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With a few days at Dragonhope behind them, the trio of now-close friends stuck together all the time. Mruna seemed able to get Cethian to work pretty hard - though she always sounded a little bossy when she got down to it. However, bossy or not, Mruna's ability to stick people together and get a job done was obvious. In fact it was obvious enough that the weyrling trainer as well as the Weyrwoman both noticed it.

Cethian's 'fear' of the dark was hardly something that ever came up here, though she knew that this far north nights lasted longer and days grew short during winter. It was the way she looked out over the weyr's open area with glassy, entranced eyes that led to Mruna asking her something odd.

"You don't like being inside, do you?" She said. The wind picked up her long hair, but she packed it into a knot and ignored it as it whiped around.

"No, no I don't. It's ... hard to explain I guess. I mean, I've lived inside all my life, and we all have to get used to being under tons of rock and stone when thread falls. But... it's scarier for me to stay inside, than to be out where the wind blows. I love this place."

"Then you're probably going to be great on a dragon's back, huh?" Mruna said and laughed.

They'd both noticed Saebastyn's penchant for gathering information, and began to use it to their advantage. Mruna asked around, trying to find a place that had flitter eggs. Surely someone had a proddy green's clutch right?

But there was no such luck in this northern weyr. Eventually, K'roohan and two other riders of smaller blues summoned the trio. With their bags packed already, there was little more to do than bid Dragonhope a temporary farewell, and hope that Tripaldi welcomed them and could use them as much as they had.

Before they would go there, though, a side trip. K'roohan heard about the kids search for flitters, and he knew of a place that had a few ready for bonding. They'd travel to Shourai Weyr first, an exotic place which seemed a bit far to travel for flitters.

The first travel that Saebastyn had on a dragon's back was a surprising one for him. He'd thought it would be bumpy, jolting, dangerous. But what he found instead on the back of this beautiful blue, was that the air only took his breath away if he let it. That if he clung on just so with his legs, he was in no real danger of falling. It wasn't like riding a runner or donkey! More like... A huge fallen log or a smooth warm stone, just big enough to be uncomfortably wide on the legs... But then he was sitting behind the rider, not where the rider sat- should he impress, he'd be sitting on the more comfortable location right behind the neck! He caught on fast. His fears faded immediately.

Cethian's ride was also one of beautiful discovery, but more because of the view she was afforded. No space around her that clung, no overhang, nothing pressing down on her from all sides - nothing but wide open air and clouds! The wings of the blue she rode upon beat a steady rhythm, she fell into it with ease, and looked around her with no distress at all. She even pointed and turned, looking around and down at the tiny cotholds and fishing villages below them as they flew south-east.

Mruna's ride, the second she'd had in the time since Search, was a pleasant one indeed. K'roohan yelled over his shoulder about where they were headed, giving her clear instructions on how to remain calm in the blackness between.

"I'm ready," she said, "I've been ready."

He nodded, waited for confirmation that the other two had instructed their own charges on breathing and closing one's eyes while teleporting. Once that was done, he raised his hand in the air and commanded Takanath between.

***

Only Saebastyn gasped for breath on the other side of their journey, the chill leaving his bones quickly enough but reminding him that he'd spent most of his own childhood on a sick bed waiting for the warmth to return. He glanced to the side, seeing Cethian cheering and laughing loud enough to be heard over the wind and the two-wings-wide space between them. He coudn't see Mruna on the brown because not only was the rider F'nek in the way, but the bulk of that brown was much larger than both blues combined!

Mruna continued to hold on to K'roohan as they circled the weyr below, but by now she was bold enough to begin turning her head around and appraising the area. It was far from their starting point. Very far indeed.

It might have been farther than they thought - not only was Shourai deeply farther south where the climate even in winter was deliciously temperate, there were dragons flying to greet them that just looked a lot different than those found at Dragonhope!

And even a couple of those Dragonhope dragons were odd...

One could compare the Shourai dragons with a kind of gemstone brilliance that Cethian's little bag of semi-precious and common tumbled rocks had.

Mruna giggled when Cethian asked if she could bring them along - she'd not ridden on a dragon before that, so she didn't know how little difference a pocket full of stones would make in their progress through the sky!

That night she'd escaped her home Hold, her mother, her family, it was the most spectacular flight in the world. K'roohan hadn't done any fancy flying, but it was in the dead of night and no one really knew quite where they had come from. Was it a local dragon? Was it a foreign one? In the courtyard who could say? Only right up close could anyone have seen it was a brown anyway, and with the size of this dragon it might have been thought a bronze!

Only, in Dragonhope, they seemed to grow their bronzes quite large indeed...

Cethian gasped in awe as the multi-colored group of dragons came up into the air. Vizth, L'go's blue, bellowed a greeting before Takanath could get one out, and the brown turned with a bit of a snide growl on his lips. Their spat forgotten momentarily, the dragons from Tripaldi welcomed them.

"They're not just green! Or blue!" Cethian yelled, "they're so pretty!"

"They are different," L'go said, "I've never been here, they're ... very different!" Indeed, the emerald and ruby, sapphire dragons that surrounded them were so much brighter and vivid in coloration than their Dragonhope companions!

"You'll be on your way soon enough! Get a bit of rest first," said one of the local weyrbrats, "but come see! There's a firelizard hatching!"

Cethian and Saebastyn glanced at one another, and hopped down from their respective blue mounts. They both thanked the riders, but only Saebastyn bowed to the dragon as well. Their bags all taken by quickly moving drudges, the trio went inside.

K'roohan remained while the blue riders left for home. "I've a message from S'xon to weyrwoman Tebsiqeu," he told one of the smarter looking folks gathered. "Could you take me to her office?" Ah - now it became obvious why K'roohan would be here, with whatever messages he might carry around from weyr to weyr, he might as well use the opportunity to bring some experience to the trio instead of just dropping them off.

As he was meeting with her, the trio was dragged into one of the kitchens where a group of shaking eggs in a basket had been put on a table. Spare scraps of meat were passed around, and soon enough a couple of the eggs hatched.

"But... those flitters don't have wings!" Saebastyn said abruptly. One of the locals nudged him.

"Doesn't matter, they're able to fly about even though."

"Odd, ain't it!" Said another. They laughed, and stuffed food down the eager gullet of their own colorful flitters, while another couple hatched.

This time it was a lovely pale colored whitish-crystal, a female, who stuck her wide nose into Saebastyn's hand. She looked up at him and belched, blinking, asking for more with a pleading expression in her whirling eyes. He could feel that she was hungry, but not as hungry as all that.

"How impolite," he said, "Poli," he called her.

Another wandered around the table until Cethian couldn't take it any longer. She dangled a piece of fatty meat over the emerald's head, and she snapped at it quickly. "Look at her eat!" She laughed.

There were no other flitters after a moment, none having gone to Mruna. But she didn't seem too put off by that, clearly prefering to either remain petless or wanting one with the more traditional wings on its back.

"What are you calling her?" Asked Saebastyn of Cethian.

"Kildare, I think," she replied.

They occupied themselves for the next few hours feeding their flitters, and marveling that they could in fact fly without wings. Right out of the egg, like most flitters apparently, but without the efford of flapping!

Soon, toward evening, K'roohan arrived with a strangely grim look on his face, but collected the trio again, and summoned other dragons ro help fly them to Tripaldi.

"What's wrong?" Mruna asked him shortly before they took off.

"I had hoped you'd stand here, but there's no life in the eggs on the sands now. It's always sad to hear that, but this clutch would have been of those gemcolored dragons. They're quite rare."

Mruna was a little sad to hear this - but they weren't expected, and Tripaldi needed them! They headed between yet again.

As they arrived to this other weyr, it was clear that parts were more traditional than Dragonhope, while others clearly were not. As they landed there was a brief glimpse of dragons that had very different color schemes indeed. But none of the trio were here for that. In fact, they didn't quite know what to think about anything like a grey-spotted brown, or a green-blue. What would they ever tell their friends they rode?

The first thing they heard when tromping through the stone corridors, was that there was another flitter hatching, and someone ought to figure out whose queens kept laying so many eggs in the kitchen rafters! They ought to have been doing it in sands!

Mruna peered into the room, saw an exasperated girl and half a dozen freshly cracking eggs on the table, a bowl of meat scraps, and two gorging flitter babies.

"May I?" Mruna asked, as another of the eggs broke open.

"Please do," said the girl, probably a kitchen drudge, but a popular one by the looks of her well-cared-for hair and smart eyes.

Mruna's hand went over the little eggs and as she passed over one, four little paws grasped her fingers and pulled. Well, she jerked away a little to find a small brown flit clinging to her hand! "Well I guess I know what your name is, Cling," she laughed. The girl at the table all but pushed another egg toward the Lady but Mruna quickly backed out of that. "I have to find my friends and show them! Thanks!" She sped away and guessed that the poor girl would have a whole flock of the flitters to herself at this rate.

With the three of them now having attending flitters, they all realized they could spend time apart and still be able to give each other notes or information. Little Cling looked to be the odd flitter out, with wings and such, but he got along well with the other two slightly older wingless ones.

Saebastyn was told he needed to choose a bunk in the crowded boys barracks, while the girls had to get to their own. He bid them both farewell for the evening, and the girls wandered around talking first.

Mruna was the one who nudged them both into remembering that they would have to be studying up on dragons and their care. "We should start reading up," she suggested. They were among the later arrivals of candidates, many others were in the Barracks already.

"Oh, bother," Mruna said. "Barracks. Ick."

"That must be odd for you," Cethian said, "to have come from your own private room like that, and wind up here. It'll probably get busy with people."

She nodded, Mruna's expression betraying some of the same trepidation as her feelings about running through a crowded party hall.

"Well, you stay in this bed over here," Cethian suggested, "and I'll take this next one. I'll trip up anyone who wants to crowd you."

Mruna tilted her head, and finally smiled widely. "You're ... thank you. That's the nicest thing anyone could ever do for me."

"No, I think K'roohan did the best for you." Cethian giggled. They started a bit of a pillow fight until the class bell rang and they were summoned for their first dragon riding course.

***

Cethian was a very quick learner in that regard. She understood immediately the size and shape of the wings, how a saddle was meant to keep a rider upright, and the direction of a weyr's ledge out of a room. Saebastyn took a little longer, but he was more apt to dwell upon the way that dragons spoke to one another. They rarely spoke outside their bond and each other - and so far none of them had actually had a dragon speak directly to them.

Mruna's forte was, as before, organization and understanding. She quickly caught on to the tactics of wing formation, and to the use of certain dragons in certain situations. However, she tempered this knowledge with the fact that there were more duties that dragons at Dragonhope performed, and they were not going to have the varied opportunities for wings here at Tripaldi.

"What kind of dragon do you think you'd Impress, Mruna?" Asked Cethian as they worked in the weyrling wing. Though there were only a couple young dragons here, they still required a lot of work, and there were always hands needed to clean, muck, or mend. Cethian was used to it, but it showed that Mruna was still a Lady - her hands grew calloused with difficulty.

"I don't know - everyone dreams of riding a queen now don't they?" She said, absently. "But I don't want to be left to a mating flight without knowing who is riding the males. That's... unacceptable."

"To a lot of weyrwomen, it is the most amazing adventure they could have," said a woman's voice, the weyrwoman's second - or perhaps her assistant, or even possibly an older weyrwoman past her prime... neither girl knew.

"And you've had this adventure, I suppose," Mruna said at last, cleaning the muck from her hands on her work clothing.

"Many times," she laughed. "It's not the end of the world to give yourself over to a strong rider. But you have a good point, it's good to know them before their dragons begin to court yours."

"You're scaring me," Mruna said. "You've already decided what I'll be riding if I even Impress."

"You'll impress," Cethian muttered with a grin. "I'm not against impressing a queen, but I don't think I could handle all the work. Look at you, Mruna! You're literate enough to write your own stories and tales, and you got me - ME! - to do this icky dirty work! That's a great sign of a good leader, isn't it, queen rider?"

With those words, Mruna's brown eyes opened wider, and she gulped a little. But the older woman was friendly, smiling. "It is indeed. But that's not all it takes, not by a long shot. We'll see what will happen on the sands. You've come later than the rest, perhaps you've got an advantage. I don't know if the queens upon the sands will allow it yet, but they may give you a few minutes to walk among the eggs."

"Saebastyn mentioned that was a practice in some weyrs, but not all of them allow it." Cethian said.

"Not all queens - or greens who lay - do." The woman admitted. "But come along, we'll get you accustomed to the heat and the winds down there. We had a nasty bit of a storm earlier, but it looks as though it's clear skies until the hatching...

***

The hatching was announced almost immediately after the trio had arrived. They were among a bunch of candidates that had been brought in a kind of emergency situation, Tripaldi's sands were in need! There were two clutches on the sands, being tended by the queen who didn't much seem to care for any intrusions unless she was ready for it.

And when the bugling and humming song of the hatching came up through the whole Weyr, she certainly was ready for it. She displayed her eggs proudly, having separated the green's clutch away from her own precious eggs. When everyone had been suited up properly, in their warm woolen white robes, they were paraded down into the sands.

All eyes were on them - Mruna was wary of any Holders that might be in the audience and recognize her, while Cethian privately wondered about the design of this warm, dry area. Saebastyn walked between his friends, and managed to get a place near the other boys. They'd all heard that Tripaldi was fairly traditional in terms of who impressed what rank of dragon. It was pretty well expected that the boys would find blues, and the girls would have green or ...

"There's a queen egg," Mruna whispered to Cethian, who nodded, staring at it. But there were also hatchlings on the sand now! Some eggs had shattered, and their contents were adorable! It was warm, uncomfortable, the soles of their feet burned, but it was the most magical of times.

For more than two hours, though, this went on - there were some twenty or more eggs out there, and as it dwindled down, it became apparent that not everyone who'd been brought in was going to Impress.

"Why did they have us all come, if they knew we'd outnumber the dragons?" Cethian asked quietly, but then a great hush descended. The gold egg had hatched, to reveal a beautiful dark colored hatchling! The two girls started to approach, along with the others left.

It was Saebastyn who didn't need to worry about that gold, of course, but more because of the deep blue dragonet who came up to him and nuzzled his hand. I am Basth, he spoke.

He wandered away from the hot sands, toward the meat bowls which had been refreshed some time before.

When the gold was the only dragonet left, Frinaith stood to reveal a second, golden egg. Her rider was exhasperated, Xalia chided the dragon but no one could complain - two golds? But four girls, that wasn't going to end well for someone.

Two someones. Cethian's hands shook, but she did not cry. She met the eyes of the dragonets, one long dried and the other freshly hatched, and she knew they were not going to meet her eyes again.

She backed away, but watched Mruna. Unfortunately Mruna came out crying, she never did say if the dragonet spoke to her or not but the pair of older women nearby were suited to their young golds. Though she was heartbroken, Mruna composed herself by the time the parties started.

She wore her grief with pride - she'd stood before two queens! Cethian accepted the heartfelt pity that some folks offered, but also, they got to meet the brilliant blue Basth that would become B'styn's everlasting friend!

"So you did choose your honorific," Mruna said, holding a glass of wine (which she offered a quick rundown of what it appeared to be made from and when, and where... it was instinct), "B'styn... B'styn, it sounds good."

"You will wear it well," Cethian said, "and you're gonna need to keep us up on what you do in classes!"

Mruna perked up, and they cornered their friend. "That's right," she said with a smile, the first of her evening after the gold rejected her, "that way we'll be up on things before we need to be!"

B'styn and his blue Basth practiced for long hours as the eggs now on the sands were growing harder.

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