Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

Over the next week I began to get pretty good at sleeping for two hours at a stretch, and since the Rangers were doing absolutely everything for me but actually having the dragonlet down their shirts, the fact that this meant I was spending twenty or more hours a day horizontal didn’t matter. Although I got bedsores. Yuck. I was a healthy almost-fifteen-year-old boy (or at least I had been). But if you lie in the same position for hour after hour, whether it’s because you’re old and weak and sick or because you don’t want to wake up a dragonlet, and maybe you need all the sleep you can get because your permanent headache means you don’t sleep very well besides having to wake up again every two hours (and also because you’re maybe having a better time in the dream cavescape in your head than you are outside and awake), you get bedsores. They weren’t bad, but that’s what they were. Whiteoak had some kind of new gummy stuff for this which stank but helped. Although I’d wake up with the dragonlet trying to get its tongue under me to lick it off. It had a surprisingly long tongue. And its tongue was hot too, so along with the blotches I started getting these sort of skinny whiplash red marks.

  But I’d been away from the Institute for long enough by then that I think even with everything else that was going on (or maybe because of it) Dad was smelling a rat pretty hard—and this was the first time he’d let me out of his sight since Mom died and this is what happened.

  I was still talking to Dad on the radio every day and I sounded a little better than I had but I was still so tired I know I must have sounded funny, even on a two-way where you tend to kind of squawk and squeal anyway, and the branch-across-the-throat excuse didn’t cover my brain. He always sounded sort of preoccupied and jumpy at the same time when he talked to me, which is a good trick but I wasn’t enjoying it. I was too tired to jump after him. Once my throat had supposedly healed he’d wanted to talk to me about finding the dead dragon and the dead guy again, but this time while I got a little farther I got way over the top upset—and nearly called her “she” which would not have been a good slip to make—so he let me off again. It’s just as well because he was getting me so spooked with his jumping-around-ness and of course I kept thinking about his not knowing about the dragonlet that I might have blurted out something even worse.

  So after Billy and the others got back we left for the Institute pretty fast. Again, at the time, I didn’t notice it so much, but I remembered later, that Billy and Kit and Jane had come back even quieter and more expressionless than old Arkhola Rangers usually are (at least when there aren’t any tourists around). I suppose, at the time, I just thought they were sad about the mother dragon too. What I did notice is that what conversations they had were all in their own language—which is something Billy never does when any of us poor retarded English-only speakers are around. That should have really bothered me. But nothing much bothered me as long as there was hot broth every two hours.

  We took it really easy, going home. All I had to carry was the dragonlet, so I didn’t have too bad a time, although I started getting pretty short of sleep again because we kept walking (slowly) most of the day. (At least the bedsores went away.) Billy had rigged a sling to keep the dragonlet in my shirt too—we’d tried putting it in the sling itself but that wasn’t good enough, it continued to demand SKIN although that may have been that it liked all the gooey salves—cloth just doesn’t slither like skin does. Anyway, with the sling I could walk without having to clutch my stomach all the time.

  And while my priorities were a bit skewed I did know we were walking into a huge ugly situation—and that I had to pay attention because my dragonlet’s future depended on it. Worrying about this was enough to make me lose sleep, and I couldn’t afford to lose sleep. Also it made my headache worse, and there wasn’t anything interesting about this worse, like there was about the dream-cave worse. The fact that I knew I wouldn’t give it—the dragonlet—up, and that Billy would back me up about this didn’t anything like mean we were going to win. He also loved Smokehill—actually I don’t think the way most of our Rangers, including Billy, feel about Smokehill is covered well enough by the word “love”—and probably, till he’d found me leaning up against a tree at midnight with a baby dragon in my lap, he’d’ve said that nothing could make him risk doing any harm to Smokehill. Or maybe he’d thought a lot about what could happen if one of us (almost certainly a Ranger, certainly not a dumb kid who’d never even soloed overnight before) ever found themselves in a position of trying to save a dragon’s life. Or maybe (I was light-headed from sleep debt, remember) it had happened several times in the last hundred years—dragon saving I mean—and I just didn’t know about it.

  But I was pretty sure (in my light-headed way) that even if dragon saving was a regular occurrence no one had ever rescued a hot, squodgy little just-born blob…. And if Billy had had any of these thoughts they didn’t seem to be helping him now. Billy is never talkative and he does a brilliant poker face, but you never saw anything so silent and so pokerfaced as Billy over most of the hike back to the Institute. And none of them were talking by the last day, in any language. Jo, who met us with the jeep, didn’t say anything either. Her eyes rested on the bulge at my middle but she didn’t ask for show-and-tell.

  The dragonlet did not like the jeep ride. It didn’t like it so much that eventually Billy and I got out and walked back into the trees so it would calm down and stop yelling and kicking. I wasn’t entirely sorry since the jeep was making my headache worse again too. We’d’ve had to get out before we got to the Institute anyway, we just got out a little early.

  I had no idea how I was going to handle the next step myself. Dad and I just didn’t get along as well as we had when there’d been three or four of us. I was too much like him. “Laid back” wasn’t in either of our vocabularies. (It wasn’t really in Mom’s either, but she had a better sense of humor than either of us did. And petting a dog is good for your blood pressure—they’ve done studies.) I’d been trying almost from the first night with the dragonlet to think about what I should do and what I should say (and not do or say) when I had to face Dad again, but then it would be time to feed the thing again, and there goes my train of thought.

  When we saw the first gleam of the Ranger office wing—which is the first you see of the Institute when you’re coming from the park side—Billy said, “Your dad wants to see you first thing. You and I’ll go straight up to his office. I’ll go in first and tell him what’s happened. You wait till I call you.” He hadn’t said that many words together since he and Kit and Jane got back from Pine Tor.

  I—the dragonlet and I—followed him silently.

  I was wearing one of Billy’s huge sweatshirts over my own clothes to hide the new bulge in my middle, and to disguise the sling. (None of the stuff I’d been wearing when it happened turned out to be salvageable—dragon birth slime is very, uh, intense. We saved my shoes only because I knew Dad couldn’t afford to replace them.) I tried to sort of round my shoulders and slouch along—aren’t teenage boys expected to slouch?—but Maria, who was in the ticket office, gave me a strange look, and Katie, standing in the door of the Ranger office, looked worried. Maybe they were worried because it wasn’t only Dad who’d been smelling a rat.

  But everyone at the Institute would have been feeling strange and worried because however Dad had decided to handle it, the news of the dead dragon and the dead poacher would already be out there in the world by now and the reaction started, whatever that was. And here finally Billy and I were back again, the vanguard returned to give witness of Armageddon. But I was only thinking about the dragonlet. Maria and Katie looking at me just made me slouch harder.

  There’s a tiny vestibule with a couple of dented metal chairs outside my father’s office. I sat down and Billy went through the moment he knocked, so he just managed to get the door closed behind him before my father tried to get out through it and get at me. I could hear Billy saying, “He’s fine. He’s not hurt,” because of course my dad thought that that’s what the Rangers weren’t telling
him, and after Mom…I was pretty impressed that Billy succeeded in keeping the door closed. I was pretty impressed Dad hadn’t hiked out to Northcamp two weeks ago to see for himself what was going on. He really trusted Billy. Well that gave us something in common at least.

  But Dad had been busy here, dealing with the world outside Smokehill. I kept forgetting.

  Billy’s voice dropped and I couldn’t hear words, just a low murmur, Billy trying, I guess, to make it all sound normal and okay and scientifically interesting and brave and stuff.

  It didn’t work. I heard my father bellow, “A DRAGON? Jake’s brought home A DRAGON?” in a voice they must have been able to hear in Washington, DC, so they could get started on the paperwork to take Smokehill away from us—good going, Dad—and then the door crashed open, banging against the wall so hard that my father, coming through, had to put his hand out so it wouldn’t brain him on the rebound. I jumped and the dragonlet jumped, and it would pick that moment to start making the noise I’ve been calling peeping or mewing. I was used to it by then, but it really really doesn’t sound like any animal noise you’ve ever heard, and I could see in my father’s face that it was all too horribly new to him and also, at that moment, that he knew what Billy had told him was true.

  In this struggling-to-be-calm voice Dad said, still too loud, “Billy says—” and stopped, like it was also finally sinking in that there were other people around who might hear him. He stood aside and I stood up, cradling the invisibly peeping dragonlet in my hands, and went in. He closed the door and I sat down in the first chair that I came to, waiting to see if the dragonlet would quiet down or if I was going to have to whip it out immediately and feed it, which was usually the answer to everything in the dragonlet’s case, feeding. (I was, of course, carrying a bottle. A bottle, unlike a camping pot, at least fits in your pocket.)

  I was glad when it subsided. I thought my father needed a little more time before he saw it.

  When I looked up again and saw the expression on my father’s face…. In hindsight I think he was having a parental crisis moment. Traumatic experience or no traumatic experience I had Broken the Rules—I hadn’t radioed Billy and I hadn’t got back on time—and I was in huge amounts of trouble and should have been totally focused on finding out what kind of punishment my father was going to give me, or whether he was going to force me to go through the “let’s discuss this like rational adults” lecture which I would have to go along with to prove that I could be treated like a rational adult although only a parent would ever think that a kid believes that’s what’s really happening. And instead I’d positively ignored him while I attended to this other responsibility that was not only mine but had nothing to do with him. At least when I used to shut him out by saying I had to take Snark for a walk, Snark was really his fault. My parents had bought and given me Snark. The first time a kid ignores a parent because something else is realio trulio more important, has to be hard on a dad, especially when the kid is only fourteen (and eleven months).

  And that doesn’t even touch the federal-prison-for-the-rest-of-our-lives, losing-Smokehill aspect of this case, which Dad had only just found out about this minute. And the eyes of the world were already on us, because of the dead guy. And I don’t suppose Dad was sleeping too well either.

  I didn’t understand any of that at the time but I did see the expression on his face. The bits of it I understood were that he was furious and at a loss. I hadn’t seen this expression before. I was pretty scared, but I didn’t want to scare the dragonlet too, and…well, having that kind of responsibility does make a difference. All that crap parents give you about Learning to Take Responsibility…it’s not crap. And what was happening wasn’t even in the same universe as being “responsible” for Snark had been. I was probably having a son crisis to go with my dad’s dad crisis. Things you can do without at the age of fourteen and eleven months.

  “I’ve heard it from Billy,” said my dad. “Now you tell me what happened.”

  So I told him. I don’t think I told it as well as I’d told it the first time, even on no sleep, and in the first shock of everything. But when I’d told Billy I’d known he’d be sympathetic. Three years ago I’d’ve known—I think I’d’ve known—that my dad would be sympathetic too, but I didn’t know that any more. The last three years had screwed up a lot of things. So I left out a lot. I didn’t tell him about having to feed the dragonlet every half hour or about being so filthy I wanted a bath or about being so exhausted I was hallucinating and crazy. I wanted to sound a little bit remotely in control. And I didn’t mention the headaches. Or the dreams. I hadn’t even told Billy about crying when she died. I stopped when I got to Billy finding me.

  My father didn’t look at me while I talked. When I was done he sat down, heavily, in his desk chair, and Billy quietly took the remaining third chair.

  “You realize that if anyone finds out, we’ll all go to jail,” was the first thing my father said. I had my mouth all open to reply—and while I don’t know exactly what I would have said, I guarantee it would have been the wrong thing—when he raised his hand to stop me, even though he still hadn’t looked at me. “No, you don’t realize. You haven’t thought about the fact that you’d be sent to a reformatory, and when they let you out you’d go to a foster family, they’d have their eyes on you all the time, and so would the media, and about half of them would think you were a hero and the other half would think you shouldn’t ever be let out of reform school at all to corrupt the rest of our population with your depraved ideas, and while I’m not going to tell you your life would be ruined, it would certainly be complicated, and I am telling you they’d never let you within a mile of studying dragons. They’d probably bar you even from taking natural history or biology or ethology in college.

  “Meanwhile, of course, we’d all go to jail too, and my guess is that any parole any of us got would be on the condition that we didn’t try to make contact with each other.” My father paused. I semi-registered that he hadn’t bothered to mention that being sent to jail almost certainly would ruin his life, as well as Billy’s and any other adult they decided to crucify.

  At the same time I could feel stubbornness breaking out all over me like measles. “I won’t give her up,” I said, which is how I found out I thought it was a she. “If she dies then she dies, but I won’t let her die. I’ll go away in the park and hide till she gets big enough to fend for herself”—like I knew how to keep either of us alive till then, or that the social workers wouldn’t prosecute Dad for making away with me if I disappeared—“but I won’t just let her die.”

  “Yes.” My father heaved a deep sigh, still not looking at me.

  “Sir,” said Billy. Billy only called my father “sir” when it was really serious. “We can do this. It will be difficult, but we can do this.”

  “You’ve kept my son hidden at Northcamp till you figured this out,” said my father with a bitterness that scared me.

  “I was really really tired,” I said, before I thought whether this was wise or not. “I was spending all my time looking after her. She eats all the time. I couldn’t’ve walked this far any sooner. And she’ll only—she only—only I—” There was no way to say this without feeling like a complete jerk. “She thinks I’m her mom.”

  But I think blurting it out like that helped. My father looked at me, finally, as if registering the real problem, which was the dragonlet, instead of all the other problems, which were created by the fact that some morons in Washington had decided that a bill against saving dragons was good for their careers—plus the dead guy, which because of all the other moron laws against dragons no one would be able to think about in terms of “self defense” or “what was he doing in Smokehill after our dragons in the first place because pardon me he killed a dragon which is also you know illegal?” But he was dead, and wasn’t going anywhere (except into the headlines). Which is what my dad would already have been coping with and been thinking was enough, thank you very much.
/>
  But the dragonlet was not only here, she was alive. And it was up to us to try to see that she stayed that way. Dad had to see that. It was, as I keep saying, what we—us and Smokehill—were for.

  I tried to make myself get it that part of my dad’s bitterness was that he knew he was going to be stuck with all the treacherous political stuff—and Mom again had been the person who poured the most oil on the permanently troubled waters between the Institute and everybody else, chiefly Congress and the Federal Parks Commission, partly because she didn’t start off all heavy and scowly and hyper the way Dad did. Which meant we were already in worse shape going into our little treason-and-insurrection dance around my adopted daughter because the FPC, goaded by Congress, was already looking for reasons to think the worst of us because Dad couldn’t always remember that to a bureaucrat bureaucracy is important. Dad would be all on his own with not only the totally unrewarding admin stuff and the horribly dangerous new stuff about the dead poacher and the dead dragon…but hidden in the background there was a secret live dragon…and the Rangers and I got her.

  And he was right. All of our necks would depend on whether or not my dad lied, and kept on lying, convincingly enough, first to the squinty-eyed congressional subcommittee drones, then to the FPC guys, who weren’t all morons but tended to be horribly law-abiding, and to everybody else who walked through the gates who thought they had a right to talk about “accountability,” which had been hard enough, since Mom died, without the lying part. And now we’d be having a whole new lot of squinty-eyed types who would arrive determined to disbelieve everything but the worst, just when we had the Secret of the Century to keep. Dad had every reason to be bitter. And scared. And I want to point out that he’s the real hero in this story.

  But for the moment he let himself be distracted. After all, he was here running the Institute because he was fascinated by dragons. “She would expect to be able to eat all the time, living in her mom’s pouch,” he said. “Couldn’t the Rangers help you?”