The Story of Owen (6 page)

Only some of that is true, of course. I wasn't wearing my watch, so I have no idea if the first time I saw my car was also the exact moment Lottie fell. It certainly makes for a better story that way, though. And it wasn't my best birthday, either. That came later.

But I did have to spend some of my precious summer holiday in driver's ed, if only so that I could save a bit of money on my insurance, which, given our rural locale, was already guaranteed to be higher than if I'd lived in a city where a dragon could go for a factory instead of for me.

After World War II, when automobiles became a staple of Western culture and the dragon population boomed thanks to the glut of carbon emissions over Europe, the United States, and Japan, there were a bunch of car-related tragedies in rural North America. It wasn't so bad in cities or in Europe, where the population was concentrated and there were always more appealing targets for dragons to go after than a lone car. But in the countryside, a carbon-burning car was one of the most dangerous places to be. After a dozen years of debate on whether to allow teenagers to drive, the government finally implemented an education program to teach young drivers how to drive defensively, providing the basics of what to do in case a dragon tried to make off with your car while you were in it.

To be honest, I was kind of excited to take the class. Trondheim had seen several cases of a car being carried off in the last decade, and more than a few people had been scorched while driving on the many unpaved side roads in the region, but it wasn't as bad as it might have been. This was primarily for two reasons. First of all, a dragon was far more likely to go after a tractor than it was to go after a car, and we had nothing if not tractors aplenty. Second, as the mines in Saltrock grew in size and production, they presented a far more tempting target. Still, the class promised to be entertaining, and at the end of it there was the promise of independence from my parents—not to mention arriving on time for band rehearsals, since between my mother's crazy schedule and my father's lack of get up and go at six o'clock in the morning, my tardy record was a bit well spotted.

“First thing's first,” said the instructor on the first day of the four-day course. “How many of you are driving hybrids?”

She sounded hopeful when she asked it, but she had to know that there was a chance that no one in the class would have one. The government had been pouring money into the development of electric cars for almost two decades now, and though they were effective in preventing dragon attacks, the jury was still out on how effective they were at not stranding their drivers in the middle of nowhere. Again, not a big risk in the city as there wasn't a lot of nowhere to be stranded in, but around here it was something of a more pressing concern. They were also apt to throw a fit if driven on gravel roads. Since most of the kids in the area lived on farms, hybrids simply weren't practical. Not to mention they were still quite expensive. Indeed, only two kids raised their hands. The instructor deflated a little bit but pressed on.

We spent most of the morning learning about the more banal aspects of safe driving: four-way stops, three-point turns, small dragon evasion, and the like. By the time the afternoon rolled around, everyone was really, really bored. The instructor must have sensed that she was losing us, because after lunch we got into the real dangers. There was a video on fire suppression and another on how to evade an attack from the air (though this was, the instructor admitted, mostly useless if the dragon caught you on a gravel road).

Then we got to the meat of the lesson: dragon identification. There weren't a lot of different species of dragon in the Trondheim area, but there was enough variation that a refresher never went amiss. Also, as our instructor pointed out, there were some differences when it came to avoiding a dragon while driving.

Draconis lakus
was first, as it was the most common dragon in the Trondheim and Saltrock area. It hunted primarily along
the shoreline of large bodies of water, but was making forays further and further inland. It was slow, though, and once it landed, it didn't always get back into the air quickly. If you were in a car, it was fairly easy to drive away from it. A grounded
lakus
couldn't even catch you if you ran. Next was
Draconis siligoinis
, the smallest dragon native to Canada. It was fast enough to catch a car, in theory, but it was also pretty stupid. It got its name because it like to hide in corn fields, which it did at all times of the year, including when the corn was not high enough to conceal it. It was also stupid enough that sometimes it couldn't tell corn from beans, making it easier to track. If you were attacked by a
siligoinis
, the key was to get off the road, leave your car, and hide.

Draconis urbs
was, like the
lakus
, big and slow. It had once been predominantly associated with cities. The
urbs
was cause for concern in that it had previously stayed in urban areas but was now encroaching more and more into the rural parts of the country. Trondheim, set in from the coast of the lake and a two-hour drive from the closest city with more than a million people in it, was slowly being sandwiched between the
urbs
and the
lakus
. Fortunately,
urbs
could be evaded the way the
lakus
could.

The most concerning dragon, however, was the
Draconis ornus
, the soot-streaker. This was the dragon that had brought down Michigan, and until a decade ago, it had never been seen in Canada at all. It had been content to plague Michigan and then to pester the other industrial states that took Michigan's place after it was abandoned.
Ornus
had crept across the border at last, to harry Hamilton and Toronto, and was even encroaching on the paper mills and nickel mines in Sault Ste. Marie
and Sudbury. And, of course, it was also making its presence known at the mine in Saltrock. The
ornus
was big enough to make off with a tractor, and our instructor explained that if you were beset by an
ornus
on the road, your best chance was to find something that was emitting more carbon than you. There was, apparently, no honor in driver's ed.

By the time the afternoon wore out, a few members of the class were clearly having second thoughts about the whole driving thing, but I was not one of them. My car, after all, looked so desperately unappetizing that I was pretty sure no dragon in its right mind would go for it, no matter how much carbon I was emitting.

After class got out for the day, I walked down to the clinic where my mother worked most Saturdays when she wasn't on call at the hospital. We'd driven into town together that morning in my car, since I still had to have an adult drive along until I passed driver's ed, and then gone our separate ways from the clinic parking lot. I guessed that she'd probably spent her whole day as bored as I had been that morning, since if there had been an emergency we would have seen the ambulances go past the driving school. At least I'd gotten to watch mildly entertaining videos all afternoon. She likely spent the day assuring various denizens of our aging population that their medication was, in fact, necessary and would not, in fact, make them more attractive to any dragon that happened to pass by.

After class, I drove us all the way home, with only one stall and not so much as a dragon-scale sighted in the distance. By September, I was driving myself everywhere with minimal oversight from my parents, which is how I managed to get all the way to Owen's house for dinner and back before they realized I was friends with a dragon slayer.

We didn't wait for Aodhan to get home before we ate. Instead, Hannah and Lottie moved around one another in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on spaghetti while Owen and I set the table. Watching them, I could tell that they had an easy system working with each other, even though Lottie's injury probably changed their patterns a little bit. Still, they were both in good spirits and poked fun at one another as they did their best not to burn the garlic bread.

“She burns everything,” Hannah explained, planting a kiss on Lottie's cheek.

“That is not true,” Lottie argued.

“It is true,” Owen pointed out. “Though since that's the point of crème brûlée I'm not really complaining.”

“Thank you, dear,” Lottie said sarcastically. “Your good opinion of my desserts means ever so much.”

“It's because Lottie doesn't understand fire,” Hannah said,
looking directly at me. “She views it as the enemy.”

“And Hannah knows how to control it,” Lottie added. “Or so she likes to remind me. Are you two nearly finished? We're about done here.”

“Yes,” said Owen, placing a stack of serviettes in the center of the table. “Have you heard from Dad at all today?”

“He's up somewhere around Kincardine,” Hannah said. “Something about an infestation, though the cell phone kept cutting in and out so I'm not sure if he was talking about the dragons or the sheep. He probably won't come home until Sunday.”

“I'm sorry he's gone so much,” I said. “It's really appreciated, though.”

Lottie looked at me and smiled. She didn't look anything like she did on the television, I realized, and it wasn't just the make-up and the clever lighting. On camera, she was a dragon slayer, a professional warrior to the core. Even though she could no longer slay dragons in the field, on TV she was all flash and fire and sound bites. Standing in the kitchen, she was kind of smaller, as if she were a trumpet with a mute in the end, playing all the same notes but at a more personal volume. It was like she was real—all of her persona made genuine in a way it couldn't be on film. She was no longer larger than life, but she was no less full of it. I squinted at Owen, trying to make the same changes in him, but I couldn't see it yet.

“Trondheim has been an easy place to live,” Hannah said. “And Aodhan likes the travel.”

“And honestly, in Hamilton it was just as bad,” Owen said. “With Aunt Lottie's commute and city traffic and all the special events she had to go to, it was like we barely saw her.”

“I can't say I have any complaints,” Lottie said, limping to her seat at the table and ladling sauce onto the noodles Hannah had served out for her.

“You haven't had to deal with the snow yet,” I pointed out, passing the marginally singed garlic bread to Owen.

“True,” she said. “But it's quiet enough to think here, and I appreciate that.”

I was dying to ask what she spent her time thinking about. She'd continued to do speaking engagements and the odd commercial for TV or radio, but for the most part Lottie hadn't done a lot to rate national news coverage since moving to Trondheim. I'd thought at first that she'd simply retired, but now that I'd met her, she didn't strike me as the type for inactivity. Training Owen couldn't possibly take up all her time. I didn't ask, though, because I wasn't sure how it would be received. Plus, the “stuck with us” from earlier was still hovering over me, and, given the choice, I'd rather they explained that one first.

“Owen tells me you're good at school,” Hannah said conversationally. She twisted the spaghetti against her spoon and formed a perfectly sized bite.

“I get by,” I said, which was the truth. I wasn't that far from the top of the class, but that was mostly because there were only about fifty people in it, even with the addition of the students from Saltrock. I had good grades, but not through any concerted effort.

“I'm more interested in the music,” Lottie said. I began to wonder how much of their surprise at my arrival had been genuine. It seemed that Owen had told them more about me than I'd thought, given their reactions. Maybe they'd just been trying to set me at my ease.

“That I'm quite good at,” I said. There was no point in false modesty. I had a wall of trophies and certificates to back me up, and I'd long since given up pretending that my attachment to my music was a passing fad.

“It is good to have useful hobbies,” Lottie said, and I couldn't help looking at her questioningly.

My music had been described as nice or even worthwhile, but certainly not useful. Perhaps if I'd been a better singer or at least pretty enough to bank on my mediocre vocal abilities, I'd have been more optimistic as to my future in the business. As it stood, the best I could hope for from a composition major—even one from Laurier, which had the best program in Canada—was a life of teaching music to kids during the day and scraping out tunes for fun at night.

“What Lottie means,” Hannah said, “is that she has a bandwagon to fill and she's hoping you'll jump on it.”

“I still think we should have waited until dessert,” Lottie muttered.

I looked at Owen, who was determinedly staring at his plate, and wondered what in the world I had agreed to by coming over for dinner.

“Could one of you maybe explain what you keep hinting at?” I asked. “Because this is starting to get a bit creepy.”

“What do you know about the history of dragon slaying?” Lottie asked, just as I took a forkful of pasta. It seemed like an easy enough question, but the way she asked it made me realize that she probably wasn't asking for a recitation of the Oil Watch Articles. I took my time chewing to think of an answer.

“Not much, I guess,” I admitted, after swallowing. “I mean, I know what they show us on TV and teach in history, but I
don't think that's what you're talking about.”

“You're right, it isn't,” Lottie said.

“Please feel free to continue this by talking with your mouth full,” Hannah interjected. “Or else your dinner will be cold by the time you're done.”

“Before the Industrial Revolution, dragon slayers were tied to the towns they were born in,” Lottie said. “It had nothing to do with money or fame, it was a matter of loyalty and honor, and every small town could count on a dragon slayer's protection.”