“True, but that was because we had stores of preserved and dried foods from more bountiful Turns to sustain us. That reserve is now gone. Except for those barrels and barrels of fish from Tillek . . .” Her voice trailed off expressively.

Lessa shuddered. Dried fish, salted fish, fish, had been served all too frequently of late.

“Our supplies of grain and flour in the Dry Caves are very low, for Benden, Bitra, and Lemos are not grain producers.”

“Our biggest needs are grains and meat?”

“We could use more fruits and root vegetables for variety,” Manora said thoughtfully. “Particularly if we have the long cold season the weather-wise predict. Now we did go to Igen Plain for the spring and fall nuts, berries . . .”

“We? to Igen Plain?” Lessa interrupted her, stunned.

“Yes,” Manora answered, surprised at Lessa’s reaction. “We always pick there. And we beat out the water grains from the low swamplands.”

“How do you get there?” asked Lessa sharply. There could be only one answer.

“Why, the old ones fly us. They don’t mind, and it gives the beasts something to do that isn’t tiring. You knew that, didn’t you?”

“That the women in the Lower Caverns fly with dragonriders?” Lessa pursed her lips angrily. “No. I wasn’t told.” Nor did it help Lessa’s mood to see the pity and regret in Manora’s eyes.

“As Weyrwoman,” she said gently, “your obligations restrict you where . . .”

“If I should ask to be flown to . . . Ruatha, for instance,” Lessa cut in, ruthlessly pursuing a subject she sensed Manora wanted to drop, “would it be refused me?”

Manora regarded Lessa closely, her eyes dark with concern. Lessa waited. Deliberately she had put Manora into a position where the woman must either lie outright, which would be distasteful to a person of her integrity, or prevaricate, which could prove more instructive.

“An absence for any reason these days might be disastrous. Absolutely disastrous,” Manora said firmly and, unaccountably, flushed. “Not with the queen growing so quickly. You must be here.” Her unexpectedly urgent entreaty, delivered with a mounting anxiety, impressed Lessa far more than all R’gul’s pompous exhortations about constant attendance on Ramoth.

“You must be here,” Manora repeated, her fear naked.

“Queens do not fly,” Lessa reminded her acidly. She suspected Manora was about to echo S’lel’s reply to that statement, but the older woman suddenly shifted to a safer subject.

“We cannot, even with half-rations,” Manora blurted out breathlessly, with a nervous shuffling of her slates, “last the full Cold.”

“Hasn’t there ever been such a shortage before . . . in all Tradition?” Lessa demanded with caustic sweetness.

Manora raised questioning eyes to Lessa, who flushed, ashamed of herself for venting her frustrations with the dragonmen on the headwoman. She was doubly contrite when Manora gravely accepted her mute apology. In that moment Lessa’s determination to end R’gul’s domination over herself and the Weyr crystallized.