Dragonsblood

by Todd McCaffrey

Kindan’s confusion showed in his expression.

  K’tan nodded toward Lorana’s quarters. “You might want to be there for her,” he said softly.

  “Yes,” Kindan agreed quickly. “You’re right.” He started to head off, his stride increasing. Back over his shoulder he called, “Thank you.”

  He was halfway across the Bowl when B’nik hailed him.

  “Ista should be fighting Threadfall over Igen soon,” the Weyrleader called warningly. Kindan smiled and waved acknowledgment, pointing toward Lorana’s quarters. B’nik nodded.

  Kindan found Lorana in Arith’s room, curled up next to her dragon. The room was gloomy, the setting sun cut off by the lip of the Bowl. Arith stirred fitfully as Kindan entered the room, but Lorana’s eyes were already wide open, staring blankly into space. She looked up at Kindan.

  “She’s resting,” she reported. “Her breathing seems easier.”

  Kindan nodded.

  “I just ate a while ago,” Lorana added, as though that were the reason for Kindan’s appearance. Her tone was acerbic as she continued, “Mikkala checked up on me in the last hour.”

  Kindan took in her words and tone with a quickly suppressed grimace. If anyone knew the deathwatch drill for a rider and a sick dragon, it would be Lorana. She had held the hands of the distraught riders, had uttered all the comforting words she could imagine, and had held the riders in her arms as they collapsed with grief and despair when their dragons went between forever.

  “Thread falls over Igen Weyr soon,” Kindan told her bluntly. “Ista will be fighting it.”

  Lorana took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She tilted her head up to look into Kindan’s eyes. “Thank you,” she told him.

  “Should I turn on the glows?” he asked, jerking his head toward the nearest glow basket.

  “More light would help,” Lorana agreed. As Kindan busied himself with the task, she followed him around the room with her eyes, partly to distract herself and partly because he was such a pleasant distraction.

  He turned back to her when he was done. “May I stay?”

  Lorana met his gaze with a bittersweet look and patted the ground beside her. “I was hoping you would,” she told him. “The ground’s hard, but you don’t notice it after a while.”

  Kindan sat beside her, unsure whether to lean against Arith as she was doing, or to offer himself as a support for Lorana, or to lean himself against her.

  She sensed his unease and turned her back to him, stretching her neck from side to side to get out the kinks. She reached behind her and said to him, “Could you?”

  Kindan stifled a laugh and began to gently massage her tense shoulder blades and upper back. He took his time and was thorough.

  Partway through, Lorana gasped and Arith jerked awake, eyes opening quickly. The little queen keened softly beside her rider, and Kindan didn’t need to see Lorana’s face to know that she was crying with the pain of dragons forever lost.

  In the end, Kindan couldn’t say who was more distraught: Lorana, Arith, or himself. Through the course of the evening—the length of the Fall as it traveled from Igen Weyr southwest, over the Ista Strait and onto the southern tip of Ista Island—Lorana shuddered as though beaten down by a miner’s hammer, and Arith keened, sometimes so often that it almost seemed as if the small dragon was chanting. The pain and anguish that both rider and dragon were suffering hurt Kindan even more because he did not feel it except through them and could not anticipate the next loss.

  All through the long Fall he stayed by them, gently massaging Lorana’s tense back, softly patting Arith’s hide. Kiyary or Mikkala must have come to check on them several times, for Kindan remembered nodding thankfully to them at various points in the night and resisting the same wine he tried to force unsuccessfully on Lorana.

  In the end, Kindan had started to count when either Lorana or Arith gasped or shuddered with the pain of dragons and riders far away. He stopped when he reached seventy. Ista Weyr had some one hundred and twenty dragons or more able to fight Thread; if seventy were injured or lost, it was just as Verilan had said: Ista would not be able to fight another Threadfall. Two Falls like that and Benden Weyr would not be able to fight Thread either.

  And then Thread would fall—unchecked—and leach all the life from the land. And even if the Holders survived, locked in their Holds, how long would it be before they starved in a lifeless and barren land?

  J’lantir surveyed the surviving Wingleaders as they gathered in the Council Room at Ista Weyr.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said to M’kir, barring the brown rider as he tried to enter. M’kir’s left arm was in a sling, his shoulder heavily bandaged where Thread had gouged it, the left side of his head bandaged to hide the gaping hole that had once held a fierce blue eye.

  M’kir opened his mouth to protest but stopped as J’lantir swayed in the doorway.

  “You need to get some rest,” the brown rider told his Weyrleader, sliding past him.

  J’lantir turned to face the others in the room. S’maj was the only Wingleader left besides himself. B’lon was favoring his left leg, wrapped in a bandage placed over his now-useless flying pants—a long thin line of blood showed where Thread had eaten through it and into his leg, but the score was not deep; B’lon’s Lareth had been able to take them quickly between, where the Thread had frozen, shriveled, and cracked off.

  A sound from behind him caused J’lantir to swivel his head. His eyes went unfocused for a bit as the movement caused the world to wobble.

  You must rest too, Lolanth chided him. J’lantir knew his dragon was right, just as he knew he had to ignore the advice.

  Dalia entered, smoothing her features as she surveyed the occupants of the room.

  “How bad is it?” M’kir asked her urgently.

  “It’s bad,” B’lon predicted.

  “Perhaps we should let our Weyrwoman tell us,” J’lantir said with a tone of reproval in his voice. He inclined his head toward her—a mistake, his stomach informed him. I’ll feed you later, J’lantir growled back at his stomach.

  Dalia raised an eyebrow at J’lantir, clearly recognizing that he was suffering, but stopped herself from commenting as she caught the pleading look on his face.

  “Fourteen dragons went between,” she told the others. “Twenty were severely injured, and it will be more than three months before they will fly again.”

  A groan went around the table.

  “Another thirty-one have lesser injuries but will need at least several weeks to recuperate.” She took a breath before finishing. “And we’ve identified another eleven sick dragons.”

  “So how many dragons will be able to fly Thread over Ista Hold in three days’ time?” J’lantir asked, dreading the answer.

  “Forty-eight,” Dalia answered, unable to keep the pain out of her voice.

  Kindan woke the next morning to Arith’s coughing. It took him a moment to realize that he was leaning against her back and that Lorana was sleeping in his lap. Arith turned her head to give Kindan an apologetic look.

  “Think nothing of it,” he responded with a courteous nod of his head. At that moment Arith sneezed, covering him with green mist.

  Lorana twitched and sat upright, blinking the morning into focus.

  “Shh, it’s all right,” Kindan said soothingly.

  Lorana focused on his face. “She sneezed again, didn’t she? You’re all covered in green.”

  Arith gave an apologetic bleek.

  “So are you,” Kindan told Lorana. Then he frowned consideringly. “Well, maybe not quite as much.”

  Are you hungry? Lorana asked Arith.

  Thirsty, Arith replied after a moment’s reflection.

  “Arith’s thirsty,” Lorana announced, standing up. Kindan followed her action.

  “We’d best clean up before we go anywhere,” he said, peeling off his stained tunic. “Or people will think that we’re sick.”

  Lorana gave no reaction to his attempt at humor. With
a polite nod to the humans, Arith stood up, stretched, took a few quick steps to the ledge of her lair, and blithely jumped off it, gliding surely toward the lake in the Weyr Bowl.

  “You know,” Kindan said, gesturing fondly after the departing gold, “I’ve never seen a dragon so young act so self-assured.”

  Lorana’s lips twisted up in the ghost of a smile. “She is agile, isn’t she?”

  They met Arith again as she splashed about on the shoreline of the lake.

  “Well,” someone behind them drawled, “now that you two have deigned to join the rest of us, perhaps you’d care to look for these special rooms I’ve heard so much about.”

  They turned to see Tullea leaning indolently against Minith’s foreleg. B’nik stood beside her.

  “Arith was sick,” Lorana explained, turning back to catch sight of the young queen as she splashed back to the shore.

  “All the more reason to search, then,” Tullea responded. “Unless you two are more inclined to cavorting?” She cast a disdainful look at Kindan’s bare chest. “And get some clothes on.”

  With that, Tullea turned away from them and headed back to her weyr, B’nik following, stony-faced.

  “I’ll go on,” Kindan said to Lorana. “I’ve got to get a clean shirt from my room anyway.”

  Passing by the Kitchen Cavern on the way to his room, Kindan was hailed by Kiyary.

  “Tullea giving out to you, was she?” Kiyary asked, smiling evilly. “I can see why, too—your bare chest is enough to make a dragon swoon.”

  Kindan, who knew full well that most dragonriders were, of necessity, more muscled than he, took Kiyary’s mocking in the well-intentioned manner it was delivered. “It’s all that hard work with my guitar,” he said, grinning.

  “And those drums up on the heights don’t hurt either,” Kiyary responded, giving him a more thorough appraisal than when she’d been teasing him. “Come to think of it, maybe Tullea has a point.”

  Kindan snorted and headed off with a backward wave over his shoulder. In his room, he pulled out a fresh shirt and hastily donned it. He paused, as he was tucking it in his pants, to look over the map of the Weyr he’d drawn in chalk on a slate board. He’d marked the map with X’s to show where they’d searched already. He pursed his lips sourly; he couldn’t see an unmarked spot.

  He spun around at a noise from the doorway behind him. It was B’nik. Kindan lifted up the map and showed it to the Weyrleader.

  “I can’t think of anywhere else to look,” he said.

  B’nik entered the room and peered closely at the map. “Perhaps the Records at Fort were wrong,” he said after a long moment.

  Kindan shook his head. “If they are, then we have no hope.”

  “I can’t see what could be so special in those rooms,” B’nik said. “Nor why they were built here at Benden.”

  “Fort would have made more sense,” Kindan agreed abstractedly. Something in the Weyrleader’s comment nagged at the edge of his consciousness.

  “I came to tell you that K’tan says the new riding harnesses have arrived,” B’nik said, obviously not at all clear why the information was important to the harper.

  “They have?” Kindan answered excitedly, looking toward the door. He caught B’nik’s questioning look and explained, “Salina had me order Lorana’s riding brightware a while back, and now there’s leather to attach it to.”

  B’nik smiled. “I can see how that’d cheer her up,” he agreed. “What sort of design did you get?”

  Kindan searched around in a drawer and pulled out a small sack. He opened it, searched for a moment, then pulled out one of the smaller pieces of brightware and handed it to B’nik.

  “Silver, is it?” B’nik asked as he took the proffered piece and examined it. It was a small circular piece, meant to be attached over one of the standard steel buckles on the riding leathers. That way, as the leathers and metalwork wore out, it could be removed and placed on a replacement riding harness.

  “I can make out the Benden Weyr symbol, but what sort of symbol is this?” B’nik asked, pointing at one of the images. “That’s a healer mark! And—there’s an animal beside it.”

  “Salina made me order them soon after Lorana Impressed,” Kindan said. “So I used what I’d learned about Lorana. Apparently, that’s about the same as the mark she used for her fire-lizard’s harness.”

  “She had fire-lizards?” B’nik asked, looking up from the silver brightwork.

  “Two,” Kindan told him. “They were lost at sea in a storm.”

  B’nik digested this information with discomfort. “Her fire-lizards weren’t sick, were they?”

  “I believe they were,” Kindan responded. “She doesn’t talk about them much.”

  B’nik acknowledged Kindan’s reply with a grunt, absently fingering the brightwork with his thumb. With a start, he pulled himself out of his musings and handed the silver circle back to Kindan.

  “I’m sure she’ll be pleased at the thought,” he said. “Why don’t you get the leathers for her and present the whole array?”

  “Thank you,” Kindan said. “I’ll do that.”

  “When you’re done, come find me and we’ll talk some more,” B’nik told him as he turned to leave.

  “Very well, Weyrleader,” Kindan said. “Where will you be?”

  “Practicing,” B’nik called back over his shoulder. “You might ask Lorana if Arith would talk to Caranth when you need me.”

  “Thank you, I will.”

  Does this mean we’ll ride together soon? Arith asked excitedly as Kindan and K’tan helped Lorana put on the flying gear.

  “She wants to know when I’ll ride her,” Lorana said out loud.

  “It will be many months yet,” K’tan said with a shake of his head. “Arith’s bigger than all the other hatchlings of her clutch—she’s the queen so you’d expect her to be—but she’s still got a lot of growth before she’s ready to carry even your light weight.”

  Arith made a plaintive sound and Lorana laughed. “Never you mind. First you need to get used to wearing the riding gear,” she said out loud.

  “Indeed she does,” K’tan agreed emphatically. “In fact, if she gets used to it soon enough she might try flying with it some.”

  Could I? Arith asked wistfully. Now? I could go eat.

  “She wants to eat with it on,” Lorana told the others.

  “The riding harness will need to be oiled first,” K’tan said, shaking his head again. “It would be better, young queen, if you waited until you’d had the harness on for a day or two, so we know that we’ve got it adjusted right.”

  Arith blew a dejected sigh through her nose, which turned into an open-mouthed cough.

  Sorry.

  Kindan and K’tan exchanged concerned looks.

  “Maybe this was a bad idea,” Kindan said.

  “No,” Lorana responded emphatically. Beside her, Arith made a similar noise, though quieter, for fear of exacerbating her cough. “And I love the brightwork, Kindan. It’s very well done.”

  “A friend of mine,” Kindan told her.

  “Well, please thank her for me.”

  “Him,” Kindan corrected with a grin. “But I’ll pass the thanks on.”

  “How’s the search going?” she asked, feeling awkward and wanting to change the topic. Seeing the worried looks exchanged by the other two, she regretted the question instantly. “Not well?”

  “No,” Kindan said. “I can’t think of anywhere else to look.”

  “That’s because you’re not weyrbred,” K’tan said, clapping the harper on the back. “Why don’t we talk about it while we check on the injured?”

  “Arith, I’d like to go with them. Will you stay here?” Lorana asked her dragon out loud, so that the others could hear. “Should we take your harness off so you can lie down?”

  No, the queen replied, shaking her headed so firmly that her body swayed in counterpoint. And I won’t get it dirty, I promise.

  Lorana
laughed and hugged Arith’s neck. Let me know if it itches, or if you need me.

  Of course.

  I won’t be long, Lorana promised.

  Take your time, Arith replied, I’ll call you if I need you.

  Lorana turned to Kindan and K’tan. “I’ll come with you.”

  Lorana appeared distracted while the three of them checked on the injured dragons. Several times K’tan had to repeat a question or a request to her before she responded. Kindan noticed that she kept looking around the Weyr, particularly whenever a dragon sneezed or coughed.

  Their work took them through the morning and still they’d only checked on half of the ninety-two injured dragons.

  “I think we should group all the sick dragons,” Kindan said as they walked to the next weyr.

  “We’ve been over this,” K’tan said. “How would you do it?”

  “Just together, at least,” Kindan said. “Probably on the lowest level.”

  “Why not a high field?” Lorana asked. “It would be colder up there—it might prevent the spread of the sickness.”

  “Or it might speed it up,” K’tan countered. “If the cold makes it harder on the dragons’ resistance.”

  “But aren’t dragons pretty much inured to cold?” Kindan asked. “I mean, they go between.”

  “But only for short periods of time,” Lorana admitted.

  “But they do fly where the air is cold,” K’tan mused. “They don’t seem to mind the cold as much as we do.”

  “Exactly,” Kindan said. “But if you have the sick dragons up high where it’s cold—and I presume you mean a landing outside of the Weyr—then what about the riders? And how will we get food and supplies to them?”

  Lorana threw up her hands in capitulation.

  “Let’s bring it up to B’nik,” K’tan suggested. “It’s his decision.”

  B’nik listened to them carefully when they approached him at lunchtime. Tullea was with him.

  “If I understand you, then,” the Weyrleader said, “the correct quarantine method depends on how the sickness is transmitted.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” K’tan agreed.

  “But we don’t know how it spreads,” B’nik continued, “so you want to try all three precautions—is that right?”