Chapter 10

Two of the passengers were boys, with whom the girls could not really interfere; the third however was a dark haired girl who was audibly complaining to the stiff featured and furious Green Rider who brought her that she had not appreciated being jolted so much, nor to being taken Between without warning.

Prisca strolled over.

"Your passenger feeling her oats because she's embarrassed about peeing herself, Green Rider?" she said, cheerfully. "Makes a girl feel very vulnerable. Don't worry if you have, m'dear, it happens to many people the first time!"

"I haven't – haven't soiled myself!" squealed the girl in outrage.

"Well, quit complaining, then, and get down so we can get you settled in," said Prisca, "and don't forget to thank the Green Rider for his courtesy in bringing you and resisting the temptation to box your ears for rudeness."

The Green Rider looked at Prisca anew.

"A candidate who know the courtesies, I see," he said.

Prisca bowed.

"My father works with the Weyrwoodcrafters in the High Reaches," she said. "We have dragonmen and women visiting for timber for various projects. Etiquette and courtesy cost nothing and help smooth the wheels of society."

She was absently scratching the eyebrow ridges of the ecstatic Green dragon. The young Rider laughed.

"Pirith says you can keep that up all day," he said. "She's going to be disappointed; I want to give her a good oiling after a bath."

"She is lovely," said Prisca. "Such a pretty shade!

"Aren't you going to help me down?" demanded the new girl.

"Oh, are you crippled, then?" asked Gwesara, with spurious sympathy. Like Prisca, she had taken an instant dislike to the girl with discontent lines already starting on her face.

"Of course not, idiot! If I was crippled, I wouldn't be a candidate for a Queen dragon, would I? now stop asking stupid questions and insulting me and help me down!"

"Pirith, I sympathise with you," said Prisca.

"How dare you! I'm not going to take this insolence from some drudge!" screeched the girl.

"Fardles! Excuse me, Green Rider, WHY did you pick this one?" asked Prisca.

He grinned.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time… she has power, candidate," he said.

"I think it all went in the volume," said Prisca, dryly. She knew that however much the Weyrfolk at High Reaches might have disliked her attitude, they did not dislike her the way they did the louder and more self opinionated candidates – like the awful Lasolly!

The dark haired girl was goggling at Prisca.

"Did he just call you 'Candidate'?" she demanded.

"'He' has an honourific, candidate," said Prisca. "Get down and stop catching veetols with your mouth half open. What's your name?"

"Ideena," said the girl, sulkily. "And I can't get down without help. If you aren't drudges, where are the drudges to carry my baggage?"

Gwesara and Prisca laughed.

"Ideena, if you think you're going to be waited on hand and foot, you are very much mistaken," said Prisca briskly. "Caring for a dragon is hard work; and you only have three weeks to be made fit enough to manage it, should you be the lucky one. And the Weyrlingmaster has to work all the candidates as though each one has a chance of being the lucky one, even feeble ones like you. Green Rider, as she is so feeble, would you be able to lower her down?"

"Certainly," said the Green Rider, not troubling to hide his grins. "I think she's out of sorts because I found her brother more attractive than her; pity he wasn't interested in coming."

"Oh well, better for us, if he's too pretty he might have stolen a march on us in Impressing the Queen," laughed Prisca, who had learned to cope with the weyr acceptance of homosexuality. This youth seemed very much at home with himself or she would not have teased at all. He laughed.

"I think he was TOO ladylike," he said, taking Ideena by the wrists and lowering her with all the grace of a sack of firestone. She squealed all the way.

Bedella came over to see what then noise was about.

"Gwesara… oh yes, I remember you, St'adar brought you," she nodded to Prisca. "G'lak, trouble?"

"Not any more, Weyrwoman," said G'lak, the Green Rider. "I've delivered her to her fellow candidates. With your permission I'd like to bathe and oil Pirith."

Bedella nodded him away brusquely and regarded the complaining Ideena with dislike.

"THIS is why I dislike having Search," she said.

"Gwesara and I will try to explain some realities of life to her, Weyrwoman, so she is not a nuisance to you," said Prisca. "At least the Rider who brought her picked her on her power…"

Bedella nodded curtly.

"True," she said. "You appear to have settled in well enough I suppose."

Prisca bowed. There was not a lot that could be profitably said. She murmured a pretty thanks to Bedella without specifying what the thanks might be for.

Dismissed by the Weyrwoman with a wave of the hand, Prisca and Gwesara hustled Ideena, still whining, into the female candidate quarters. The things she was complaining about as they deposited her in a sleeping chamber were that she had no idea how to deal with her clothes and who was going to bring her chest of belongings in, and where would it fit in such poky surroundings.

Gwesara and Prisca had to go outside to laugh without being offensive. Keilla joined them.

"Is she for real?" she asked.

"Unfortunately, yes," said Gwesara.

"Is that her chest? Oh MY!" said Keilla. It was a big clothes chest of leather bound with metal. "She'll never lift that on her own."

"All she has to do is ask for help," said Prisca. "But as she started off by ordering Gwesara and me about, she'd better be very polite if she does ask."

"I'll tell her," said Keilla and went back in.

"I almost want to listen to that," said Gwesara.

"Almost but I think maybe not quite," said Prisca. "Anyway, here comes someone else."

The someone else almost fell off the transporting Blue dragon, thanking him and his Rider with quick, nervous courtesy, snatching up her carisac and looking warily at the two girls.

"We don't bite," said Prisca, dryly, "though I don't guarantee the same of all the candidates."

"Oh, er, thank you!" said the girl. "Daraleen; Craftbred, My father is a Harper; he teaches at Telgar Hold."

"Oh, I see. You're used to snotty little girls then," said Prisca.

Daraleen flushed.

"Yes, and though my father didn't like the idea of me coming here, he thought it was better than having retribution fall on me when they find out it was me who paid them back for all the pinching and slapping and nastiness," she said.

"Oh, hello, Harper-trained imagination?" said Gwesara, sounding interested.

"I was pretty desperate," said Daraleen. "They had said if I was a Harper's brat I should entertain them – they made me dance and pricked my legs with bodkins to make it livelier. So I put hotroot juice in all their underlinen."

"Sounds fair to me," said Prisca.

"Well it wasn't because they were going to punish the laundry drudges and I was about to own up when the Search dragon came, and my father talked him into taking me and said he'd tell them for me. He - the Rider - said I had enough power, so here I am, and I hope my father will be all right, but I was so scared they'd make me do something that would kill me. But I couldn't let them flog the laundry drudges, could I?"

Gwesara and Prisca exchanged looks.

"You'll do," said Prisca, having picked that idiom up in the Reaches.

"Do for what?" asked Daraleen.

"It means, you're a good person," said Prisca. "You'll do just fine as a friend. Only if you want to Impress, you need to learn not to make so diffident."

"I hadn't actually thought about wanting to Impress, or not," said Daraleen. "Dragons don't scare me, but people scare me, and father says there are some scary people here, and so I don't know if I want to stay."

"I don't think you have a hope at a Queen," said Gwesara, judiciously, "Though I might be wrong! But we have a plan to view the other eggs too, and if any of us Impresses a Green, to stand by each other. Are you up for that? after all, once you're Impressed, if you hate the formality here, you can always ask to transfer to High Reaches Weyr where they're all pretty friendly – so Prisca says."

"I was a candidate there when I was too young and foolish to make the most of my opportunities," said Prisca. It seemed like another life! In truth, the idea of lying around most of the day now seemed horrifying; the exercises she did in the morning filled her not with exhaustion as exercise had done at first in the Weyr, but with exhilaration and energy.

"Oh! well if I can do that…" Daraleen was clearly thinking, hard. "I think I could face Thread, I've walked sweep. Dragons are beautiful. I wouldn't really want to be a Weyrwoman; and father said I wasn't talented enough to apprentice properly, or I could have gone to the Harper Hall. I play and sing well enough, better than an amateur, but not well enough to be more than a very mediocre Journeyman, and father said that while girls were getting established it was necessary to be better than very good. I take his point; a misfortune for me to be born at the wrong time."

"Or at the right time to make a point and start some much-needed changes here," said Prisca. "Harpers serve in more than one way, as I've heard often enough – usually accompanied by some cheeky Harper tapping his nose and grinning."

Doraleen laughed.

"Well, I've heard that too," she said. "Father is supposed to be helping with the attitudes of the Ranking children in Telgar, and I was supposed to be an example of a nicely brought up girl, but they don't care about my manners, only that I'm low born beside them and should drudge for them."

"I should like to see them under the care of the High Reaches Weyr folk," said Prisca. "No single rooms there for the girls, nor a drudge, nor privileges – we do seem to be given some respect and privileges here by the way the Riders are circumspect, is that right?" she appealed to Gwesara.

"Yes, we will be expected to do lessons in the mornings and some gentle exercises in the afternoons too," said Gwesara, "but as candidates for a Queen, any one of us might be very important in twenty days time so the Riders tread warily, in case someone later takes retribution."

"Shards!" said Prisca, in horror. "That wouldn't happen in the Reaches – anyone of a taking retribution nature would be sat on firmly by T'lana, the Weyrlingmistress, or Pilgra, the senior Weyrwoman. Or L'rilly, who interferes constructively," she added. "And Riders who were incorrect in their behaviour would pretty soon be told off by someone – probably one of the female Green Riders, they're pretty vocal – though I've never seen it happen. Anyone misbehaving, I mean. I've heard someone disappointed after a mating flight has been known to be more insistent than is proper, and female candidates are told to put a knee where it will do most good," she added.

"I DO wish I was at High Reaches," said Gwesara.

"Well, we need to make it more like that here," said Prisca, firmly. "Good, we have a cadre of three of us to stand for Greens too. I'm in two minds about inviting Keilla."

"She'd blurt it out an instant and get us into trouble," said Gwesara, "and I don't think she's awfully sensitive, she wouldn't understand."

"I fear you may be right," said Prisca. "Y'lara, also seabred, is pretty blunt, but she notices things and they say she's awfully kind if you go to her with troubles even if she's a bit brusque. I can't see Keilla being someone to go to with troubles; and Dragonriders protect and serve."

"Well that's a new one on me," said Gwesara.

"It's in the Charter," said Prisca.

"It is," agreed Daraleen. "It's why father isn't impressed by the Weyr, because they don't always follow the Charter."

"I guess I need to study it," said Gwesara.

"I can help!" said Daraleen.

Prisca had been about to offer, but something told her that if Daraleen could help her new weyrbred friend, it would do her the world of good. There was much about the strained look on Daraleen's face that spoke of ongoing bullying of a kind that had left her on the verge of mental breakdown; and the pranking of the other girls as much an expression of how close she was to snapping as any childishness. And at least an expression of pressure that was fighting back, rather than leaping off the fireheights as a weaker character might have done.

The girl was too badly bullied to be a Dragonrider if Impression were to happen immediately, but Prisca knew a few of the stories of the Green Rider girls of High Reaches Weyr and she knew that those with worse backgrounds had blossomed with encouragement and appreciation. The daughters of Meron, for example, Imbelinne and Ipominea, now I'linne and – Prisca had heard – Po'nea, who had been systematically ill treated. Daraleen had a supportive father which should help. If there were two Green Rider females, it was a start – and a support for whichever one of them, Gwesara or herself, had the Queen. Prisca had completed her growing up in realising that it did not actually matter too much which of them was a Queen Rider as long as she herself was present to bring in the new ideas from outside. And if she were a Rider of any colour that would help. Having a confederate who also Impressed a Green would be even better. So far Daraleen was the best bet.

"Why is their a trunk out there in the bowl?" asked Daraleen as they went to the cavern.

"Because Ideena is too full of herself to make do with less than a trunkful for three sevendays, and too lazy to move it herself and too discourteous to ask for help with it," said Prisca. "If she manages to ask nicely one of us will give her a hand. But not unless. Though I see a couple of drudges approaching; Gwesara, please tell me that Queen candidates are not so indulged."

"I don't know, we never had any in my recollection" said Gwesara in disgust "but it wouldn't surprise me. You wouldn't believe what some of the sons of Brown and Bronze Riders get away with when they're standing. And then," she laughed a slightly spiteful laugh, "they wonder why they don't get Bronzes themselves."

"Well, well!" said Prisca, "dragons know; and given the choice they don't like lazy toerags. Which is why I never Impressed. Do they Impress at all?"

Gwesara shrugged.

"Often there's not many more boys than eggs so yes… I think there should be more."

Prisca was shocked.

"There should be at least twice as many boys as eggs, preferably three times as many. We need to subvert as many girls as we can to give the Greens more of a choice at least, which gives the other colours more choice too."

Gwesara brightened.

"Good thought!" she said.

oOoOo

The next candidate arrived while they were in the cavern showing Daraleen to a cave. This one had golden hair and blue eyes and the knots of the Weavercraft support staff.

"Hello everyone!" she said, "My name's Trayana, my father is a Master Weaver, and isn't this exciting? I'm just so happy to be here, it's such an adventure!"

"Pleased to meet you," Prisca came forward first and introduced the others to the bubbly girl. She seemed a likely sort of girl in some respects; but seemed very young for her age. Prisca decided not to tell her about viewing eggs and caught Gwesara and Daraleen by the arm to draw them to one side to tell them why, while Trayana bubbled happily on to a bored Ideena, a sneering Mendra and a faintly amused Keilla.

"Not her," said Prisca.

"She seems to have a good attitude," frowned Gwesara, "why not? listen to her enthusing about beautiful dragons saving Pern."

"And can you imagine her remaining quiet about beautiful eggs viewed clandestinely?" asked Prisca.

"Good point, actually," conceded Gwesara.

"In a turn or two…" said Daraleen.

"And maybe we could point her in the direction of High Reaches or Igen, which I believe is also opening to female Green Riders when she doesn't Impress here for being too young for the job," said Prisca.

Gwesara nodded.

"Well, we shall keep an eye on her," she said, "and at least protect her from the others."

"Indeed!" said Daraleen, with feeling. "She does seem nice, and we don't want her spirit being destroyed by being continually carped at by those nasty ones."

Prisca reflected that a protective and crusading spirit would do wonders for Daraleen's self confidence!