Free Prairie Fire by E. K. Johnston Page A

they think it’s out of the way and that everyone will forget about you while you’re gone. But I have been fighting dragons and training dragon slayers for a very long time, and I am telling you that Alberta is as dangerous and as important as any other place they might have sent you, and not just because of the dragons.”
    He was talking to all of us, which I appreciated, because he could have just spoken to Owen. I didn’t think it was possible for the fire crew to stand any straighter, but somehow they did. Maybe it was because now they wanted to.
    We got on the train and wordlessly sorted out who would be sitting where.
    It would be days before I saw the prairies for the first time, but I heard them coming before we got there. I could feel them in the train wheels, clicking against the tracks, and in the way the carriage swayed. It was a different song—not the one that any of us had expected—but we would write it all the same.

TOTEM POLES
    Fort Calgary was a hard town, between an uncaring prairie and a mountain range that would just as soon the city didn’t exist at all, if the weather that rolled down the mountainsides was any indication. You could see it from pretty far away, but not as far as the jokes about the prairies suggested. Alberta was flat, but it wasn’t that flat.
    We arrived by train, all fourteen of us in one car, with the regimental reinforcements in the carriages behind us, bound for the base in Edmonton. Though Edmonton had the larger numbers and a civilian population besides, Fort Calgary was nothing to sneeze at. When it was at full capacity, it boasted twice the population of Trondheim, upwards of five thousand people, all members of the Oil Watch. At need, it could host five thousand more in emergency quarters.
    The bottom berths in the train carriage folded into seats during the day, but there wasn’t a lot to do besides look out the window and wonder if we were seeing the curvature of the Earth or if we were merely going insane from the monotony. At least we slept through Northern Ontario. We traveled through Canada the whole way, because the rail lines were safer there. Since we were north of Ottawa, we were clear of most of the populated hatching grounds, whereas if we’d gone south through Maine and around the foot of deserted Michigan towards the province of Dakota, we’d have been at more risk. Furthermore, there had been a series of dragon attacks in Nebraska, along the Canadian border. There are any number of American movies about dragon slayers fighting dragons from the tops of trains, but I was quite happy not to be reenacting one. We made it all the way to Manitoba before we even saw a dragon out the window, and it was far enough away that we didn’t have to worry about it.
    For the first two days, everyone trod lightly around Owen, expecting him to be angry about where we were being sent. I could tell that he wasn’t. Sadie had been surprised by her assignment, which should have gone to a dragon slayer who was used to the coast, but we all knew she’d be so busy learning that she’d barely have time to miss us, or me anyway. She’d said good-bye to both of us at the same time, as if she was going to see us in the morning, and stood on the train platform with her head held high as we pulled away. We were bound for Alberta, where we wouldn’t even need our passports, but as the cornet-sergeant reminded us, it wasn’t exactly going to be a walk in the park.
    By the time we entered Saskatchewan and became more or less permanently hypnotized by the endless vistas stretching away from the train tracks, the others had relaxed. Anderson taught us to play poker, which I was wretched at, and we talked more about our lives before we’d joined the Oil Watch. Aarons took the time to look over Owen’s sword and mine and lamented that he was never going to win renown by making a weapon for his own dragon slayer because