Yet here she was. And that bright, active future F’lar had so glowingly painted had not materialized. Instead of using her subtle power to manipulate events and people for Pern’s good, she was forced into a round of inconclusive, uninstructive, tedious days, bored to active nausea by R’gul and S’lel, restricted to the Weyrwoman’s apartments (however much of an improvement that was over her square foot of the cheeseroom floor) and the feeding grounds and the bathing lake. The only time she used her ability was to terminate these sessions with her so-called tutors. Grinding her teeth, Lessa thought that if it weren’t for Ramoth, she would just leave. Oust Gemma’s son and take Hold at Ruatha as she ought to have done once Fax was dead.

She caught her lip under her teeth, smiling in self-derision. If it weren’t for Ramoth, she wouldn’t have stayed here a moment past Impression anyway. But, from the second in which her eyes had met those of the young queen on the Hatching Ground, nothing but Ramoth mattered. Lessa was Ramoth’s and Ramoth was hers, mind and heart, irrevocably attuned. Only death could dissolve that incredible bond.

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!