Occasionally a dragonless man remained living, such as Lytol, Ruatha’s Warder, but he was half shadow and that indistinct self lived in torment. When his rider died, a dragon winked into between, that frozen nothingness through which a dragon somehow moved himself and his rider, instantly, from one geographical position on Pern to another. To enter between held danger to the uniniated, Lessa knew, the danger of being trapped between for longer than it took a man to cough three times.

Yet Lessa’s one dragonflight on Mnementh’s neck had filled her with an insatiable compulsion to repeat the experience. Naïvely she had thought she would be taught, as the young riders and dragonets were. But she, supposedly the most important inhabitant of the Weyr next to Ramoth, remained earthbound while the youngsters winked in and out of between above the Weyr in endless practice. She chafed at the intolerable restriction.

Female or not, Ramoth must have the same innate ability to pass between as the males did. This theory was supported—unequivocally in Lessa’s mind—by “The Ballad of Moreta’s Ride.” Were not ballads constructed to inform? To teach those who could not read and write? So that the young Pernese, whether he be dragonman, Lord, or holder, might learn his duty toward Pern and rehearse Pern’s bright history? These two arrant idiots might deny the existence of that Ballad, but how had Lessa learned it if it did not exist? No doubt, Lessa thought acidly, for the same reason queens had wings!

When R’gul consented—and she would wear him down till he did—to allow her to take up her “traditional” responsibility as Keeper of the Records, she would find that Ballad. One day it was going to have to be R’gul’s much delayed “right time.”

Right time! she fumed. Right time! I have too much of the wrong time on my hands. When will this particular right time of theirs occur? When the moons turn green? What are they waiting for? And what might the superior F’lar be waiting for? The passing of the Red Star he alone believes in? She paused, for even the most casual reference to that phenomenon evoked a cold, mocking sense of menace within her.

She shook her head to dispel it. Her movement was injudicious. It caught R’gul’s attention. He looked up from the Records he was laboriously reading. As he drew her slate across the stone Council table, the clatter roused S’lel. He jerked his head up, uncertain of his surroundings.

“Humph? Eh? Yes?” he mumbled, blinking to focus sleep-blurred eyes.

It was too much. Lessa quickly made contact with S’lel’s Tuenth, himself just rousing from a nap. Tuenth was quite agreeable.

“Tuenth is restless, must go,” S’lel promptly muttered. He hastened up the passageway, his relief at leaving no less than Lessa’s at seeing him go. She was startled to hear him greet someone in the corridor and hoped the new arrival would provide an excuse to rid herself of R’gul.

It was Manora who entered. Lessa greeted the headwoman of the Lower Caverns with thinly disguised relief. R’gul, always nervous in Manora’s presence, immediately departed.