to more than a

croak. For such small things are we grateful, she thought to herself.

The lad, rangy and awkward in the midst of adolescence, turned away from

her, but he did not continue in his destruction. Instead, he started picking

his way across the shard-strewn floor toward the door.

Wind Blossom sighed inwardly with relief as she noticed that he at least

had his boots on. The damage to his hands looked minor as well, she

noted clinically.

As always, almost instinctively, he kept the right side of his face—the

“good” side—toward her and tilted his neck in such a way that the

lacerations on his nose looked their best.

Of all his injuries, the damage to the nose was the worst—at least for a

sixteen-year-old boy who had to endure the pitying stares of his elders and

the taunts or the silent shunning of his peers.

Wind Blossom knew that it was possible to repair the damage, once his

face had finished growing. If she could learn the necessary skills. If she

could find the necessary materials. If she could keep the necessary

medicines. If she lived long enough.

They were in a three-legged race: waiting for him to grow up, striving to

keep the medical supplies necessary, and hoping that she didn’t grow too

feeble to perform the surgery.

And they both knew they were losing.

Latrel could have done it, but that lab accident had cost him the use of his

left thumb and, without it, he couldn’t operate. Carelly had never progressed

beyond competent nurse. Wind Blossom felt that she could train Tieran to

do it—he had the skill—but he could not be both surgeon and patient.

“Where is it?” Tieran demanded in a rough, torn voice. Wind Blossom

raised an eyebrow.

“Where is the antibiotic?” He glared at her.

“It is safe,” Wind Blossom said.

“I want it,” Tieran told her. He held out a hand. “Give it to me—now.”

“Why now?”

Tieran’s face crumpled. “He—he—he was under that rock slide for two

days! The sepsis had set in long before they found him. The fever took him

before I got there.”

Wind Blossom shuddered. “He was a good man.”

Tieran glared at her. “Give it to me! I’m going to find someone—M’hall,

someone—and we’ll
time
it—don’t think I don’t know—and we’ll save him. I

need that medicine!”

“You cannot break time, Tieran,” Wind Blossom said softly. “Not even for

your father. There is no way.”

Wind Blossom had taught Tieran that dragons could not only go

instantaneously
between
places but also
between
times. The paradoxes

and rules of time travel applied to dragons as much as to anything else that

existed in the space-time continuum. It was impossible to go back in time in

a manner that could alter events that had already occurred.

“You can’t alter the past,” Wind Blossom said.

Tieran’s face crumpled and he leaned over and onto Wind Blossom. “You

said he’d always be there. You said we’d always see each other. You said .

. . And I wasn’t there! I couldn’t help him, I wasn’t there!”

Drawing on her inner strength, Wind Blossom straightened her spine and

held the lad while his sorrow and anger poured out.

“I shall miss him, too,” Wind Blossom said after a while. “He was a good

man. A good botanist, too. With more training—”

“Training! Is that how you measure a man?” Tieran demanded. “Is that how

you see me? No scars, only an apt student? And what am I learning? A lost

art, a dying way of doing things—all for your pleasure!”

“Your father wanted you to—”

“My father’s dead,” Tieran cut her off. “And now it’s only you who wants me

to learn all this genetic foolery. Splicing genes we can’t see—the last

electron microscope failed last year, or don’t you remember?—for ends we

don’t know. We could introduce mutations without knowing about it, and for