The Story of Owen (2 page)

She could have stayed in Hamilton, lived out her life as a hero there and done the motivational speaking circuit, but she didn't. Instead, she announced that her brother Aodhan would be taking over her duties until a permanent replacement could be found. Aodhan was a fair dragon slayer, in the tradition of his family. He'd done his time in the Oil Watch and served as faithfully as Lottie had, if not to such renown. He was still on the official roles, but he held no contract and seemed content to live unnoticed in his sister's shadow, raising his son to follow in her footsteps. Lottie's accident thrust him into the limelight.

It soon became apparent that Aodhan couldn't cope with the pressures of slaying dragons in an urban environment, particularly not one so hard-fought as Hamilton. He could handle the dragons well enough, but the constant audience, the way the media watched him and criticized his every move like he was a goalie for the Leafs, was something he had trouble with. Still, he might have learned to deal with it. What he really couldn't handle was protecting actual people, the stupid ones with camera phones and no survival instincts. So Lottie made another announcement: After much consideration and research into local areas that needed help, the family had decided to move to the countryside. There, she said, her brother would be able to protect barns and chickens, and perhaps as her physical therapy progressed, she might even be able to help him.

The nation reacted in shock. Never before had such a high-profile dragon slayer moved to the middle of nowhere and set up shop. Cities were always the focus of government-mandated
and independently contracted protection, and with good reason. Centers of industry attracted dragons by the score. In the country, a town might get one dragon attack a week, and even then, only a single farm or one residential block of some town no one had ever heard of would be lost. But Lottie was determined, and she refused to let anyone gainsay her decision. Neither she nor Aodhan had contracts, she pointed out, which was true, as she had been released from hers and Aodhan still didn't have any official paperwork, so they were free to move wherever they liked.

As the country watched, the Thorskards put their house up for sale and began, as quietly as they could, to organize their move. The coverage lessened after a few days, as the media moved on to other topics. There were plenty of other dragons in the sky, after all, and it
was
the playoffs. By the time all the Canadian teams were eliminated, it was almost like everyone had forgotten—or at least stopped thinking about—Lottie's sacrifice. And, in the city, they mostly had.

The countryside was different, though. Small towns across the province waited on edge for the announcement of which of them would be profiting from this unexpected piece of luck, as morbid as it was. No one cared that Lottie's career was over, that she would probably never slay a dragon again. The idea of her being close, choosing one of our own towns, was enough. We all clung to that hope as the Thorskards put their affairs in order in the city and loaded up their lives into a fireproof moving van.

And then she moved to Trondheim, with her family in tow, and we got our very own dragon slayer.

When he's older, I'm sure, they'll sing songs of his bravery and his heroic deeds. Once he's filled out enough to merit a name like “Owen the Broad” or “Owen the Football-Shouldered,” he'll be a legend. Right now, though, on top of being Lottie Thorskard's nephew and de facto town hero, he's reed-thin, weighs 150 pounds soaking wet, and I have to tutor him in algebra. And English. It would be embarrassing if it weren't so funny.

It's a family thing—the dragon slaying, I mean, not the bit where he's rubbish at school. His father slays dragons and his aunt used to, before that dragon's tail ended her career. His grandmother slayed them as one of the first members of the Pearson Oil Watch before that, and all the way back through the line. There's Viking in Owen somewhere, a broad euphonium and rolling drums and something else I haven't pinpointed yet, all buried underneath the crap life throws at adolescents. Before that day, though, I'd only ever seen it in
hints and flashes. Usually he hid it so well you'd think he was just any other kid, trying to survive high school long enough to fill out his growth spurt.

It was a sunny day in early December when I first saw the Viking shine clear through in Owen. I was at his house and we were reading
Heart of Darkness
, which is a valid piece of literature, I'll admit, but still not exactly relevant to the interests of a small-town Canadian teenage girl, and I was trying to explain that European imperialism was not the answer to everything when the phone rang.

He answered it with a brief and businesslike “Hi, Dad,” and squared his shoulders. He was still narrow and thin, more “Owen the Weedy” than anything else, but I could imagine him in his armor, with trumpets heralding his entrance, as he carried his shield in one hand and his broadsword in the other and didn't collapse under their weight.

There must have been a dragon close by for his father to call the house. The number of attacks had been steadily increasing ever since the family had moved to Trondheim, but usually they were concentrated more toward the lake. Owen lived with his dad and his aunts in a big old house outside of town. His mother had duties of her own that I wasn't comfortable asking about, so his aunts trained him in swordsmanship while his father traversed the countryside defending livestock and farmsteads. I sat at the kitchen table, worrying my pencil between my finger and thumb, and tried not to look like I was more interested in the phone conversation than I was in the book, but it was very nearly impossible.

When Owen came back to the table, he had a reluctant smile on his face. He looked different than he had before he'd
picked up the phone. His skin was flushed with excitement, and his eyes sparkled with anticipation. His smile widened as he sat down, and he seemed somehow to take up more space. The overture to some kind of Nordic saga began to hum in my head.

“Dragon?” I said, no longer even pretending that I was paying attention to the homework.

“Just a small one,” he said. “Dad thinks it's about the size of a bus, plus the wings.”

“That seems big enough to me,” I said.

“He's engaged the adult dragon,” Owen said. “The little one flew off toward town. I'm supposed to go intercept it.”

We had an algebra test tomorrow that he hadn't studied for. We were supposed to work on that after we finished the homework for
Heart of Darkness
. On the other hand, in the face of an inbound dragon, math was probably the least of our worries. One of the fringe benefits of tutoring a dragon slayer was that it occasionally got you excused from your homework altogether.

Most teenagers only ran afoul of dragons as a result of their own carelessness or inattention. It was not uncommon for a new driver to be stranded on a gravel road with a flat tire and an engine belching carbon. There were also stories of field parties ending badly when a dragon came out of the corn and closed in on the bonfire in the dark. Dragons didn't get much from carbon in terms of nutrition, but they came after it like candy whenever it was in the air, and since humans were usually located close by, they didn't exactly want for nourishment.

Owen, of course, was not most teenagers. He never had been. He didn't precisely chase dragons—that was his father's job—but he didn't run away from them either, and that made
him unusual. And if Owen was unusual, then so was I. That's why I was sitting at his kitchen table, genuinely hoping he'd ask me to drive him to meet whatever kind of dragon was headed our way. I didn't let myself think about what my parents would say. They were nervous enough that I was hanging out at Owen's house. I was pretty sure they would not be at all sanguine if I arrived home with even slightly scorched tires. Maybe I had overestimated my use on a dragon slaying expedition, anyway. It wasn't like I was doing this professionally.

I wasn't sure how much longer I could cling to that excuse, though. I was hardly an amateur anymore. I'd been there when Owen's family slayed a couple of dragons, but his aunt Hannah usually insisted that I hide in the dragon shelter until after it was done, which, for the record, was fine with me. But I couldn't stay underground forever, not if I wanted to do my job.

I wasn't exactly in a hurry to face any of them, but I was hardly going to let Owen go off on his bicycle when my car was parked in the driveway. Still, I didn't want to push my luck. It was entirely likely that Owen would rather face this dragon by himself. I did my best to sound as neutral as possible, a steady chord waiting for the composer to push it to minor.

“I can lock up, if you need to go,” I said.

Owen looked at me for a few moments, and when I didn't meet his gaze, he looked down at the pencil I still held in my hands. I could almost hear his mind putting things in place, shuffling his sense of duty with his sense of adventure. I was in and out of the house more and more now that Owen was training harder, even though he was doing better at school than he had been when classes had started in those first few weeks of September. Practically one of the family, Hannah liked to say.

When he looked up at me again, his smile was even wider, almost incandescent on his face. There were tightly wound strings shivering in the air as the overture began in full. We were definitely getting out of that math test.

“Wanna come?” he said.

That's not how it started.

I met Owen Thorskard on the first day of grade eleven. He was lost, looking for English. Apparently the principal had decided that, as a future dragon slayer, Owen would be able to find the classroom on his own. When I found him, bouncing on the balls of his feet as though the first few bars of the National Anthem had rendered him incapable of walking, he looked a little bit shell-shocked. I stopped beside him because being caught in the halls during opening exercises was embarrassing, and I couldn't bring myself to walk past him. I didn't recognize him. The pictures we'd seen were mostly of Lottie and Aodhan, and Owen wasn't exactly what crossed your mind when someone said the words “dragon slayer.”

Even though Trondheim had passed the summer in a state of near euphoria on account of miraculously acquiring a dragon slayer of our very own, Lottie had done her best to keep Owen and his other aunt, Hannah, out of the eyes of the media. It wasn't really that hard. Trondheim was hard up for news
most days, it was true, but between following Aodhan around to dragon slayings and following Lottie around to see if she did anything interesting, our local reporters were pretty much spoken for. The city journalists had all gone back home as soon as they had assured themselves that we really were as boring as they had been suggesting all through the summer. After they were gone, we returned, more or less, to business as usual.

Anyway, that's how Owen managed to make it all the way to the first day of school without being instantly recognizable to everyone in the town. It's also how I ended up getting this job, but I am getting ahead of myself.

My name is Siobhan McQuaid, and I have lived in Trondheim all my life. My situation is not unique. It is more unusual to be from somewhere different and have moved to Trondheim, like Owen did, than it is to have never lived anywhere else. You might think that his newness would have been enough to set Owen apart, and any other year you would have been correct, but the year I started grade eleven was also the year that Trondheim Secondary amalgamated with Saltrock Collegiate. For one morning, there were plenty of new faces in the school hallways, and for one more morning, Owen fit in just as well as any of us.

“I don't suppose you have English right now?” he said to me in a hopeful tone when the anthem finished playing and we could move again without feeling that we were willfully betraying our country.

“Actually, I do,” I replied. “It's this way.”

As he followed me down the hall he matched my quick pace, not looking like he was entirely comfortable with how long his legs were. I knew, as Owen didn't, that our English teacher was
merciless. There wouldn't be any slack for being late on the first day, even if he was new and I had miscalculated how many parking spots would be left in the school lot due to the influx of new students. I never for a moment that day thought they would sing songs about him. And I certainly didn't think that I would be the one who had written them.

“An excellent beginning, Miss McQuaid,” Mr. Cooper said when I entered the classroom, Owen a few steps behind me. “Detention on the first day of school. At least you've nowhere to go but up.”

I didn't say anything, mostly because I genuinely liked Mr. Cooper and couldn't really fault him for following school protocol, regardless of how I felt about an English teacher abusing prepositions. I slid into one of two empty desks at the back of the room and returned the sympathetic glances of my classmates who had gotten seats closer to the front. I was stuck under the vent, which meant I would be freezing in good weather when the AC was on and sweltering in the winter when they turned on the heat.

“And you are?” Mr. Cooper said as Owen took the seat beside mine. Looking back, this was probably one of the better moments of my entire life.

“Owen Thorskard,” Owen said as quietly as he could, but it didn't make a difference. Everyone heard him, and the sudden silence was like a needle scratching vinyl (though I doubted that anyone in the room except for me, and probably Mr. Cooper, had ever actually listened to a vinyl record).

The expression on Mr. Cooper's face was priceless. Not only was he going to be Owen Thorskard's first teacher at TSS, but he was going to have to give him detention right off the bat.
The whole class shifted nervously, right on the edge of giggles. I felt the whole school year stretch out in front of me, a note held by a player who was running out of air. If they laughed, Mr. Cooper would never get control of the classroom back again.