The White Dragon recap

Jaxom, Lord Holder of Ruatha and rider of the undersized white dragon Ruth, is allowed to be neither a proper Lord nor a proper dragonrider, and secretly trains Ruth to fly between and to flame Thread. When the riders exiled to the Southern Continent steal a queen egg from Benden's Hatching Ground and bring the Weyrs to the edge of war, Jaxom uses Ruth's unique certainty about time and place to take it back and return it unseen. He falls dangerously ill afterwards and is sent to a southern cove to recover, where the healer Sharra, the harpers Menolly and Piemur and the wider south open up a life nobody is managing for him. He locates the retired Weyrleader D'ram in the past when no other dragon could; at Ista the exiled leader T'kul loses his dragon, attacks F'lar and is killed, and Masterharper Robinton survives a heart attack and is retired to a hold built at Jaxom's cove. Following memories carried by fire lizards, the group uncovers the buried settlement of Pern's first colonists. Jaxom is confirmed as Lord of Ruatha, keeps Ruth, and takes Sharra as his lady.

Pern is periodically scoured by Thread, a spore that falls from a wandering neighbouring planet and devours anything living. 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 remained occupied. The bronze rider F'lar found Lessa, the last heir of Ruatha Hold, hiding as a drudge under the conqueror Fax, killed Fax, and became Weyrleader when Lessa's queen Ramoth flew to mate. Thread returned, Benden's dragons were far too few, and Lessa rode Ramoth four hundred Turns into the past to bring Pern's five abandoned Weyrs forward in time, saving the planet and importing thousands of riders raised four centuries earlier. In Dragonquest, those Oldtimer riders proved unable to accept a Pern where holds and crafts no longer obeyed the Weyrs without question. Fire lizards, small telepathic cousins of dragons, were discovered and spread across Pern; two queen dragons fought and died, leaving Brekke dragonless; F'nor's attempt to fly to the Red Star ended any hope of attacking Thread at its source, while grubs found in the Southern Continent proved able to destroy Thread in the soil. F'lar finally defeated the Oldtimer leader T'ron in a duel and exiled the irreconcilable riders to the south. At the Hatching that followed, Jaxom, the boy Lord Holder of Ruatha, opened an undersized egg and Impressed the white dragon Ruth.

Turns on, Jaxom is in his teens, Lord Holder of Ruatha in title while his warder Lytol governs, and rider of a dragon nobody knows how to classify. Ruth is full grown at roughly half the size of an ordinary dragon, white, healthy and clever, and the Weyrs have quietly decided he is a pet: not to be flown against Thread, not expected ever to rise to mate, and not to be taken seriously. Jaxom is caught in the same judgement from the other side. The Lord Holders will not risk Ruatha's heir in a Fall; Benden will not let a hold's Lord fly in a wing. So he is taught hold management, drilled on his responsibilities and kept out of the sky, while the boys he trained beside go to the Weyrs. He also begins to notice something about his dragon that no Record describes: Ruth is never disoriented, never uncertain, and always knows precisely where and when he is, which is exactly the sense that ordinary dragons lose when they travel between times.

Jaxom decides that if nobody will train Ruth, he will do it himself, and teaches him to fly between in secret, working from the visual references a rider must hold in mind to travel. Then Pern's balance breaks: the riders exiled to the Southern Continent, aging and without a queen of breeding age to keep their Weyr alive, steal a queen egg from Benden's Hatching Ground. Benden is prepared to go to war over it, the northern Weyrs would be fighting each other in the middle of a Pass, and no ordinary dragon can be sent to search the south without being seen. Jaxom realizes that Ruth's certainty about time makes them the one pair on Pern who could take the egg back without being caught. They go, find the egg among the exiles, and return it to Benden's sands almost unnoticed, which averts the war. Jaxom cannot claim what he has done, because admitting it would mean admitting everything else he has been doing with Ruth.

The egg is back and the crisis passes, but the secret sits badly with Jaxom, and only a handful of people ever learn the truth of it. N'ton, the Fort Weyrleader, works out enough of what Ruth can do to become an ally rather than an obstacle, and quietly helps Jaxom train instead of reporting him. Jaxom pushes further: if Ruth can fly between, he can chew firestone and flame, and Jaxom sets about teaching him. Between hold duties, his own frustration at being managed, and a young woman named Corana at a small holding on Ruathan land, he is living three separate lives, none of which the Lords or the Weyrs would sanction. Ruth, meanwhile, is followed everywhere by fire lizards, who treat him with a deference they show no other dragon, and whose fragmentary shared memories are stranger than anyone has bothered to examine.

Jaxom takes Ruth into Threadfall, and the pair prove they can fight, though the manner of it can no longer be hidden. Shortly afterwards Jaxom collapses with firehead, a fever that leaves him weak and disoriented for a long time, and the healers order him out of the northern winter. He is sent to convalesce at a quiet cove on the Southern Continent, where the climate does the work no medicine can. There he is nursed by Sharra, a healer from Southern Hold, and joined by the harpers Menolly and Piemur, with Brekke and F'nor keeping an eye on all of them. For the first time in his life nobody is managing Jaxom's future for him. He recovers slowly, swims, explores the coast with Ruth, and falls in love with Sharra, while the south itself, unmapped and enormous, starts to look like the answer to a question the north has not asked.

D'ram, the Istan Weyrleader, loses his Weyrwoman and disappears rather than preside over the succession, leaving Ista leaderless in the middle of a Pass. Because only Ruth can fix a person's exact time as well as place, Jaxom is the one who finds him, in an earlier Turn at a southern cove, and persuades him to come back. Ista's queen then rises to mate, and T'kul, leader of the exiled riders, brings his aged bronze north to fly her. The dragon dies in the attempt. T'kul, dragonless and beyond reason, attacks F'lar, and F'lar kills him, which effectively ends the exiled Weyr as a threat. In the same crisis Masterharper Robinton suffers a heart attack and very nearly dies. He survives, is forbidden to go on as he has, and D'ram takes on the southern responsibility. A hold is built for Robinton's retirement at the cove where Jaxom convalesced, so that Pern's most useful man can be kept alive and still be talked to.

With Robinton installed at Cove Hold and a standing company of harpers, riders and holders around him, the southern coast becomes the centre of Pern's curiosity rather than its politics. Ruth's peculiar hold over fire lizards turns out to matter: the creatures carry inherited images from far further back than any Record, among them a mountain that burned and people who went away. Piemur's Turns of exploring the south, Ruth's certainty about place, and Robinton's willingness to take a fire lizard's memory as evidence combine into an actual search. Jaxom, now openly flying Thread with Ruth and no longer pretending otherwise, spends his time between Ruatha's business, Sharra, and the hunt. On a high plateau inland the group finds regular shapes under a deep layer of old volcanic ash, and starts to dig.

What they uncover is the settlement of Pern's first people: buildings of stone and unfamiliar metal, buried when the mountain erupted and abandoned by ancestors who left the site and, over the centuries, lost even the memory of it. It is the first physical proof that Pern's inhabitants came from somewhere else and once possessed things the crafts cannot now make, and it changes what Pern can ask about itself. Around that discovery everything else settles. T'kul is dead and the exiled Weyr finished; D'ram holds the south for the Weyrs; Robinton is alive at Cove Hold with more than enough to occupy him; Toric of Southern Hold is quietly counting how much of the continent he can claim before the north notices. Jaxom's own status, unresolved for the whole book, is resolved by what he has done rather than by anyone's ruling: he is confirmed as Lord Holder of Ruatha and remains Ruth's rider, flying Thread with the Weyrs, the first man on Pern to hold both places at once. He takes Sharra as his lady, over her brother's objections, and Ruatha has a Lord again.

The party working out of Cove Hold follows the fire lizards' inherited memories of a mountain that burned to a high plateau in the south, digs, and uncovers stone-and-metal buildings buried under old volcanic ash: the settlement Pern's first people abandoned, and the first hard evidence of where Pern's inhabitants came from and what they once had. Robinton, retired to Cove Hold after a heart attack that nearly killed him, is alive and given the discovery to occupy him. At Ista, the exiled Oldtimer leader T'kul is dead by F'lar's hand after his bronze died attempting a queen's mating flight, which ends the exiled Weyr as a threat, and D'ram, recovered from the past, takes charge in the south. Jaxom's own question is settled last: having flown Thread with Ruth in the open, recovered the stolen queen egg, found D'ram and helped uncover the ancient settlement, he is confirmed as Lord Holder of Ruatha while remaining Ruth's rider, an arrangement the holds and the Weyrs both accept because he has made it impossible to argue with. He takes Sharra as his lady over her brother Toric's objections. Toric's ambitions in the south, and the question of what the buried settlement will eventually tell Pern about itself, are left open.