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It's a bright, sunny day for the Hatching. Lytol remembers that years later, the slant of the sun across the Hatching grounds and the chill of the air. A few of the other boys are shivering, but it's no colder than at High Reaches in the morning. It's just the contrast of hot sands with the crisp air, the heat coming up sharp through the soles of his feet.
He's still not sure why he's here among these boys. Most of them are children of the Weyr, raised to this. He's not sure what the blue rider saw that made him stop in his casual stroll through the crafthall to talk to Lytol, who was getting on with his work while most of the other apprentice boys swarmed round the dragonrider trying to be noticed, those that weren't hiding out of sight. Lytol didn't expect to attract a dragonrider's attention no matter what he did.
Lytol has never attracted much attention. He's a sensible child who works diligently at the tasks he's set. He's learned to spin and to dye plain colors, and he's learning to warp the great looms, the beginning of the craft whose end is the tapestries that line the crafthall walls, full of flaming reds and intricate shadows of a hundred wings. He thought hard work and time would make him its master.
There is nothing here on these sands that he can work at, nothing he can hold in his hands until he comes to understand how it is put together. If experience counts for anything, then it will be the boys around him who succeed, the ones who have grown up in the shadow of dragon wings all their lives. And yet he's still here, watching the eggs rock in the hot sand, the sound of voices from the stands rising as the first cracks begin to show.
He doesn't expect anything but to watch as the others around him are chosen. He tries hard not to hope. He watches, entranced, as the first damp wings unfold in the sun, their colors brighter than any tapestry could capture. There's the murmur of voices around him, rising in excitement and fear.
The hatchlings are clumsy, stumbling blindly into the boys who crowd round them, staining the sand with blood as their claws catch the overbold. Lytol hangs back, watching it all. Some older part of him knows he'll remember this all his life.
He sees the shadows move before he sees the spreading wing in front of him, a brown neck rising, a brown head craning to watch him the way he has been watching, a little wary and suddenly hopeful, like bright wings opening in his chest and light pouring in.
My name is Larth, he hears, like someone speaking not in his head but in his heart.
He wants to ask why it's him, but it's some time later before he thinks Larth is old enough to understand the question. It's another bright cold morning, on their way to the feeding grounds, calling teasing remarks back and forth with the other weyrlings. In the afternoon they will practice flying in the crisp clear air. He's struck by the feeling that this is all a stroke of luck that could easily have passed him by.
"Why did you want me?" he asks abruptly, so he won't lose his nerve to ask at all.
Because you are yourself, Larth says, and L'tol leans against Larth's warm side and rests his hand and his cheek against the dragon's hide. He still isn't sure why Larth believes he's anything special, but he'll try to deserve it if it's the last thing he does.
*****
Lytol comes back to the crafthall too old to know so little, but he takes up an apprentice's work without protest, working at each task as if it's the most important thing in the world. Each is the most important thing in his world, as important as anything can be every morning he draws breath without Larth. There's nothing left that matters more. He may as well spend hours warping a loom, working with careful hands.
He can't stand so many things, the easy conversation of the apprentices, the sympathetic touches of his mother and his sisters, the gathers that fill the Hold with talk and laughter and leave him mute. He's lost the skill to touch anyone, to speak of anything besides the craft. He takes refuge in the feel of fabric under his hands, real and undemanding. The loom demands nothing of him but care, will reveal nothing of him when its pattern takes shape.
He can't stop himself from caring what the pattern is, eventually. He can't stop himself from seeing colors and trying to catch them in cloth, the fine harsh lines of light and shadow. It's not the more demanding task of telling a story in pictures, or trying to capture the play of living things, but he works at it. There's nothing alive he cares about, but there are the hard lines of the mountains, the blue of the hours before sunrise that he sees when he can't sleep.
It's hard for him to work in browns, hard not to try to reproduce a shade of brown he will see forever when he closes his eyes, hard not for every curve to turn into the play of muscles under dragonhide, every angle into a wingtip. It's hard then to remember why he's here and not in that cold quiet place where there are no colors, no pain, no breath.
When the threads tangle under his fingers, he can rip out his mistakes and begin again. It scarcely matters whether he's weaving or tearing apart what he's woven. It's a way to pass the hours, and to see them passing. It makes it possible to believe that there's such a thing as time, and that it is taking him farther away every day from the day Larth died. The day he died.
He may be dead, but he's still breathing, his hands moving steadily, the day wearing away. It's hard not to notice the way the light changes, turning gold with the afternoon. Hard not to notice that outside the broad windows the mountains cut a heartbreakingly blue sky. They won't stay gray in mourning.
It's wrong for there to still be colors in the world, but they are still here, and so he lets them take shape under his hands. It's an empty sky, an empty room; there's no one in it with a heart to break.
*****
He's never been sure if he might have left a child behind him at the Weyr; he passed pleasant nights with the women of the Lower Caverns but never settled down to a weyrmate, and there wasn't a woman who called him her child's father. It's one more thing he thinks he's left behind him. There's nothing in him but coldness for the women of the crafthall, nothing in him for anyone.
Cessera is as patient as he is, working beside him without speaking, her swift hands passing the shuttle back and forth, her eyes quick to catch any flaw in the pattern spreading out before her. She doesn't ask him questions, but he finds himself talking to her in the end, hesitantly, unused to the sound of his own voice.
He learns that she's a widow, her husband dead of a winter fever, born and raised in the crafthall and taking a quiet satisfaction in the rhythm of its days. She has a daughter, a quick shy child with the stamp of Cessera about her, her brown hair untidy and her blue eyes sharp. He would have known these things already if he paid more attention to the life of the crafthall, to anything that lives and breathes.
She comes up behind him when he's spreading out a bolt of fine brown fabric across the table, lifting it in his hands so that it catches the sun. He can almost see the rainbow of undertones that should be there, bright and supple underneath his hand.
"Tell me about Larth," she says, and he can feel something in him break. It's been years since he wept, but now he can't stop the tears, even when he clenches his fists in the fabric. He'll ruin the work of days, and some part of him takes some dark satisfaction in that.
She rests a hand between his shoulder blades, and the warmth of it is shocking. He's learned to shrug away from well-intentioned touches. He's aware, suddenly and just as shockingly, that she is a woman, that if he turned her breasts would press against the cloth of his tunic and her hair brush against his lips.
"I can't," he says, but he does turn, and she draws him down to her, her mouth against his scarred cheek, tasting the salt there, letting out a breath she must have been holding when he bends his head to hers.
It's nothing like those laughing nights in his weyr, untangling long after midnight to sit at the entrance with a fur pulled around them both, the bowl of the weyr stretching out below them and the stars sharp and clear above them. It's nothing like the heat of a mating flight, his whole being with Larth as he strains for height, both of them at last tangling with the green in the air, both of them at last reaching for the green rider, hard muscles moving under his and a hot mouth under his own.
There is more comfort than passion in it to start, and yet it ends in heat, his body demanding satisfaction as it demands food and drink, stubbornly insisting on life.
He rises when it is still dark and goes to the window, opening the shutters to see torches in the Hold courtyard, moving lights in the darkness. Fax's men are setting out again, who knows where and for what purpose. They may come home that day satisfied with their patrol, or weeks later having achieved someone else's ruination.
He turns back to look at Cessera sleeping, the lines of her face quiet in sleep. He's not sure when he learned them by heart. He opens his hand, closes it as if he could keep something safe there. He opens it again, still empty.
It's two Turns before their first daughter is born, and he watches her watch him from his arms, her eyes wide and unfocused, as if she is dreaming. They will most likely turn to brown like his own, Cessera says, but for now they are the blue of the sky before the dawn.
He cups his hand over her head, soft and fragile like the curve of a shell.
"I'll keep you safe," he says, but it won't be true.
*****
Jaxom is a fragile thing at first, and at first it seems as if all hopes for Ruatha to return to Ruathan blood will come to nothing when he dies. Lytol tries to pay him little mind, his days full of the work that must be done each day no matter who will Hold here years from now. Ruatha is a shambles, and there is much to be done. The stores are pathetically empty, and he sets the most sensible of the women to sorting through what is ruined and what they must trade for before the winter is over.
It is easier than knowing what to do about the anger that simmers under the surface. There has been too much blood shed in Ruatha, and nothing he does will erase its stain. All he can do is restore lands to the small holders, as best he can from what records are left and with the testimony of the old men who remember better days. He demands little except that men see to the repair of their own cotholds and fields, and that nothing green is allowed to grow near the Hold. It will take time before there is the leisure to build again.
The Hall must not be allowed to look like a ruin, for the sake of Jaxom's reputation, if nothing else; it seems that the boy will live, and if he is to live, Lytol will not do him less than a faithful steward's duty. He has old hangings brought out to cover bare walls, in place of ones that have vanished or been torn. It will have to do until they can again commission new.
Some are threadbare, better than nothing but not what he thinks would be suitable given a choice. Others show little wear but must have been put away when Fax took the Hold, their scenes of heroes in flight an unspoken rebuke to a man who had no use for dragonriders. He hesitates, but has them hung, even though for a long time he finds it hard to look at the bright wings that fill the woven skies.
He comes upon Jaxom gazing up at one of the tapestries, his small hands spread as high as he can reach on the heavy cloth, and his first impulse is to tell him he'll ruin it with his fingers, which are certainly not clean.
He stops instead, watching the boy and not the still, stiff images of dragons above him, which only a child could believe were anything like the real thing.
"We owe them a great debt," he says, his voice harsh in his own ears, and though he thinks the boy is too young to understand, Jaxom nods anyway, his eyes wide and wondering.
*****
It's another bright day, a colder one, Lytol thinks, or maybe it's only that he's grown old. Nothing has changed, and everything has. The eggs are rocking on the hatching ground, the sky full of wings as the dragons bring notables to watch the hatching and the candidates to stand on the sands.
He watches for the girl, Brekke, the one they hope will Impress again, even though he knows in his bones that she will fail. There are some things that are gone and never come again. If she can, she will live as he has lived. He takes a kind of pride in that now, like a withered tree that still stands against the wind.
The boys are watching the eggs, waiting for their beginnings. At his side, Jaxom is chattering to young Felessan, always quick to speak and slower to think. He is learning caution and care, the lessons Lytol can teach him, not quickly but perhaps surely. He will not be a man like his father, wasteful and cruel, caring nothing for fragile things except to ruin them.
Lytol will teach Jaxom patience, and how to hold things in his care. It will be the long work of the boy's life, and Lytol has worked to be sure that the boy will do it well. He knows that is the trust that F'lar and the Lord Holders have placed in him, and he has done his best to be worthy of it.
He wonders if the boy hopes for more, for some love that burns brighter than the suitable alliance he'll someday make, for blazing days that he'll remember until he's old. He would wish those things for Jaxom, but he's not sure he believes in them anymore. They're lost with the past, the whole world grown colder.
Below, the eggs are cracking, the light catching the first stretch of opening wings, and he watches, for a moment thinking of nothing at all but brown wings opening bright against the sky.