“It is much as it is now, save that there are no carved lintels, there is no outer Court or Tower . . .”

“That’s it. Oh, by the first Egg, it is so simple. Zurg said this tapestry is old. Lessa must have decided it was four hundred Turns, and she has used it as the reference point to go back between times.”

“Why, then, she’s there and safe,” Robinton cried, sinking with relief in a chair.

“Oh, no, harper. It is not as easy as that,” F’lar murmured, and Robinton caught his stricken look and the despair echoed in Lytol’s face.

“What’s the matter?”

“There is nothing between,” F’lar said in a dead voice. “To go between places takes only as much time as for a man to cough three times. Between four hundred Turns. . . .” His voice trailed off.

Who wills,

Can.

Who tries,

Does.

Who loves,

Lives.

THERE WERE VOICES that first were roars in her aching ears and then hushed beyond the threshold of sound. She gasped as the whirling, nauseating sensation apparently spun her, and the bed which she felt beneath her, around and around. She clung to the sides of the bed as pain jabbed through her head, from somewhere directly in the middle of her skull. She screamed, as much in protest at the pain as from the terrifying, rolling, whirling, dropping lack of a solid ground.

Yet some frightening necessity kept her trying to gabble out the message she had come to give. Sometimes she felt Ramoth trying to reach her in that vast swooping darkness that enveloped her. She would try to cling to Ramoth’s mind, hoping the golden queen could lead her out of this torturing nowhere. Exhausted, she would sink down, down, only to be torn from oblivion by the desperate need to communicate.

She was finally aware of a soft, smooth hand upon her arm, of a liquid, warm and savory, in her mouth. She rolled it around her tongue, and it trickled down her sore throat. A fit of coughing left her gasping and weak. Then she experimentally opened her eyes, and the images before her did not lurch and spin.

“Who . . . are . . . you?” she managed to croak.

“Oh, my dear Lessa . . .”

“Is that who I am?” she asked, confused.

“So your Ramoth tells us,” she was assured. “I am Mardra of Fort Weyr.”

“Oh, F’lar will be so angry with me,” Lessa moaned as her memory came rushing back. “He will shake me and shake me. He always shakes me when I disobey him. But I was right. I was right. Mardra? . . . Oh, that . . . awful . . . nothingness,” and she felt herself drifting off into sleep, unable to resist that overwhelming urge. Comfortingly, her bed no longer rocked beneath her.