“They’re Impressionable. Catch their minds at their hatching, just like dragons, feed ’em into stupidity and they’re yours, for life.” Kylara was carefully laying the eggs down on the warm stones of the great fireplace. “And I’ve got them here just in time,” she said in triumph. “Assemble your men, quickly. We’ll want to Impress as many as possible.”

“I’m trying,” Meron said through gritted teeth as he watched her performance with some skepticism and much malice, “to apprehend exactly how this will benefit anyone.”

“Use your wits, man,” Kylara replied, oblivious to the Lord Holder’s sour reaction to her imperiousness. “Fire-lizards are the ancestors of dragons and they have all their abilities.”

It took only a moment longer for Meron to grasp the significance. Even as he shouted orders for his men to be roused, he was beside Kylara, helping her to lay the eggs out before the fire.

“They go between? They communicate with their owners?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“That’s a gold egg,” Meron cried, reaching for it, his small eyes glittering with cupidity.

She slapped his hand away, her eyes flashing. “Gold is for me. Bronze for you. I’m fairly sure that that second one—no, that one—is a bronze.”

The hot sands were brought and shoveled onto the hearth stones. Meron’s men came clattering down the steps from the Inner Hold, dressed for Threadfall. Peremptorily Kylara ordered them to put aside their paraphernalia and began to lecture them on how to Impress a fire-lizard.

“No one can catch a fire-lizard,” someone muttered, well back in the ranks.

“I have but I doubt you will, whoever you are,” Kylara snapped.

There was something, she decided, in what the Oldtimers said: Holders were getting far too arrogant and aggressive. No one would have dared speak up in her father’s Hold when he was giving instructions. No one in the Weyrs interrupted a Weyrwoman.

“You’ll have to be quick,” she said. “They hatch ravenous and eat anything in reach. They turn cannibal if you don’t stop them.”

“I want to hold mine till it hatches,” Meron told Kylara in an undertone. He’d been stroking the three eggs whose mottled shells he fancied contained bronzes.

“Hands aren’t warm enough,” Kylara replied in a loud, flat voice. “We’ll need red meat, plenty of it. Fresh-slaughtered is the best.”

The platter which was subsequently brought in was contemptuously dismissed as inadequate. Two additional loads were prepared, still steamy from the body heat of the slaughtered animals. The smell of the bloody raw meat was another odor to mingle with the sweat of men, the overheated, crowded hall and the general tension.

“I’m thirsty, Meron. I require bread and fruit and some chilled wine,” Kylara said.