Prairie Fire (2 page)

OWEN THE FOOTBALL-SHOULDERED

Once he got older, they sang songs of his bravery and his heroic deeds. He'd filled out enough that I wasn't surprised to learn they'd attached names like “the Broad” or “the Football-Shouldered” to his self-effacing “Owen.” Most of the time, he was kind of a legend. Right then, though, in addition to being weighed down by the responsibility for twelve people who still didn't really know him very well, and standing much too close to a terrifically poisoned forest glade, he was about to go up against a kind of dragon he'd never even seen before, much less fought. I, for one, was feeling pretty darn flammable.

Owen was a professional, though, his tempo more measured than some of the drill sergeants who had overseen our every move these past twelve weeks before turning us loose into the woods. Owen had dragon slayer singing in his blood farther back than most people kept records, and he had the training to match. He was the third generation of his family to enlist in the Oil Watch. Though the dragon lighting aflame the treetops above our heads hadn't realized it yet, that clearing was going to be its end, if the Viking in Owen Thorskard had anything to say about it. And the Viking had done very well since he'd joined the Oil Watch and arrived at CFB Gagetown for Basic Training.

Basic Training had not gone so well for me, and I'd let my responsibilities as Owen's bard slide as a result. Where once I had kept track of all the parts and where they fit, I now had to focus solely on my own performance and ignore the orchestra around me, even if I sensed it faltering behind the beat. We'd all agreed to this, Owen, Sadie, and I, before we'd ever left Trondheim, but I still felt like I was letting him down. I didn't have a choice though. My burned hands had mostly regained their former colour, but there was no working around the angry red lines of scarring or the hardened muscles and knitted phalanges. I had no leisure for composing, which took me far longer than it used to, or even spare moments to think about songs to compose later. I spent all of my time scraping by, meeting the minimum physical requirements and trying to avoid the cold looks of the other cadets who assumed, possibly correctly, that someday my disability would get them killed.

I could have stopped. Basic Training essentially served two purposes: preparing troops for the field and identifying those who would never, ever make it. From the very first night, when I'd only managed to eat half my dinner in the time we were allotted and was berated at full volume by our barracks-sergeant for not dressing quickly enough, it was clear that I was, at best, a long shot. If I had been playing actual music, I could have just pointed my embouchure in the general direction and hit most of the right notes, but the military demanded considerably more precision.

None of Lottie and Hannah's stories had really prepared me for life in the Oil Watch. Theirs had been a different era, when gun battles with other people had been as likely—if not more common—than actual dragon slaying. They talked about the Oil Watch like it was all adventures and foreign locales. They didn't sugarcoat anything, not on purpose anyway, but I knew a story when I heard one. They did their best to tell us what to expect, but their memories were clouded by nostalgia, and I quickly learned there was nothing nostalgic about being rousted from my bed at 0400 and shouted at for ten minutes because I hadn't fastened my buttons quickly enough, before being ordered outside to run laps until the sun came up.

For his part, Aodhan reminded us that after we had done our time in the service, we would be able to return home to Trondheim, where a grateful town and familiar tune would be waiting for us. He did not tell stories about his days in the Oil Watch, which I thought was too bad. He was much more pragmatic about that sort of thing than his sister was. But I'd already heard most of the details about what had happened to him in the desert, and I knew better than to ask for any more. As the weeks wore on and I still failed, repeatedly, to keep up with my cohorts, I clung more and more to Aodhan's reminders that someday we would all get to go home.

By the time we were divided into squads—the assortment of firefighters, medics, engineers, and in Owen's case, bard, who supported a dragon slayer in the field—my place on the front line was generally accepted if not always appreciated. Sure, I was entertaining if you happened to be stuck in a shelter for a couple of hours while the more experienced troops dealt with an attacking dragon, but for the most part there was relief on the faces of those people not assigned to work with me.

For the dozen unlucky souls who would make up Owen's dragon slaying support squad, though, relief was not to be had. I tried to make myself scarce so as not to besmirch Owen's reputation any more than a solid year of news reports had already done by suggesting, not always subtly, that he was essentially an ecoterrorist. Usually, it would have been my job to sway their opinion, but this time, he was mostly on his own.

To be fair, Owen hadn't suffered that much without me to talk him up. He did come to the military with a very well established public record, for good or ill. Between my music and Emily Carmichael's Internet acumen, there weren't very many people in Canada who didn't at least know his name, if not exactly what had happened on Manitoulin Island. The other dragon slayer recruits at least respected his achievements—even if they were a bit jealous of his notoriety—and the engineers, medics, and firefighters all looked at him with something like awe. After a week, I was starting to figure out how our squad fit together, more or less, anyway. The engineers were identifiable enough, and the medics also cooked our food, so I did my best to stay in their good graces. I could only barely tell the male firefighters apart, though, much less put them into the songs I should have been writing. I felt bad, but unless one of them did something heroic or stupid, I'd end up writing them as the low bass: supportive, utterly necessary, and predominantly away from the focus of the piece.

Of course, now the engineers, medics, and firefighters of Owen's squad were looking at him with something like terror, but that was probably because the fire above us had started to burn through the trunks, and we were all in very real danger of being brained by falling treetops.

We'd been wandering around the carefully landscaped forest that surrounded the main living areas of the base for five days of drills with only each other for company. I think the general idea had been that we'd either kill each other or learn to work together, and we had chosen to do the latter. The general idea had
not
included any dragon slaying, particularly unsupervised dragon slaying, but apparently no one had thought to tell the dragon that, and it continued to demand Owen's attention, forcing him towards the poisoned ground we had been trying so hard to avoid. It was time for action, and that was the thing we had been training for all these weeks.

We were in unfamiliar surroundings, and even though there were fourteen of us, we felt very much alone. Everyone in the squad had seen dead dragons before, but this was going to be the closest most of them had ever been to a live one. Basic was for physical fitness and mental discipline. We weren't supposed to worry about dragons until we had received our posting, and then we would be working closely with a mentor, an established dragon slayer, and his or her squad. Help might arrive from the base, but it was going to take some time to get here. Another dragon slayer might have cracked, might have run.

But another dragon slayer wouldn't have had two years' experience commanding the high school soccer teams in group manoeuvers. Another dragon slayer wouldn't have grown up in the shadow of one of the Oil Watch's greatest heroes. Another dragon slayer wouldn't have been taught patience by a giant. Another dragon slayer wouldn't have had swords made for him by the woman who'd raised him from diapers. We weren't about to face the fire with just any dragon slayer. We were with Owen Thorskard, who had fought on the beaches of Manitoulin and returned home to finish the fight there as well.

When I looked at him, I saw that same reluctant smile I'd seen so long ago, half excitement and half worry. In his uniform, his shoulders seemed more square, his stance more grounded. The familiar strains of that Nordic saga came to me, not in whispers like they used to, but at full volume. If the others could have heard it, they might have smiled too.

“Send the code, Siobhan,” he said, reaching over his shoulder for his sword.

That's not how it started.

ENLISTMENT AND A NEW SOUND

There were three things I realized pretty quickly after I joined the army.

The first was that I might die. This was not quite as alarming for me as it might have been for another eighteen-year-old, because I had faced down death on a pretty regular basis ever since Owen had moved to town. Even death by dragon fire was starting to lose its fatal charm. You burn down the world's largest freshwater island once, and it kind of puts the whole fiery doom thing in perspective.

The second thing I realized was that my friends might die. This was also less alarming than it might have been, since it was with my friends that I usually faced death. Owen signed up the same day I did, having waited until my birthday so we could enlist at the same time. The TV cameras were certainly more interested in him than they were in me, and I couldn't blame them. He'd grown, finally, and filled out enough that he actually looked like something a dragon might need two bites to swallow.

The third thing was that I needed to stop calling it “the army,” because that's what people who aren't in it think it's called, and people who are in it can be sort of touchy about that sort of thing. I walked into the recruitment office a civilian, albeit a very unusual one, and I walked out a member of the Canadian Forces.

We didn't set out for New Brunswick right away. We still had to finish school, for one thing. The Oil Watch operated as part of the Canadian Forces, but thanks to its international influence, it also played by its own rules, and one of its rules was that all members had to have completed high school. Owen, as planned, had done well enough in his final year to squeak into the officer track, while Sadie was several steps ahead of him in that regard. I think her parents were kind of hoping that the first time a dragon died at her feet and ruined her shoes, she'd decide that she had made a mistake. I happen to know she kept those boots, looked at them often, and only worked harder as a result.

There was also the not-small matter of my physical fitness. Yes, I could do the running and the push-ups and the marching for kilometres with heavy things on my back, but my burned hands still had very limited mobility. I think, had I arrived at the enlistment office with anyone other than Lottie Thorskard, I would have been sent on my way, but Lottie had been determined, and very little could stop her when she decided she wanted something done. Furthermore, while it was common for civilians to choose the Oil Watch, I was the first bard to enlist in decades, and they weren't entirely sure what to do with me. Again, Lottie had been prepared.

“She simply won't be able to do the work required,” the sergeant said. He was tall and broad and not from Trondheim, so he didn't really care about what had happened there a year ago. The Burned Bard meant nothing to him. All he saw was a girl who had to wear Velcro shoes like a child.

“She will,” said Lottie, and proceeded to cite all kinds of precedents, most of which had been tracked down by Emily earlier in the week in preparation for this conversation.

Eventually, the sergeant called his superior, who conceded. He glowered all through my paperwork and barely spoke to me. I looked across the room at Owen, who was filling out his own forms quite a bit more speedily than I was. His sergeant could barely control his delight.

“That's going to happen a lot, isn't it?” I said to Lottie as we finally left.

“Yes,” she said. “The military is good at a lot of things, but change comes slowly.”

She opened the door for me to get in the car. I could handle regular doorknobs now, but I had problems getting my curled fingers around car latches, and even when I could, I was angled poorly to pull the door open afterwards. Lottie did all of these things for me with no attention called to them, and I knew she must have learned the trick from Hannah after her injuries. My parents did similar things, of course, but with them it was always a small production. Lottie couldn't help me sign my name on the enlistment papers, but I had been practicing for months. My signature was new, but it was mine, and even the grumpy sergeant couldn't fault it.

We watched as Owen and Aodhan spoke briefly to the cameras before cutting through the crowd to get to the car. Once, it would have been Lottie they swarmed, but Owen was younger and newer and both his legs could bend at the knee. Also he occupied that tenuous space between folk hero and government menace, and the press loved him for that more than they loved the fact that the Leafs were likely to miss the playoffs for the third year in a row. I don't think Lottie missed the camera's attention that much, but sometimes there was a hungry look in her eyes, particularly if it had been a while since a dragon had tried to eat Hannah's backyard forge.