Then, suddenly, the magic moment was over. F’lar gave a graceful leap to the dragon’s shoulder, caught the fighting straps and pulled himself into place on the neck ridges. Air whooshed around Menolly and the others as the great bronze opened his fragile-looking wings. The next moment, he seemed to be in the air, catching the updraft, beating steadily higher. Abruptly the dragon winked from view. Menolly was not the only one to sigh deeply. To see a dragonrider in the sky was always an occurrence: to be on the same ground with a dragon and his rider, to witness his graceful take-off and exit between was a marvel.

All the songs about dragonriders and dragons seemed inadequate to Menolly. She stole up to the little cubicle in the women’s dormitory that she shared with Sella. She wanted to be alone. She’d a little pipe among her things, a soft, whispery reedpipe, and she began to play it: a little whistle composed of her excitement and her response to the day’s lovely event.

“So there you are!” Sella flounced into the room, her lace reddened, her breath rough. She’d obviously run up the steep stairs. “Told Mavi you’d be here.” Sella grabbed the little pipe from Menolly’s fingers. “And tuning, too.”

“Oh, Sella. It’s an old tune!” Menolly said mendaciously and grabbed her pipe back.

Sella’s jaw worked with anger. “Old, my foot! I know your ways, girl. And you’re dodging work. You get back to the kitchen. You’re needed now.”

“I am not dodging work. I taught this morning during Threadfall and then I had to go with the crews.”

“Your crew’s been in this past half-day or more and you still in smelly, sandy clothes, mucking up the room I have to sleep in. You get below or I’ll tell Yanus you’ve been tuning.”

“Ha! You wouldn’t know a tune if you had your nose rubbed in it.”

But Menolly was shedding her work clothes as fast as she could. Sella was just likely to slip the word to Mavi (her sister was as wary of Yanus as Menolly) about Menolly piping in her room—a suspicious action on its own. Though Menolly hadn’t sworn not to tune at all; only not to do it in front of people.

However, everyone was in a good mood that night: Yanus, because he’d spoken to F’lar the Weyrleader and because there’d be good fishing on the morrow if the weather held. Fish always rose to feed from drowned Thread, and half the Fall had been over Nerat Bay. The Deep would be thick with schools. With Yanus in a good mood, the rest of the sea holders could also rejoice because there’d been no Thread on the ground at all.