Maitre d'Dalibor [Cath]

The Tanrider's lips pulled tight when Delilah looked away after, at first, appearing to acknowledge him. But his dull olive eyes calculated the scene again, following the Apprentice's hands especially, trailing to her patient's face. By the time she left he'd relaxed, and turned to the Blackrider in her absence. Q'sis' low voice went through a few neutral words of encouragement. When the patient smiled, proving receptive to a male subqueenrider's praise, the Weyrling touched an uninjured shoulder and leaned down to whisper something that had the Blackrider chuckling wheezily.

He straightened up as the Pinkrider returned, blinking hard, like something'd caught in his eye, at her question. But Delilah followed her own inquiry well, and Q'sis lifted his dark-bearded chin, then turned away from her to see that she made good on her words.

"Fajra's orders, if you want to think of it that way." Q'sis' voice rumbled over the din, he never looking back to find out if he was talking to himself or not. "I am sure she and her headwoman- the new one -had a fair hand in picking out all the healers currently in charge." A ruminating pause carried him through the breaching of the camp boundaries, the concentrated antiseptic odor giving way to Dalibor's native oceanic winds. Q'sis gave some consideration to a couple chair-like rocks on the borders of the camp, judging by how his step slowed past them, but he kept moving. "Or since there's still Thread duties going on, maybe it's O'sho's orders."

He located a second collection of rocks in almost the exact same configuration as the first, only they were further away from the healer camps, and in fact squatted together in one of the barest portions of the Bowl, equidistantly far from everything. The wind ran strong, and the sun opened up on them from above without any nearby walls to shield them. "Best to call them my orders," Q'sis suggested, finally looking over his shoulder at her. "And you did well to follow them, Delilah." He turned around and sat himself down on the tallest of the rocks with a grunt, extending his legs away from the base till they were comfortably bent, but not ground beneath him.

Q'sis picked up the tiny secondary bag he had been hauling alongside his first. He held it out to the other Tideturner. "You eat, then you rest." The bag held a slightly crushed fishroll, a small, dry redfruit, and a flask of water. "I eat, then I- go back for more orders." There was no official requirement in place, but as Q'sis could no longer assist during the Fall he felt somewhat obligated to make good on his training afterwards. But the healers did keep sending him on decidedly lax assignments like this one. He pulled the far larger bag into his lap and loosened the knot at its throat. From the scents that flittered out into the air, there was an entire buffet in the sack.

The first thing he took out was a hard leather drinking pouch, which he uncapped, rewarded with a gasp of steam from the still-hot klah inside. Q'sis drained some of the drink, still thoughtful on his task, brow twinging downwards after he'd observed Delilah a moment. "The Boss-" He meant the Master Healer on-duty, but Delilah would have to work out that nuance on her own. "-thinks that Weyrling Apprentices like you have a tendency to overwork themselves when not monitored carefully."

He ignored her after conceding his mission, poking through his bag till he located the first of the bubbly pies he had collected. It was only the size of his massive palm, and he balanced it in one hand while he used the other to peel away the cloth wrapper. He bit open a corner of the crust, flinching as the piping hot bluefruit innards grazed his lip, then sat there nibbling anyway while steam blew out of the pie's growing wound. "Your dragon did not fly today," he observed between measured bites. He did not like to get crumbs in his beard. A bubbly pie was the strongest possible assassin. "What good is a dragon that does not fly?"

The Tanrider looked up as the Pink's voice intruded, swimming through his awareness like an exotic scent. There had been a period when such contact had been painful, and though Unath now provided a buffer, Q'sis still flinched. A smile followed. Hello, Agnith.

His flat olive eyes descended to the Pink's rider, who spoke after the dragon, and could be heard only by ear. Her words were without malice. He had not known the healers were only humoring her till she and her dragon had passed the last leg of Weyrlinghood. "You are in control of yourself then," he said. "Good news for the Master Healer."

His gaze dropped to the small bag of vitals he had given her, and he started rummaging through his own again. "And for your fighter." He pulled out a small wherry drumstick wrapped in cloth, and kept the fabric wrapped over the bony end while he bit off the top. That kept his hands dry and clean throughout the indulgence.

Unath had not been oiled yet when Agnith called to her, but she had remained quite comfortable splayed on the ground as she was.

Hi. With a passing interest in the location of her caller, Unath rolled onto one side. All she saw was a wall. The dark dragon rocked her weight till she propelled herself over onto her back, belly to the sky. She could see many dragons swirling around the Bowl, but not the one that had talked to her. Unath blinked her inner lids.

"How helpful it would be, were more dragons willing to speak to men other than their riders," Q'sis said. "Even Unath I must control for that to happen." Control, it seemed, was descending as a main theme of the shared lunch. Or perhaps it was just one of Q'sis' recurring classics. "Everything in Fall would run faster." He took another clothbound morsel from his bag: a bar of klah extract that released a sharp cinnamon odor as soon as his teeth snapped it. He glanced over Delilah's comparatively impoverished lunch a second time. "Do you need anything else?"

Q'sis had to resist the urge to smile. He had to resist his first, unclarified instinct: that this girl was good. Not that he wanted to judge her otherwise, but it simply did not fit for him to appreciate her, a fighter's rider. What good was she in the long run? But she did work hard, and she was...

"You are calm for a woman," the Tanrider observed. His statement might be mistaken for praise, what with his surprised pleasure in the direction of this conversation pulling on his lips and softening his stares. "You remind me of someone." Who was it? He tried to remember. It had been another girl that puzzled him, rather than angered him, or made him happy. He still much preferred the lattermost kind, but puzzling was at least not irritating. Or monstrous.

He recalled her: Traepsie, now a Cyanrider. Another girl misplaced to a fighter. Q'sis looked down into his bag, and his attention lingered there even as Delilah replied on the matter of dragon speech. "In Threadfall, speed is safety," he added at last.

I am not falling. I am rolling. Unath curled her neck, craning her snout skyward, then turned her head to one side to fix a single eye on the pink blot that had just been realized over a ledge in the distance. She flipped back over onto all-fours, then leaped away from the Candidate Barracks and swept herself up on full-bodied sweeps of her wings in an ascent that was nearly vertical. Q'sis' gaze left Delilah and followed the dragon with dreamy appreciation.

Unath landed primly on a free spit of stone nearby, rather than slamming down right next to Agnith as her trajectory seemed to have been originally planned. Found! she crooned at the Pink, quite contented with herself. Found you, she elaborated, then laid her chin down on the rock and nestled back into lethargy, though she still watched Agnith.

"Fish?" Now a trace of his lingering bewilderment did turn up Q'sis' tone. "Outside the Weyr, you mean?" The Tanrider pressed his lips together, cinching the bag he had brought back up, though it was not entirely empty. It was one thing to have an adult dragon and an adult rider like, say, Samael, traversing the forests for game. The forests were far too dense for anything too dangerous to grow there. But the beaches were open territory, hospitable to immigrant pests of all sizes. And Delilah, for all her virtues, was not Samael. She was still a girl, as far as Q'sis had estimated.

He looked over his shoulder at the healer camps he had meant to join. Several of the tents were already being folded up, the work light for this Fall. "It will be evening soon. If you are going beyond the Weyr lake, I am coming with you."

Q'sis' shoulders sank a little as he listened to her. A scowl that had already started on the tail-end of his statement, anticipating resistance, melted back to grim neutrality. The Tanrider's green gaze adjusted between her eyes and the movements of her lips as she spoke, not quite convinced he was hearing what he thought. But when he had confirmed at least a few of the words, he looked back up at her- as much as her eyes represented 'her,' anyway. Q'sis bit the inside of his lower lip as she acquiesced too to his demand, making a disappointed tug at the corner of his mouth.

"I want to say you remind me of L'kie," he said, in a voice haunted not by solidity but by a trace of conversational amity. "But that's too obvious, you both being Healers. And he is uglier than you, and his temper is not as professional." Q'sis seemed to ruminate on his own speech for a pause. "But that is where I am starting, for some reason." Even his words lacked their typical steadiness now, like he was no longer choosing the ones with the strongest oppressive qualities. He held out his hand, turning up the callused palm. "Give me your bag. I will bring this lot back to the kitchens. Get what you need from your weyr, and I will meet you there." He knew where it was now, with Unath and Agnith to guide him.

Like her rider, Unath responded better to tone than content. Unlike him, she could only pull out one aspect of a voice, and the touches of dragon minds were a bit more sophisticated than simple human tongue flapping. She could also misinterpret. She thought Agnith sounded concerned, and so: I am okay. She inchwormed to the edge of her perch, and tried to point at something on Agnith with one of her arms. Her reddish claw quivered furtively in the space between them, unable to reach. I like... she started anyway, but without making that crucial touch she seemed unable to finish.

She wiggled on her elbows, dragging her forebody off the ledge, but just as she was about to make contact her head jerked away, angling dully after Q'sis. Oh. The Tan looked around at herself, surprised by her off-balance positioning, but quickly worked it to her advantage by leaning left and flopping sideways from the ledge. Her entire body rotated around once, then she stretched open her wings with a bewildered hoot. She hovered there till a second command pulled her back on-task, and she glided down toward the kitchens entrance. She did not say goodbye or even look back at Agnith.

Unath was a quiet but stronger-than-usual bubble of support at the back of his thoughts. Q'sis was only passing through the kitchens to deliver the bagged refuse, but the Tan seemed to be tapping his memory all the way back to other times, and other journeys he had taken down those tunnels. The point was only affirmed when, upon his reemergence from the kitchen gap, the dragon rumbled her relief and lowered her head to follow his progress personally. This led to a dramatic flexing of her neck-coil as he climbed up her shoulder and seated ahead of her wings. But Unath's diligence did not pass unrewarded, as with her snout so close Q'sis could readily pat the pad of skin between her nostrils. His hand dropped and he pressed his thumb just at the separation of her lips, rubbing the pale stalk of a fang. She had all the sharp teeth and muscle of any other dragon- more than most, even. Q'sis looked up to her large, clear eyes, which brightened their gossamer green at his attentions.

He seized on her, turning her head out to the sky, then springing her into that glistening blue domain of dragons. He liked to grip the air with her wings, see how far he could take her in a single flutter. At their Rim-level weyr he stripped off the the webwork of her fighting harness, slapping some oil over her neck before he laid in a fresh pair of simple riding straps. The leather and sweat of the Fall went off, exchanged for lighter wherhide trousers, and the deep ebony coat signifying all non-official operations. Though it used to be habit, it was now a conscious decision to slip his beltknife into a sheath and fasten it at his hip, the jeweled hilt strapped in just firm enough to keep it from plummeting while he clambered over Unath's architecture.

He arrived at the Pinkrider's ledge without dismounting, a bag and a couple glowbaskets swinging from Unath's neck-straps like ornamented tassels. A few seconds after she'd set down, Unath looked around herself in restrained bewilderment, then chirruped a hello at Agnith. Q'sis regarded his fellow Tideturner through flight goggles, which still had a few smokey marks on their banding even though he had wiped the glass parts clean.

Show me where you go, then, he ordered, voice channeled through Unath where he thought it might be insufficient spoken. Even Agnith's ledge was high enough to catch the wind at this hour, and Unath stood somewhat distant from her sister, wings fanned for an immediate second take-off.

He watched Delilah ascend her Pink's arm. At first he was keen for any inefficiencies in her climb, but when he found none there was only the flash of blond hair to look at. Q'sis tilted his head out toward the brisk summer skies instead. He did pay a little more attention to Agnith's rise from her ledge, but he had seen it before. The Tideturners were more familiar with the dragons of their class than any others. Under his direction, Unath waited for the Pink to escape them by a few dragonlengths before she dropped off the point of the ledge. The wind changed by the time she got to it, and she had to drag herself up on her own wingbeats.

Luckily her wings were vast, and Q'sis was much-practiced in operating the finger-spars to achieve a power of his liking. He did not try to catch the fighter, but stayed a respectable Tan-length behind her on the way out, and just a little higher in the sky. When Unath and Agnith's thoughts began to touch together with more than the default draconic sociability, he swept the speckled subqueen forward and down, finally abreast with the other beast but with a handy length between the outer tips of their wings.

He only let Unath gawk after Agnith as far as it served his observation of the technique. Then he steered her nose to the right and they peeled away from the other dragonpair, setting Unath's dark form into a comfortable orbit over the sea. Water rippling jade like wherry's blood teamed with tricks of light, and Q'sis did not make easy sense of the dark patches even when he started watching with Unath's eyes.

After a significant delay he-- Unath --dove, though the drop was without steepness, the dragon's wings incompletely shut to promote her downward velocity. Q'sis was bunching her up on a school of nine-foot mysteries, their side-to-side swimming reminding him of a gang of tunnelsnakes. He had thought what speed he'd accrued, combined with the approach from behind, would suffice.

Shipfish! the Q'sis-Unath collective barked shortly before they were on their prey.

Twenty of the creatures disappeared into deeper water, only the last slow to turn. He could see the golden slicks striped along the sides of its blue tail, and was bizarrely reminded of Delilah.

Then the fish squirted out of Unath's talons as he closed them around its midsection, and abandoned its plans to escape to the depths. Right in front of him it squirreled its body around and dashed straight out of the water to his left. It had six immense fins, black-tipped and triangular, that carried it away through the air just above the waves. Here the lack of angle in Unath's descent came into play, as Q'sis was able-- after a moment of open-mouthed confusion --to steer her after the escapee with a minimum of drag. The spray of the water on Unath's paws was a brief but delightful sensation.

The fish did not fly like a dragon would. It lashed its spade-tail frantically, but its wing-fins held out stiff at its sides. It had a long prow with a point at the end, but its jaws seemed fixed back by the root of the extravagant rostrum. Its huge silvery eyes reflected the green of the sea, the blue of the sky, and in one corner the dark brown advance of the dragon. Q'sis easily caught up, but as he made for a quick grab with Unath's smaller forelimbs, the fish simply folded its wings from front to back and flicked back under the skin of the water like an arrow.

For a moment the Tan glided stupidly over the empty seas, her empty hands hanging outward in an inefficient palms-up posture. Then she belted back up to Agnith's height with an aggrieved roar, tail lashing as violently as the fish's when she got back on-level with the fighter. This time she got in much closer to Agnith with her circling, but her eyes-- flashing red and green in bright half-second rolls --were not fixed on the Pink. This time, she asserted with a very non-Unath-like growl. The grumbling was followed with a much lighter, and less acutely sourced: This is fun.

Unath did not react to Agnith's straining muzzle, though the man at her back looked over at the pink. When Agnith moved down toward the sea again, he steered Unath after, already anticipating he could filch a catch off the fighter's efforts. The only surprise was when he was invited to it. He hesitated because there were no shadows to hunt in that direction, but rolled Unath according to Agnith's guidance just in time to be inundated in fugitive fish fleeing the pink.

A happier tone of draconic bellowing flatlined into a growl as the first fish he seized fell right out of Unath's paws without any special wriggling on the fish's part. He had been trying to prevent mangling of the carcass by holding it loose, and had been rewarded with a coating of oil and no fish. Q'sis twisted his tan's body after the other prey items, grabbing at one with Unath's right forepaw and lancing three of her claws through its side. The tan fell into a misty hover over the sea as she lifted the fish up for his inspection. Four feet or so, with little flesh left that had not been rendered to rags by the clumsy catch.

Q'sis watched the fish's remains squirm for a few seconds, then grunted and Unath's jaws dropped to nip off the captive's head. She arched her neck back a few times to swallow the hard, armored fish-parts as he glanced back toward the pink and hers.

Stay still, he ordered Agnith. I am coming to you. Unath's big wings lifted her substantially through the act of turning about. Q'sis shook the fish off her paw and washed the offended appendage, pinching the corpse by its tail as he set off for the fighter. Unath approached Agnith from below, long body angling near-vertical. Q'sis braced his feet on her shoulders, but the ridge behind him provided ample support and he even took his hand off the strap ahead so he could watch for fish while he maneuvered Unath's paws into placing the fish.

The tan hooked one small arm against Agnith's, tucking the tattered fish into the pink's transport netting with the other. Her paw slapped Agnith's shoulder in confirmation of the transfer, then Q'sis ducked back against the ridges and minimal straps he had donned for the excursion. I see them. Follow me. Unath's back arched, tipping her head, neck, and chest into an upside-down loop for as long as it took to get a preponderance of her weight in the correct direction. Q'sis grinned at Delilah as the agility gave him a glimpse of her, then offered an upside-down salute. Unath's wings clipped closed within the same moment, and her hindquarters were flipped on the same arc, sending her off on a steep dive, snout perpendicular to the waves.

As she got within a dragonlength, her wings fanned and her shadow enveloped a familiar school: yellow-finned flying fish burst away from her landing zone in all directions like the rapidly growing petals of a flower. One smaller individual leaped straight up and was immediately seized in a descending hind-talon. It was a long shot, but Q'sis mustered his beast to the north, after the largest of the fish he'd assessed in the split-second before his first attack.