The Story of Owen (12 page)

The Taggerts lived one side road out from Trondheim toward Saltrock, in the opposite direction of the Thorskards. I had never been there—well, not since I was young enough to go trick-or-treating (there's always better candy in the country), but you could see the house, barn, and drive shed from the highway, so I knew roughly what I was getting into. About a dozen cars and trucks were parked in the driveway, and I could feel the bass in my chest, even though we were still a few hundred feet from the shed.

Bass emanations always made me feel a little bit ill, so I was pale when Sadie turned off the car and opened her door. She reached out and shook my shoulders.

“Siobhan,” she said. “It'll be fine. You look great, you're with me and you're friends with Owen Thorskard. You have absolutely nothing to worry about.”

I took a deep breath and smiled at her. She was, after all, correct in all of her assertions except for one: I did have something to worry about, because behind the drive shed, some idiot had already lit a fire.

The account was never particularly clear. The kids from TSS blamed the kids from Saltrock, and vice versa. All I knew for sure was that by eight, there was a sizable smoke plume, and since Jerry Taggert's parents were out of town for the weekend (hence the field party) and cell phone reception was notoriously poor this close to the Saltrock bluffs, we were on our own. There was a keg next to the bonfire. I stepped on at least three red plastic cups, crushing them under my running shoes, before I reached the edge of the fire.

“Well, I guess it's a good thing I didn't make you borrow my other boots,” Sadie said, reaching down to scrape the mud out of her heel. “But if we ever do this inside, you totally have to. They'd look perfect with that shirt.”

I looked at her like she was out of her mind, and then went back to measuring the fire. It was in a pit, thank goodness, and therefore relatively contained, but it was still going to take some doing to put out. It had probably been lit to provide some heat.
I had never understood why my schoolmates chose to spend their Saturday nights outside in the cold. Even the drive shed would have been moderately warmer, but for some reason, they were all standing around the keg pretending they weren't cold, or running into the drive shed for a few moments to warm up before coming back outside.

“Hey, Sadie!” shouted Alex Carmody, even though he was well within earshot. “Who did you—oh! Hi, Siobhan!”

“Alex,” I said, nodding. “Do you happen to know if there's a hose around?”

“Um, I've never actually been here before,” Alex admitted. “I just came because—well, I heard you were coming.”

This whole thing just kept getting more and more ridiculous.

“You'll have to forgive Siobhan,” Sadie said. “She's never done this before, and some idiot decided to ruin her first field party by lighting a fire. They'll probably kill us if we use the keg to put the fire out, don't you think?”

“Doesn't alcohol burn anyway?” Alex asked. “I'll find a hose.”

He wandered off, and I turned to Sadie. I decided that I needed answers, whether we were about to get eaten by a dragon or not.

“What the heck is going on?” I said. “First you call me, then you invite me to a party, then you tell everyone I'm coming, and somehow that makes them all excited? Have I fallen into some kind of bizarro world?”

“It's because you're friends with Owen, Siobhan.” Sadie said it as gently as she could. “People want to ask you questions about him.”

“So you're just using me?” I said. “Not that I'm completely averse to that, mind you. Fire aside, this has been weirdly fun.”

“I know, eh?” Sadie said. She didn't answer my question, though, because Alex came back with a bucket that was mostly full of water. I suspected he had dumped some of it as he ran back.

“I can get more,” he said. He wasn't even breathing hard, but in the firelight his face was red.

Sadie took the bucket and carefully upended it near the base of the flames on the southern side of the fire. The sizzling was encouraging, but when the bucket was empty, there was still a lot of fire in the pit.

“More,” said Sadie, holding out the bucket to Alex, who took off with it.

“Hey!” said a Saltrock boy I didn't know. “What are you doing?”

“We're putting out this fire so you don't get eaten by a dragon, Nathan.” I wondered how Sadie knew everyone's name. “I can't run as fast as Alex, but I can run faster than you, which means you'll have a better chance of getting eaten if a dragon decides to come take a look at all this smoke.”

Nathan was holding a plastic cup and seemed a bit unsteady on his feet already. I was pretty sure my chances were better than his too.

Alex came back with another bucket, and also with Jerry, who was very angry and kind of drunk. Jerry had the garden hose, though, and soon enough the fire was out. We stood there in the dark, all of us scanning the skies, looking for the airborne flame that would tell us we hadn't been fast enough to quench the fire.

Nathan wandered into the cornfield. I didn't pay much attention to him. I'd seen enough movies to know that what high school boys did in cornfields at parties was absolutely nothing I wanted to get involved in. Instead, we stood in the near dark of the Taggerts' yard. Someone gave me a cup, but I didn't drink out of it. I watched Sadie, since she was my driver, and she didn't drink anything either.

“So Siobhan,” Alex said once we'd decided that there wasn't a dragon nearby. “What's it like?”

“What's what like?” I asked. I was starting to find the rhythm of the party, after the rocky start, but I still wasn't sure what my part was.

“Owen,” Sadie said. “What's Owen like.”

“You guys spend just as much time with him as I do,” I pointed out. “I mean, you're in his classes and you eat with him in the cafeteria. All we ever do is homework.”

“He spends half of lunch with you,” Alex said.

“He watches me compose,” I said. “It's not exactly thrilling.”

“He must really like you,” said a voice I didn't recognize. I turned toward the speaker, though I had no idea what I was going to say, but Sadie beat me to it.

“You know as well as I do that there are probably dragon slayer rules about that sort of thing,” she said. I wasn't sure that there were, but if it made people stop asking, I might be willing to pretend. “And anyway, that's not the cool part. Lottie is teaching Siobhan how to use a sword.”

That got a response. There were rapid-fire questions: everything from how one learned to use a sword to what Lottie looked like up close to whether or not that made me a dragon slayer. I was hard-pressed to keep up with the answers, since
each one I gave seemed to spawn a new question. Sadie threw her arm around my shoulder and squeezed, somehow deducing, even in the dark, that I was starting to panic.

“Guys, guys!” she said. “One at a freaking time.”

“Have you been inside Hannah's smithy?” asked a girl I was almost positive was named Heidi.

“No,” I said. “I looked in the window, but it's quite small, and full of smith things. I watched her sharpen a sword, though. You don't need fire for that, so she does it outside.”

“Cool!” said probably Heidi.

“Where the hell is Nathan?” another Saltrock boy asked.

There was no consensus, though several people besides me had seen him wander into the cornfield. It was quickly determined that no one else was missing, which meant that whatever mischief Nathan was getting up to in the field was of a solitary nature. They shouted for him, but there was no answer, and it was decided that he had probably succumbed to his alcohol.

“We should go,” Sadie said.

“It's been less than an hour,” I pointed out, even though I didn't particularly want to stay.

“The whole point of a field party is to get dressed, show up for a little while, and then leave before the boys start doing stupid things,” Sadie said. “Apparently we missed the un-stupid part of the evening. If we leave now, we can still watch a movie before you have to be home for curfew.”

I looked around. Probably-Heidi and a few other kids were getting into a car, and a couple of the trucks were already gone. Suddenly, getting out of here seemed like a very good idea.

“Let's go,” I said.

We headed back to the car, and I rolled down my window
in the hope that the air would get the smell of smoke out of my clothes. If my parents smelled bonfire on me, they might never let me out of the house again. As we drove off, Sadie looked in the rearview mirror with a startled expression on her face.

“What?” I said, looking back over my shoulder.

“It's probably nothing,” Sadie said. “I mean, it's probably just us, but I thought I smelled smoke.”

She rolled down the other windows, the better to air us out, and the smell decreased as we drove. The rest of the evening was quiet. Sadie's parents seemed thrilled that we had smartly decided to forgo the field party, and offered up the entertainment center without protest, retreating upstairs and leaving us with enough chips and pop to stun a regiment.

“That's a big part of it,” Sadie said in a conspiratorial tone after they had departed. “You show some good judgement, which happens to be what you wanted to do anyway, and all of a sudden they trust you to the ends of the earth.”

I considered that as we watched a Jane Austen thing I can't remember the name of, and Sadie insisted on showing me how to use a curling iron. I'd never given my parents a reason not to trust me, but I'd never gone out of my way to show them that my judgment was sound either. And then I'd just announced that I was taking up with a dragon slayer and let Hannah do all the bargaining on my behalf. Maybe Sadie was right, and it was time for some judicious coloring outside the lines, the better to make me look good when I went back inside them. Maybe this whole hanging out thing was going to have unexpected fringe benefits. Sadie hadn't answered my question earlier about using me, but she hadn't denied it either. Turnabout was fair play, as long as neither of us deliberately hurt the other, I decided.

When she dropped me off at home, Sadie passed me the extra boots. I hadn't even seen her get them, and I wondered if she carried a pair around in the backseat of her car for emergency situations. She was that kind of person, I was starting to learn, and it wouldn't have surprised me.

“You should wear these on Monday,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said, and I found that I meant it, even though I had no idea what I should wear them with and had visions of myself falling down the stairs thanks to the not-unsubstantial heel.

It had been an odd night on all fronts, but I finally thought I was starting to get the hang of the whole high school thing, even if I was about three years later than most people. I clung to that good feeling until Sunday morning, when I went downstairs for breakfast and Dad told me that Nathan Brash had wandered into a cornfield at a party, lost his sense of direction thanks to the height of the late-season corn and the amount of beer he'd had to drink, and walked right into the squat of a corn dragon.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Victoria who grew up to change the shape of the world. She loved twice and deeply: once a prince, whom she married, and once a Scottish dragon slayer, which was a bit of a secret because she was a widowed queen when she loved him. She worked hard to confine the dragons of England, and since she had the resources of an empire on which the sun never set to do so, she was largely successful. She lived a very long time and led her country through the bitter outcome of the Industrial Revolution, when the dragons on the island increased and the people had to learn to evade them or die in fire. Her story is the exception.

More common is the story of what befell the state of Michigan.

Like Mark Antony at Actium and Napoleon on his way to Russia, the settlers of Michigan started out well enough. The land was good for farming, and the weather wasn't terrible all the time, though for most of recorded history the blackfly
population was something of an issue. Michigan joined the Union, and development proceeded apace through the turn of the century.

There had always been dragons in Michigan. It was said that a person in that state couldn't be more than six miles from water, and most of that water was small lakes and ponds, which are prime breeding grounds for dragons. There were several different species native to the area before the European settlers arrived, and they managed to bring three new breeds with them, trailing the burnt corpses of fallen livestock as they made their way west. The upside was that the newer dragons were bigger and quickly drove the older dragons out. The downside, of course, was that the new dragons were bigger.

The dragon slayers, both Native and European, adapted, and at last a balance was struck. Across the sea, Queen Victoria worked to contain the British dragons, and in Michigan, it seemed that it would be easy enough to follow her example. For a brief time, it looked like success would be had, but then came further expansion, and more and more industrialized use for coal, leading to more carbon emissions than ever before. In 1903, with the advent of gasoline and the internal-combustion engine, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated, and Michigan's economy turned into an automobile-producing giant.

The effects were immediate and disastrous. The dragon population increased as Ford built factories and pumped more and more carbon smoke into the air. New species appeared, and the dragon slayers were hard pressed to fight them off. There was no loyalty to Queen and Country here, and that forced Ford to do something that had never been done before. Rather
than go back to the relatively safer steam, he sent out a call all across the USA, asking for dragon slayers of any skill to come and defend his plants, and he promised them unheard-of sums of money to do it.