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Re'ka folded the last of her clothes and slipped them into one of the wall alcoves before heading deeper into the bathing cavern, slowly unbraiding her hair as she went. Her muscles ached and her right thigh stung a little, vicarious pain from a small score Pycath had taken, but it was a satisfying ache and the wound would soon heal.

the brown said, lazily brushing up against his rider's mind as he lounged out in the sun down by the lake.

"Mmmmmh," Re'ka purred in reply as she stepped into one of the deliciously warm pools. "Good Fall," she commented to L'ris as she settled in; there hadn't been any deaths or any wounds that would obviously be crippling to rider or dragon. Sometimes things just didn't heal right of course but there was no help for that or any point in worrying about it, especially as it didn't affect anyone she personally cared about.

A good natured 'heh' of amusement was L'ris' reply to that comment. "Sure," she replied, "Third-One's not so bad, you're doing pretty well considering you don't have me and Pycath anymore." She'd enjoyed her first turn of riding with Third-One but murder investigation hadn't suited her as well as it might have; she was better at tracking bandits than she had been at taking witness statements and sifting through clues.

"No First Wing today of course," Re'ka added slyly on the heels of her friendly brag, "they must be running around like wherries with their heads cut off."

"Maybe, but only once they've finished measuring too," Re'ka replied with a grin as she finished unbraiding her hair and sank up to her neck in the water, luxuriating in the heat. "It'll be interesting to see who T'gall does give it to though... is he going to try to secure the people he was winning over at the feast, or placate the ones who're rumbling like G'vian?" There would be no satisfying some of them; a brown dragon had produced a bad clutch and that was something the traditionalists would latch onto hard, that and the fact that he had demoted G'vian of course.

"T'gall's a brown rider," Re'ka pointed out with a shrug, "maybe he'll favour another brown for it.... Probably a man though." T'gall was no traditionalist, she liked that about her old wingleader, but she doubted he would go so far as to appoint a woman or the rider of a blue or green.

"I could be first wing material though," the large woman continued in the matter of fact tones of the utterly self-assured, "but I think for now I'd rather focus on promotion within my own wing... not easy with Ko'ren in charge of course but he probably won't be around forever, if he's on G'vian's side of this he probably won't find himself in post much longer." She wouldn't miss him, though she had to admit that the new air of competition he had stirred up within the wing kept things interesting, and his dismissive attitude towards First was good fun too; everyone had their up sides... most people anyway.

"Ha! Who knows." Re'ka rose a little way back out of the water and lent her elbows on the side of the pool, smoothing her hand over her hair and shaking her head. "All I can think is that he thought he would humiliate T'gall and convince everyone they made a mistake in voting for him but that's stupid anyway, T'gall would have had him easily. G'vian might have been near unbeatable in his day but as T'gall said at the feast his day has passed, he's too old now. Maybe he wanted just one last whiff of glory."

Pycath opined to his rider in a slithering sigh.

Re'ka sighed, because much as she liked T'gall pretty well she thought he had gone far too far in his own opulence for the night.

<Wasteful.>

Re'ka chuckled unabashed and shrugged her huge shoulders a little. "Maybe not, but his days of thinking he can just pick up a sword and beat anyone in a duel are. He's still good - I've seen him drill - but he doesn't have a younger rider's edge anymore; he's fifteen odd turns older than T'gall and it shows, there's a difference between leading a Weyr and winning a duel." G'vian might still be capable of the latter but the former? Not against the Weyr's younger master duelists like O'ail, the up-and-coming Ko'ren, or - admittedly to a slightly lesser degree in her opinion - T'gall.

Pycath pointed out to his rider and to Pennath. G'vian did what was needful and he respected that even if the man's attitude to female riders and chromatic dragons was a problem for his own plans.

"Not to G'vian." Re'ka inspected mainly healed cut on her forearm as she said this, and her brow wrinkled slightly as she thought. "I guess it was just all too much, losing his position like that wiped out his inclination to sensible sobriety; he'd been weyrleader so long... And then he finally loses it to some showboating brownrider." This last was said with some satisfaction; she might think G'vian was probably the better man for the job but her clannish loyalty to T'gall, one of her people, made her enjoy the bronzerider's fall all the same.

Pycath replied with some distaste. Some of the others were faulty too, most notably the one with the shrivelled leg, but none were so obviously hopeless as that brown.