Prairie Fire (13 page)

“Aunt Lottie wasn't too helpful,” Owen said to me as we filed off to the barracks for lights-out. “She said there have always been independent contractors.”

“Yeah, Darktide,” I said, naming the biggest firm in the United States. “But they get paid a lot of money, and they include dragon slayers. And they're mostly made up of Americans.”

“Yeah, I think the point may have drifted since we were e-mailing,” Owen admitted. “Did you e-mail Emily?”

“Yes,” I said. “You know how much she likes a good conspiracy.”

“There's no conspiracy.”

“We don't know that.”

He waggled his eyebrows at me. I rolled my eyes.

“Did you bet on Nick and me?” I asked him. I'd been trying to broach this for the past few days, but this wasn't exactly an easy conversation to have.

“Of course,” he said. “I bet on never. Easy money.”

“Good,” I told him. “That's what I wanted you to bet on.”

“If you give me half the buy-in, we can split the payoff,” he offered. “Even though it's a bit open-ended. I think when we get reassigned after training, it'll be considered ‘never.'”

“Well, that's reassuring,” I said. “Did you hear from Sadie?”

“She's fine,” he said. “Her mentor is some Lithuanian giant she can barely understand, but he's very good and appreciates her willingness to work herself half to death, so they get along well enough. She said his smith tends to make heavier swords than she's used to, which is taking up most of her training time, but the water stuff is going well.”

“That's good.” Sadie's e-mail to me had mostly been about food, and how much she missed reliable vegetables that came from someone she knew rather than all the way from South Africa. “Has Lieutenant Porter said anything to you about where his support squad is?”

We'd quickly determined that one of the reasons Porter did most of the lecturing was that both Nick and Kaori's mentors were needed to patrol. They spent most of their time outside the protective steel forest of Fort Calgary, and their support squads went with them. So far as I knew, Porter hadn't slayed a dragon since we'd arrived, though there had been several battles within the fort. Owen was itchy about it, even though the windows in the shelter let him see what was going on. Maybe Porter had just learned to cope.

“He doesn't have one at the moment,” Owen told me.

“That's weird,” I said.

Dragon slayers didn't always have the same squad. Sometimes people died, after all, or ended their tours and went home. The firefighters most often stuck together, only getting shuffled up for things like injury or death, but they could be reassigned to another dragon slayer. I knew that Courtney was serving out her degrees from the Royal Military College, and that Ted only intended to stay in the Oil Watch long enough for it to put him through med school, but the others—save Owen, of course—were in it for their careers.

“I get the feeling Porter works best alone,” Owen said diplomatically.

“I like him, though,” I said. “At least he's interesting.”

“Agreed,” Owen said. We stopped in front of the door to the barracks where I stayed.

“Good night,” I curled my hand around the door knob. It was a pull door, which was always worse than pushing, but I managed it.

“'Night,” Owen said, and followed the other guys down the hallway.

Our barracks were well-ordered, all things considered, but still noisy before lights-out, especially since it was Friday night and we had most of tomorrow off from all training except sparring and firearms. Since all the girls were in the same billet, Kaori was joined by both of her engineers and one of her medics, and we had two of Nick's firefighters. I had initially felt bad for Kaori's squad, whose limited English isolated them, but it was clear by now that there were some informal language lessons going on, and Kaori was very good at rapid-fire translation. As an only child, I had been afraid that I wasn't really cut out for communal living, but at least being friends with Sadie had prepared me for the unnatural interest everyone else seemed to take in my life.

“Do you need a hand?” Annie asked as I headed for the bathroom with my pajamas and my toothbrush.

“No thanks,” I said. “I'm good.”

I mostly was, though the cap on the toothpaste required me to use my teeth. I rinsed my face and pulled on my hair. It was almost an inch long now, but still well within regulation. I lived in a perpetual state of hat hair, but it was still easier than French braiding it. I wiped my face with the towel and set to changing as fast as I could.

“They're breaking us in easy,” Laura was saying as I came out of the bathroom in my pajamas. I didn't mind getting dressed in front of my own squad, but while the Japanese crew were polite enough to not stare at me too openly, the Americans had no such restraint. I avoided them as much as I could.

“You think this is easy?” one of the Americans drawled. “I don't think I've ever been to a place with this many dragon attacks.”

“That's probably why we're here,” said the other, her accent more northern. “At least there are enough dragon slayers to deal with them.”

“No, I mean it,” Laura said. “The Wapiti and the Longtail are the easy ones. You can actually slay them. They're saving the big one for when we've settled in.”

“For the love of God,” said Courtney, looking like she wanted to wring her neck. “Just tell them.”

“The Chinook,” Kaori said, once she finished translated for her crew. Her voice was low, almost reverent. “She means the Chinook.”

The Canadians all shuddered.

“I thought that thing was a myth,” said the southern firefighter.

“I wish it was a myth,” said Laura. “In the meantime, just thank your lucky stars it's the only dragon in the whole damn world that we can predict.”

“It's not predicting,” Annie corrected her. “It's a warning.”

“Close enough for me,” Laura said.

There was some chatter from the Japanese crew as they conferred, and we waited until Kaori leaned forward again.

“Please tell us the details,” she said. “Our mountain dragons are also island dragons, so they are small and easily dealt with. We worry that too much of what we know about your Chinook comes from legend, and we would like to know the facts.”

Everyone looked at me, expecting a story. The Wapiti and the 'Bascan Long were so regional that, as a non-resident of Alberta, I hadn't really had to learn about them before I got here. The Chinook was different. Even though it was the most regionally specific dragon in the entire country, possibly the entire world, everyone knew a little about it. We didn't talk about it much, and it was certainly kept out of the mainstream media as much as possible. Emily didn't like that. She thought it was prone to cause misinformation and panic. She had a point, but at the same time, I quite enjoyed living in denial about the Chinook.

Most dragons, you see, have weaknesses. The
siligoinis
is dumb. The Wapiti has short forearms that prevent it from moving on all fours once it is grounded. The
lakus
and the
urbs
are slow. The soot-streaker can't obscure itself and light you on fire at the same time.

I cleared my throat, and they all leaned in. I trusted that Laura would correct me if I made any mistakes, but I didn't think I would. You couldn't really overstate the dangers a Chinook posed, even when you took poetic license with them. We have lots of stories, of course, about every dragon in the world. And all of them tell you how those dragons can be slayed. But the stories about Chinooks have different endings. Of every dragon to ever have lived, from the grassland giants of Mongolia to the monstrosities from the Eastern European steppes, they are the biggest. Of all the species to fill the air or sea, they are the most vicious and the best equipped to deal death in fire. You can run from them, and you can dig your shelters deep, but their hearts are so far inside their bodies that even the Royal Canadian Mounted Dragon Slayers can't reach them with their steel-tipped lances.

I haven't written songs about a Chinook. And I never will.

A MORE COMFORTABLE DISTANCE

Owen looked at the horse with an incredibly skeptical expression. I have to admit, even I had my doubts. I had been riding before, though not often. When other girls my age wanted ponies, I held out for a harpsichord.

The fireproof saddle on the horse in front of Owen looked sort of like an upholstered chair that had wandered into a bar, gotten extremely drunk, and mistakenly gone home with an equestrian. I suppose in theory the built-up front and back of the seat was to prevent Owen from being thrown, but I had my doubts as to whether or not he'd be able to kick his leg high enough to get over it.

While Owen looked at his mount, I focused on the dragon slayer who was going to teach him to ride it. It was the Texan, Lieutenant Anne Marie Beaumont. She preferred to be addressed as Amery, but Owen always called her Lieutenant and even pronounced it the American way, the better to differentiate her from Porter. Amery's dislike of Owen was plain on her face, and I didn't think it was just because of how he addressed her. I hadn't figured out why yet, because she disliked me even more.

“So you know,” Porter had said the night before, when he'd informed Owen what his lessons would be today. “Horseback riding is my least favourite part of living in this abysmal place. It's worse than the weather. In England, we gave up sticking dragons with lances two centuries ago and have never looked back, but these barbarous prairies lend themselves to tilting, so you have to learn.”

Amery said nothing. Just looked at us and then turned to examine her own tack.

“Look on the bright side,” I whispered to Owen. “You can't possibly be worse at this than Nick will be.”

“Thanks.” He reached up to pat the horse's head.

RCMD horses were carefully bred for dragon slaying. Traditionally, knights had worn spurs and put blinders on their mounts to help them keep control, but unhorsing due to panic had still been very common and usually painful for the dragon slayer. Sometime just after mounted knights became trendy in Europe, an enterprising soul had noted that some horses tended not to panic when their riders had them charge down an enormous fire-breathing beast. A few decades of careful breeding had produced horses that were less likely to spook, and by the time Owen stood in front of a horse named Constantinople on the plain in front of Fort Calgary, they had it more or less down to a science. It was entirely possible that Owen's horse could trace its lineage back to the reign of Augustus, assuming the bloodline hadn't taken a detour through Spain during the Inquisition.

“Have you ever done this before?” Amery asked, not sounding hopeful.

“No, Lieutenant,” Owen said. “We get to try it for a while without the lance, right?”

“Yes,” Amery said. “Now stand at his shoulder—no, face the other direction, and left foot in the stirrup first.”

I watched Owen scramble on to the horse's back and felt a little sorry for them both. Owen did kick the back of the saddle on his way past, and he landed rather more heavily than he should have in his seat. It was rather amusingly ungraceful, but Amery was not smiling.

“Not the worst I've seen,” she said. Owen grimaced. “Now get off the same way, and we'll do it again.”

I realized that it was going to be like this for a while. Amery would make Owen perfect his mount and dismount before she let him actually move anywhere (on purpose, that is, because the second time Owen landed in the saddle, the horse started and took several steps forward before Amery could snatch the reins). I didn't want to stand there and do nothing all morning while Owen was training and the rest of our squad was off doing their specific lessons.

“Lieutenant?” I asked, when there was a break in the action. “May I be dismissed to go practice bugle calls?”