Prairie Fire (22 page)

“Won't having a dragon slayer daughter help?” I said. “I mean, that's usually pretty good press.”

“It would if I were a normal dragon slayer,” Sadie said. “But I have known ties to radical thinkers. And I'll never be a normal dragon slayer anyway. I'm not born to it.”

“You really think Trondheim will invest in a scandal?” I asked. “Most people just vote for the person they went to high school with.”

“The Conservatives favour a more American approach,” Sadie said. Her voice sounded like Hannah's. The one that was always sad and a little bitter when she talked about our neighbours to the south. “They won't nominate Dad when his daughter is a de facto poster girl for the NDP.”

“Is he really upset?” I asked. My parents didn't even like to attend school board meetings, but they had voted for the New Dragon Slayer Party since its inception. I planned to follow their example, now that I had reached voting age.

“I think it's just that he doesn't understand,” Sadie said. “Which is totally fair, because I don't understand him either. We're both doing what we feel is right, and it unintentionally crosses paths.”

“I hope it doesn't get too awkward,” I told her.

“You and me both,” she said. Then she sat up, a bright smile on her face. “Now, tell me about the boys.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “What did Owen tell you?”

“Something about an American who thinks he's a superhero,” Sadie said. “And you've mentioned a Peter.”

I explained Nick as quickly as I could. With him gone on assignment, he was the less immediate concern.

“Sounds to me like he's a good guy,” Sadie said when I was done.

“Well, yes,” I said. “That's the problem.”

“Because he's a dragon slayer?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, that and he's set on returning to New York and joining the NYPD after his tour is up.”

“That's four years from now,” Sadie said. “You plan way too far ahead.”

“Someone has to,” I pointed out.

“What's your concern, then?” she asked.

“I like being his friend, but I don't want him to think I want to be more than his friend,” I said.

“Right,” Sadie said. “That is not your problem. That is his problem. You be as friendly as you want, be as
you
as you want, and don't let anyone trick you into thinking you've made some kind of promise. Because you haven't.”

“I'm not sure that's how it works,” I said.

“That's how it should work,” Sadie said. “Aren't you supposed to be some kind of trailblazer?”

It was my turn to collapse back into the pillows now. “I didn't think it would be so constantly exhausting.”

Sadie laughed and lay down beside me. “Okay, so that was the easy one. Now tell me about Peter.”

“I think he's the easy one,” I said. “I only see him professionally.”

“Siobhan, you write music with him,” she said. “For you that's practically second base.”

“You know, I thought that at first, like those exact words,” I said. “But I don't think it's like that after all. We have music, but aside from that there's nothing to really talk about. He doesn't understand us, not really. I don't think he'd buy in long term.”

“Uh-huh,” Sadie said. “Well, when the dam finally breaks on all this denial, I'm only an e-mail away.”

“Tell me about the North Sea,” I said, suddenly desperate to change the subject.

“It's freaking cold,” she said. “The scuba training was miserable. But aside from that it's kind of fun, unless we've got rig duty. Then we just sit out on these enormous metal platforms and wait for the dragons to come get us.”

“You're actually slaying dragons?” I said. She hadn't mentioned that in her e-mails.

“Of course,” she said. “What else did we sign up for?”

“We get to spend all of our dragon attacks in the shelter,” I said.

“Yeah, but your dragon slayer is gone,” she said.

“Even before that,” I told her. “Except for the dragon at Basic and the Athabascan Long he got with Porter, Owen hasn't slayed a dragon since he left Ontario.”

“But he's the best,” Sadie said. “For his age, I mean. And Porter's a fucking
legend
in the UK.”

“That may be,” I said. “But they're not really well thought of in Alberta.”

“I wonder why he stays,” Sadie mused. “Porter, I mean. His contract has come up a couple of times since Kansas. Why doesn't he just leave?”

“Owen thinks he doesn't know what else to do,” I said. “He's been out of England a long time, and he's old to get a starting contract with a corporation.”

“Maybe he'll settle down with your engineer,” Sadie said. She was smiling like she used to when we were in high school and she was trying to pair me off with Alex Carmody so that we could all go on double dates.

“At the rate Courtney's going, it's a distinct possibility,” I allowed.

“Is it safe there?” Sadie asked. “I mean, as safe as you can get when you're staring down an oil field?”

“Are you asking me if I think our own military is trying to get your boyfriend killed?” I replied. It was something I had considered, in my darker moments. I figured I'd get really concerned when Emily started talking about it, and so far she hadn't brought it up.

“I guess I am,” she said. “I was really hoping we'd both end up overseas. I thought the furor would quiet down while we were gone, and then we could all just come back here and save chickens from premature barbecuing.”

“The weird thing is that I think they are actually trying to sideline him,” I said. “They shunted him off to Alberta in the hope that he would disappear, but he's in Canada, so everyone knows who he is. And they gave him a semi-disgraced mentor, but the local civilians think that he's awesome too. They've done the opposite of what I would have done, if I'd wanted people to forget the name Owen Thorskard.”

“If you wanted people to forget the name, all you'd have to do is stop writing music about it,” Sadie said.

“Maybe that's what they're doing,” I said. “They're not trying to get rid of him. They're trying to make sure that I don't have anything to say.”

“That sounds more reasonable to me,” Sadie said. “You haven't written anything in a while.”

“I have, actually,” I said. “Emily and I spent most of yesterday working on it. She's coming back on Boxing Day and we're going to start recording so that she can upload them a few at a time after I go back west.”

“What are you singing about?” she asked. “The price of wheat?”

“Not in terms of money,” I said.

“Remember when our only problems in life were accidentally ending up at field parties where people had lit fires?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Someone died that night. I'll probably never forget it.” I had that song still, even though I'd never written it down and Owen was the only other person who would ever hear it.

“Let's go downstairs and make cookies before we murder the spirit of Christmas entirely,” Sadie said, sitting up.

“I don't know if we have stuff for that,” I said.

“I brought most of what we need,” Sadie said. “Mom's gone all healthy since I left, so there're no cookies at all at our house. What's the kid of a dentist to do?”

“Eat sugar and develop radical politics at the neighbours', I guess,” I said, laughing.

“You betcha,” she said, and we went down to the kitchen.

“What is that?” I asked after we had the trays cooling on the sideboard and went into the living room to sit down. Sadie had brought a large bag with her from a store I'd never heard of and put it under the tree.

“Oh, that's the British food I brought home for Owen to give to Porter,” Sadie said. “He mentioned he'd asked you to get something, and I had the luggage space.”

I looked at the cans and packages. Some of them looked familiar, or at least comfortingly normal.

“Chocolate cake in a can?” I asked. “Made by the same people who make ketchup? That can't possibly taste good.”

“You'd be surprised,” Sadie said. I looked back in the bag.

“I can't give my commanding officer something called spotted dick. It sounds like an STD.”

She looked affronted. “It is a perfectly legitimate form of cake.”

I don't know who I was channeling at that point, but I replied with: “That's what she said.”

Sadie laughed so hard she had to sit down.

“Honestly, I don't know how you get on without me,” she said. If she was still angry about her assignment, she wasn't letting on. Maybe the adventure was winning her over. She was actually getting to do what we all thought we'd do once we'd enlisted: see the world and slay dragons. And besides, it was only four years. We had all the time in the world to change it.

“It's pretty awkward,” I admitted. I missed her a lot, but I knew that she and Owen missed each other more. Or at least in a different way. “But I manage.”

“Soon it'll be over,” Sadie said. “And we'll all come back here and raise baby dragon slayers together.”

“Now who's planning too far ahead?” I asked, but it made me feel better to know that she and Owen were of like minds when it came to the future.

THE STORY OF YOUTUBE

Once upon a time, if a bard wanted to spread word of her dragon slayer's accomplishments, she would require a lyre and a stout pair of shoes. Her meals and board would be covered by whoever's house she stayed in, paid for with stories or with a dragon slayed. She would wander the countryside, and if she was talented, she would find welcome where ever she went, and her dragon slayer too, even if there were no great beasts in the air.

There is the story of Richard the Lionheart, who was more interested in slaying dragons than he was in ruling his kingdom. He was caught and held for ransom, and it was not his soldiers or his brother, John, who found him, but rather his bard. Legend says the bard traversed hither and yon, singing the king's favourite song. One day the king heard him and answered back, and he was rescued. There are other tales, of course, of wandering bards who saved children from wells or stole them from their beds in the middle of the night, but they are only tales.

Soon, the days came when bards no longer traveled. They lived in stone houses with solariums and sitting rooms, and in the evening, people would come from miles around to hear them sing or perform. Soon, bards lived in cities and had the patronage of princes. They took students and taught at universities, or ventured out into the wilds to take their chances in the new countries being founded all over the world.

At last, there came the radio, the record, the cassette tape, the 8-track, the CD. And, finally, YouTube. Most bardic practice had died out somewhere between the record and the cassette tape, but there were still a few musicians who came together online, and as Internet traffic increased, so too did the number of videos on YouTube.

Traditionalists dismissed the online community at first. It was, they argued, just a bunch of kids with Wi-Fi and microphones. They hadn't fought their way through the music industry. They hadn't auditioned or, in most cases, written the songs they sang. They just did covers. But what the traditionalists neglected to realize was that some of them were very, very
good
. It was only a matter of time before those kids got a little bit older, a little bit wiser, and started to write their own stuff. It still wasn't bardic, but it was good music, and the fans came online in droves.

Into this scene came Emily Carmichael, Internet personality and social media savant. She correctly concluded that Twitter was a terrible medium for a dragon slayer. No one really needs live updates of a dragon slaying, and she felt that it would set a bad example. We wanted people to put their phones away and run, not make a few updates while they tried to video us. She dismissed Facebook because of the layout and Tumblr for much the same reason as Twitter. But YouTube, she decided, had potential.