The humming stopped. In the sudden, unquiet silence, the faint crack of a shell was clearly audible, followed by the pop and shatter of others.

The dragonets, glistening, awkward, ugly young things, began to flop from their casings, squawking, crooning, their wedge-shaped heads too big for the thin, sinuous necks. The young boys stood very still, their bodies tense with the mental efforts of attracting the dragonets to them.

The first was free of its encumbrance, staggering beyond the nearest boy who jumped adroitly out of its way. It fell, nose first at the feet of a tall black-haired lad. The boy knelt, helped the dragonet balance on his shaky feet, looked into the rainbow eyes. Jaxom saw Lytol close his, and saw the fact of Lytol’s terrible loss engraved on the man’s gray face, as much of a torture now as the day his Larth had died of phosphine burns.

“Look,” Jaxom cried, “the queen egg. It’s rocking. Oh, how I wish…”

Then he couldn’t go on without compromising himself in his friend’s good opinion. For much as he wanted Talina to Impress which would mean three living Ruathan-bred Weyrwomen, he knew that Felessan was betting on Brekke.

Felessan was so intensely involved in the scene below that he hadn’t been aware of Jaxom’s unfinished phrase.

The golden shell cracked suddenly, right down the center, and its inmate, with a raucous protest, fell to the sand on her back. Talina and two others moved forward quickly, trying to help the little creature right herself. The queen was no sooner on all four legs than the girls stepped back, almost as if they could not press their claim, by mutual consent leaving the first opportunity to Brekke.

She was oblivious. To Jaxom, it seemed she didn’t care. She seemed limp, broken, pathetic, listing to one side. A dragon crooned softly and she shook her head as if only then aware of her surroundings.

The queen’s head turned to Brekke, the glistening eyes enormous in the outsized skull. The queen lurched forward a step.

At that moment a small blur of bronze streaked across the Hatching Ground. With defiant screams, a fire-lizard hung just above the queen’s head. So close, in fact, that the little queen reared back with a startled shriek and bit at the air, instinctively spreading her wings as protection for her vulnerable eyes.

Dragons protested from their ledges. Talina interposed her body between the queen and her small attacker.

“Berd! Don’t!” Brekke moved forward, arm extended, to capture the irate bronze. The little queen cried out in protest, hiding her face in Talina’s skirts. The two women faced one another, their bodies tense, wary.