Prairie Fire Read online

  “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.

  “Well,” said Owen as he slid into the backseat beside me. He didn’t help me with my seatbelt, even though I was having a hard time with it. “I guess we’ve done it now.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Aodhan said, checking over his shoulder before pulling out into traffic. Driving in the Volkswagen with Aodhan at the wheel was commonplace for me now, but being in a regular-sized car with him still made me giggle. He had to duck to look at stoplights out the front window. “Siobhan, did you have any trouble?”

  From most people, that would have been a delicately worded question about my feelings with regard to the fact that I could barely hold a pen. I knew that Aodhan didn’t mean that, though. He had been there when I first saw a dead dragon, and he had defended the hospital while my mother worked inside it. He already thought of me as a comrade-in-arms. It’s reassuring when a giant trusts you to protect his back. And his son.

  “The sergeant clearly has his doubts,” I told him. “But I do too, so I think that’s only fair.”

  “We’ve still got time to work,” Lottie assured me. “And I’ve promised your father that I wouldn’t let you go if I thought you couldn’t handle it.”

  My parents had managed to wait a whole month after Manitoulin before asking if I still planned to join the Oil Watch. They weren’t surprised, I think, when I told them that I still would, if the Watch would take me, but Mum did spend a lot of time on the phone with Hannah that week.

  “We’ve got almost a month to think of something specific for you to do if there’s no need for actual music, and for me to call in every favour I have left to make sure you get to do it,” Lottie continued.

  Owen had his cell phone out, and I knew he was texting Sadie. Thanks to the new towers in and around Trondheim, put up once Aodhan had provided assurances that they would not be easily destroyed by dragon fire, she might actually get the text before we got home. Her parents had insisted she sign up on a different day, to avoid the news cameras. I didn’t tell them that Sadie’s enlistment would probably merit TV cameras on its own. Sadie’s fame was entirely different from Owen’s, but it was growing, thanks in no small part to me.

  For the rest of the drive home, we talked about other things. The Thorskards were very good at avoiding certain topics of conversation, like impending doom, without making it awkward. I looked out at the fields, some newly plowed, some with winter wheat already stitched in green against the dark brown soil. Owen watched the skies, like always, but they were empty. His phone beeped. I did my best not to get in Owen and Sadie’s way, after extracting a promise from Sadie that she would tell me if I was doing something she didn’t like, because my chances of recognizing it were very low. She’d only laughed and told me I was adorable, which she did a lot anyway, and so far everything had been just fine.

  Aodhan dropped me off at the foot of my driveway, and my dad waved from the door.

  “It’s done?” he said, when I was close enough that he didn’t have to shout.

  “It’s done,” I told him. “Is Mum home yet?”

  “She got in just after you left,” he told me. “But she said if you want to practice, she’ll be fine as long as you keep the mute in.”

  One of the (very few) handy things about being forced away from the saxophone was that a trombone could be muted and made to play more softly while still using the proper amount of air. I had an electric mute, which played only for the wireless headphones I wore while I practiced, but I also had a regular mute, which served to muffle any noise I might make. This weekend, though, I didn’t have the trombone home. Instead, I had another brass that I could play with a mute.

  Trondheim Secondary School didn’t own a bugle, but they did have several trumpets, with varying degrees of dings and scrapes. Before, I had never really used them much. Most composers feature them a lot, but after three years of watching them get all the good melodies in band, I was happy to relegate them to flourishes and counterpoint. Last November, when we’d stood at the cenotaph on Remembrance Day, one of the veterans had played the last post, and I thought of something that had, until right then, escaped me.

  Before wireless communications and radios, before clocks and watches, and when flags were too untrustworthy, the military had used a series of short bugle calls to communicate things like when it was time to wake up, time to eat, and time to assemble for mail call. Most bases still used a variation of this, though the calls were all prerecorded. The Oil Watch, since it often incorporated dragon slayers who didn’t speak the same language, relied on the call system even more. A trumpet and a bugle are mostly the same, and once you’ve developed the embouchure for a horn you can do anything, so I knew that if I practiced with the trumpet, I would be able to transfer my skills to the bugle easily enough.

  And when you play a bugle, you can do it without moving your fingers.

  THE BRAID

  The last month of school absolutely crawled by. Sadie enlisted, with more fanfare than her parents expected, but we all still got up early every morning and ran farther than I thought was reasonable. After school there was Guard practice and then soccer. I was actually on the team this year, with no small amount of pressure from Sadie, and while I didn’t get much playing time due to my extreme incompetence at kicking things in the appropriate direction, I did run. A lot.

  I spent most of my evenings with the trumpet, or with whatever piece of newfangled implement my physiotherapist thought would help my hands. Most of them hurt, skin stretching and muscles trying their best to do the work with less mass, but I couldn’t deny that they had improved my abilities. My right hand was still the worst in terms of looks and pain, since it was the hand I favoured, and the hand that had had the most contact with the hilt of the white-hot sword. The left wasn’t much better, and I was clumsy with it besides, but it was better than nothing, I decided.

  “You know,” Dr. Madison had said
, very early during our relationship. “Do you have access to a piano? It’ll sound really hokey, but even if you can only plink out ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ it might help you regain your range of motion.”

  Dr. Madison was lovely, but that morning I very nearly walked out of her office and never came back. She was from London and knew me only as a burn victim at first. I’m not even sure if my mother told her they were dragon-fire burns, though most physicians specialize in either those or mundane burns while they’re in medical school, due to the specificity of chemical contamination that can infect the former. My parents still had notions of preserving my anonymity in those days, until the news cameras came back to Trondheim with a vengeance and showed no signs of ever leaving.

  “No,” I said. Lying for a cause was easier now. I didn’t feel bad about it anymore. “I can’t play the piano.”

  I read up on it later. Dr. Madison was right, of course. Playing would make all ten fingers operate separately and help with muscle strength. But I couldn’t do it. I sat on the bench when Mum and Dad were at work, and opened the lid of the keyboard. It was dusty for the first time in my entire life, and when I hit middle C, I noticed it was out of tune. It had only been two months since I could play the masters, and now I couldn’t even handle “The Old Grey Mare.”

  The current method of torture-by-physio involved one of those child-friendly rug hooking kits you can buy at Canadian Tire. I think this one was supposed to be a butterfly, but Dr. Madison had taken the pattern out because she knew that if she gave me details to focus on, I’d never actually get anything done. It was still very frustrating though, and by the time Sadie called at seven o’clock, I was really bored.

  “There’s two hours of daylight left,” Sadie said, once I’d managed to get my phone answered. It was an awkward process, and I missed the days when I could just pick up the landline, but I guess progress is progress. “Please come and rescue us from calculus.”

  “Have I mentioned lately how glad I am that I am not taking that class?” I asked, already on the way to the door.

  “Yeah, shut up,” she said, laughing.

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” I said. “I’m sure my keys are around here somewhere.”

  I slipped into a pair of flats that were very impractical for anything that might end in dragon slaying, but laces vexed me more than lakus these days. I retrieved my keys from the bottom of my purse with some effort. It was still really easy to forget that when I threw something somewhere, retrieving it was going to be awkward. For the first week after my bandages had come off, when I couldn’t open, close, turn, or manipulate anything smaller than a loaf of bread, I’d done a lot of angry crying when I thought no one was looking. Now I just pretended that I was on camera all the time, which helped me keep it together.

  Driving, mercifully, hadn’t changed much. I mean, I drove with all the bad habits that would have made my driving instructor despair—palming the wheel, leaving one hand on the shift, failing to check the rearview mirror for dragons as often as I should—but I did it. By the time I pulled into Sadie’s driveway, I was feeling relatively normal.

  Owen was not allowed in Sadie’s bedroom, which all three of us thought was both hilarious, because it’s not like they couldn’t manage mischief elsewhere, and insulting, because it’s not like Sadie didn’t have some pretty elaborate plans for the future. If I was along, they could go upstairs, but since we spent most of our time in the backyard trying to hit each other with sticks, the point was moot.

  I found them hunched over the coffee table, calculus notes everywhere. Sadie was pretty much guaranteed an A at this point, but Owen needed to pass the exam to maintain his B–, so they spent a lot of time studying.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” said Sadie, though she must have heard me pull in. After a close encounter with a lakus back in March, my poor car had developed an unhealthy-sounding rumble that had thus far eluded my mechanic. My parents had offered to replace it, but we’d been through a lot together, that car and I, and I was kind of attached to its ugliness.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked. “I’ve just moved down another handle size, so I’m not going to be good for sparring right now.”

  “Actually, we wanted to talk,” Owen said. “About Basic.”

  I took a seat. I was kind of relieved that we wouldn’t be practicing. Hannah and Dr. Madison had cooked up this plan where I would start with an oversized handle on my sword, and then they would gradually take me back down to a regularly proportioned one again. Every time we changed, it was like learning to hold the stupid thing all over again.

  “Okay,” I said. “Did Lottie tell you anything new?”

  “No,” Owen said. “We’re just worried about you.”

  I looked at my hands. You spend a lot of time looking at your hands, I’ve discovered, when you want to avoid something. It’s more awkward when your hands are what you’re trying to avoid.

  Emily had put in hours of research. Lottie had called in every favour she could. Hannah had pushed me harder than ever. And I was in. Now I had to make it through, and I didn’t know how that was going to play out. The melody went on, uninterrupted, for Owen and Sadie—just the addition of a drum tattoo under their lines—but mine, mine had been on rest measures for months. And I didn’t know for sure what it was going to sound like when it started again.

  Neither of them had ever said I didn’t have to do this. We all knew that it was true. We all knew that it would probably be easier if I didn’t. But I was going to anyway. The fire on Manitoulin might have taken my hands, taken my music—or at least the easy parts of it—but it had left something behind. Forests burn all the time, dragon-caused or otherwise, and after, when the fire goes out, the plants and animals come back. The dead things, the unnecessary things, are gone, and life begins anew.

  That wasn’t exactly what happened to me, but it was close. What grew up in the space where the fire had burned was a sense of obligation. Before, I had only wanted to protect my home. After Manitoulin, I realized that things far away from Trondheim could be just as devastating as a local infestation of corn dragons. We needed oil and sugar and wood and potash. And while the island burned, I had discovered that I was one of those people who was willing to pay the price for them.

  “I’m worried too.” It was the first time I had said it out loud. “But we’re in this together.”

  “That’s what I told him.” Sadie’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  “What if they assign us to different places?” Owen said.

  “They can’t,” I said. “Well, they can with Sadie. But you and I come as a pair.”

  “You need Sadie too,” he said softly. “I can’t French braid.”

  I had taken to wearing my hair down. It was simple enough to comb and mercifully stayed mostly straight. When we were patrolling, playing soccer, or on the training field, Sadie braided it for me. I couldn’t even do a simple ponytail anymore.

  “Then I’ll shave my head,” I told him. “We’ll match and everything.”

  The uniform requirements for Oil Watch recruits were a bit more extreme than they were for regulars, largely because of the increased chance of burning. Lottie and Hannah had both shaved their heads while they were on their tours—I’d seen the photos—though Catalina, Owen’s mother, had opted for the more complicated protective helmet.

  “Siobhan,” he said, “you can’t joke about this forever.”

  “I’m not joking,” I told him. “I am going to do this. And it is going to suck. But that’s not going to stop me.”

  “Tell you what,” Sadie said. “We’ll borrow my dad’s clippers and do it before we leave.”

  “We?” I protested. She’d been planning to wear the helmet.

  “Sure,” she said. “If you can make drastic decisions, then so can I. We’ll do it tomorrow, after school.”

  Owen and I exchanged a glance. Our telepathy had improved dramatically since we’d met. I could tell he was thinki
ng that there was no point in arguing with Sadie, and he knew that I was thinking it was his fault for dating her.

  “Fine,” I said. “Tomorrow. Now can we please go into the backyard and hit things?”

  “Yes,” Sadie said, and gestured to the floor in front of her.

  I sat between her knees, and if we cried while she braided my hair for one last time, none of us were rude enough to mention it.

  REAL PIE

  In hindsight, we probably should have waited to shave our heads until after Owen’s last interview with the local newspaper. Emily was annoyed. She liked having first dibs on releasing any news about us to the world at large. She’d had to give up most of her online aliases after what we’d engineered last spring. I didn’t understand it fully—something about sock puppets, which apparently the Internet is desperately against—and having direct access to us was something she cherished. Usually we didn’t mind letting her have the first go, but the haircuts had been kind of spontaneous.

  Sadie brought the clippers over to the Thorskards’ on Friday after school, as we’d planned, an hour before Owen’s weekly sit-down with Sheila, the editor-in-chief (and also main photographer, copy editor, ad saleswoman, and espresso machine operator) of the Trondheim Weekly. I’m pretty sure we were all standing there wondering if this was a terrible idea.

  “I think we should hack off most of it with scissors,” Sadie said, twisting her ponytail in her hand. “That way it’s kind of past the point of no return.”