F’lar stiffened and his eyes turned as orange as Mnementh’s. He stared at her with a compound of fear and loathing that sent Brekke reeling back. As if her movement released him, F’lar looked toward the bronze dragon roaring stentoriously on the heights.

His shoulders jerked back and his hands clenched into fists so tight the bones showed yellow through the skin.

At that instant, every noise ceased in the Weyr as every mind felt the impact of the warning the fire-lizards had been trying inchoately to project.

Turbulence, savage, ruthless, destructive; a pressure inexorable and deadly. Churning masses of slick, sickly gray surfaces that heaved and dipped. Heat as massive as a tidal wave. Fear! Terror! An inarticulate longing!

A scream was torn from a single throat, a scream like a knife upon raw nerves!

“Don’t leave me alone!” The cry came from cords lacerated by the extreme of anguish; a command, an entreaty that seemed echoed by the black mouths of the weyrs, by dragon minds and human hearts.

Ramoth sprang aloft. Mnementh was instantly beside her. Then every dragon in the Weyr was a-wing, the fire-lizards, too; the air groaned with the effort to support the migration.

Brekke could not see. Her eyes were filled with blood from vessels burst by the force of her cry. But she knew there was a speck in the sky, tumbling downward with a speed that increased with every length; a plunge as fatal as the one which Canth had tried to stop over the stony heights of the High Reaches range.

And there was no consciousness in that plummeting speck, no echo, however faint, to her despairing inquiry. The arrow of dragons ascended, great wings pumping. The arrow thickened, once, twice, three times as other dragons arrived, making a broad path in the sky, steadily striving for that falling mote.

It was as if the dragons became a ramp that received the unconscious body of their Weyrmate, received and braked its fatal momentum with their own bodies, until the last segment of overlapping wings eased the broken-winged ball of the bloody brown dragon to the floor of the Weyr.

Half-blinded as she was, Brekke was the first person to reach Canth’s bleeding body, F’nor still strapped to his burned neck. Her hands found F’nor’s throat, her fingers the tendon where his pulse should beat. His flesh was cold and sticky to the touch and ice would be less hard.

“He isn’t breathing,” someone cried. “His lips are blue!”

“He’s alive, he’s alive,” Brekke chanted. There, one faint shallow flutter against her seeking fingers. No, she didn’t imagine it. Another.

“There wasn’t any air on the Red Star. The blueness. He suffocated.”

Some half-forgotten memory prompted Brekke to wrench F’nor’s jaws apart. She covered his mouth with hers and exhaled deeply into his throat. She blew air into his lungs and sucked it out.