Chapter 24

J'enia was so happy.

Shehereth was the most wonderful dragon on Pern, and Igen the nicest Weyr to be living in, with all her friends and family! Time flew as Shehereth grew – almost visibly, V'sheren teased the tiny girl.

"She'll overtake Ramoth at this rate and be the biggest dragon for the smallest dragongirl!" he quipped.

J'enia laughed. She suffered no inferiority complex for her small size; she knew she was fit and strong enough to throw sacks of firestone when it was needed. Indeed, she was starting to do so, to toss them up to L'issa and her clutchmates as they ferried firestone to the fighting wings, to save time.

J'enia and R'ban were also taking turns sensing weather; and on learning what they were doing, a previously Impressed lad of the clutch before also admitted to sensing weather. L'kerel was seabred, and his entire family had weather sensing skills, so he assumed it was normal. G'narish promptly asked if he had sisters, often despised by Seaholders; and on discovering that he had, the Weyrleader determined to Search them for the next clutch!

L'kerel took it upon himself, with R'ban's enthusiastic help, to winnow through every weyrling to discover if there were any other skills and talents to be discovered. They discovered one minebred lad who knew where there were natural fissures in rock, and whether a delving would be dangerous, invaluable when expanding the Weyr, as G'narish agreed. There were two lads who knew exactly where dragons were, who were promptly given training in using flamethrowers, to add to their dragon's flame, when the young dragons learned firestone chewing, because they would be safe to carry flamethrowers as they knew when not to flame through sensing the other dragons. There was also one boy who could picture star patterns for anywhen, to enable timing it to be more accurate.

G'narish was amazed at the undisclosed talent in his Weyr! He then sent S'sher to winnow through the blooded Riders as the two boys had done through the weyrlings.

This threw up another Rider with an innate feel for time, a skill he confessed sheepishly to time it more often than G'narish would have considered desirable; another weatherwise, and a man who had, in the Oldtime, spoken to shipfish before he Impressed. Large numbers could sense power in individuals, and most also claimed to feel uncomfortable if unexpected danger threatened. One ageing Brown Rider claimed he had developed this sense to help him dodge Thread though it was not Threadsense as the young Queenrider felt it; and S'sher saw no reason to doubt his own self assessment. His own sixth sense had urged him to wink between with Shadrath, narrowly avoiding score by so doing, without being conscious WHY he felt the urge.

It was an interesting study; and G'narish hoped to compare notes with T'bor, who claimed the largest number of recorded sensitives and talents in all the Weyrs of Pern. G'narish was beginning to wonder if that record was partly because the Weyrleader of High Reaches had actually asked about such talents as much as the High Reaches reputation for encouraging eccentricities. G'narish could see no use in being able to speak to shipfish – not for a dragonrider, anyway – but was delighted with the other talents at his disposal! With several people who were weatherwise, each could study a smaller area in more detail, and be on hand in each Wing to give more immediate warning of localised weather conditions!

oOoOo

Meantime, J'enia helped sense weather and was as contented as any girl might be; and was mightily shocked after having been hurling sacks of firestone one day when B'noria walked up behind her, and said,

"I'll walk right behind you into our weyr, J'enia, so none of the boys see."

"See what?" demanded J'enia.

"You're all over blood. Didn't you feel anything? No belly pain?"

"Oh, is that what it is? I thought I'd eaten too much breakfast," said J'enia. "I didn't pay any account too it, thought I'd work it off and here it is gone."

B'noria gave here a twisted grin.

"Oh, you're going to be one of the lucky ones, I suppose," she said, without rancour, "who bleeds easily and without even noticing. C'mon; let's get you into a bath and I'll fetch your sanitary diapers and clean clothes."

"Thanks," said J'enia, "Ah well, it was too good to last, not having them. I guess that makes me all grown up for real."

Tall B'noria laughed.

"Grown up, maybe, but not very far!" she teased.

"Pine tree," retorted J'enia cheerfully.

Periods were tedious; but J'enia was indeed one of the lucky ones who had no problems. What she found more irksome were the extra lessons, as a Queenrider, in the politics of the region, the alliances and rivalries of Holders beHolden to the Weyr, so that the Weyr might avoid treading on too many toes, Nadira told her; and J'enia had to learn to recognise the colours of the knots of all the Holds. She had known some of the knots in any case; at least in Southern Telgar, Upper Igen and the western parts of Keroon. It was worthwhile for an Itinerant family to quickly recognise knots of a Hold where they had not been welcome; or of a Hold that had been profitable. In this exercise, Silaya and Telara joined C'rya in helping the young Queenrider to learn, also with brief biographies of the personalities in each Hold. Telara's word pictures of Keroonian notables was pithy and cynical; Silaya started to describe some Holders she knew, flushed and muttered that she had not always seen personalities too clearly and might be wrong.

J'enia squeezed the girl's arm.

"Then tell me about their produce, what family they have, and so on," she said.

Silaya nodded gratefully.

It had been a blow not to Impress, and had she not started to find out what it was to make friends, it would have been unbearably humiliating! But now the girl accepted the existence of J'enia's gifts, she acknowledges that the young acrobat was the best choice as Queenrider, and did what she did in sheer joy of living, not in the spirit of showing off. She could see that J'enia was by far the better Queenrider than Nilis would ever be, the only other candidate she had once counted a rival! Silaya was realising that unless she found herself as a person, she would herself be unworthy of Impression; and was trying to understand what it was that set aside those girls who had Impressed, two of them being girls whom she had sneered at for being cripples! Evidently the dragons felt them worthy; and for the first time in her spoilt life, Silaya was trying to look beyond the disabilities to understand L'alla and B'noria as people, because she wanted desperately to be worthy of dragons more than she wanted the glory of riding a Golden Queen. She had felt quite humbled after Impression when her little sister Layanya had run up to her to hug her in commiseration; and Silaya had defended J'enia when her mother asked disapprovingly who that girl WAS, for she was no family SHE knew. Silaya had said that J'enia was Craftbred, the daughter and granddaughter of Masters; for the Weyr DID acknowledge her craft. It was no big thing for Silaya to lie to her mother, but in the presence of dragons, the girl was glad that it was only a technical lie. Her mother had lost interest after that, and had gushed excess sympathy and suggested that now the chance at a Golden Egg was gone, dear Silaya should return home and find a nice husband.

Silaya had no intention of returning home, and had murmured that as G'narish hoped to build up numbers, one could never tell if another Golden egg might soon be laid, and being in residence was an advantage. When little Layanya had hugged her again and suggested she might always ride a Green Dragon now girls were allowed to, Silaya ignored her mother's cry of outrage and started considering the matter seriously. Layanya's opinion – other than her new, tentative, weyr friendships – was, she found, the only one that counted. She realised in shock that she scarcely knew her parents, for they had provided her with expensive gifts and clothes all her life and had found very little time to actually spend with her at all! And if Layanya thought it suitable to stand for a Green dragon, it was worth considering!

It took her some courage to approach V'sheren; but Silaya managed it, looking down her nose, firmly.

"Yes, Silaya?" V'sheren sounded bored; in truth the Weyrlingmaster was disappointed by her arrogant expression, having hoped that the girl had grown up, and having jumped to the conclusion that J'enia's influence was either too far removed with the Queenrider's extra duties or that jealousy over the other girl's Impression had soured the Ranking Silaya.

Silaya quailed inwardly, and she looked even more down her nose.

"I wanted to ask if, next clutch, it was within order for me to ask to stand for a Green egg," she said.

It took a moment for the words to sink in; V'sheren had half expected from her demeanour that she was about to demand to be taken to another Weyr where there was a Queen egg.

"My good kid, it would be eminently in order!" he said, "especially if you can manage not to look at me like I'm something a tunnel cat caught, down in the lower caverns."

"I – I wasn't sir!" Silaya was indignant.

"You were, as it happens; but by that aghast look on your face, you didn't mean it that way," said V'sheren, giving her a half smile. "My good kid, are you telling me that making that request made you nervous enough that you had to face me out like you were warding off Fax invading your uncle's Hold?" he asked.

Silaya flushed.

"I – I thought you might not want me to stay," she said. "I – I've had some ideas that weren't good. But…. But dragons are always right… I want to stay…"

She had tears in her eyes and V'sheren stood to pat her kindly on the shoulder and push her gently into a chair.

"Silaya, I can't say I like your parents much, from what I've seen of them," he said, frankly, "and I think you're a lonely girl who broods too much on unimportant things. If you'll turn your attention to loving dragons and caring for doing your duty, you'll continue to grow in happiness on the path J'enia set you on. You're a clever enough girl, Silaya; you've realised by now that the life you've been leading as a spoilt brat is neither natural nor desirable. And we'll all meet you half way. Especially as your mother gets on my nerves and your father irritates me, and I would do anything I could to help anyone get away from them."

"I – I don't even really know them," confessed Silaya. "I had a nursemaid once, my milk mother, until I was about six. I never had a milk sibling, her baby had died. But she was dismissed because I told my mother I loved my milkmother best in all the world."

V'sheren winced.

"The devastating honesty of a small child! What else should your mother expect, I don't know, farming you off on another woman! Well in your own way, you've had troubles and trauma as much as many kids with less apparent privilege in their backgrounds," he said.

"Can my sister be brought on Search? She's over twelve," said Silaya.

V'sheren blinked, taken aback.

"We weren't thinking of putting kids that young to egg, well, not girls. Too many profound changes to go through that need the loving care of a mother….hmm, I see what you mean. J'enia just gets on with things; she's had a happy, stable childhood and I doubt we'd have let her stand had we known she was not, er, fully a woman. And that would have been our loss."

"Yes, sir; Geeta was right, she was the only real choice," said Silaya, "and – and I had a shock when I became a woman; no-one explained it to me. I want to have Layanya near me."

V'sheren nodded.

"If she wants to come, then – and only if – I'll have her brought in. It is her Right to choose, regardless of what her parents say. I doubt she'd Impress so young; but the wording of the rules concerning the ages of youths does not actually specify that they are male, probably because whoever wrote them never dreamed that any but mature young women would be likely to stand. Or maybe because they took girls that young too in the past," he shrugged, "in any case, she doesn't have to pick three consecutive hatchings as her clutches to stand for. She can wait a turn or two between them, fostering with other weyrbred kids in the meantime."

"Thank you, sir," said Silaya.

"There'll be another one who will be too young as well," said the Weyrlingmaster, "we're picking up some weatherwise Seabred sisters of a weyrling; girls aren't rated by Seaholders. WE will value their talent whether they Impress or not. It'll give the kid someone closer to her in age. NOW! You are to stop worrying, and concentrate on learning to be happy, hmmm?"

"Yes, sir," said Silaya, happily.

The Weyr took care of its own; and now she was one of its own!

oOoOo

The Weyr also took an interest in news of those who had aided them.

When traders arrived with a tale of a minehold devastated by renegades, G'narish himself questioned them closely: and went to see for himself.

After the visit to the parent Hold he summoned all his adult Bronze Riders and Queen Riders, including J'enia.

He started the meeting without preamble.

"The mine to which I took that boy Restin to work off his attack on J'enia has been attacked, apparently by Renegades," he said, curtly. I asked the identities of those killed. All four miners were butchered without compunction. Restin was gone."

J'enia gasped.

"You mean – he escaped and killed them?"

"Unlikely. He had outside help," said G'narish, "the dead men were killed with swords, no makeshift weapon that he might have used. Naturally, as he was our problem, the Weyr will pay restitution to the miners' families; though that hardly covers their loss."

There was a murmur of agreement from the shocked assembled Riders.

"G'narish, could his father be so lost to shame as to have sent men to rescue Restin so brutally?" asked Nadira.

G'narish shrugged.

"I don't know for certain; but it seems likely. I've sent G'nad, who knows the Hold, to hunker down and watch from a vantage point, to see if they take the boy back there: I gave him a distance viewer to check for Restin's face. And I made a report to Lord Corman. He's going to send his own men in covertly, because it's not really our business, except that it is because Restin was sentenced by me."

"It's appalling!" said S'sher. "I know we aren't supposed to cite the change in attitudes from the Oldtime….."

"There are reasons," said V'sheren, "it's because of the expansion during the Long Interval; anyone who could Hold land could become a Holder, there was NOT the tradition of Blood Obligating because there was less need to protect the people, so the new blood took their obligations less seriously, and without the tradition, such things are not passed on. With the need to cover more, this stretched the Weyrs further than they had been stretched in the Oldtime, and made the irritable amongst us Oldtimers more irritable and caused incidents which have widened the breach and made the Holders more inclined to wish to cock a snoot at us and so on."

"If itinerants like my family can keep tradition alive, then so could settled folk," said J'enia. "Fitness to Hold should cover more than just ability to farm land, and turn a profit from it, it should cover adherence to the Charter too. And so few Holderfolk know about the Charter – why, Silaya has never seen it, and only had the vaguest idea what it was, before I explained it. Her main concept was that it enshrined the right of autonomy, which is of course only a small part of it."

"Right enough, young J'enia, but the fact remains that the traditions have not been kept; and we need to know what G'narish thinks we ought to do about it," said C'ril.

"We'll have to put patrols out to keep a watch out for Restin," said G'narish, "he counts as a fugitive from the Weyr."

"J'ton could ask questions in the Igen Holdless cavern and take Voll a picture of him," said J'enia. "L'alla has seen him; she can draw several pictures to send about to ask questions."

G'narish nodded.

"Excellent idea," he said, "organise that, Queenrider J'enia; I'll speak to J'ton."

L'alla was more than ready to make pictures of the bullying boy; and J'enia suggested that little Green Kath could take visualisations via Shehereth to jog L'alla's memory.

"Kath says she can read visualisations from you directly," said L'alla, "she says he looks a nasty man but she will make pictures for me so he can't hurt anyone else. Yes, that helps me recall him better; I'll get to work."

The Weyrleaders were serious; this could be a bad business! G'narish was glad to have the backing of Lord Corman who had honked his outsize nose indignantly and added his own contribution as compensation to the miners.

J'enia too wrote an open letter to the Minehold, expressing her condolences and sorrow that the Weyr had inadvertently let down those good enough to enact deserved punishment on an attempted rapist; and G'narish insisted she sign it 'Queenrider J'enia', feeling that a personal letter of condolence from a Queenrider might go further than mere marks to the two grieving mothers and several siblings. At least only bachelors worked in the smaller out-mines; there were no widows and orphans.

It was a sad time for Pern if a Holder felt able to act in such a way; and privately, G'narish resolved to alert the other Weyrleaders in case Holder Reseder had ambitions to be an Eastern Fax, disregarding the rights of others!

It was all very worrying.