Disclaimer: Pern and the dragons of Pern belong to Anne McCaffrey.

AN: Yes, I know what you're thinking – 'Another one?' Yes, another one. Here I am again! The thing is, it's addictive. I write one fanfiction story… and it fills me with ideas for another one… and then I introduce a minor character who I think really deserves a story of her own… and here it is! It's loosely connected to my two stories about Ista Weyr – in that it features some of the same characters – but it's not a sequel (if anything it's a prequel) so don't worry if you haven't read my other stories. This one will still make sense. Although there are virtual cookies available for people who have read the earlier ones and who spot characters who feature in them when older. Other than Katriel, obviously. She doesn't count.

You know, I feel really dumb talking about these stories as 'sequels' or 'prequels'. It sounds a bit grand. They're only little fluffy stories after all, not huge novels or anything. But whatever. Anyway, I hope lots of people are going to review me anyway, because I'm feeling unloved over on my other story where I've reached an all time low of zero reviews for my most recent chapter.

Which reminds me - lots of love to all my friends on here. How are you, guys? Let me know what you think of this one; it's a bit different to the others, but then what kind of a writer would I be if I wrote the same story every time?

Ok, I feel like I'm rambling now, so I'm going to shut up. I hope you enjoy it, and please, please review!

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Kat had quick ears, and she was probably the first who heard Egan's wailing. She flicked alarmed eyes across the table at her pretty stepmother, taking care that her posture should not change and betray to her father the small disturbance in his perfectly regimented Hold.

At that moment a louder cry breached the distance and the stone walls between Egan's nursery and the dining hall, and Kat and Fani winced in unison as Galen's heavy eyebrows drew together.

Muttering a few words of excuse, Fani began to get to her feet, the glowlight sliding over her silk dress. She set down her heavy cut-crystal glass of wine, and the light shining through it splashed a pool of dark red light onto the table; it was the same colour as the gleaming fabric, Kat noticed.

'Sit down.' Galen's voice conveyed no understanding that he might ever be disobeyed. 'It is the boy's nurse's job to look after him, not yours.' As Fani subsided in her chair, he turned to Kat. 'I hope you remembered my injunctions today, Katriel?'

Kat caught Fani's quick sympathetic glance as she said demurely, 'Yes, father. Today I worked at my embroidery and I helped Fani and Halina.'

'Excellent.' Her father bit the word off sharply and again they were washed in uncomfortable silence, listening to Egan's cries. In the main body of the hall, the Holders, seated according to rank and situation, chatted and laughed, producing a clamorous sound that rose to the roof of the cavernous hall in the same way that the dancing flames of the huge hearth leapt up the chimney, stirring air currents that lifted and moved the expensive, glowing hangings as they passed.

Only they were silent, thought Kat, bitterly. At the far end of the high table, Harper Tercel and Healer Vidan made valiant, stilted small talk, but neither Kat nor Fani dared make remarks which they were not sure Galen would approve of. She wanted to inform her father cuttingly that for an active girl, embroidery was not an excellent occupation – not even sensible! She could hear herself saying it, knew how she and everyone else would sound and look – but she hadn't the nerve. Kat kept her mouth shut.

Kat studied her father covertly as she ate, her back stiff and her mouthfuls small and refined, as protocol demanded. Galen was a forbidding man who looked much older than his real age – some turns short of forty – with thick black hair and brows and a nose like the beak of a hawk. His eyes were black too, a deep empty colour which gave nothing away. Kat sometimes wondered if there was a person left inside her father at all. When she was younger she'd had nightmares that nothing lived inside her father's head except a set of rules. 'Discipline!' he had roared at her in the dream, swooping down at her like a huge black bird of prey.

Kat shuddered at the memory and then instantly stilled the movement, hoping not to draw her father's ire. She reached out a slightly shaking hand for her glass and took a genteel mouthful of the wine, the sour, fruity taste filling her mouth as she composed herself. She had no taste for wine, but experience had taught her to swallow it without blinking, and certainly without mentioning her distaste to Galen. They said he hadn't always been like this…

Noticing Kat's slight shudder, Fani caught her eye and smiled encouragingly. Kat returned the smile, grateful for her stepmother's quiet support. Fani deserved batter than Galen, Kat thought. She could have had it, too, gentle Fani with her smooth ivory skin and huge dark eyes. Kat knew that the niece of the Lord of Igen had had many suitors. She couldn't conceive what had persuaded Fani to marry her father over a younger and kinder man.

You could cut the tension in this Hold with a knife, Kat thought. Well, if you had a knife. After all, 'Gently bred girls do not carry belt knives, Katriel'.

Kat took a tiny, elegant mouthful of roast wherry, hardly tasting the tender flesh. I'll get fat, she thought bitterly, sitting idle all day and then eating like this. But she didn't dare leave any of the meat on her plate. And it was an insult to old Palla's rich, spicy sauce not to finish off the vegetables. Kat could picture the old woman pouring hours of effort into that sauce in an attempt to entice her two ladies to eat.

She set her back ramrod straight, and forced another mouthful down her constricting throat.

Galen and Fani were eating equally mechanically. What's the point? Kat thought, suddenly. All this rich food, and I don't believe any of us enjoys it. We could be spending the marks on… on what? Inwardly, she sighed. This Hold isn't lacking anything you can buy with money.

It was a long time until the end of dinner. When Galen finally swallowed his last mouthful of wine and rose to his feet, Kat shot upwards as fast as elegance would allow. Fani, slower and more graceful, gave Tercel time to pull her chair back for her as she stood up. Then, as a group, they walked through the hall. Like a sharding procession! thought Kat angrily. The Holders fell silent as their frowning Lord passed, and then the chatter rose up again behind them as if a bubble of quiet followed them.

Galen opened the door at the far end of the hall and stood back to let Fani and Kat pass through. Kat blinked unhappily as Galen fell into step behind her. It was the correct order of precedence, of course, but she couldn't help thinking that a man who was more kind and less correct would have allowed the Healer and Harper to pass through first.

Once out in the hallway, Galen bid them a curt farewell and strode away towards his study. Like an unspoken sigh, the whole atmosphere relaxed. Fani smiled at the two Crafters. 'Good night, Vidan, Tercel,' she said, civilly.

'Good night, my ladies,' said Tercel, bowing to both of them. He was new to the Hold, having arrived from the Harpercrafthall only two sevendays back, but he was already learning that in Lemos it was best to keep your thoughts within your own head. Vidan, long ingrained in the silence of complete propriety, merely bowed, before the two Crafters turned towards their own quarters.

Kat and Fani carried on together into the bowels of the Hold. Fani walked with the smooth, elegant gait of a well-bred lady, her skirts rustling gently as she glided across the floor, but Kat took advantage of her father's absence to hitch her own sea-blue dress out of the way of her feet and to stride like a man. She had vague memories of being allowed to dress in boy's breeches when she was very young, and to play around the stables and yard, getting under everyone's feet, but now she thought that she must have imagined that time. She couldn't believe that her cold, severe father had ever allowed her to be free of the restraints of her skirt.

As they rounded a corner, they came across a drudge filling the glowbaskets on the walls. Kat instinctively dropped her skirts so that they brushed against the ground again, and moderated her step so that she didn't step on the heavy material dragging across the flagstones in front of her. Fani didn't react at all to her sudden change of pace; both the ladies of Lemos knew that it was better to be cautious, to preserve appearances at all times, no matter how insignificant or innocent the observer might seem.

Neither relaxed until they reached the door of their own suite of rooms. Of all the cold and empty halls of the Hold, the inmost rooms, deep inside the rock face, were the ones that Kat disliked least. She had hated them as a child made to sleep there alone – they had been huge and shadowy and echoing to her five-year-old imagination, and she had been unable to sleep because of the terrors that came in the night – but after Fani had married Galen and come to Lemos things had improved. Kat's young stepmother was gentle and yielding, but she had a core of good sense, and she had firmly shut up most of the suite, designed to house the ten or fifteen ladies in the train of most Lord Holders, and moved some softer, more comfortable furnishings into the rooms that she and Kat did use.

Fani hurried ahead of Kat into the rooms, and passed on through the warm and welcoming sitting room to Egan's nursery which lay beyond. Soon Kat could hear the rise and fall of her stepmother's voice as she spoke to Berna, Egan's nurse, and presently both women came back into the main room, and Berna gave Kat a little curtsey. 'Lady Katriel.'

Kat was standing very upright in the centre of the room, lips pressed tightly together, waiting for the woman to leave. She inclined her head slightly to the nurse, acknowledging her.

'You may go, Berna,' said Fani, gently, and the nurse curtsied once more and hurried out into the corridor, closing the door behind her. Kat, finally dropping her haughty demeanour entirely, kicked out at a cushion lying loose on the floor, scowling.

'I hate him!' She kept her bitter voice low, knowing that Egan's cries had penetrated nearly the whole Hold, and that if she was heard shouting it wouldn't matter very much whether her words were reported to her father or only the fact that she had been raising her voice in an unladylike manner. 'I really hate him! How can he do this to us? I hope you remembered my injunctions today, Katriel. Well, yes, as it happens I did! I remember every sharding time I can't do a single thing that I want to!'

'You don't really hate him, Kat,' Fani said, gently. 'I know you're suffering, but bitterness against your father won't help matters.'

'Scorch it!' Kat rounded on her. Carrying a contented Egan, now sleeping peacefully, on her hip, Fani was glowingly beautiful. She also looked far too young to be a wife and mother. 'And I don't know how you can be so sharding patient all the time!'

'Ssh, Kat, sit down. You'll wake Egan.'

Kat scowled and flounced angrily to a chair by the fireside, where she pulled her feet up and rested her chin on her knees in a posture that Galen would certainly have denounced as inappropriate for a young lady of her age and station, ignoring the discomfort of hard stone that couldn't be disguised even by drapes and cushions. Her anger gave way temporarily to curiosity. 'How do you stand it, Fani? I mean, I can't see any reason why you should have married him. And then there's Egan – I mean, how?'

'Kat!' Shocked and embarrassed, Fani blushed, her ivory skin stained pink, clashing with the deep wine-red colour of her dress.

'Sorry!' Kat reddened too, although she doubted that it looked as attractive on her as it did on Fani. She had her father's slightly brown, coarse skin, and she couldn't make herself believe that her hair was anything other than sand-coloured. 'I meant…'

Egan shifted and grizzled slightly, and Fani rocked him gently, soothing him as she recovered her own composure. 'It's all right. I know what you meant. And in answer to your question – Galen wasn't always like he is now, Kat.'

Kat scowled again. She was always being told that. But what use was it to her? Here she was, fifteen turns old and trapped in this airless inner room without even a window to open and let the air in, without even a window that she could look out of and gaze up at the stars and dream of being free of the restraints of propriety and of her father's suffocating discipline.

'I know,' she said, impatiently. 'When my mother was here.'

Fani shrugged sympathetically. 'I didn't know him then. But even when I first met him, Kat, he was – he was cold, he was cautious, he was in some ways a wounded man, but he was still human.'

Kat knew where her stepmother was going with this line of thought. 'Arrin.'

Fani nodded, rocking Egan in her arms and gazing into the fire. 'I liked Arrin, Kat, don't get me wrong –'

'Like!' Kat interrupted, forcefully. 'He isn't dead!'

'That's true. I like Arrin, and I understood his frustration and his restlessness, Kat, as I do yours, but when Arrin left too, that was what finished your father. I do think that Galen has been badly treated by the world, Kat. I think… if I was him I would feel as though everything that I had ever loved had walked away from me.'

'That's not true!' said Kat, fiercely. 'He drove Arrin away! Himself! His fault. I'd go, if I could get away with it. If I'd been old enough when Arrin left, I would've.'

'Right. And somewhere, Galen must know that too. Your mother hurt him, so he cut himself off from you, and from Arrin, and so he caused that second great hurt to himself.'

'It was all her fault,' Kat said, jealously. 'Why did she have to go away? Didn't she love us enough?'

'It's a very great thing, to be Searched to a dragonweyr,' Fani said, gently. 'Perhaps she was overwhelmed by it. She was very young, you know, younger than I am now. She married your father young, and you were only a babe in arms.'

'All the more reason not to leave me!' Kat clenched her fists. 'She was older than I am, Fani, and I know if I was happy and had a loving family and a little baby I wouldn't leave them for any reason!'

Fani didn't say anything. She rested her cheek on her own son's soft head and felt the warm weight of him in her arms, like a small animal. She could find no answer to Kat's assertion. She herself couldn't comprehend the reasoning that might have led to Galen's first wife's abandonment of her husband and child.

'And if she hadn't,' said Kat, angrily, 'then everything would be all right. We'd be happy here. Father would be kind, and I'd be allowed to go out and ride and… I'd have brothers fostered so there'd be other people my age in this whole vast mausoleum, and everything would be fine!'

She paused, as if waiting for Fani to find some more arguments in her mother's defense so that she could continue to get angry and tear them down, and when Fani made no response she snorted. 'I'm going to bed.'

'Sleep well.'

Kat scowled and flung herself out through the archway that led to both her and Fani's rooms as well as to Egan's nursery.

Kat was still thinking of her mother as she lay in bed, frowning into the dark with immense sadness as she listened to Fani pacing backwards and forwards and singing quietly to a fretful Egan in the next room.

The younger Kat had grown up in a Hold full of her mother's ghost, or so it had seemed to the girl. She didn't even know if Calantha was truly dead, or if she was living as a goldrider at Benden Weyr. Living happily, forgetting that I exist, Kat thought, bitterly. She tried to piece together in her own mind what little she did know about her mother.

Arrin had told her the most. He was her father's brother, although he had seemed to Kat more of an elder brother than an uncle, for he had been some turns Galen's junior, almost as close in age to Kat as to her forbidding father. As a child Kat had followed him around constantly, especially before Fani came, delighting in Arrin's sense of fun and his outgoing chatter and kindness. Arrin had been the first person to tell her that her father had once been different. 'He wasn't always like this,' Arrin had told the girl, when she cried because her father had been cross with her for soiling her dress or for bothering the stablemen about their duties. He had used the phrase like a talisman for the child. 'He wasn't always like this.'

Kat hadn't realised then that it had been to reassure himself as much as her. While Galen had had no wife and no son, Arrin had been the obvious potential heir to Lemos' Lordship, and Galen's insistence on the responsibilities and ceremony of the close family of a Lord Holder had borne down heavily on the naturally light-hearted young man. Kat remembered well hiding herself under a table in the hall, wide-eyed and holding back tears as Galen and Arrin had shouted at one another. Later she had been too old for such retreat, and she and Fani had looked on aghast as the brothers fought. For years Arrin had kept himself from despair with the idea that Galen hadn't always been this way – and might not be this way forever.

Until he had stopped hoping. One night he had slipped into ten-year-old Kat's room just as the girl was on the brink of sleep. 'I'm going away,' he'd said. 'I can't stand it any more, Kat.'

Even then the girl had blamed her misfortune on her mysterious mother's departure. She'd got as much of the tale as she could from people who were willing to tell, but even that just gave her tantalising and fragmented hints. 'She was a good fun – a wild one,' Arrin had told her. 'That's why he wants you to be so prim and proper, I think, Kat. He doesn't want you to grow up like her.'

'She was good-looking, all right,' fussy old Palla, the head cook, had told her. 'Now get out of my way, Lady Kat, I've a lot to do.'

'She did wrong by this Hold,' tall, gaunt Berna said, glumly. 'Ah, Lord Galen should have known what comes of an imprudent marriage.'

'They were so much in love,' sighed Shona, the flabby middle-aged woman who had been employed to teach Kat the basics of spinning, weaving and embroidery. 'But I shouldn't talk about it, Lady Katriel, the Lord wouldn't like it.'

That was how every conversation about her mother ended. Your father doesn't like it talked about. It seemed to Kat that her father was determined to pretend that Calantha had never existed at all.

If only that would extend to pretending I don't exist, she thought bitterly, rolling over and pulling the blankets more tightly around herself. I get the worst of both worlds – being stuck with all the propriety and restraint he expects of his daughter, without him ever once looking me in the face. I wish I could get out of here!

The absolute blackness of the room seemed to contract around Kat, forcing the air from her lungs. She shut her eyes and forced herself to breathe regularly… in… out. It didn't really help. Even when she pulled her body back under control, there still seemed to be an echo reverberating round the room and through her head. Trapped… trapped… trapped…