F'lar and Lessa were vindicated when the deadly Thread returned as the records predicted and Lessa used her discovery that dragons could move between time to go back four hundred years and persuade the dragonriders of the past to come to her time. F'lar was mostly relieved to have someone experienced at fighting Thread step forward and help with the crisis, but the solution came with a lot of new problems. A few months later and the disagreements between the "Oldtimer" dragonriders and civilian holders are growing, and F'lar himself is losing patience with their arrogance. This means that for the first time ever, dragonriders are threatening to use the dragons as weapons against civilians, and the Lords Holder of Pern are looking to F'lar for another miracle.

The Red Star had recently passed beyond Pern and boredom was setting in for the dragonriders when Lessa arrived in the past asking for their help. They do agree to come forward in time with her; however, fighting Thread is dangerous work and the Oldtimers don't appreciate it when the modern Holders don't show what they consider to be appropriate gratitude. The problem is not easily resolved  as their expectation of tithes exceeds what Bendan Weyr actually has available, and modern craftsmen won't simply give them whatever they want for free. There is one additional problem as well, and that is the fact that settlements have spread out during the past 400 years, so there is a lot more area that needs to be protected. Neither side seems willing to work with F'lar to settle the issues.

F'nor, F'lar's brother, has chosen to stay on the Southern Continent with his brown dragon, Canth, to bolster their numbers. He falls in love with a young queen's rider Brekke, who was a healer before being discovered on Search. When dragons mate, so do their riders, so Brekke can only hope that Canth, who is unusually large for a brown, can compete against the larger bronze dragons. They are also surprised to discover that the mythological tiny fire lizards are actually real and can form empathic bonds with anyone nearby at their hatching, which offers a small taste of what bonding a dragon is like to civilians. It's hard to imagine though, that the old stories are true and dragons were bred from such creatures...

Admittedly, Dragonquest was my least favorite of the first Dragonriders trilogy. Perhaps because I was very young when I first read them, so the storyline about F'nor and Brekke was of less interest to me (I pretty much wanted to be Lessa when I grew up), but I did find what they learned about Pern's past on the Southern Continent interesting. The clash between "how things were done in my day" and what younger generations perceive the world will always be relevant.