Eleanor knew there was something I wasn't telling her too and she was a total brat about it, but at seven, being a brat was almost her job and I didn't take it too seriously, except that Eleanor's force of character did kind of mean you had to take it seriously. She took it particularly personally from me because I was another kid, and there were only the three of us. The last family with kids had come and gone while I was still pretty out of it after Mom and then Snark, so I didn't remember them much (although I remembered their dogs), but Martha and Eleanor had been friendly with them and Eleanor really noticed when they left and kind of realized that what it was about the three of us was that we were the only ones who ever stayed. Eleanor nagged me, all right, but she didn't get any more out of me than Martha did. The difference was that sometimes I almost told Martha, and I never had to stop myself from telling Eleanor.

The real point was that Lois was, amazingly, still a secret from most of the Institute — usually everybody knows everything about everybody else who lives here. (It's a joke among the grown-ups that either your partner is faithful or gone.) Somebody was watching over us. Maybe the Arkhola had a song for it. But even if the Arkholas had a lot of songs for it, Lois' guardian angel was going to need a very, very, very long vacation when all of this was over.

This is hindsight again, but you weren't there, so I'm trying to tell you the story as it might have looked to a sane person at the time, if there had been any sane people around, which obviously there weren't. Hindsight tells me that we couldn't POSSIBLY have kept Lois a secret. So we didn't. But I've told you how ginormously difficult it is to get hired to work at Smokehill, and all that vetting does a pretty good job. I think the Rangers who do the hiring, and the senior ones pretty much all have a lot of Arkhola blood, sort of hum over the candidates, and if the humming goes right, you get hired, and if it doesn't, you don't. So what we had at the institute is a lot of people who were willing to leave a secret alone, because they would guess it must have something dangerous to do with dragons. Maybe Dad suddenly looked twenty years older and Billy stopped making his peculiar bone-dry jokes because of what was going on after the dead dragon and the poacher . . . but in that case why was Billy's house suddenly off limits now that the Rangers' underage apprentice was living there? Not to mention my mysterious semi-disappearance — what was I doing all those hours I was holed up at Billy's house? Vision on my first solo, huh? It must have been sooome vision.

Even now it's an effort for me to think about the poacher, even now when that part of it is more or less over and I'm trying just to tell it as a story. I don't even know his first name — I don't even really know what he was doing in Smokehill, except ruining everything. He was — and still is — always just "the poacher" to me like you might say "my worst enemy" or "the devil," if you go for devils, which I don't much since

I stopped playing computer games, but it's that kind of feeling, that blasting him through seven levels isn't good enough. He's "the poacher" because I hated him so much.

Sometimes I stopped even pretending to have any rational view of anything and called him "the villain" or "the bad guy" like what was happening was a Clint Eastwood film or something. He destroyed Smokehill. He did too. Sure, Smokehill is still around, and everyone (maybe even including me) would say that it's in massively better shape than it was four years ago. But the old Smokehill is gone, and he killed it, when he killed Lois' mom. This is the new Smokehill, and not everything about it is better (like me writing this story), and making anything better was certainly not in his plan.

Anyway. The whole big thundering emergency that the poacher created was enough to make Dad look (and feel) twenty years older, and Billy stop telling jokes. So some big cheezing camouflage. And that we are here means that anyone who couldn't keep the secret about Jake's solo bought it that the only big stressful thing going on was about the poacher. Which is not the sort of thing you want to have to rely on, but sometimes when there's nothing more you can do and you know it's not enough it works anyway. As I say, maybe the Arkholas have a song for it.

Which isn't to say we didn't sweat trying keeping her a secret. We did. So when carrying a spectacularly illegal and mercilessly increasing in size wiggly baby animal under your shirt is your only real alternative, you stay home a lot. I'd — we'd — started working on convincing her to stay by herself as soon as we got her back to the Institute but it was a struggle. I was really disgusted that the best cover story anybody could think of, the first two or three months, for why I never seemed to leave the house at all, was that I was having nightmares so bad that I wasn't sleeping, because it made me sound like such a wuss, but it did explain the way I looked if anyone did see me — haggard and haunted. I didn't know it at the time but the people who'd been involved in removing what remained of the poacher said that it had given them nightmares — and these were outside guys who did stuff like Official Wilderness Cadaver Removal or whatever, so maybe it wasn't such a bad cover after all except for the offer of counseling; which Dad helped me to fend off.

But even at four months old an hour without me began to stress Lois — and not too long after that she'd start mewing and scrabbling at the blankets, and once she'd uncovered herself she got panicky, because while being able to hear Grace and Billy was okay for noise, she couldn't bear being handled by anyone but me. We eventually found out that if they buried her again wearing gloves that I'd also worn and Lois and I had also slept with for a while that worked pretty well, but it was still all really hairy.

Scrubbing up before I went up to the Institute was a colossal bore like I can't begin to tell you too. Especially all the sore hot-baby-dragon bits. But as I say, baby dragons are smelly little beasts — and the scrubbing up had to be done fast because my time was ticking away. (I had had some practice for this part of it though, having perfected the ninety-second shower as soon as we moved into Jamie's old bedroom. I was not going to do the Bath with Friends thing even one day longer than I had to. For ninety seconds once a day she could just lie on the bathroom floor in my old clothes by herself and live with the vile and tragic trauma of separation.)

I don't think we'd ever have got away with that part — the smelly part — if it weren't for this sinus-blasting incense Billy started burning, and he used to like soak me in it. All the Rangers started using it, burning it at their doorways, even bedrooms at the barracks, and later on they got enough of it made up to sell in the gift shop; tourists will buy anything, and if it's true that smell is our most evocative sense, well, any tourist who lit a wand of the stuff once they were home again would be transported back to Smokehill all right. WHAM.

I don't know how anyone who didn't have a secret baby dragon around to give them a powerful motive stood the stuff, but the story was that it was to keep off the bad luck/fate/ghosts/spirits/supernatural thingy of choice that were flying around as a result of the death of the dragon and the poacher. Yeah, it was too woo-woo for me too, and then again it kind of wasn't. After all, I was dreaming about caves full of dragons every night, I no longer knew what woo-woo was.

And, you know, I'd try anything for Lois. Too goofy? Fine, bring it on.

I should explain a little more about the dragon smell. The main thing is that there was so much of it. It wasn't a proper stink like stink. It was just really thick. It didn't make you feel sick or grossed out or anything — it wasn't destroying your life, it was just there. It was kind of almost like another person (well, dragon) in the room. There's you, your dragonlet, and the way your dragonlet smells. That makes three. It was kind of the second cousin twice removed of the normal Smokehill dragon smell — not only was it a lot more up close and personal but it just wasn't quite the same thing. Whether this is the difference between baby dragon and grown-up dragon or because Lois was having a seriously nontraditional dragonlet-hood I don't know.