Weyr War

Summary: AU Five hundred Turns span the time from the end of the second Pass to the beginning of the third – a long Interval that breeds mistrust and feuds among the dragonriders. This is the story of the beginning, a path that will lead to the greatest war Pern will ever experience.

Author's Note: As per Anne's preferences, I am not playing with any of her characters, though this is her world that I use. All events mentioned in this fanfic to the end of the Second Pass are accurate to canon insofar as it is known to the books and to fan-speculation. (The female bluerider thing – which is often debated and, as far as I know, unresolved in fandom – I leave up to grabs, although it will be used in this fanfiction to a different effect.) From the first year of the Second Interval, however, the events and characters are of my creation alone unless otherwise noted, though they may have been guided by the plotted events in the original series. The idea of Pern itself belongs, as ever, to Anne McCaffrey.

Another note worth making: this plotline will not lead to Anne McCaffrey's other books. It's an offshoot, a might-have-been that I thought worth exploring. Do not expect F'lar, Moreta, or white dragons here without much furious debating beforehand. Also, this is a prequel to another story, although whether I'll write them in parallel or sequentially is another question as of yet unanswered.

There may be events in this story you consider uncanon. I would welcome the corrections, unless your suggestion is to scrap the plot entirely, in which case I'll welcome you to find something else to read.

Enjoy.

Chapter One: The Hatching

"You're going to be late…" Linden smiled, swiping lazily at his companion's wrists, which were presently occupied with the less than noble task of laundry. Kalyndrel, dark-haired and well-accustomed by now to the other Candidate's efforts at distraction, deftly flicked the cloth out of his way and poked her tongue out at him in lazy triumph.

"Late for what?" She retorted blithely, grimacing at the garment she had inadvertently shaken out over the table. "Move your feet. The smell's going to stain the clothes. Anyway, it's not as if the Candidate Master says anything useful at those meetings. He's supposed to be briefing us on dragons and how to act at Hatchings, and instead spends time staring at Dhakeur's big round—"

"I suppose it doesn't matter anyway," the male Candidate mused, crossing his arms as he tilted his chair back. The light caught his hair, spun it into a mass of thready gold, shrouding his features like a halo. "The eggs are pretty hard by now."

"And how would you know?"

He grinned wickedly. "I wasn't the one out sick and cold when Ryesda and Darvadeth decided to break all tradition and let the Candidates touch the eggs for once. Of course," he went on, ramblingly, as the lanky adolescent was wont to do about politics, "she needed that extra touch; she Searched the Lord Holder's daughter and has been taking more tithes than Ista thinks is due to the Weyr since the end of the Second Pass – she needed to get in with the Holder. Having Daddy's little girl write home about how wonderful the Weyrwoman is probably soothed him somewhat."

"And how would you know that?" Her fingers slid in and out of the folds with disconcerting quickness – but then, she'd been born to chores, and would have been surprised if laundry, of all things, did not come to her easily now. "Been sneaking into closets with her lately, have you?"

He laughed, a sharp bright sound, and the echo was snatched up in his eyes to glow a brilliant amber. Consciously, she touched the edges of her own eyes, which were a bleached grey like stone and ice in the wintry High Reaches. "Jealous?"

"You'd wish, wouldn't you? Kick your feet off, I said. There's barely room enough for all the clothes as it is without you putting great muddy boots up on the hardwood. And no… all I wish is that you'd tell me how you found these things out. It seems as if you know half the things that go on around the Weyr before the Weyrwoman herself."

Linden snorted, shifted his feet and did not drop them. "As if that would be hard. She complains so much that her own folk don't tell her things half the time just to put off listening to her prattle."

She turned to him at last, half-laughing as the rumpled shirt fell from her hands. "Get your feet off!" She pleaded, her mouth curling irresolutely, and shoved them abruptly. This brought no visible effect save to draw him to lean towards her, gripping her wrists as they wrestled, back and forth until, with a last burst of effort, she reeled back against the hard spiny chair, his eyes on hers, luminous.

"I win." He murmured, the words dropping into her mouth. Her tongue dried of words – this was as close as he had been, had ever been since she had first met him at the Weyr seven months ago... She had never asked him about the way his voice had burned itself into her mind, his features imprinted as solidly in her thoughts as though they had been etched there. It had been like that since the fourth month, and she could not bear to ask. But here he was, his eyes glimmering faintly with something she thought she recognized, and she opened her mouth to ask…

"Isn't this cozy."

They whirled at the sound, his knuckles whitening over her bones. She stifled a cry with the sight of the Weyrwoman leaning against the door.

Age had not been kind to Ryesda as they had to others: the goldrider's slim brown mane was rapidly thinning out, her sharp black eyes misting and framed like a Weaver selling threads stretched across her skin. The force of her personality was no longer evident in the sagging bones, though the clarity of her remark showed how little appearance could be trusted. The Weyrwoman was still the Weyrwoman for a reason, though she was seventy-seven and, wagging tongues snapped, should have passed the reins to Haro and her Risyth by now.

"I thought," the woman went on smoothly, pacing across the floors in a few long strides, "that the Candidates were supposed to be working. Yet I find only half the shift here, and those two doing anything but that." She stopped; the glowbaskets' light fell short of her face and her eyes gleamed in the dark. "It's not the First Pass anymore; we don't need babies being made at every Turn."

Linden was the first to recover, throwing back to her a fleeting look full of colors and uncertainty. She divined only Follow my lead as a message before he spoke and she was immersed in heartpounding wariness. "It was only a game, Weyrwoman," he began strongly, but was interrupted by her laugh, shrill and caustic.

"Only a game?" the dragonrider said silkily. "Games should not be played during chore-time, Linden. You, of all people, should know that." Her gaze lifted, and Kalyndrel saw mazes, labyrinths, puzzles that looped back into each other and could not be understood. She said: "I never liked you."

"Weyrwoman," Linden began, with a strange helpless tone that she had never heard from him before. But only when he turned back towards her, his mouth shaping impossible, belated warnings, did she realize that it was not to him the Weyrwoman spoke in that muted, mocking tone.

The Weyrwoman did not notice: her eyes were fixed on Kalyndrel herself, and there was nothing at all subdued about the terrible expression imprisoned within. "Never liked you." She repeated gently, alighting into a smile as she approached. "Surely you've known; surely you've known. And haven't you wondered…"

An unintelligible noise sounded out over the Weyr, muffling the rest of her speech. Embedded within the triumphant blare were words, and Kalyndrel did not know who it was or how it spoke into her mind, only that it resonated there like a memory newly created. It said: Come to the Hatching Grounds now, Candidates.

And added: If any of my children go between because you are late, I will hunt human instead of herdbeast for my breakfast in a few days.

Then the presence was gone, leaving her scrambling after a creature she had not known was there in an ocean of noise that went on around her, twining together into exultance for something she did not quite understand.

Linden, who was Weyrbred and knew the signs, lifted his head, dazzled. "The Hatching."

"The Hatching." The Weyrwoman acknowledged, grimly. She drew a step away from Kalyndrel, then, her mouth whittled down by tension into a thin dark line. "You heard Darvadeth." She snapped when they did not move. "All the Candidates to attend! For Faranth's sake we must not have any more betweenings¸ do you know what the Weyrwoman of Igen said the last time we had a Hatching. She wanted to lend us one of her queen eggs because her own Weyr had too farking many! And now that we've got a third queen-to-be on the Sands, there will be no mistakes. Go!"

Linden turned, saluted her lazily with a thin smile, but Kalyndrel simply ran, hurtling down the corridors as the sound of dragons hummed in her ears. Her arms, she knew, were trembling, but the nervousness had not yet found her legs and she planned to dash until they gave out. With this in mind, she turned corners, dove under Weyrfolk carrying great platters for the Hatching feast, ran smack into several other white-clad Candidates and did not pause to apologize until her feet met the secure smoothness of the Candidate Barracks, where, at last, they began to slow.

Ophidia, who had been Searched around the same time as Kalyndrel herself, snatched at her hands jubilantly as she sprinted into the Barracks. Her dark eyes were merry and distinctly pleased as she fingered her own gleaming white robes and tossed her short black hair, leaping up and down. She was a foot shorter than Kalyndrel, but the elder girl was accustomed to this: at five feet and ten inches, she towered over a great many people.

Nevertheless, her friend, not about to let Kalyndrel pass the day away in dreams, seized the moment and tossed a robe at her head; it hit Kalyndrel squarely across the nose and landed in her waiting hands.

"I love you very much," the smaller girl said, "but not enough to miss the Hatching. Faranth, Kal, have you no sense? Our first Hatching ever and you're going to be late!"

"You're kind." Kalyndrel muttered, tossing her a sly grin that was promptly knocked away as Ophidia aimed a pair of sandals at her forehead. Knowing a hurry when she saw it, she ducked into the billowy garment, trying to find the exit. "All right, all right, I'm hurrying! No worries: the Hatching's only just begun. We'll only miss the first egg."

"Only?" The other girl squealed as her friend shimmied darkly through the outfit. "Do you realize I had a bet on with Taset on about the first egg to Hatch? I said it'd be the small pale one to the edge, and that it would be a brown!" She stomped her feet, irritably. "That was four marks, right there!"

"Your fault for betting so much." Kalyndrel said candidly, and plucked the laced sandals off of her forehead before slipping into them and scurrying off.

They made it into the Hatching Grounds just as a splitting sound like muted, condensed thunder rattled across the rocky walls. "Just in time." Kalyndrel murmured in satisfaction, interpreting the rising roar of the crowd arranged in the Stands as the feverish excitement that was beginning to grip her own bones as she strode across the Sands. "Ow!" Heat seared across her feet, and she cursed the sadistic Weyrwoman, Weyrleader, or whoever it was whose idea had been to expose the tender heels of Candidates to a dragon's incubation station.

"Quiet." Ophidia pushed her finger lightly against Kalyndrel's lips, standing on tiptoe for a moment in order to do so. Rapidly, she grabbed the taller girl's wrist. Her face shone brilliantly as she elbowed her way through the crowd, dragging her friend behind her. ""Scuse me, pardon me, coming through—woah!" Her eyes brightened as they broke into an open space at last. Conversationally, she said, "Wow. The Weyrwoman really did go all out for this one, didn't she?"

Mutely, Kalyndrel nodded. The Barracks had been crowded with Candidates from Searches all over Pern. It was a wonder that she had managed to find her robe intact and, the superstitious Ophidia would have claimed, proof that Faranth smiled down upon this Hatching.

"Hey," Whirling, she found Linden slipping casually into place beside her, with an indolent, lovely smile for the boy who had grudgingly parted to allow her friend through. He nodded, not towards the rocking eggs, but towards the throng ranged across the Grounds, his features lit with a private smile. "Crowded, isn't it?"

On her other side, leaning across as if Kalyndrel no longer existed, Ophidia laughed. "My last count was somewhere around a hundred." She told him, her voice fulsome and tremulous with brightness. "She's stuffed the Grounds with underage and overage Candidates; all that she can to try and lord it over Ista's Weyrwoman."

Linden shook his head, but he, too, was grinning. "Well," he said, "she's led us through the last Fall, she can't be all bad, and we should be a little more considerate of her eccentricities."

Between them, Kalyndrel bit back a grin. "The Lords and Ladies get to be eccentric. When a Candidate gets squished by her two friends, she just goes plain mad." She elbowed the both of them playfully before her eyes wandered across the Sands and widened into the gasp she could not voice. Catching the arrowing, direct glance, Linden looked up sharply to follow its path, and made a long, slow whistle as the first hatchling broke wetly from its shell. Promptly, with a clumsiness characteristic of most dragonets, it creeled weakly and tumbled into the Sands, making desperate swimming gestures and piteous noises.

Impulsively, she drew away from her friends, her feet taking several unconscious steps towards the dragonet before Ophidia caught her fingers and held them, fiercely. "Don't." The word was lowly spoken, harsh and true. "See, it's already being helped." She was proven true as a boy from the closer edge of the crowd moved tenuously out towards the thrashing dragonet, prying away the sand that held it still flailing.

It blinked, once, in its sudden freedom, sand falling from its encrusted eyelid. Then it moved carelessly away, swinging tail scoring him once across the chest.

"And that," said Linden dryly beside them, "is what happens to generosity at Hatching-time." Nevertheless, his eyes widened too as all around them the shells flaked away from the shells to reveal the dragonets gleaming beneath their porcelain disguises. Blues and greens tumbled about in a whirl of dizzying, spectacular colors, like acrobats at a Gather, while browns pranced determinedly across the Sands and bronzes made their plaintive attempts at dignity known. In the midst of this colorful confusion, the sandy dragonet moved quietly, like a shadow, inspecting each Candidate without haste or desire as it trailed through the Hatching Grounds.

Kalyndrel, too, watched them stilly as the greens approached her, blinking, before shifting past her, melting into the crowds to find their bondeds. The blues followed suit, and the browns and bronzes did not look at her at all, but ducked through the crowd to collide lovingly into the boys they had sought. And as the hours wore away, their casual jokes became more strained, their features colder, sharper with the intensity of their desires.

Finally, when it had been narrowed down to a scant three eggs upon the Sands, with only browns and blues idling by the boys, Kalyndrel broke.

"I can't do this." She said, lowly. Both her friends snaked her a curious look, and she shook her head sharply as if she thought she could ward away their strange kinds of pity with that gesture. She moved towards the edge of the Sands, where the stones came out from beneath the sands and the Healers stood, their mouths strings frayed and taut with worry. "Let me help you."

"But," one of them, redheaded and young, began tentatively, though his diligent fingers never ceased in winding a bandage about the wounded arm of one of the Candidates she did not recognize, "You're a Candidate."

"I'm an old Candidate," Kalyndrel snapped, more sharply than she had meant, "and the Hatching's almost over. I'm not one to be in denial about what I can and cannot do. Give me that bandage. I can do bandages." When still the junior of the Healers vacillated, she bit out, "Faranth's blessing, that boy's going to bleed himself out while you sit there wondering about whether you should let a Candidate help you or not! I am twenty, was a make-shift Healer taking lessons with the Journeyman stationed at our Hold when I was Searched, and I think it's quite clear that the dragonets don't want me. I can't help there, but I can here. Now give me the bandages or I swear I will wrestle them from your hands and stuff them down your throat."

The boy blinked, once, before giving her the bandages. She immersed herself, then, in the Healers' world, which did not see the beauty in things as they did the madness of the Hatchings, the reckless Candidates who threw themselves before the hatchlings in the hopes that they would Impress and did not. And soon she had whittled down the world to three things: the tasks set before her in each moment in caring for the patients fresh from the Hatching, the space between action and speech where her thoughts drifted, and the ache, numbed, in wondering whether Ophidia or Linden had Impressed yet. She had seen neither of them in the Healers' space, which meant there was a chance…

A sudden roar in the Stands sounded out across the Grounds, but Kalyndrel refused to look up. Whether the last egg Hatched or not, whether they had Impressed or not… there would be time enough to uncover that later, and presently there was a boy with a nasty, jagged wound stretched out across his leg like an emblazonment, and she could not ignore it. (She quashed the spark of a whisper at her ear that said that it was not from the injuries she wanted to run, but from the Hatching where Kalyndrel the conqueror had failed, and that beneath the trappings of bandages and snappishness at the surface was this truth, which she could not erase.)

She was brought back to Pern again, however, as the boy Healer plucked at her sleeve, his freckles countable with the paleness of his face. "M-m-muh." He stuttered, pointing behind her, and she lifted her head, then, only to be struck with a sound like a storm.

I am Liralyth, The voice within her mind rang out, rippling through her memories as if it could leave its imprint on each so that she could pass no moment without recalling this one. It was indescribable: the texture of glass and mystery, the sound of hearts bursting, the sight of suns unraveling to form stars, the taste of laughter against her mind, her skin in a sudden invasion she welcomed with all that she was. And when she turned, she knew what to expect and saw it – a pair of lucent, faceted eyes, tinged with exhaustion and the brilliant pleasure that she understood now as Impression. Why are you wrapping white around his leg?

"Because he's bleeding." The Candidate – no, she was a Weyrling now, wasn't she? – said out loud practically, though her voice shook with something indecipherable. The line between laughter and fatigue had blurred into a state of mind that understood only Liralyth, and perhaps not even that. There was still an edge in her thoughts that did not grasp it, that saw the dragoness looming before her, all graceless and lovable angles, and thought surely she must belong to someone who will come to claim her at any moment. "If we did not, he would die."

That sounds awful. Liralyth said nonchalantly. I would like to eat now.

"My dear, I offer you my congratulations!"

The words echoed across the walls, and several people in the Stands stood to get a better look at the dark-haired woman striding towards her. Kalyndrel herself considered the stranger for several long moments before she caught sight of the winking knot at the woman's throat and understood: Haro, Weyrwoman's second.

I am hungry. Her own queen said again, darkly, addressing the older queenrider this time. She will not listen to me. Why will you not listen to me, Kalyndrel? You are mine. I am yours. We are together.

"She's just a little shocked, I'm sure." Haro assured the dragonet sympathetically, nodding with a conspiratorial wink towards Kalyndrel. "There, there, my dear, it's all right. You've Impressed. You're the newest weyrwoman at Telgar; and much appreciated, I assure you!" She broke into a large, hearty laugh. Beneath her consciousness, Kalyndrel thought, what a booming twit. But before she could disclaim any sort of association, present or future, with the other goldrider, Haro had already moved forward, guiding Kalyndrel with gentle little pushes towards the space that had been cleared for the Weyrlings and loaded with buckets of meat for the dragonets.

Food! In an instant Liralyth had bolted towards the buckets, moving faster than she might have supposed was possible for a newborn hatchling.

Haro, behind her, merely grinned. "Fast little thing who knows her own mind, isn't she?" She asked, rhetorically. This was followed by a hearty clap on Kalyndrel's back, and the Weyrling nearly fell over from the force of it. "Ah well; they're all like that at one point, and trust me, someday you'll miss it – even if that's not right now!" She began to march away, leaning over several of the new Weyrlings to make her little comments, which they received with nervous laughter.

Kalyndrel, watching, thought: How easy it is to win the hearts of children who are afraid.

But what mind would think of that, and use it this way?

But she was distracted, then, as the last hatchling wobbled to a weak stand, her eyes murky and fearful. It was, Kalyndrel noted with distant surprise, the sandy dragonet from the beginning of the Hatching. It did not look as though she would last for much longer: indeed, the Weyrling was surprised that she had lasted so long at all. Liralyth seemed an unlikely candidate herself to have lasted any longer than twelve seconds away from food by the way she was eating.

Nevertheless, as if spurred by their attention, the dragonet looked up plaintively towards the assembly, making a quick, strident bugle before she moved towards her lifemate at last. Kalyndrel twisted away from Liralyth, absorbed in her meal, pressed by mad instinct to look away from the shouting, clear chaos that surged near the buckets. At first, she saw nothing. Then, from darkness, the long, direct motion of his strides broke out across the Sands as Linden threw his arms around a great green dragonet. To Kalyndrel's wonder, the dragonet did not tear him in two but preened against his caress in the unmistakable gesture of an Impression, and she felt something dim and ebb away beneath the tension of her muscles as she saw them together, replaced with the coldness of dread.

He was L'den now, a greenrider… to her gold.

to be continued