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mating flight of a fire lizard queen, with her bronzes in close pursuit.
    So fire lizards weren’t boy talk! Awed, Menolly watched the swift, graceful flight. The queen had led her swarm so high that the smaller ones, the blues and greens and browns, had been forced down. They circled now at a lower altitude, struggling to keep the same direction as the high fliers. They dipped and dashed in mimicry of the queen and bronzes.
    They had to be fire lizards! thought Menolly, her heart almost stopping at the beauty and thrill of the sight. Fire lizards! And they
were
like dragons. Only much, much smaller. She didn’t know all the Teachings for nothing. A queen dragon was gold: she mated with the bronze who could outfly her. Which was exactly what was happening right now with the fire lizards.
    Oh, they were beautiful to behold! The queen had turned sunward and Menolly, for all her eyes were very longsighted, could barely pick out that black mote and trailing cluster.
    She walked on, following the main group of fire lizards. She’d bet anything that she’d end up on the coastline near the Dragon Stones. Last fall her brother Alemi had claimed he’d seen fire lizards there at dawn, feeding on fingertails in the shallows. His report had set off another rash of what Petiron had called ‘lizard-fever’. Every lad in the Sea Hold had burned with plans to trap a fire lizard. They’d plagued Alemi to repeat his sighting.
    It was just as well that the crags were unapproachable. Not even an experienced boatman would brave those treacherous currents. But, if anyone had been
sure
there were fire lizards there … Well no-one would know from her.
    Even if Petiron had been alive, Menolly decided, she would not have told him. He’d never seen a fire lizard, though he’d admitted to the children that the Records allowed that fire lizards did exist.
    ‘They’re seen,’ Petiron had told her later, ‘but they can’t be captured.’ He gave a wheezing chuckle. ‘People’ve been trying to since the first shell was cracked.’
    ‘Why can’t they be caught?’
    ‘They don’t want to. They’re smart. They just disappear …’
    ‘They go
between
like dragons?’
    ‘There’s no proof of that,’ said Petiron, a trifle cross, as if she’d been too presumptuous in suggesting a comparison between fire lizards and the great dragons of Pern.
    ‘Where else can you disappear to?’ Menolly had wanted to know. ‘What is
between
?’
    ‘Some place that isn’t.’ Petiron had shuddered. ‘You’re neither here nor there,’ and he gestured first to one corner of the Hall and then towards the Sea Dock on the other side of the harbor. ‘It’s cold, and it’s nothing. No sight, no sound, no sensations.’
    ‘You’ve ridden dragonback?’ Menolly had been impressed.
    ‘Once. Many Turns ago.’ He shuddered again in remembrance. ‘Now, since we’re touching on the subject, sing me the Riddle Song.’
    ‘It’s been solved. Why do we have to know it now?’
    ‘Sing it for me so I’ll know that you know it, girl,’ Petiron had said testily. Which was no reason at all.
    But Petiron had been very kind to her, Menolly knew, and her throat tightened with remembered regret for his passing. (Had he gone
between
? The way dragons did when they lost their riders or grew too infirm to fly? No, one left nothing behind, going
between
. Petiron had left his body to be slipped into the deeps.) And Petiron had left more behind than his body. He’d left her every song he’d ever known, every lay, every ballad, saga, every fingering, chord and strum, every rhythm. There wasn’t any way a stringed instrument could be played that she didn’t know, nor any cadence on the drums at which she wasn’t time-perfect. She could whistle double-trills as well as any wherry with her tongue or on the reeds. But there had been some things Petiron wouldn’t – or perhaps couldn’t – tell her about her world. Menolly wondered if this was because she was