Dragonflight recap

On Pern, a long-isolated world, the deadly spore called Thread falls from a neighbouring planet whenever its wandering orbit brings it close, and the only defence is dragons and their bonded riders. After four hundred Turns without a Fall, five of the six Weyrs stand empty and the holds despise the riders they are obliged to support. Convinced Thread is about to return, the Benden bronze rider F'lar searches for a new queen's rider and finds Lessa, the last heir of Ruatha Hold, hiding as a drudge under the conqueror Fax. F'lar kills Fax, Lessa Impresses the queen Ramoth, and when Ramoth flies to mate F'lar becomes Weyrleader. Thread returns as he predicted, and Benden's two hundred dragons cannot cover a planet. After the riders discover that dragons can travel in time as well as in space, Lessa works out from an old riddle-song that the five missing Weyrs went forward in time, rides Ramoth four hundred Turns into the past and persuades them to come. Pern gains the dragons it needs, and with them thousands of riders out of its own distant past.

Pern, a world settled long ago and largely cut off from its origins, is periodically scoured by Thread, a spore that falls from a wandering neighbouring planet and devours anything living it touches. The defence is dragons, bred from a native species, telepathically bonded for life to their riders and able to chew a mineral that lets them flame Thread out of the sky. But Thread has not fallen for four hundred Turns. Five of Pern's six Weyrs stand empty and abandoned, only Benden is still occupied and it is badly undermanned; the holds resent the tithes they pay and treat the riders as parasites on a danger nobody living has seen. F'lar, a Benden bronze rider, believes from the oldest Records that Thread is about to fall again, and rides out on Search for a woman fit to Impress the queen dragon's next clutch. The Search brings him to Ruatha Hold, ruined and sullen under the conqueror Fax, who took it ten Turns ago by killing its ruling family. What nobody knows is that one Ruathan survived: Lessa, hiding as a kitchen drudge, gifted with a strange ability to touch minds, and quietly working to make Ruatha worthless to the man who stole it.

F'lar provokes Fax into a duel and kills him, and Lessa steps out of her disguise to claim Ruatha as its last surviving heir. Fax's exhausted wife, Lady Gemma, dies bearing a son at Ruatha; the infant, Jaxom, is named Lord Holder in his father's place, with the former dragonrider Lytol installed as warder to raise him and govern the hold. Lessa gives up her claim to Ruatha in exchange for a larger one: F'lar takes her to Benden Weyr as a candidate, and on the Hatching Ground she Impresses the golden queen Ramoth, the only queen dragon left on Pern, which makes her Weyrwoman of the last inhabited Weyr. She is furious to discover how much of her new life she is expected to accept without explanation, and how little the Weyr's leadership intends to tell her about why they came looking for her at all.

Lessa chafes under the instruction of R'gul, the Weyr's traditionalist leader, who forbids her to fly Ramoth or to read the Records for herself; she does both anyway. Ramoth grows enormously and comes of age, and when she rises to mate Mnementh outflies every other bronze, which by Weyr custom makes F'lar Weyrleader and finally gives him the authority he has wanted. He drives Benden's riders back into fighting drills nobody has needed for four hundred Turns, over the objections of men who think Thread is a story told to justify the tithe. Lessa, meanwhile, reads. The Records are damaged and full of gaps, but between them and the old teaching ballads one thing becomes clear: the ancient defence assumed six full Weyrs, and Benden has roughly two hundred dragons where thousands are needed. Ramoth's first clutch, unusually large, is the only good news anyone has.

Thread falls. The wandering planet's approach is confirmed and the first Fall drops over Nerat, burning into forest and living flesh exactly as the old songs describe. Benden's riders fight it and win, but the victory exposes the arithmetic: one understrength Weyr cannot cover a whole planet, and Falls will come every few days across every region for fifty Turns. Riders and dragons are scored and injured, and the holds, panicking, discover that the tithe they resented bought the only thing standing between them and being eaten alive. Then an accident reveals something the Weyr had forgotten: a dragon given a place and a time to visualize can travel to both, arriving before it left. Dragons can go between times as well as between places, which lets Benden's small force be in two places at once, but it exacts a heavy toll of exhaustion and disorientation on riders and dragons alike, and a rider who miscalculates simply never arrives.

Time travel buys Benden breathing room and nothing more; the riders are wearing out under a burden meant for six Weyrs. F'nor and Kylara take a group of dragons, candidates and eggs ten Turns into the past to the long-empty Southern Weyr, where they can breed and train a fresh fighting force and return after only months of the present's time. Even that will not be enough. Lessa keeps returning to a fragment of an old teaching song about the Weyrs going away, which no harper can explain; Robinton, the Masterharper, agrees it is a question nobody has ever answered. Setting the song beside the Records' abrupt four-hundred-Turn silence, Lessa reaches a conclusion nobody else has considered: the five Weyrs did not die out, they left, and they may still be reachable. To go to them she needs a place and a time she can hold clearly in her mind, and she finds it in an ancient tapestry at Ruatha, which shows the hold as it looked four hundred Turns ago.

Lessa makes the jump alone on Ramoth, using the tapestry as her reference, and nearly dies doing it: four hundred Turns is far beyond anything a dragon has attempted, and the crossing is long, cold and blank. She arrives in the past, where the five Weyrs are full and a Pass has just ended, leaving thousands of dragons and riders with nothing to fight for four centuries. She persuades their leaders that the future needs them, and the five Weyrs come forward through time to Benden, arriving in the present as a fighting force large enough to defend all of Pern. Pern is saved, F'lar has the dragons he needed, and the riddle-song is answered by the very act of answering it. The cost is not yet obvious: Pern now holds thousands of riders raised four hundred Turns in its own past, accustomed to their own customs and to a deference the modern holds and crafts no longer offer.

Lessa rides Ramoth four hundred Turns into the past, using an ancient Ruathan tapestry as her reference point, and survives a crossing long enough to nearly kill them both. In the past she finds the five Weyrs at full strength at the close of a Pass, facing four hundred Turns with nothing left to fight, and convinces their leaders to bring every dragon and rider forward. They arrive at Benden as an army: enough dragons to cover all of Pern for the whole of the new Pass. F'lar is confirmed as the leader who was right about Thread and who now commands a force capable of fighting it, and Lessa's gamble closes the loop that made the old riddle-song a question in the first place. The holds' contempt for the Weyrs is broken by the plain demonstration that the riders are all that stands between Pern and the spore. What is left unresolved is what Pern will do with several thousand riders displaced from four centuries in its own past, who expect the customs, the authority and the deference of their own time and have arrived in a world that changed without them.