The heat in the Records Room was stifling, the air still, and Fiona was soon sweating profusely as she dragged Record after Record into and out of the range of the thin beam of light she’d managed to coax from the outside by dull mirrors.

She calmed herself first by locating the old Records of the last Fall and was pleased to see that they were exactly where she’d remembered them. If anyone else had bothered with them, they’d clearly put them back carefully, but judging by the layers of dust, Fiona was pretty certain that hers were the last hands to touch them.

She moved slowly, partly to defeat the heat but more to keep her thoughts from intruding into Talenth’s awareness. The queen was drowsing back at the Star Stones, happy with the light breeze even as it tapered off with noonday sun.

She had to keep her notes in her head and found it difficult, especially as the dust made her more parched. She promised herself that she’d stop in at the wherhold later before heading back. It would be good to see Nuella and Zenor again.

She made herself focus on the issue that had driven her here. How often did queens rise when Thread fell? How many eggs were in each clutch? And how long did it take from mating to clutching? Clutching to Hatching? Hatching to being able to go between?

The information was not as difficult to find as it was to pin down. Fiona found herself going through Turns and Turns of Records.

She would get some inkling, and then another mating flight or Hatching would throw her numbers off: Was a clutch twenty-one or thirty-one eggs? Was one gold egg or two gold eggs common? Was it twelve weeks or fifteen weeks from mating flight to Hatching? Whenever she thought she’d got it sorted, nailed down with the certainty of someone like Verilan, the meticulous Master Archivist—or someone worried about exactly how many fighting dragons a Weyr would have by when—she would find some new entry that disagreed with her carefully deduced findings. Worse, the newest Records had been written in the Interval, which was less important to her than the Records of the Second Pass, which had deteriorated and were harder to read.

One item in the newer Records alarmed her more than any other: the recurring mention of few mating flights, right up to the time when Tannaz, the last junior Weyrwoman at Igen, elected to go to Fort Weyr, causing depleted Igen to finally merge with Telgar. Were there supposed to be more mating flights? The Records in the Interval showed no such alarm, and the Records from the Second Pass made no more than passing mention, small gloating entries amid reports of Thread injuries and lost riders and dragons.