Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  “Busy going to the meeting,” muttered Eleanor.

  “We’re short staffed,” Martha continued as if Eleanor hadn’t said anything.

  “We’re always short staffed,” said Eleanor. “But there’s never been a meeting for all the grown-ups before.”

  “About the caves?” I said, completely at a loss. I remembered Dad yesterday saying, really casually, that I could have the day off, stay home, away from the Institute. At the time I thought he just meant, and give Lois a break, because I’d been so long we knew she’d be in a state when I got back. He probably did mean that—but had he arranged for me to be delayed yesterday, to give himself the excuse to tell me not to come up today? What damned meeting? But suddenly I knew. And I didn’t want to know.

  Eleanor gave me one of her famous you-don’t-know-anything-you-pathetic-schmuck looks. “No, stupid. About the dead guy. Oh!” She looked back at Lois. “You’re right, Martha. It’s a dragon.” That’s another thing about Eleanor. She never believes anything anyone tells her until she works it out for herself and it suits her to believe it. “The dragon the dead guy killed was a mom dragon, and this is her baby.”

  I decided without any difficulty not to say that this was her fifth and only living baby, and how I knew this, but I didn’t deny that Eleanor was right. Pretty good thinking for eight.

  “She doesn’t look like a dragon,” Eleanor continued. “She looks like…”

  Eleanor actually paused. I’ll tell you for free that most people’s imaginations aren’t up to describing what a dragonlet looks like, and Eleanor was always so busy trying to figure out how to get in the way out here in the real world she hadn’t worked on her imagination much. I was allowed to describe Lois to myself as looking like roadkill or one of the monsters out of the first series of Star Trek, but I didn’t want anyone else doing it. So I managed to interrupt. “Just stop there. I don’t want to hear.”

  Martha knelt down, the way you do with small children and animals to get them to come to you. This works too well with Lois—she peeped delightedly and shot out from under the desk where she’d been keeping the backs of my legs hot. I dropped Eleanor’s arm just in time to fend Lois off. “Don’t—she’ll burn you.” Too late, of course—Martha might have listened but Eleanor instantly reached out to pat her. “Ow,” she said, like Lois had hurt her deliberately.

  This made me madder than it should’ve. Not at Lois. At Eleanor. “I told you,” I said, trying to be patient. “She’ll burn you. She can’t help it. She’s just hot.”

  “What do you—” Eleanor began accusingly, and then stopped and looked at her hand. She hadn’t touched Lois long enough to have left a red mark. “Oh,” she said. “Eczema. It’s not because your mom had it.”

  The things that kid picks up. “No,” I said.

  “If she opens her mouth, can you see the fire inside?” said Eleanor. It was a reasonable question for an eight-year-old.

  “No,” I said. “It’s a special organ, like you have lungs to breathe, dragons have a fire-stomach for fire.” Which was about as much as anyone knew: We were all eight-year-olds about dragons. I was down on the floor now too, with my arm around Lois’ neck. It was mostly only fresh bits of me that weren’t used to it that really burned any more—although my stomach stayed pretty scaly—and I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt. Eleanor sat down in front of me, staring with renewed fascination at Lois, now only a few inches away. I was used to it, but at this distance you could feel her radiating heat, like sitting too close to the stove.

  “Your eczema should be a lot worse,” said Eleanor.

  “You get used to it,” I said.

  “I’ve always wanted to see a dragon up close,” said Martha.

  And suddenly we were on the same side again. Suddenly I realized that while everything, Lois’ life, Smokehill’s future, everything that mattered, was about to have to rely on whether we could come up with a good reason to make Eleanor keep her big blackmailing mouth shut, it was also a relief to be a kid among kids again, even if I was the oldest and Eleanor was a pain in the butt. When you’re the only kid surrounded by grown-ups, even when the grown-ups are busy protecting you, you spend a certain amount of time just holding your own line, just hanging on to being yourself. When you’re with other kids you don’t have to do this. Well, not so much. Eleanor has always been pushy. She was a pushy baby.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

  “What’s her name?” said Martha matter-of-factly, as if naming a dragon is a perfectly ordinary thing to do. As if having a dragon to name was a perfectly ordinary thing.

  “Lois,” I said.

  “Lois?” said Eleanor. “That’s a stupid name for a dragon.”

  This was so typical an Eleanor remark I didn’t bother to answer it, and I didn’t care either. But Martha said quietly, “I think it’s a nice name,” and mysteriously this made me feel really good.

  We all sat there a little longer, staring at Lois. Lois, who was extremely used to me holding her off from flinging herself on the few people she ever got to see, had given up, and collapsed half onto my lap, grunting and murmuring a little from the awkwardness of her position, but also because she had this funny habit of muttering into silences in conversations. That was how we usually have conversations, right? Someone talks while everyone else is quiet, then someone else talks while the first person shuts up, and so on. I hadn’t had a good shouting-over-each-other match with Dad since Lois came. Probably all the conversations she ever heard were polite ones. Snark had known my schedule better than I did, and if I was late to be doing something (like getting on the sofa after dinner to watch TV, so he could join me), he reminded me. Lois didn’t seem to have much sense of time, but she had a sense of conversation. If no one else was saying anything, she did. And I’d got in the habit of letting her finish. After Lois had had her mutter, I said, “What is this about the poacher?”

  Martha sighed her worried sigh, but Eleanor launched straight in. “His parents are on TV all over the country saying that dragons are too dangerous and they should all be killed!”

  I gaped at her. “They’ll never make that stick.”

  Martha said, “They’re very, very, very, very wealthy.”

  I don’t know how good an idea about money most kids have, but I’d grown up listening to my parents not just trying to figure out how to make the year’s budget work and what we could get along without so it would stretch a little farther, which probably most kids listen to in most families, but about the really dazzling mess of getting, keeping, justifying, and accounting for funding for the Institute. I knew about congressional subcommittees and private donors and action groups and lobbyists. And I knew instantly—as Martha, whose mom was a member of the Institute’s budgetary council, also knew—that very, very, very, very wealthy people who wanted something and didn’t care how they got it were very, very, very, very dangerous. I hadn’t thought I could worry any more than I was already worrying, all the time, about Lois. I was wrong.

  “It’s been going on for months,” said Martha. “Well, since—since it happened. At first nobody took them seriously. But they just kept at it—”

  Kept throwing money at it, I translated silently.

  “And they’ve started the Human Preservation Society”—I didn’t know Martha knew how to sound that scornful—“and they’re really well organized.”

  Have hired goons to write letters and hang out with members of Congress and other people who like playing with money and power, I translated. And because they have lots of money, they’ve hired effective goons and send lots of letters.

  I hoped Dad’s coping mechanism was up to it. My brain was doing a slow, dazed reshuffle of my awareness of the tension level around the Institute. It made me feel silly and self-absorbed (or Lois-absorbed) to be reminded that the world—the world that mattered—didn’t actually revolve around us. I wasn’t enjoying the reminder. It was also incredibly stupid of me to have forgotten about the death of the poach
er, even if it had been months ago now, and I didn’t want to remember. I remembered the death of Lois’ mom all right. I still thought of her every day.

  You can’t pet a dragonlet. Well, you can, but in the first place you’ll probably burn your hand, depending on how sensitive your skin is, and in the second place I figured it couldn’t feel like much to the dragon. Even as a squishy baby Lois had noticeably thick skin, and now that she was growing scales, it was more like running your hand over pebbles. But she was certainly an interactive creature and, as I say, noisy. I was having the petting-reflex as I thought about the poacher—I’d half petted the hair off Snark when I was worried about something—but I’d learned to deflect the reflex in Lois’ case. Unfortunately I didn’t think about this any more—I wasn’t used to having people around with me and Lois—so I burbled at her. I could do a half-decent Lois burble. I couldn’t peep and I couldn’t mew, but I could burble. She turned her funny snout up toward me—she’d been staring at Martha and Eleanor as keenly as they were staring at her—and burbled back.

  “You’re as goofy about that dragon as you were about your dog,” said Eleanor, who was four when he died and shouldn’t have been able to remember him at all. He wasn’t her dog and she’d never found him interesting. She probably didn’t mean to sound as snotty as she did sound, but she sounded pretty snotty.

  I stood up. I did not have a brilliant coping mechanism. “You shouldn’t be here, and if I tell anybody you were here you’ll get into more trouble than you’ve ever imagined getting into,” I said to her. This was not what I’d planned a few minutes ago when I’d been thinking about how my first priority was to think of a way to make Eleanor keep her mouth shut, but then I hadn’t had any plan. If I hadn’t been so pissed off at her saying what she’d said, though, I’d have known better than to threaten her, which was always the thing that worked least with her. But Martha surprised me.

  “She won’t,” said Martha. She’d stood up when I did. Martha wasn’t big for thirteen the way I was big for fifteen, but she was still a lot bigger than eight-year-old Eleanor. This is a lot of Eleanor’s problem, as I say. She takes on the world because she hates being littlest, and she’s a little littlest. But although I saw her face pulling into its usual pig-headed brat the-thing-I’m-going-to-do-first-is-the-thing-you-don’t-want-me-to-do lines, she looked at me and then at Martha and wavered. This was a first with Eleanor so far as I know. She doesn’t know how to waver. Martha and I must have looked pretty fierce. I was feeling like pig-headed brat roast for dinner, but I didn’t know Martha knew how to look fierce. I looked at her though and she did.

  She didn’t sound angry the way I did, but she said, very calmly, “Eleanor, this is about all of our lives. This about you and me and Jake, and Mom and Dr. Mendoza, and Billy and all the Rangers, and everybody you know. And it’s about Jake’s dragon and all the dragons in Smokehill. You know dragons are why we’re here, don’t you?”

  Eleanor is one of these people who when she comes into the room, whatever is going on becomes all about Eleanor. I didn’t think even Smokehill really got through to Eleanor.

  I was wrong. I don’t know if Martha knew her better than I did—if maybe she was more Martha’s sister than I’d realized. But Eleanor looked thoughtfully at Martha for a moment, and she looked smaller for that moment, just an ordinary kid. “Yes,” she said, “I do.” She added in more her usual manner, “I’m not stupid.” And then she turned on me and stuck her chin out and clenched her fists and said, “And I’ll even keep your secret for you, but first you have to apologize, and then you have to ask me nicely, and I don’t care what you think you can do to me.”

  I was over my bad temper by then. And besides, Lois was so much more important. (Lois, who I was keeping trapped between my shins so she couldn’t go burn Martha and Eleanor and, among other things, maybe give the game away after all.) “I’m sorry,” I said, almost sincerely. “Please don’t tell anyone about Lois, okay?”

  She pulled her chin in a little and crossed her arms. “Okay,” she said. And I believed her.

  The grown-ups were really preoccupied at dinner that night, so they didn’t notice I was really preoccupied too. Kit and Jane were there as well as Dad, and Grace and Billy. I don’t know if having more silent grown-ups there was supposed to make the silence less obvious but it didn’t. Grace and Lois and I kept the conversation going. Grace did a pretty good burble too, although she always did it the way you make “mmm-hmmm” noises at a four-year-old (human) who wants to tell you a story. It reminded me of being four, when Grace sometimes baby-sat for me. This didn’t actually improve my mood. It seemed to me they were still “mmm-hmmming” me really.

  I wanted to ask them how the meeting had gone, but I couldn’t, since I wasn’t supposed to know about it. It did make me a little angry that they seemed to think Martha and Eleanor wouldn’t have noticed, even if they thought they had me safely tucked away (they were right about that, which was part of why I was angry), but I’ve noticed before the way children are conveniently assumed to be dumb when adults need them to be. You’d think the adults would learn. But who am I to be sarcastic? I didn’t want to know about the poacher. The villain. I didn’t want the poacher ever to cross my mind for any reason whatsoever. It was bad enough thinking about Lois’ mom, every day, which I did, as I told you. I used to try to blot out the memory part of it by deliberately calling up that dragon cave I still dreamed about sometimes, which usually had her in it, because there she was alive which is how I knew it was only a stupid childish dream and it meant I really was a wuss.

  I mostly could blot the poacher out. But this was the worst yet: that he had parents who could make big trouble for Smokehill. How do I explain this to you though? I did think about it, that evening, with all these preoccupied grown-ups eating Grace’s food and pretending really badly that everything was normal, whatever normal was any more. I thought about it and kind of realized—although writing it down like this makes it again a whole lot more rational than it was at the time—that I couldn’t think about it. It was too much. If there was a line, this was over it. My job was to raise Lois. Somebody else was going to have to deal with the villain.

  About the time Lois started riding on my shoulders she also suddenly hey presto housebroke herself. What a major relief that was. Dragon diapers are the WORST. (And I should say I didn’t do all my own laundry, if you counted Lois. We all did Lois’ diapers. And—speaking of needing generators to run stuff—I can’t imagine doing baby dragon diapers without a washing machine. Or anyway I don’t want to. Mind you we were probably destroying the local groundwater table or whatever. They took more than one go and you didn’t just throw them in without some preliminary detox either.)

  But it was weird, how fast it happened, and how little I had to do with it. It makes sense if you figure that this must be the stage when the baby dragon is not merely old enough (and scaly enough) to look out of its mom’s pouch but old enough to climb out and do its business outdoors, which must be a major relief to Mom. I had noticed that Lois’ scales first started really looking like scales on her head, like they grew there first so she could look out and get used to the idea of out.

  It was a relief in other ways too—her tail was turning into a tail, and the diapers didn’t fit so well any more, and even Billy’s ingenuity has its limits. Big disgusting yuck. I used to make jokes about Super Glue. Especially when—No, never mind.

  The point is that suddenly it wasn’t a problem any more. Except that it was because everything about Lois was a problem and the problem got bigger as she got bigger, and while no more dragon diapers was TOTALLY a good thing, dragon dung doesn’t disintegrate that fast, so I had to get out there and bury the stuff all the time, and dragonlet digestion really puts the stuff through, so while I would have said she was never out of my sight when we were outdoors together (she’d better not be) she still managed to leave piles I didn’t notice her leaving.

  Then there was the fact that dragon
let pee slowly burns holes in almost everything it touches (it didn’t burn right through the diapers, but it wore through fast enough that we had to patch them, and needlework is not my thing but Grace let me use pretty much anything in her sewing box, so some of them got kind of artistically interesting over time and repeat mending) and fortunately Billy and Grace’s house didn’t have any lawn to destroy, but she still almost managed to kill one of Grace’s Smokehill-winter-proof, tougher-than-the-French-Foreign-Legion rhododendrons before I figured out how to persuade her—Lois, not Grace—to pee and crap in one sort of general area. Although this still wasn’t foolproof. I swear I was always out there with my shovel—to the extent that if a dragon could get neurotic I should have given Lois a complex—and even so half the time when Kit or Jane came round the conversation would begin like this:

  Kit or Jane: “Hi, Jake. There’s a—”

  Me: “Okay.” And I go get my shovel. (If it was Whiteoak, he just looked at me. And I’d go get my shovel.) And miss whatever they’d come to say, probably, which may have been the idea.

  Lois would always come with me. Far from developing a complex she was delighted for an excuse to go outside and play some more, and as far as she was concerned (evidently) my strange compulsion to bury her leavings was as good an excuse as anything else, and the house was getting smaller and smaller as she got bigger and bigger. (I wonder what she thought about the toilet. I always used to wonder that about Snark. I don’t know how good a dragon’s sense of smell is, but it would have to be really bad not to draw the correct conclusions about what the toilet is about. And a dog has to know. So isn’t it thinking, Hey, why do you get to use that thing when I have to go outdoors even when the wind chill makes it sixty below and the snow is coming in sideways?)

  She weighed about thirty pounds when she housebroke herself, but that’s still a pretty fair weight to carry around on your shoulders (if you’re only a human), especially when it wiggles. The thing I worried about the most—the most after the possibility of someone taking a wrong turn and wandering into Billy and Grace’s back yard some day, especially some day when I hadn’t got out there with my shovel, or maybe in fact I was out there with my shovel, and with Lois herself—was that she was going to start practicing her fire-throwing. The fact that she was alive proved her igniventator was working, and the skin on my stomach sure believed it. And as well as getting bigger and noisier she was getting livelier and she wanted more action. How do you teach a dragon to come, sit and stay? Fortunately she still had little short legs and couldn’t run as fast as I could. (Snark had been able to run faster than me by the time he was twelve weeks old, although I was still pretty little myself then.) But I was pretty sure this wouldn’t be true much longer. I was also keeping a sharp, anxious eye on her wing stubs, but they didn’t seem to be doing anything much yet either.