Dragonhaven (13 page)

After a couple of eons he said, “Okay. Let's do it.”

It was the second time in my life I wished I knew how to pray. The first time had been when Mom disappeared. I was going to do better by my dragon.

I named her Lois. She looked like a Lois. I know how that sounds: It sounds like the ugliest woman I ever met must have been named Lois. But that wasn't it at all. It was really interesting after having that weird flash when I was seeing her how my father saw her. Maybe when Billy and the three other Rangers saw her for the first time it was still so soon, or I was still so tired, or I hadn't finished realizing that we had, you know, bonded, and I wasn't going to be able to hand her over to someone else, or maybe it was just that I couldn't read Rangers the way I could read my dad—my dad in a passion anyway, which didn't take a lot of reading.

But it was like the Rangers just saw her. My dad looked at her with all this other stuff going on about it. Granted that he was my father and the head of the Institute, and an Institute that was under sudden siege, but even so, it was interesting. And it gave me kind of a shock. And another teeny insight into what I was going to be doing and how hard it was going to be. Teeny because I slammed the door on it, before I saw any more of it, and then tried to forget what I had seen. I'd let myself see a little bit of the bigger picture in Dad's office—but only long enough to understand why Dad was so wired, even for Dad, who is always wired. This was what Dad later named my Footman Period. Remember the Frog-Footman in
Alice
, who, while all hell was breaking loose around him, sat on the doorstep and said, “I shall sit here till tomorrow—or the next day, maybe. I shall sit here, on and off, for days and days.” That was me. Days and days and days and days. While plates whizzed past my head and there was lots of screaming.

I named her Lois because I liked the name. And the reason she seemed like one to me was because after my father had looked at her I realized that I thought she looked like one of those wallflower girls in kids' books that suddenly grow up one summer and then they get a new haircut and contact lenses and go back to school that autumn and wow. (I used to read a lot of books about kids going to school and having normal lives, even ones about girls. You figure out why.) Lois was still in her squatty-with-glasses, wallflower stage, but I knew she was going to get over it. It was just up to me to make sure she lived long enough to do it.

Yes, I did think about calling her Alice—I thought about it a long time—but she just wasn't an Alice. Also, I didn't feel like encouraging any loose karma hanging around to put her through any more of the human wonderland than she absolutely had to go through—which was already more than enough. Also I was seeing the dragon caves nearly every night and they were just nothing like Alice's underground, and this seemed important somehow.

 

The Rangers' wing of the Institute is really two wings: barracks and offices. If you were on night duty, you had to sleep in the barrack wing, but once you were a real Ranger, which took anywhere from two to six years, you got your own little cabin in the woods beyond the Institute—with the Institute buildings protecting you (somewhat) from all the tourist stuff that went on on the other side. Tourists still managed to gatecrash sometimes, because tourists are like that, but it was supposed to be private. You were pretty much automatically on call all the time if you were in the Institute buildings. I'm not blaming my dad for being a little touchy, you know? He lived there
all the time.
And while I did too—till I adopted Lois—I was still only a kid. And some of how he protected me was that I didn't realize how much he did protect me.

Once you got your Ranger badge and sewed it on your shirt, you got a house. Sometimes you built it, and on the night of the day it was finished, the other Rangers came round as soon as it was dark and sang to you and your house, sang these long songs in Arkhola, and the chills went up your spine, even if you were just a kid hiding in the shadows so you could listen, and it had nothing to do with you. If you didn't build it, they still sang, telling the house that you were its new person (Arkhola doesn't have a lot of words about owning stuff). And once you had a house you could even get married. To another Ranger was a good idea. (People who weren't Rangers tended to leave, taking the children with them. A few tough guys compromised by having their families in Wilsonville, and didn't see much of them.) Billy was married. She wasn't a Ranger, but she was an Arkhola, and she'd grown up in this weeny village the other side of Wilsonville, so she should have had some idea what she was getting into. They were still together thirty-five years later so maybe she did.

As an apprentice I should have been in the barracks wing but (this was the official version) since I was an underage apprentice, I got given to Billy instead. Billy's cabin happened to be a little farther in the woods than most of the rest of them, and farther away from the Institute and the tourist trails, so that was good too, and also just farther away, period. The other Ranger houses, if you went to the front door and shouted, all your neighbors heard you. Except Rangers don't shout much, especially the Arkholas. Billy and Grace's house was a good half mile from the Institute, and what's really interesting is that it was one of the oldest. Old Pete's son, who built it, obviously took after his old man in terms of seriously not wanting a lot of human society.

Lois and I lived in the tiny bedroom Billy's son had grown up in. I was used to little—my bedroom at the Institute was little—but Lois made it smaller in a way Snark never had. (Billy's son was now an investment banker in Boston, but—surprisingly—not a bad guy. He's the one who got me interested in the political side of what Old Pete had done—had made me see he wouldn't have got Smokehill going if he hadn't been able to play the political game. Jamie had obviously learned those lessons well. There aren't exactly a lot of Native Americans who are successful investment bankers in Boston.)

Grace had at least as much to do with Lois' continuing to thrive as I did. She's the one who, once we were installed in the spare bedroom, made the broth, and she kept putting different extra stuff in it, all that vitamin and mineral stuff for babies that are still growing, but how she knew which extra vitamins and minerals a growing dragonlet needed is beyond me. She did all the plant and flower drawings for the various Smokehill guidebooks as well as a lot of stuff for national guidebook publishers about Smokehill's vegetation. (Which is, they say, increasingly uniquely peculiar because of the fence. We've still got big old full-grown elms in eastern Smokehill. Eat your heart out. There are beginning to be botanists out there who are getting on as crazy to do research in Smokehill as the dragon nuts.) When you saw Grace at her drawing board you could believe that
everything
about the plant she was drawing was soaking into her brain, including what was good for making baby dragons go a better color and grow some scales. She'd also always been a fabulous cook—most of us who lived at Smokehill would do anything to get invited to dinner at Billy and Grace's—but I don't know if Lois noticed.

By the time the next lot of school equivalency testers came around to aggravate me, Lois could bear to stay by herself for an hour or two, knotted up in our very-us-smelling bedclothes with a hot water bottle. This only worked if the sheets hadn't been changed in a while. I thought this was very funny, because it meant that when our sheets got so high that Grace insisted that I change them—and this happened pretty fast; baby dragons are smelly little beasts, however often you change their diapers—we couldn't wash them till the new ones had got pretty high too, so that I could go on practicing leaving Lois by herself. We couldn't even keep the door to our smelly bedroom closed, because part of Lois' fragile feeling of security was that it wasn't too quiet, and it was, too quiet I mean, in there by herself. She needed to hear Grace or Billy moving around. Which also meant that one of us had to be home
all
the time. (Occasionally one of the other Rangers who were in on it baby-dragon-sat.) Very labor intensive, raising a dragonlet.

Anyway I aced all my tests so fast the testers didn't know what hit 'em. I'd always been a pretty fair student—I've told you this already, I knew I needed to be—but this was almost ridiculous. I even aced
Latin.
Well, A minus. (But
boy
did I earn it.) But I was
home
all the time, wasn't I? I had a lot of time to study, so I might as well—and because the school-equiv creeps weren't going to go along with this apprenticeship scam if I didn't look like I was blooming and booming on it. (I actually gave up playing Annihilate—I mean completely. Lois didn't like the way I jerked and shouted when I was losing.) I was still having sleep-and-dream-and-headache problems, but I was getting more used to them, and it was actually easier to ignore—no, not ignore, live with—the headache if I was doing something, even schoolwork.

Martha was usually the grind who did the extra work and didn't just get As but hundred percents. I say it that way because I felt really bad about Martha (okay, here's a deep dark secret for you: also I was jealous that she is brighter than me), because she knew there was something up beyond just that I'd had some kind of freaky vision during my first solo and for some reason the grown-ups were taking it seriously. We used to do a lot of our schoolwork together, and we didn't any more, and because of pressure elsewhere the “class” lectures when some Smokehill person talked to the three of us stopped pretty much altogether so we didn't have that either. And that I was supposedly spending more time on learning Ranger stuff didn't cover it while the social worker and school-equiv gang still owned my ass, which they did. Even when I was there it was like my mind wasn't there with me—which it wasn't. It was on Lois, and whether she was okay. Zombie Jake, the New Not Improved Model.

Martha was sad because I hadn't told her what it was all about, but, being Martha, didn't nag me about it. She barely even asked, just wanted to know if I was okay. “Sure,” I said, and she smiled, that smile you do when you know the person is lying to you. I felt
lousy
. She knew that I was—had been—planning to go off and get a few PhDs so I could study dragons like my parents. She also knew that I periodically packed that one in and swore that I was going to apprentice to the Rangers—but she also knew I said that mostly out of funk. Most of the grown-ups might buy it that I suddenly really knew what I wanted, but Martha knew me pretty well, and she also knew that Billy wouldn't've accepted me if it was just funk. Martha takes after her mom. They're both way too sharp to be easy to have around.

Eleanor knew there was something I wasn't telling her too and she was a total brat about it, but at seven, being a brat was almost her job and I didn't take it too seriously, except that Eleanor's force of character did kind of mean you had to take it seriously. She took it particularly personally from me because I was another kid, and there were only the three of us. The last family with kids had come and gone while I was still pretty out of it after Mom and then Snark, so I didn't remember them much (although I remembered their dogs), but Martha and Eleanor had been friendly with them and Eleanor really noticed when they left and kind of realized that what it was about the three of us was that we were the only ones who ever stayed. Eleanor nagged me, all right, but she didn't get any more out of me than Martha did. The difference was that sometimes I almost told Martha, and I never had to stop myself from telling Eleanor.

The real point was that Lois was, amazingly, still a secret from most of the Institute—usually everybody knows everything about everybody else who lives here. (It's a joke among the grown-ups that either your partner is faithful or gone.)
Somebody
was watching over us. Maybe the Arkhola had a song for it. But even if the Arkholas had a lot of songs for it, Lois' guardian angel was going to need a very, very,
very
long vacation when all of this was over.

This is hindsight again, but you weren't there, so I'm trying to tell you the story as it might have looked to a sane person at the time, if there had been any sane people around, which obviously there weren't. Hindsight tells me that we couldn't POSSIBLY have kept Lois a secret. So we didn't. But I've told you how ginormously difficult it is to get hired to work at Smokehill, and all that vetting does a pretty good job. I think the Rangers who do the hiring, and the senior ones pretty much all have a lot of Arkhola blood, sort of hum over the candidates, and if the humming goes right, you get hired, and if it doesn't, you don't. So what we had at the Institute is a lot of people who were willing to leave a secret alone, because they would guess it must have something dangerous to do with dragons. Maybe Dad suddenly looked twenty years older and Billy stopped making his peculiar bone-dry jokes because of what was going on after the dead dragon and the poacher…but in that case why was Billy's house suddenly off limits now that the Rangers' underage apprentice was living there? Not to mention my mysterious semi-disappearance—what was I
doing
all those hours I was holed up at Billy's house? Vision on my first solo, huh? It must have been sooome vision.

Even now it's an effort for me to think about the poacher, even now when that part of it is more or less over and I'm trying just to tell it as a story. I don't even know his first name—I don't even really know what he was doing in Smokehill, except ruining everything. He was—and still is—always just “the poacher” to me like you might say “my worst enemy” or “the devil,” if you go for devils, which I don't much since I stopped playing computer games, but it's that kind of feeling, that blasting him through seven levels isn't good enough. He's “the poacher” because I
hated
him so much.