Ready to Ride to Her Rescue

Writers: Jane
Date Posted: 28th July 2014

Characters: Sahna
Description: Sahna writes letters to her family.
Location: Harper Hall
Date: month 8, day 7 of Turn 7
Notes: Mentioned: R'haran, Iselen, Tellen, Arwey, Tibby
Notes: Mentor approved.

The illustrated letters she sent to Tibby always took the longest to do. There
was quite a bit of planning to them, settling on the few words, drafting the
pictures and then redrawing them in their final form. She started them during
the sevenday and by the restday they were in the final stages.

She didn't know why she persevered with them, other than R'haran's assurances
that Tibby loved receiving them.

Sahna put down her pen and riffled through the pile of letters in the basket in
front of her on the workbench. She pulled out and opened a couple before finding
the one she wanted.

** ... and it's not just Tibby who loves them. I save them all – and you know
how little paperwork I bother to keep – and sometimes I find the others have got
them down out of the press and have them spread out across the floor of the
weyr. Perhaps Evie doesn't appreciate them as well as she might, but everybody
else enjoys your little picture-stories so please keep them coming.**

And that, she thought as she re-folded R'haran's letter and replaced it in the
basket, was why she kept doing them every sevenday.

Sahna looked at the final copy of Tibby's 'letter' and put it aside. It was
done. And now she had to write to everybody else.

Her sister Arwey wasn't difficult. Arwey just wanted to know about people.
Gossip, Sahna might have called it, but it was not exactly that to her sister.
Arwey was simply people-oriented and it was only people that interested her. It
was odd, then, that the rare skill their adoptive father had of remembering
everything he read should have re-appeared only in Arwey, of all of them.

Sahna smiled at the thought that all R'haran's efforts to get Arwey to read more
–and so to learn more – had come to nothing since Arwey would only read about
people. Made-up people, for a choice. And especially made-up people living very
unlikely lives straight out of the most exaggerated harper's tales.

**Dearest Arwey,** Sahna began. **Incredibly the thief in the dormitory has been
unmasked and you will never believe who it was ...**

Sahna's straight dark hair fell forward as her head bent over her work and the
pen scratched against the paper for some time before she finally signed off.

She hoped Arwey would remember that the letters were just stories. She would
_remember_ of course, because she had read it, but remembering and applying what
she remembered were quite different things, unfortunately.

It was always easy to write to Iselen. They were the two eldest and they were
responsible for their family even though all five of them had for some Turns now
been formally adopted by their grandfather's uncle, greenrider R'haran. What
made writing to Iselen even easier these days was that he had gained permission
to Stand for the next Hatching at Dolphin Cove and so his brief letters to her
were all full of his new life as a Candidate.

Sahna wrote a little about her own sevenday at the Hall, asked a few questions
about how their younger siblings were getting on, and then filled the rest of
the page with questions about Candidacy and dragons. Iselen would be happy that
she was taking an interest.

Tellen was the middle child in the family, and at nine Turns old was nearly four
Turns her junior. He was never any trouble and that almost worried Sahna.
Younger siblings ought to cause a bit of trouble and Tellen hardly ever did. He
might follow the others into scrapes of one kind or another, but he was there
because he was loyal. She started her letter to him, telling him about her
hand-casting the letters for her history of printing classes. She thought it
would interest him and she tried to break up her tales between all her letters
so the same information didn't get repeated in each. Everybody, she thought, had
a piece of her sevenday in their letter.

Once she signed and set aside her letter to Tellen she found herself staring at
the next sheet of paper.

**Dear R'haran,**

Every sevenday she paused at this very point, wondering what to tell her
adoptive father. She knew he worried about her – a female apprentice in the
Southern Continent that still banned women from crafts. At a word he would be
here on scarred Evie to take her back to the Weyr, and if she wanted to continue
her craft, up North where women could craft or not as it pleased them.

But not every girl-apprentice had those options and thinking about them often
made her feel that she was not as committed as the others. She wasn't risking as
much by being here when she had access to the Weyr and the North if she cared to
use it.

So, her letters to R'haran informed him about some of her work during the
previous sevenday, some of the amusements of being an apprentice at a craft
hall, and some of the ups and downs of her life at the Harper Hall at Emerald
Falls Hold.

It was a finely crafted piece of work. Not quite as fictional as her letter to
Arwey, but with omissions that made it slightly less-than-honest.

She didn't doubt for a moment that R'haran saw through her careful wording and
subject matter. He had been a harper as well as a dragonrider in the decades
before Thread returned, a negotiator and a mediator. He understood what people
said and what they meant – and could recognise the difference.

It _was_ nice to have somebody ready to ride to her rescue, somebody older that
she could rely on. After their grandfather had died she had been the eldest, the
one who had to keep things going and make the decisions, and she appreciated
that R'haran now did that for the five of them.

But she didn't need rescuing. Not this sevenday.

And her letter home to R'haran had to reassure him of that.

Last updated on the July 28th 2014

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