Dragonquest recap

Seven Turns after the five lost Weyrs were brought forward through time, Pern is fighting Thread successfully but coming apart socially: the transplanted Oldtimer riders expect an obedience the modern holds and crafts will not give. F'lar of Benden pushes for craft invention and for attacking Thread at its source. F'nor finds a clutch of fire-lizard eggs in the south, and the small telepathic dragon-cousins spread rapidly across Pern. Kylara's neglect of her queen leads to a mating flight in which two queens fight and both die, leaving Brekke dragonless and Kylara destroyed. F'nor's attempt to fly a dragon to the Red Star nearly kills him and ends that hope, but the discovery that Southern's grubs devour Thread in the soil offers a lasting defence. When the Oldtimer leader T'ron challenges F'lar to a knife duel and loses, the irreconcilable riders are exiled to the Southern Continent. At a Benden Hatching, the boy Lord Holder Jaxom helps a tiny white dragon out of its shell and Impresses him.

Pern is periodically scoured by Thread, a spore that falls from a wandering neighbouring planet and devours anything living it touches. The defence is dragons, telepathically bonded for life to their riders, flying from mountain Weyrs and flaming Thread out of the air. In Dragonflight, after four hundred Turns without a Fall, only Benden Weyr was still occupied, and the holds treated the riders as parasites. The bronze rider F'lar, convinced from the Records that Thread was returning, found Lessa, the last heir of Ruatha Hold, hiding as a drudge under the conqueror Fax; he killed Fax, she Impressed the queen Ramoth, and when Ramoth rose to mate F'lar became Weyrleader of Benden. Thread fell as he had predicted, and Benden's two hundred dragons could not cover a planet. After the riders rediscovered that dragons can travel between times as well as between places, Lessa reasoned from an old riddle-song that Pern's five abandoned Weyrs had gone forward in time, rode Ramoth four hundred Turns into the past, and persuaded them to come. They arrived at Benden as an army large enough to defend all of Pern. Pern was saved, but it now holds thousands of riders raised four centuries earlier, who expect a deference the modern holds and crafts no longer wish to give.

Seven Turns have passed since the five Weyrs came forward. The Pass is being fought competently, but the alliance that fights it is fraying. The transplanted riders, called Oldtimers, were raised in a Pern where holds and crafts obeyed the Weyrs without argument, and they resent modern holders who bargain, craftsmen who invent and a young Benden Weyrleader who tells them what to do. F'lar, still Benden's Weyrleader with Lessa as Weyrwoman, is trying to hold seven Weyrs together while pressing two ideas the Oldtimers detest: that the crafts should be encouraged to build new things, and that Thread should be attacked at its source instead of merely burned out of the air every few days for fifty Turns. Mastersmith Fandarel is producing better flamethrowers and pushing for a faster way to send messages across Pern, and the smith Wansor has been handed an ancient instrument nobody has understood in centuries. F'nor, convalescing from a Threadscore at Southern Weyr on the far continent, comes across something no Record mentions: a clutch of fire-lizard eggs on a beach. Fire lizards are small wild cousins of dragons, and they can be Impressed by people in exactly the same way.

The fire lizards change Pern quickly. Eggs are gathered and given out, and the creatures prove affectionate, telepathic within a short range, and able to carry small objects and simple messages. Brekke, the young queen rider who does the real work of Southern Weyr, Impresses one; so does Mirrim, the girl she fosters, who manages three at once, which nobody thought possible. Eggs also reach hands Benden would rather they had not, most notably Lord Meron of Nabol, a spiteful and ambitious holder who is glad of anything that raises his standing and who has been keeping company with Kylara, Southern's senior Weyrwoman. Kylara treats her rank as a privilege and her queen Prideth as an inconvenience, spending her time away from the Weyr. Brekke and F'nor grow close, although custom has other plans for a queen rider. In the north, Fandarel and Wansor turn the ancient instrument out at the sky, and discover it is a distance-viewer that can be pointed at the wandering planet itself.

Brekke's queen Wirenth comes to her first mating flight. Prideth, unattended and beyond Kylara's control, rises at the same time, and the two queens meet in the air. Queens are not supposed to fight; these do, and both die. Brekke is left alive with her dragon dead, a loss riders almost never survive, and she withdraws so completely that F'nor, Manora and her fire lizard are all that keep her breathing. Kylara, whose neglect caused it, breaks entirely and is beyond recovery. The disaster is public, and it hands the Oldtimers exactly the argument they wanted: this, they say, is what modern laxity produces. It also leaves Southern Weyr effectively leaderless and the northern Weyrs badly shaken, at the moment F'lar most needs the seven Weyrs to act as one.

F'lar's argument that Thread should be stopped at its source becomes urgent, and Wansor's work with the distance-viewer gives it substance: the wandering planet can be observed, its orbit calculated and its surface glimpsed. F'nor, grieving and impatient, takes Canth and attempts the flight to the Red Star itself. They reach it and find conditions no living thing can endure, and only just get back; both are badly hurt, and the idea of carrying the fight to the source on dragonback is finished. Almost at the same time the Southern Continent yields a different kind of answer. The soil there is full of grubs that consume Thread where it burrows, protecting the vegetation from below, and the evidence suggests they were deliberately bred by Pern's ancestors as the other half of a defence in which dragons were only the aerial part. If the grubs can be established in the north, Pern's dependence on dragons need not be permanent, which is a conclusion the Oldtimers find intolerable.

The quarrel with the Oldtimers comes to a head in public. With Lord Holders, craftmasters and riders all present, T'ron of Fort Weyr challenges F'lar's authority outright, and the two men fight with belt knives. F'lar wins, badly wounded, and instead of killing his opponent imposes a settlement: the riders who cannot live in the modern world are exiled to the Southern Continent, away from the Weyrs still fighting the Pass, and are to stay there. Fort and the other affected Weyrs pass to leaders willing to work with the holds and crafts, and the younger bronze rider N'ton comes to prominence among them. The split ends the immediate crisis and creates a lasting one: a body of resentful, displaced riders is now settled in the south with nothing left to lose and no Thread of their own to fight.

With the Oldtimer split settled and F'lar recovering from his wounds, Benden holds a Hatching. Among the guests is Jaxom, the boy Lord Holder of Ruatha, brought by his warder Lytol. One egg on the sands is unusually small and the hatchling inside cannot break out of it; Jaxom, standing close enough to reach, opens the shell himself. The dragon that emerges is tiny and white, unlike any dragon in the Records, and it Impresses him on the spot. A Lord Holder is not supposed to be a dragonrider, and a dragon that small is not expected to survive, let alone fly or mate, but Ruth is alive and Jaxom will not give him up. Brekke, brought to the Hatching in the hope that the new queen might choose her, is not chosen and will never ride again, but she begins to come back to herself and to F'nor. Pern closes the book with its Pass being fought, its Oldtimer problem exported rather than solved, the grubs offering a defence that could outlast the dragons, fire lizards spreading everywhere, and a white dragon nobody knows what to do with.

F'lar defeats T'ron in a knife duel in front of an audience of Lord Holders, craftmasters and riders and, badly wounded, uses the victory to settle the Oldtimer question: the riders who cannot accept the modern world are exiled to the Southern Continent, and the affected Weyrs pass to leaders willing to work with the holds and crafts, among them the young bronze rider N'ton. The search for a permanent answer to Thread produces two results. F'nor and Canth reach the Red Star and find conditions no living thing can survive, closing off any dragon-borne attack for good. Against that, the grubs of the Southern Continent are shown to consume Thread where it burrows, which suggests Pern's ancestors designed a defence in two parts and that the dragons were only the visible half. At a Benden Hatching, Jaxom, the boy Lord Holder of Ruatha, opens an undersized egg with his own hands and Impresses the white dragon Ruth, a pairing that satisfies neither the holds nor the Weyrs and that nobody knows how to undo. Brekke, not chosen by the new queen, accepts that she will never ride again and begins to recover with F'nor. Fire lizards are spreading everywhere, the Pass goes on, and the exiled riders sit in the south unreconciled.