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

AN: Just to prove that I honestly can keep to a tight schedule when I put my mind to it. Although it wasn't that hard as this is only a very very short chapter. And remember, I always welcome feedback, especially comment on what worked or didn't work for you and anything I can do to make this story better! (ps - Amere, hi! Great to hear from you again. See, I don't take forever to upload... well, not always...)

The huge cavern seemed to be spinning around her, bright sparks of dragon hides dancing and cartwheeling around the corners of her vision. 'I'm seeing things,' she thought, distantly. 'It's the heat. I wonder if I'm going to faint?' But the centre of her vision remained unnervingly clear; her family, all of them, in their festival finery, together, walking into the Hatching Ground. Her father inside the Weyr, albeit stiff and awkward and forbidding - her father greeting, voluntarily greeting the Weyrleaders! Her father!

'I'm so arrogant,' Kat thought, wonderingly, watching them. 'I'm so arrogant! Did I really think only I could do anything? Did I believe it was all about me?'

Galen took a seat and scanned the Hatching Ground loftily. If he spotted her he gave no sign of it, but then Fani took the seat next to him, and the tiny inclination of the Lord Holder's head as her mouth moved in a soft-voiced remark told Kat that despite his unchanging face he was listening to her, recognising his wife in a way Kat had never seen. The girl's mouth dropped open even further as she drank in the scene through wide eyes. 'Oh, Fani!' she thought, and laughed softly, almost breathless with joy. 'What has happened?'

Arrin moved, and she thought she knew. Her athletic uncle looked around, hesitated - and then carefully, deliberately, chose the seat next to his older brother. Kat gaped up at him, wishing she was close enough to throw her arms around him. 'He went back!' she realised. 'Someone, somehow, something touched him, and - or maybe it was father, even, maybe he swallowed his pride and wrote Arrin, how am I supposed to know, but someone had a moment of insight, of wisdom, and somehow, somehow, it's going to be all right!' Her skin ached where her smile was so wide it threatened to split her face in two and she lifted her hands to her cheeks and found herself wiping away moistness from astonished, happy tears. 'It was never about me,' she thought. 'It was about all of us, and someone - older and wiser and braver than me - has tipped the balance back in the right direction. And -' the next thought was so astonishing that it stopped even her desperately relieved flood of thoughts '- and they're all right without me.'

'They don't need me.' Somehow, weight that Kat didn't even know she was carrying was lifting free of her shoulders, letting her stand taller, letting her float. Her family supported her - they were here to support her! - maybe, just maybe, they even loved her - but they didn't need her there, tied to that life, stuck in the eternal grimness of Lemos Hold. Now she was free. Now she could be anyone that she wanted to be.

And she wanted to be a goldrider of Benden Weyr. Kat spun around, dazzlingly joyful and finally, finally sure of where she was going, and marched back to the raised dais where the queen egg waited.

There she had to pause a minute; the platform was shoulder height for her, and the sand was burning hot where she would have to out her hands in order to pull herself up. She frowned, looking up and down, wondering whether there was an easier way up.

"Here." Someone above knelt at the edge, bracing themselves and reaching down.

"Thanks," Kat responded gratefully, grabbing the offered hand and scrabbling her way up until she landed in an ungraceful breathless heap on her belly at the top. The other girl helped her to her feet, and Kat steadied herself and found herself looking into Ola's deep brown eyes.

Kat opened her mouth and was hit by a sudden feeling of déjà vu. "Ola -" she paused, not knowing exactly what to say. "Thank you. Why are you helping me?"

Ola's face was earnest and serious. "I want to ride the queen. Don't make any mistake about that. But - what's the point in winning if you haven't beaten the best?"

Kat looked at the other girl, her own face falling into the same intent lines as she inspected Ola. 'This is honour,' she thought, faintly surprised. To her, honour had always been about standing on your dignity and refusing to show emotion or weakness. But this, this stubbornly self-hindering quality in the auburn-haired beauty, was real honour and the right sort of pride.

She nodded slowly, and said quietly, "Right."

The two girls turned together, almost in unison, and walked over towards the queen egg shoulder-to-shoulder. Kat glanced sideways at Ola out of the corner of her eye as a couple of other girls stepped back to let them through. 'This would be a friend worth having,' she realised, 'If I can only make it happen…'

The queen egg was rocking now in its place, the great golden dragon stretching her long neck over towards it and humming more strongly as if encouraging it. Kat could feel the vibrations reverberating through the rock of walls and floor, stirring the stifling air in gentle patterns as the light seemed to shape itself so that the eleven girls clustered around the gleaming egg were the focal point of the whole cavern. The noise seemed to build tremors of excitement through Kat; she snatched another glance upwards at her family, half-afraid that they would have vanished, and found that they were all, even Galen, watching enthralled.

Her heart singing and a foolish smile breaking out across her face, Kat took another step forward. The egg cracked, a distinct splintering sound, and shivered as a fine network of lines spread themselves across it. Behind her she heard someone's tunic rustling as they tried to move in, but a sudden and vehement hiss from the maternal queen caused them to jump back hurriedly. Stilling her own impulse to jerk away in fright, Kat snatched a glance at Ola, still beside her. 'We two seem to be tolerated,' she thought. 'So it really is just me and her.'

She'd known that anyway.

Gently, carefully, walking on the soles of her feet as though she were sneaking through the back corridors of Lemos, she stepped towards the egg. It was cracking apart now in earnest, flakes of shell falling to the ground with that unmistakeable sharp and brittle noise and within Kat could see damp dark gold flashing. And then one last ferocious shove smashed through the remnants of the smooth oval and the egg collapsed in a heap of porcelain fragments, and the little queen stood in the midst of it all, shaking shell-grit off her wet hide with an irritated flick of her tiny wings.

And Kat found that her vision had gone funny again; the light seemed to coalesce around the dragonet and skid glitteringly off her gleaming shape, outlining her softly so that when she moved she left dazzling traces in the air where she had been. Kat exhaled slowly, a long gusty sigh, and took another step forwards, almost involuntarily. Ola was opposite her now, on the other side of the little gold, and if you'd asked Kat moments before what she'd do she'd have said that she'd look at Ola, maybe even sneak one more glance up into the stands to check that her family were really there, but actually in that perfect breathless moment she stood entirely separate from everything in the world except the baby queen as the dragonet snaked out her neck and swung her elegant wedge-shaped head around to meet Kat's eyes.

And Kat, the hot, rippling air swirling about her, fell headfirst into those welling pools of light, sank into Lumeth's eyes so deep that she knew she would never break surface again.