Exultations welled out of her in a raucous laugh. Just wait until Meron of Nabol saw these beauties! There was no doubt in her mind that the holder hated dragonmen because he envied them their beasts. He’d often carped that Impressions ought not to be monopolized by one inbred sodality. Well, let’s see if mighty Meron could Impress a fire-lizard. She wasn’t sure which would please her more: if he could or if he couldn’t. Either way’d work for her. But if he could Impress a fire-lizard, a bronze, say, and she had a queen on her wrist, and the two mated…It might not be as spectacular as with the larger beasts, but then, given Meron’s natural endowment…Kylara smiled in sensuous anticipation.

“You’d better be worth this,” she told the eggs.

She put the thirty-four hardened eggs into several thicknesses of the firestone bagging she’d brought along. She wrapped that bundle in wherhides and then in her thick wool cloak. She’d been Weyrwoman long enough to realize that a suddenly cooled egg would never hatch. And these were mighty close to cracking shell.

So much the better.

Prideth had been tolerant of her rider’s preoccupation with fire-lizard eggs. She had obediently landed in a hundred coves along the western coast, waiting, not unhappily in the hot sun, while Kylara quartered the burning sands, looking for any trace of fire-lizard buryings. But Prideth grumbled anxiously when Kylara gave her the coordinates for Nabol Hold, not Southern Weyr.

It was just first light, Nabol time, when Kylara’s arrival sent the watch-wher screaming into its lair. The watchguard knew the Southern Weyrwoman too well to protest her entry and some poor wit was dispatched to wake his Lord. Kylara blithely disregarded Meron’s angry frown when he appeared on the stairs of the Inner Hold.

“I’ve fire-lizard eggs for you, Lord Meron of Nabol,” she cried, gesturing to the lumpy bundle she’d had a man bring in. “I want tubs of warm sand or we’ll lose them.”

“Tubs of warm sand?” Meron repeated with overt irritation.

So, he’d someone else in his bed, had he? Kylara thought, of half a mind to take her treasure and disappear.

“Yes, you fool. I’ve a clutch of fire-lizard eggs about to hatch. The chance of your lifetime. You there,” and Kylara pointed imperiously at Meron’s holdkeeper who’d come shuffling in, half-dressed. “Pour boiling water over all the cleansing sand you’ve got and bring it here instantly.”

Kylara, born to a high degree in one Hold, knew exactly the tone to take with lesser beings, and was, in fact, so much the female counterpart of her own irascible Lord that the woman scurried to her bidding without waiting for Meron’s consent.

“Fire-lizard eggs? What on earth are you babbling about, woman?”