The Story of Owen (27 page)

“Okay,” he said. “I'll see you after classes.”

I spent the afternoon in the practice room. There was a song at the tips of my fingers, but the melody just wouldn't make it onto the keys.

History will tell you that mapmaking started with the Egyptians. Maybe, if it is feeling inclusive, in India, or with the Chinese. As usual, History is lying through its teeth.

The truth is that ever since the first Australopithecine looked up at a flaming sky and thought “Dear God, what is that thing?” people have been drawing maps of the places that dragons live, the better to avoid them altogether. We have very little evidence from those early days—cave walls and volcanic happenstance for the most part—but we know that maps were made: lines of demarcation, whether on the edge of an uncharted sea or deep in the heart of Africa, yet unseen.

In some places, those lines were reinforced in stone, and later in steel. There is a wall in China, and another on the edge of the English moors. The Government of Canada destroyed the Ambassador Bridge, and halted construction on the Bluewater before the piers had set. Do not enter. Here there be dragons. For most places, the smoke on the horizon was
warning enough, and people stayed close to home.

There were, of course, the very foolish and the very brave. They went out from the safe places and found new ones—or didn't. Once they were secured, more maps were made to guide the cautious to the new havens, pushing back against the blank edges of the world. Thus was mapped the globe, and Canada was no different.

Our mapmakers were French, to start, because the French were the first to arrive. These
coureurs de bois
ventured out from the shelter of the city wall at Quebec and found trails to the homes and havens of the local First Nations. What followed was ugly and shameful, and not at all improved by the subsequent arrival of the British. The First Nations were promised European-style maps, and those maps were delivered, but the cost was high. Corralled into too-small villages on the fringes of the Upper Canada hatching grounds, the population plummeted.

That's the other thing History likes to forget about maps. Their cost is not just in the blood of people killed by dragons, but in the blood of people killed by other people.

The mapmakers pressed on, north and ever-west, and the First Nation groups they encountered were more cautious, slower to bargain and treat. But the maps were made, shaping Canada as much as war or our constant struggle not to be annexed by the United States did. Those were the maps I learned in school: those thirteen provinces and three territories. I could recite their capitals and spell them. I knew which parts of them were safe and which parts were not. I didn't know what they had cost, because they don't tend to tell you that sort of thing in elementary school, but I learned that too, in time.

In school, they give you a blank sheet and you try to squish “Saskatchewan” into a box that's always too narrow while you fill in the familiar words and shapes. Those maps are copies and cost nothing. Their price has already been paid. The map I saw in my head was different. It wasn't some faceless prairie far away. It was my home. It was towns I recognized, places I had been. Names that were a mix of English holdovers and Algonquin prayers to Manitou confused people who weren't born there, but they were second nature to those who were.

Even if we succeeded, there would be fire. And if we failed, there would be so much more, and blood besides. My home would be gone, swallowed up like Michigan while progress marched on around me. And there would be another line—another boundary—that only the foolish and the brave would dare to cross.

I hadn't thought of anything by the time we made it to Owen's house that night, but Emily looked decidedly optimistic. I wasn't sure when she'd had time to do any research, since she didn't have a spare, but she did spend the whole car ride typing something on her phone, so I guessed that one of her Internet sources had come through with something she liked. Owen didn't say anything in the car either. He spent the whole drive scanning the horizon. It was a habit Aodhan had instilled in us, and while I couldn't do it very well while I was driving and also watching the road, Owen took his copiloting duties very seriously.

Hannah and Lottie weren't in the house when we got there, but there was smoke over Hannah's smithy, so we knew they were home. We set up on the kitchen table, notebooks and maps and sticky notes, and by the time we were settling in, Lottie came back inside.

“Homework?” she said, kicking off her shoes a bit laboriously. “And are you all staying for dinner?”

“Sort of,” I said. “And yes, please.”

“I'm not sure I like the sound of that,” Lottie said. “But the second part is just fine. Hannah's making pizza.”

“In the smithy?” Emily asked skeptically. “Isn't that a bit, you know, hot?”

“Probably,” said Lottie. “But she's more or less mastered it. I don't ask questions.”

“It's really good,” Owen said. “Plus it means she can make dinner and swords at the same time, and that's just cool.”

“Fair point,” Emily said.

“Don't distract me,” Lottie said. “What are you doing?”

“You said we should work together,” I started to say, but Emily pulled out a folded piece of paper and leaned forward to unfold it on the table.

“Sorry, Siobhan,” she said. “I figured we should start with this.”

I turned to get a view of what I thought was the top of the paper.

“It's a map of the salt mine,” Lottie said. “Where did you get that?”

“The Saltrock archive,” Emily said. “Did you know that back before it was common for people to have their own dragon shelters, the main plan for evacuation in case of a major dragon attack was to funnel everyone into the mine?”

“Really?” Owen said. “How big is that place?”

“It goes out for miles under the lake,” Emily said. “You could fit everyone from the whole county down there with room to spare. Well, until the oxygen ran out, but still.”

“I had no idea it was that big,” I said.

“Technically, the size and structure of the mine are
classified,” Emily said. “But this plan was made and filed before the government classified the information, and I guess everyone forgot about it.”

“How did you find it?” Lottie asked, somewhat suspiciously, even though she was poring over the map as intensely as we were.

“One of my online contacts told me it existed and where it was, and then I went and got it,” Emily said.

Lottie looked at her for a long moment and then sighed. “What else have you got?” she asked.

“Does that mean you've given up trying to shut us out?” Owen asked.

“It doesn't look like I've got much of a choice,” Lottie said. “I can't do as much as I used to, and getting more people involved was the whole point of moving here. I guess I just thought it would take longer to come to this.”

Owen reached across and took her hand. She looked down, as through realizing for the first time that his hands were bigger than hers were.

“Well, the mine plan gives us a kind of backup if something really big should go down,” Emily said. “We can plan for a large-scale dragon encounter and not have to worry about the populace getting in the way.”

“We don't have anyone to fight the dragons with,” Lottie said. “It's just us.”

“We know,” Owen said. “Everyone else is going north.”

“It's a numbers game,” Lottie said. She didn't look down at her leg, but she did tighten her hand on her knee, and I saw her wince. “It's exactly the sort of thing I wanted to stop by coming here, that kind of cold government decision that punches everything into a spreadsheet and decides who is worth saving.
But there were more dragons than I could have ever expected, and I don't know what to do.”

“Pizza's here!” said Hannah loudly from the doorway, and we all jumped. She set the trays down on the counter and looked at our serious faces, her levity vanishing. “What's going on?”

“Just put them on the table, love,” Lottie said. “And we'll serve ourselves.”

Hannah shuffled the trays and a stack of plates onto the table and sat down. Owen passed the plates around so we could take our own slices.

“They've figured out that we're not getting any backup,” Lottie told her wife.

“That doesn't mean we're outmatched,” I said. “It just means we have to stop playing defense.”

“What do you mean?” Lottie said.

I took a bite of pizza before answering and immediately burned the roof of my mouth on the sauce. Smithy pizzas were definitely hot.

“She means that we shouldn't wait around for the dragons to come to us,” Owen said. “That we should go to the hatching ground and end it.”

“You can't just
end
a hatching ground,” Hannah pointed out. “If you could, the Americans would have been back in Michigan two decades ago.”

“Queen Victoria did it,” Owen said. “Sort of.”

“She had countless dragon slayers at her beck and call,” Lottie pointed out. “We have two and a half.”

“Three and a half,” Emily said. Everyone looked sharply at her. “Hannah's not registered, but everyone knows she's at least as good as Owen.”

“It's true,” Owen said to his aunt. “If I count, so do you.”

“Thank you,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

“There's also the Guard,” I said. “Which means we can leave any actual evacuation or crowd management to other people and focus on the dragons themselves.”

“You think people will listen to teenagers?” Hannah said.

“They did in Wingham,” I pointed out.

“And you've had very good press since then,” Emily added, speaking with her mouth full.

“I'm glad we have you to help us manage that,” Hannah told her. “I thought the Internet was going to make our jobs more difficult, and for a while it did, but I have to admit that with control and practice, it's been as useful a tool as Siobhan's songs or Owen's sword.”

“It's the timing,” Lottie said, steering the conversation back on track with a fond look at Hannah. “That's what's been slowing us up.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The dragon eggs will hatch in three weeks, give or take,” she said. She looked at Owen. “Just in time for your birthday.”

“Great,” he said.

“When that happens, the baby dragons will swarm down from Manitoulin, or up to the stacks in Sudbury, and we'll be overrun.” She reached under the map of the mine and pulled out the map of Ontario so we could see what she was talking about.

“So we have to get to the eggs before then,” I said.

“Yes, but the adults will be guarding them,” Lottie said. “And we don't have enough dragon slayers for that kind of frontal assault.”

“Is there a way to lure the dragons away from the island?” Emily asked.

“There's always a way to do that,” Hannah said.

I knew exactly what she was talking about. I'd seen it in a classroom, the first time Mr. Huffman ran the Offense/ Defense Friday exercise with us. There was always a way to lure a dragon, but it involved setting yourself on fire.

“We could blow up the mine,” Emily said. “And hope for prevailing winds.”

“No one is going to go for that,” Owen said. “And even if they did, we'd be so busy defending Saltrock that no one could be spared to go to Manitoulin.”

“Plus, your first plan was for everyone to hide in the salt mine,” I told her.

“I didn't say it was a
good
idea,” she said. “I just didn't want to leave anything out in case it sparked an idea in someone else.”

“I think you're on the right track,” Hannah said. She held a pizza crust in her hand and was using it to draw circles on her plate. “We can't blow up the mine, but there are other things. It just needs to be a big enough explosion.”

“Big enough to make Saltrock a more appealing target than Sudbury,” Lottie said. “Which won't be easy. But I think we can do it.”

“Do it like the canal,” Owen said. “Like the Suez Canal, but your version of it, Siobhan. The one where you lit yourself on fire.”

I didn't say anything, even though I could hear the opening chords of the piece. The others looked confused, but they hadn't been in class that day. Owen grabbed the sticky
notes and started to place them offshore of the mine. Hannah whistled, and Lottie's eyes widened.

“We'll use tankers,” Owen said. “We'll push them out toward Michigan. When they're far enough offshore, we'll blow them up remotely.”

“It's still not that easy,” Emily said. “There will have to be the right wind conditions and a dragon attacking so it can call in others.”

“That hasn't been a problem lately,” I pointed out. “There have been sightings all the time.”