“Lorana was desperate, her Arith was near to death, she thought to mix some of each of the vials and inject it into her.”

“She killed her dragon?” Shaneese asked anxiously.

M’tal nodded.

“The mix was wrong—we only discovered that much later,” he said. “Arith went between. It wasn’t until Lorana recovered that we realized there were other rooms and she thought that perhaps the answer lay in them.”

“She lost her dragon and she didn’t give up,” Shaneese said in awe. She sniffed once, dabbed at her eyes, then motioned politely for M’tal to continue.

“The miners returned and excavated another section above the rooms that led to a different entrance,” M’tal said. “This was the entrance we should have found first, because when we entered, we were greeted by a voice.”

“A voice?” Fiona asked, thinking of the voice that she’d been hearing in her head. “Did you recognize it?”

“More than that: It introduced itself to us,” M’tal said. “It said it was a recording—almost like playing music on an instrument from a written score—and the voice was Wind Blossom’s.”

“Wind Blossom?” Shaneese repeated. “Two people? Or one person with two names?”

“Two names,” Fiona told her. She glanced at M’tal as she continued, “I learned about her from Kindan. He’d been trying to find the words to a song that he’d read just before—”

“Just before the fire at the Harper Hall,” M’tal interrupted her quietly. “He found the title; he remembered the song.”

“It was important,” Fiona said, recalling how often Kindan had striven to remember the song when she was growing up, how much it had driven him.

“The song saved Pern,” M’tal said. He saw a man in harper’s blue approach and waved him to a seat. “You must be Norik.”

Norik nodded but said nothing.

“I was just saying that a song saved Pern,” M’tal explained. “It is called ‘Wind Blossom’s Song’ and it contained a question that Lorana had to answer to open the door to the final Teaching Room, the one where we learned how to defeat the illness.”

He paused, silent for a moment, turning his head toward the queens’ quarters. “But it wasn’t enough to cure just one dragon. So Minith and Tullea went back in time to High Reaches Weyr, where she clutched and her dragonets grew to full size. With them—including Jeila’s Tolarth—we had enough serum to cure all the dragons. And now, with Telgar here, we have done so.”

“So that’s why High Reaches was being so aloof!” Fiona exclaimed. “I remember Cisca talking about it, saying that they’d not had any contact for three Turns.”

“They couldn’t let anyone know,” M’tal said with a grimace, “because no one did know.”