Энн Маккефри: The Second Weyr

Blood only, Alaranth! Torene repeated as her queen leaped on a second large bullock. You must fly the highest you can. You must not eat to do that! Blood it only!

Though they were the length of the Weyr apart, Torene felt as if she were right there beside her ravenous queen; the hot blood was running down her throat, and she wondered why it wasn’t choking her. With another part of her consciousness, she felt hands touching her and realized that she was surrounded by many sweaty male bodies, but her immediate concern was not for herself, but for Alaranth. The queen seemed to pulse goldenly even from this distance.

The terrified herd beasts were stampeding about, but they had nowhere to go, and as their circling took them too close to the blooding queen again, she casually made a little hop and landed on one of the smaller creatures.

Blood it! Don’t you dare take the flesh, Alaranth. Don’t you dare!

Torene was in her queen’s mind with an immediacy she had never experienced since Impression. Still, she gasped at the suddenness with which Alaranth flung aside the last kill and, with a gigantic push from her hind legs, surged aloft. The male dragons on the Rim were equally surprised. They all sprang up; two or three dropped off the Rim and were somehow airborne and rising faster than their rivals. To Torene, they were just a blur of wings behind her, for she was Alaranth more than she was Torene, increasing the distance between herself and the males with every beat of her broader, longer wings.

The peaks were falling fast below, and the air cooled a body heated by blooding and by sexual drive at its most potent point. Alaranth reveled in her speed, in the height she was gaining so effortlessly. She caught a thermal and soared on it, attaining more altitude. This was higher than she had ever ventured, and she felt strong, felt the powerful lift of air under her wings, caressing her body, stoking the fires already consuming her.

Far below her sparkled the sea, blues shading to green and aqua. She felt, rather than saw, the shadow: sensed the proximity of another. Craning her head around, she saw the cluster of males below and some distance behind her. They would not catch her so easily. They hadn’t her wings, her strength, her. . .

Strong talons gripped her shoulder joints, a powerful neck twined with hers, and wrenching herself about to meet her attacker, only too late did Alaranth realize she had done exactly as the bronze had hoped and she was well and truly caught. As he made sure of his conquest of her, wing to wing, necks twined, talons locked, Alaranth realized that only one had ever been in contention for her, and she abandoned all restraint.

“Now! Torene, now!”

Torene was no longer aloft with Alaranth in the throes of the dragons’ mating passion; she was naked in the arms of the bronze’s rider-naked, and her body demanding the same glorious orgasm that her dragon had just experienced.

“Damn it, Torene,” that rider was saying as he attempted to penetrate her body, “did you have to wait until now?”

She gripped him to her, her nails digging into the muscular flesh of his back. The hurt was a mere moment’s discomfort, immediately forgotten in the powerful surging of lust that rose from some unexpected, limitless depth within her.

“Toreeeeeeeene!”

The cry of her name produced mild astonishment in her: the tone held more than triumph, more than surprise, more than intense pleasure. So she opened her eyes to see whose dragon had flown hers so skillfully, which rider had take her.

His face was still buried in her neck; his body, limp with repletion, leaned heavily against hers. He smelled of sweat, as she did. Even his hair was damp. They were both dripping, but as she wrapped slippery arms about his slippery back, she knew him, and knew him more intimately now than she had known any other man.

“Polite”? “Considerate”? Her errant mind went through the comments of the other queen riders about this man. “Deft”? Well, he had certainly been that, both with his bronze’s tactics and with herself. “Controlled”? Oh, no, not a bit controlled. Not polite, and more angry with her virginity than considerate. But then, had she been all that wise, leaving her first experience until her queen’s first flight? Well, it had been her option, and she was glad she had. That way she had been sure that it was her dragon who would choose, not some silly preference of hers.

“Mihall?” She spoke his name softly. His breathing had slowed, and she didn’t know if he had fallen asleep where he lay on her. He wasn’t that heavy, and she’d better get accustomed to it anyway, since he was now indisputably the Weyrleader-and her weyrmate.

He gathered himself to move away, and she held him fast. She liked his body. Indeed, she liked it very much for the way it had made her feel, the way it had completed her.

“You made for the thermal current right off?” she asked, having figured out just how he had managed to achieve his goal.

“Hmmm.” He moved his head to emphasize the agreement.

Vividly blue eyes regarded her with solemn appraisal. His short hair was dark red with sweat, but it curled as much as hers did. She expected that they’d have curly, red-headed children and smiled to be thinking that far ahead right now.

“Only way,” he murmured. Then, almost as if he expected her to resist, he ran a wondering finger down her cheek.

“Alaranth hadn’t a chance against that technique,” she said.

“I didn’t intend that she should, ‘Rene,” he said with a slow smile, and stroked her cheek again. It was the warm smile she liked so much. “I couldn’t let any other rider have you.”

She looked up at him quizzically: not “dragon,” but “rider” and “you.” He meant her, not just what she brought to this union, her dragon and the Weyrleadership.

“Rider?”

He raised himself on his elbows, looking down at her face as if he had to memorize every detail. “You are exceptionally beautiful, you know, and those eyelashes are totally unfair!” That marvelous smile of his again curved his firm mouth.

“But you said you were going to be Weyrleader.”

“Oh, I’d’ve been that one way or another, sooner or later,” he said in a blithe tone. He gave her very tender kisses on the edges of her lips.

“Polite”? “Restrained”? She couldn’t help smiling up at him, thinking of how very wrong the other women had been and how very glad she was that they were.

“It was always you I ached to have,” he said, still memorizing the planes of her face, kissing her cheekbones. “From the moment I saw you Impress Alaranth. But my father had warned me off the queen riders. I had to shadow Admiral Benden in order to get anywhere near you then without having my backside flayed.”

“That long ago?” Who had been avoiding whom since? She raised her eyelashes then and swept them teasingly across his forehead. His arms tightened, and there was nothing polite or considerate about his response: a response that had nothing to do with his dragon.

We both have what we wanted, said a dragon in a sleepy satisfied tone.

Try though she would in all the years she and M’hall were the Weyrleaders of Benden, Torene was never sure which dragon had spoken. Or to whom.