knows beforehand what foes may sit waiting for him?’ ”
Her brother leaned toward her. “Well, that couldn’t make less sense, could it?” he whispered.
The farm seemed to be in an uproar as they pulled into the gravel driveway. Several farmhands were at the front door where Uncle Gideon was handing out orders. Their great-uncle was wearing a white lab coat, but he still had on his bedroom slippers and looked quite distracted.
“Thank goodness,” he said as Ragnar and the kids got out. “Where’s Simos?”
“You know he will not go in the truck,” Ragnar told him. “He will be here soon. He told me what to do.”
“Then come on. She’s taking a long time to give birth. It’s hard to tell from external temperature, but I think she might have a fever.” From the distance came a noise like a broken foghorn-obviously the sound of an uncomfortable dragon. Gideon finally noticed Tyler and Lucinda. “You two run along. Mrs. Needle will give you something to do.”
“Can’t we come?” Tyler asked. “I want to see the dragon again.”
“No, you can’t. She’s not used to you and she’s in distress. Besides, she’s making a lot of noise and it might draw Alamu.”
“Draw a what?” Tyler asked.
“Alamu. Her mate.” Gideon frowned and flapped his hands at the children. “Blast it, I don’t have time to talk to you two right now. Go on inside.”
“So much for being on a farm,” Tyler grumbled to Lucinda as they went into the house.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We’re supposed to see stuff like this, aren’t we? The miracle of life and all that garbage?”
“You heard Uncle Gideon, didn’t you? Hello-o! Angry male dragon roaming around!” She couldn’t believe her brother sometimes.
Tyler shook his head. “They’re never going to tell us anything. We’re going to have to find things out ourselves.”
“What are you talking about, Tyler?”
“Oh, never mind.” He turned and stomped up the stairs.
Brothers! Lucinda thought. She’d begged her parents to get a dog instead, but nobody ever listened to her.
Chapter 12
A fter several days of discomfort that kept the whole farm in a state of alert, Meseret finally laid an egg.
Lucinda snuck a quick peek at the dragon’s egg from the door of the Sick Barn. It looked like a partially deflated beach ball, a pale leathery sack big as the beanbag chair her brother spent most of his time in back at home, headphones on, sneakered feet on the wall, GameBoss Portable held only squinting inches in front of his eyes.
They’re sure making a lot of fuss over a big beanbag, she thought. It wasn’t that she didn’t care; there was just something about being around the dragon that upset her, something about the watchfulness in the creature’s huge red-gold eyes. Lucinda often found herself making excuses to avoid being near the dragon very long-not that anyone was urging her to stay. The Sick Barn was a busy place now and it was easy to get in the way: Uncle Gideon and Mr. Walkwell hardly left Meseret’s side for the first week. Apparently this was the third or fourth time Meseret had given birth and none of the other eggs had hatched, so everyone was worried.
The children spent most of their time that week with Mrs. Needle or Ragnar, doing chores and helping out, or trying to. Tyler hated doing the inside jobs, and he didn’t like Mrs. Needle at all. Lucinda had more mixed feelings about the Englishwoman. She remembered very little of the conversation they had shared, but she remembered feeling very grown-up and privileged to be spending time with someone so interesting and special. When Lucinda came in to the farm office one morning to ask a question and found Mrs. Needle winding her long black hair into a French pleat, it felt like stumbling onto a fairy creature in a patch of forest moonlight. Patience Needle was so pale, so lovely-and yet somehow as fierce as a panther and more than a little frightening. Lucinda didn’t really know what to think.
Being around Ragnar was entirely different. He was obviously fairly old, but he looked like a barbarian out of one of Tyler’s games, or some long-haired professional wrestler. Ragnar didn’t try to be tough or cool, although in his own weird way he really was cool.
“Where do you come from?” she asked him one morning, amused by his pronunciation of “jam jar” as “yam yar.”
“Denmark, you would call it. But I have not been there in a long time. Everything is different now, they tell me.” He shook his head, staring out past the field whose wire fence he was fixing, as though he could see Denmark just beyond. For all Lucinda knew, he could. (She had never been much good at geography.)
Tyler seemed glad of this opportunity to rest for a moment and wipe the sweat from his face. They had been working all afternoon restringing wire fences in the valley sun, and even though Ragnar did the lion’s share of the chores-Lucinda suspected this whole thing was more about babysitting them than getting any actual labor out of them-it was still hot and tiring work. “Why did you come?” Tyler asked. “Here, I mean.”
Ragnar laughed. “Things had gone sour for old Ragnar. I had little choice but to take Gideon’s kind offer.”
“I don’t get it,” Lucinda said.
“And I hope you do not ‘get it,’ ” he told her, serious now. He bent and heaved up another bale of wire in one hand as if it was a roll of aluminum foil, and directed Tyler where to help steady it against the fence post. “But you are Gideon’s kin, which is for the good. Others around him are sometimes forced to pay a very high price indeed.” He laughed again but it almost sounded angry. After that he began banging huge metal staples into the post and it was too noisy for them to ask any other questions.
So many jobs! Feeding all the animals, doctoring them, repairing their cages and pens and tanks, as well as taking care of the farm’s vegetable garden and house and kitchen. Not to mention the huge variety of creatures- not just unicorns and dragons, but skittish, snarling wampus cats, hoop snakes, and even something called a hodag, a truculent creature that looked like a badger covered with crocodile skin and smelled like old cheese. Lucinda couldn’t begin to imagine how Uncle Gideon and his employees kept a place like this going with only a dozen or so employees, although Mr. Walkwell, for one, never actually seemed to stop working. Twice she had woken up in the middle of the night and gone out to the hall and the bathroom there only to spot him through the window, driving his wagon across to the Sick Barn or limping across the farm hauling bags of feed by moonlight. Didn’t he ever sleep? And how could somebody who was so obviously crippled, or at least severely limited in his mobility, work so hard? She had no idea what was wrong with his legs-she had asked Ragnar, but he only shook his head and said, “Mr. Walkwell has his own stories. They are not mine to tell.”
Some things Ragnar would talk about, though. He was happy to tell her about the Carrillo kids they had met at the store.
“They come from the farm next door,” he told them.
“The family has owned that land for a very long time. Those children’s great-grandfather loaned old Octavio workers to do repairs on the farmhouse, and helped him find people to do some of the other jobs on the place- Gideon did not bring me and the others until later, you see. So the Carrillo family does not know your uncle’s secrets but he likes them and trusts them. Sometimes he even goes to their house for the Christian and American holy days.”
Lucinda wasn’t sure exactly what the last part meant-American holy days?-but she gathered that the Carrillo kids weren’t considered Official Enemies of the Farm or anything, so it made a little more sense that Mr. Walkwell carved things for them. Still, that was the last thing she ever would have imagined such a strange, grumpy man doing.
Lucinda and Tyler quickly settled into a routine. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they went with Ragnar
