Not Being Chosen

Writers: Jane
Date Posted: 22nd December 2006

Characters: Arateyka, Lhara
Description: Arateyka talks to Lhara about Standing as a candidate.
Location: River Bluff Weyr
Date: month 1, day 5 of Turn 4

"A sevenday or so."

Arateyka looked around and smiled at her sister. Lhara was wearing an old dress that was a hands-span too short and washed almost free of colour and then wearing on her blonde curls a wide-brimmed, oiled rain hat. The journeywoman smith couldn't help but smile at a slightly ridiculous but still very attractive picture her sister made.

"What are you doing out here?" she asked, patting the parapet of the bridge beside where she was leaning to watch the river flow under the bridge.

Lhara dabbed at the stone, inspecting her hand before she leaned next to her sister. "I came to see if you were ever leaving the smithy. Don't you have anything else to do in the evenings other than work?"

"You know, I don't, really." Then it occurred to Arateyka that she could have bragged about her emergency teapot repair and made her evenings at the smithy seem more exciting than socialising in the dining cavern would be. As she went to speak she recalled what Lhara had said as she had approached. "A sevenday or so?"

"Mmm." Lhara studied the water intently. "Not an exact time, is it?"

"What isn't? Oh, the Hatching?" She was right about that. Once the eggs were clutched it was easy enough to add the right number of days to get a date for them to hatch, but it would only be approximate. Eggs – or the dragonets inside them – seemed to have a mind of their own. "No, not exact. Are you nervous?"

Ducking her head so that the wide brim of the hat came between her and her sister's searching look, Lhara shrugged. "Excited a little?"

"_Nervous_ about not Impressing," Arateyka said, certain about it. "I think everybody is. Weyrbred everybody, I mean." Those who weren't Searched and Stood only as a right of birth in the Weyr. "Go on, tell me you're not."

Even knowing she was being teased Lhara couldn't help tilting her head and glaring at her sister. "_You_ weren't. You only ever wanted to be a smithcrafter."

"Well, yes, I did, but I was worried about … being left. No matter that we could see there were two or three times as many of us as there were eggs and it was obvious the majority of us were going to leave the Sands alone." Arateyka shrugged. "Not being chosen – who _would_ enjoy that?"

"But you just went back to smithing."

"Until the next clutch. Yeah, that was fun, doing it over and over again." The smith journeywoman lifted a hand to tug at the brim of her sister's ridiculous hat. "As time goes on you get better at pretending that you didn't expect to Impress anyway, but it's always a disappointment."

"But you didn't want to, did you?"

"Do you?" Arateyka countered quickly. She was never sure that their sister Ykana had wanted to, and yet she had.

"I asked you first."

"Anyone would think you were four, not fourteen," the journeywoman grumbled.

"And you fourteen not twenty-four. Come on. Tell me. Did you want to Impress?"

Arateyka had to think about it and to try to sort her current feelings from the way she actually felt at the time. "I'm happy that I didn't.
I like what I do, and I wanted to do it long before T'kanu insisted I Stand … but yes. I did, I suppose. I would have liked to be a dragonrider, then."

"Not now?"

"Not a choice I have. That's yours. T'kanu won't insist with you, you know. Not since Ykana's death."

"I know. I want to."

"Stand, or Impress?"

Lhara pushed herself off the parapet and took one last look at the swiftly flowing river. "No point in Standing if I don't want to Impress," she said with a smile. "Come on back and having something to eat."

Arateyka straightened and walked beside his sister, teasing her about the rain hat and unable to forget that Ykana's willingness to Stand hadn't included any real willingness to Impress.

Last updated on the December 24th 2006

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Not Being Chosen