Disclaimer: I don't own Pern. I do, however own most of the characters in this story.

Chapter Seven: Questions and Songs and The Question Song

The trip between was long, and she was glad she had taken a deep breath of air before. It was still cold and black after she had counted to ten. She frantically reviewed the image she had given Thyrath and was horrified to find what it was: the little Green Patch she had dreamt of.

I am here! Do not worry, we are going- it will be long, but we are together. Stay with me. Do not go, Nairyry! The queen dragon kept up a steady flow of encouragement and entreaties to stay. She forced herself to stay awake, to hold the breath.

But at last she faded.

Later, she recalled thinking vaguely that perhaps Lessa and Ramoth must have not taken the crucial breath when they jumped between four hundred turns. Later her queen told her that she lost consciousness from lack of oxygen very near the end. Later she would wonder how, in going back an unknown but vast period of time, she had not had the severe ill affects that Lessa and Ramoth had sustained in their mere –mere?– four hundred Turn jump.

She did not know how long she was between with Thyrath, but it was long, so long.

000

Eventually she heard her dragon again. Nairyry was slumped, gasping, only now conscious, over the great queen's neck.

You wake! you wake! you wake! you wake! You live again! Her dragon's repetition was the first thing she heard.

I- I'm fine now, Dearest. Just… woozy. Like I had a full bottle of Bended white on one go and just woke up from the hangover, she thought. But I'm really fine, now.

Thyrath rumbled under her and she opened her eyes, to see one of the dragon's whirling slowly with the yellow of alarm fading and blues and greens becoming more prominent. Nairyry smiled weakly at her dragon and gave the eye ridges a soothing rub, causing the gold to lower her innermost eyelid in pleasure and contentment.

Then she looked around.

Trees everywhere and a bit of apparently early evening sky with a few stars above. Apparently, from the trees jarred around them, Thyrath had made a crash landing in this new world. A new world… She whispered it to her self, gazing around in awe. Everything was greener, too, rather than the blue-green of Pern.

Do you think… it is Earth? she asked her dragon, not knowing the name of any other world besides her own dear Pern.

I do not know, but it is not my home. I am not… not right here; I feel I don't belong… Thyrath sounded unsure, shaken.

Nairyry frowned. Her dragon might not belong, being a descendant of a creature bioengineered from a creature native to Pern, but she felt oddly… she was home. Her blood sang in her ears, calling out the connection to this place. How strange, she mused, looking around again.

Then Thyrath stumbled and fell on her side, jolting her rider about in the saddle. "Thyrath!" she cried with mind and voice, and freed herself from the straps in a panic. Nairyry raced to her dragon's head, only distantly aware of being heavier than normal on this world as she stumbled, and put one hand on the muzzle.

What's wrong? Are you hurt? The queen shifted her head briefly, then closed all but her last eyelid in pain.

My wing… she said, and her thought was as red with pain as her eyes. Nairyry got up and dashed to her other side. In her dragon's wing joint was a forked stick, as thick as her finger and twice its length with another finger length of each prong sticking through the major joint.

Her rider hesitated then pulled out her belt knife and, working carefully around the green ichor, wing finger bones and arm bone, muscle, wing membrane and hide, cut off the prongs, then yanked out the twig. Thyrath let out a short, half-muffled bellow, then growled.

The queen attempted to unbend her wing, then let it go. It will take time to heal, Nairyry told her with concern as she started bandaging it with strips cut from her flying jacket.

And I cannot fly until it does, confirmed Thyrath. Then she lowered her head, having turned it to see the operation, closed her eyes and fell into an uneasy sleep.

Nairyry looked on helplessly without medicinal supplies, then finished bandaging the great gold wing, working slowly and with a heavy heart, keeping panic at bay.

Her dragon could not go between from the ground or with an open wound, and she could not fly until her wing was healed. They were stranded on a strange world in a strange time without any way to get home again.

Eventually Nairyry curled up in the curve of her dragon's neck and stargazed. She wanted to see W'lam again, to practice music in her weyr with him again. She wanted to fly with Thyrath above the skies again and to swim in the warm Southern waters again.

As she looked up at the sky, so different and so similar to Pern's sky, a tear trickled down her face. Then she drew out her flute and began to play a low, soft tune on it.

That was when she heard the answers from the trees.

000

Jessica Palmer heard the bellow and then crash first, as if someone had just dropped a house on the Wicked Witch of the West in the middle of Central Park, New York. She was walking home from flute lessons… or, rather, her attempts to create something on a flute that would be passable as music. Again the seventeen-year-old wondered why she had ever thought it would be a good idea.

When she heard the crash the first thing she did was jump –it had been just off the path where she was– and drop the case she had been holding, containing her flute. Jess picked up the case, eyes still cautiously in the general direction the crash had come from. A shuffling and an anxious crooning.

She frowned, then carefully, quietly stepped off the path and made her way into the woods, unconsciously clutching her flute case. Jess knelt beside a tree, toppled over by a great force. Carefully she raised her head over it.

In the twilight she blinked, trying to resolve what she saw into something she could get her mind around. But the image stayed the same. She shook her head, braided copper-dyed hair flapping against darkly tanned skin, but it did not change.

A huge golden– dragon (there was no getting around it: a dragon in Central Park) with hide of dull gold rather than scales, crouched in a tangle of knocked-about trees and under brush. On her lower neck an unconscious form slumped, sun-streaked brown hair tumbling over a face.

The form stirred and pushed the hair from its face. A young woman, she was, Jessica saw. Why, except for her at least six-foot-tall frame, her dragon and the clothing she wore (as far as Jessica could tell a tan leather jacket, pants made of some soft material of light blue and dark brown boots not out of place in a rodeo show) she would not have been strange to find in a grocery store.

The woman seemed confused and a little frightened. She smiled shakily at the dragon and gave the gold creature a rub on the ridges over its eyes. Jessica watched her look around, and saw her smile slightly at the stars, which she seemed to find slightly calming.

She frowned, though it was hard to tell in the dim light. And then her dragon stumbled, falling closer to Jessica's hiding place. "Thyrath!" she called, or something like that that. The dragon's eyes were red and –holy crap!– they were whirling, moving! Jessica saw the young woman get out of the belt buckles or whatever was rigged up there and go over to the dragon's head, pause, then turn to the wing.

Apparently previously unnoticed by either of them a forked stick was jammed through the point where all the wing-fingers jointed together. With a morbid fascination but trying to look away and filled with pity, Jessica watched as the dragonrider cut the twig, glanced at her great beast and pulled it out, releasing a half-swallowed bellow and then a growl from the golden beast. The green ooze was disgusting to watch and Jess was glad that the woman took off her leather jacket, showing a lavender shirt of light cloth, and cut strips from it to bandage the wing wound.

The dragon lowered her head to the ground, closed her eyes and apparently went to sleep. Her human friend (rider, for lack of a word that better explained her sitting in a saddle-type thing on the dragon's neck) finished bandaging quickly. She gazed at her golden beauty for a long moment. If they had been facing the right way Jess could have seen her expression, so close they were. In fact, if she had taken two steps out of hiding towards them she would have been able to touch the dragon herself. The idea was tempting.

With a light sigh, worry creasing her face, the dragonrider went and curled up in the curve of her dragon's neck and looked up to the stars. After a little while, just when Jess thought she could slip away unnoticed, she shifted, bringing out- a flute!

She put it to her lips and blew, playing a hunting, sad tune more melancholy than any Jessica had ever heard.

Jessica put her own instrument to her lips and quietly began playing a separate tune, easy, one she made up as she went along, but always following slightly behind the notes lead by the first flutist. That was the way she always was best; she just couldn't follow the music someone else had made up.

She was startled to find that a third person in the strange song was singing, not words but sounds, like a clear note from a crystal class or a light glass bell. It put her in mind of the elf-singing from the Lord of the Rings movies she had seen.

000

For a second Nairyry stopped playing in astonishment, and when the other two falteringly continued she realized they had been weaving their songs to hers and she slid forward to her knees and continued, turning her aimless piping into the tune to Lessa's Question Song.

When the song came to an end she lowered the flute and waited, looking between the directions of other flutist and of the not-quite-singer.