(Yeah, it's amazing what some grown-ups will say when there's a kid right there. Martha told me because she was worrying that she was the reason why her father was such a creep. All I want to know is how Katie married the guy in the first place. He must have had a brain transplant after the wedding. I was only eight, but Martha's story made an impression. Also having a five-year-old girl to play with — and Martha loved Snark — was better than having no other children around at all, and the bulge might have turned out to be a boy.)
But I wasn't holding the sling in place, of course, or the dragonlet. I was protecting her from my father. I didn't know that at the time — and fortunately I didn't think about Katie and Eleanor-the-bulge either — but I know now what I was doing. And that some of my feelings (including lower back pain) weren't so different from Katie's.
My father's a very bright guy. He knew what he was seeing at the time. And, of course, a dragon . . . whatever the damn laws were, dragons were why we were here.
After a couple of eons he said, "Okay. Let's do it."
It was the second time in my life I wished I knew how to pray. The first time had been when Mom disappeared. I was going to do better by my dragon.
CHAPTER FOUR
I named her Lois. She looked like a Lois. I know how that sounds: It sounds like the ugliest woman I ever met must have been named Lois. But that wasn't it at all. It was really interesting after having that weird flash when I was seeing her how my father saw her. Maybe when Billy and the three other Rangers saw her for the first time it was still so soon, or I was still so tired, or I hadn't finished realizing that we had, you know, bonded, and I wasn't going to be able to hand her over to someone else, or maybe it was just that I couldn't read Rangers the way I could read my dad — my dad in a passion anyway, which didn't take a lot of reading.
But it was like the Rangers just saw her. My dad looked at her with all this other stuff going on about it. Granted that he was my father and the head of the Institute, and an Institute that was under sudden siege, but even so, it was interesting. And it gave me kind of a shock. And another teeny insight into what I was going to be doing and how hard it was going to be. Teeny because I slammed the door on it, before I saw any more of it, and then tried to forget what I had seen. I'd let myself see a little bit of the bigger picture in Dad's office — but only long enough to understand why Dad was so wired, even for Dad, who is always wired. This was what Dad later named my Footman Period. Remember the Frog-Footman in Alice, who, while all hell was breaking loose around him, sat on the doorstep and said, "I shall sit here till tomorrow — or the next day, maybe. I shall sit here, on and off, for days and days." That was me. Days and days and days and days. While plates whizzed past my head and there was lots of screaming.
I named her Lois because I liked the name. And the reason she seemed like one to me was because after my father had looked at her I realized that I thought she looked like one of those wallflower girls in kids' books that suddenly grow up one summer and then they get a new haircut and contact lenses and go back to school that autumn and wow. (I used to read a lot of books about kids going to school and having normal lives, even ones about girls. You figure out why.) Lois was still in her squatty-with-glasses, wallflower stage, but I knew, she was going to get over it. It was just up to me to make sure she lived long enough to do it.
Yes, I did think about calling her Alice — I thought about it a long time — but she just wasn't an Alice. Also, I didn't feel like encouraging any loose karma hanging around to put her through any more of the human wonderland than she absolutely had to go through — which was already more than enough. Also I was seeing the dragon caves nearly every night and they were just nothing like Alice's underground, and this seemed important somehow.
The Rangers' wing of the Institute is really two wings: barracks and offices. If you were on night duty, you had to sleep in the barrack wing, but once you were a real Ranger, which took anywhere from two to six years, you got your own little cabin in the woods beyond the Institute — with the Institute buildings protecting you (somewhat) from all the tourist stuff that went on on the other side. Tourists still managed to gatecrash sometimes, because tourists are like that, but it was supposed to be private. You were pretty much automatically on call all the time if you were in the Institute buildings. I'm not blaming my dad for being a little touchy, you know? He lived there all the time. And while I did too — till I adopted Lois — I was still only a kid. And some of how he protected me was that I didn't realize how much he did protect me. Once you got your Ranger badge and sewed it on your shirt, you got a house. Sometimes you built it, and on the night of the day it was finished, the other Rangers came round as soon as it was dark and sang to you and your house, sang these long songs in Arkhola, and the chills went up your spine, even if you were just a kid hiding in the shadows so you could listen, and it had nothing to do with you. If you didn't build it, they still sang, telling the house that you were its new person (Arkhola doesn't have a lot of words about owning stuff). And once you had a house you could even get married. To another Ranger was a good idea. (People who weren't Rangers tended to leave, taking the children with them. A few tough guys compromised by having their families in Wilsonville, and didn't see much of them.) Billy was married. She wasn't a Ranger, but she was an Arkhola, and she'd grown up in this weeny village the other side of Wilsonville, so she should have had some idea what she was getting into. They were still together thirty-five years later so maybe she did.
As an apprentice I should have been in the barracks wing but (this was the official version) since I was an underage apprentice, I got given to Billy instead. Billy's cabin happened to be a little farther in the woods than most of the rest of them, and farther away from the institute and the tourist trails, so that was good too, and also just farther away, period. The other Ranger houses, if you went to the front door and shouted, all your neighbors heard you. Except Rangers don't shout much, especially the Arkholas. Billy and Grace's house was a good half mile from the Institute, and what's really interesting is that it was one of the oldest. Old Pete's son, who built it, obviously took after his old man in terms of seriously not wanting a lot of human society.
Lois and I lived in the tiny bedroom Billy's son had grown up in. I was used to little — my bedroom at the Institute was little — but Lois made it smaller in a way Snark never had. (Billy's son was now an investment banker in Boston, but — surprisingly — not a bad guy. He's the one who got me interested in the political side of what Old Pete had done — had made me see he wouldn't have got Smokehill going if he hadn't been able to play the political game. Jamie had obviously learned those lessons well. There aren't exactly a lot of Native Americans who are successful investment bankers in Boston.)
Grace had at least as much to do with Lois' continuing to thrive as I did. She's the one who, once we were installed in the spare bedroom, made the broth, and she kept putting different extra stuff in it, all that vitamin and mineral stuff for babies that are still growing, but how she knew which extra vitamins and minerals a growing dragonlet needed is beyond me. She did all the plant and flower drawings for the various Smokehill guidebooks as well as a lot of stuff for national guidebook publishers about Smokehill's vegetation. (Which is, they say, increasingly uniquely peculiar because of the fence. We've still got big old full-grown elms in eastern Smokehill. Eat your heart out. There are beginning to be botanists out there who are getting on as crazy to do research in Smokehill as the dragon nuts.) When you saw Grace at her drawing board you could believe that everything about the plant she was drawing was soaking into her brain, including what was good for making baby dragons go a better color and grow some scales. She'd also always been a fabulous cook — most of us who lived at Smokehill would do anything to get invited to dinner at Billy and Grace's — but I don't know if Lois noticed.