So that evening at Dragon Central, it had kind of been in the back of my mind for a while, I'm a retro kind of guy in a lot of ways and I'd begun to feel I was getting (even) less normal with every arriving mailbag and/or TV interview and I wanted to do this normal thing of marrying my sweetheart, okay? I was kneeling behind her and she was half lying with her legs stretched out in front of her, but she'd leaned back so her forearms and elbows were braced on my thighs and her face tipped up toward me with her eyes closed and even upside down she was so beautiful, so Martha, that I heard my voice say, "If you married me, you could get this on demand."

Martha's eyes opened and she smiled an upside-down smile. "I can get it on demand now." She closed her eyes again, and probably my grip on her skull faltered a little, because she opened her eyes and said, "That doesn't mean I won't marry you."

"But does it mean you will marry me," I said, pathetically, and she pulled herself up and out of my hands and turned around and said, "Yes, of course I'll marry you, YOU silly man, and I won't even tease YOU about it being for your hands," and then she kissed my hands, one after the other, and then she kissed me.

Bud was lying there with us — or some of the end of his nose was (the loooong hot rising and falling gust of his breathing politely angled past us), the rest of him going on and on to Wyoming or so the way the rest of Bud always does — and his eyes were half open, watching us, although it's interesting, there's no voyeur thing about it when he watches us, which he does a lot, although I'm pretty sure he has a pretty good idea what kissing is about. So after this kiss had gone on for a while and I started to get it through to myself that I'd just asked Martha to marry me and she'd just said yes, I wanted to jump around and shout and the only person [sic] available was Bud so I said, "Let's tell Bud."

It's a good example of the Marthaness of Martha that she didn't say, "What do you mean, tell Bud? We've spent five years trying to learn to tell dragons anything, or they us, and even you can't do it." She just said, "Sure," and got up out of my lap and we both went the few steps to Bud's nose and touched it with our hands. One of the things we have learned is that the getting-something-through — and I'm not going to call it "telling" or "communication" because that's a lot more grand than it mostly is — usually works better if the human has a hand on the dragon's nose, slightly depending on what the message is. (There may be other bits of both dragon and human that would work as well, but they'd probably be more embarrassing.) I sort of instinctively guessed that, that day I "told" Gulp that the bad guys were coming for us, and she got Lois and me away — but you tend to grab the other party when you're really urgent about something, and the reflex remains even if it's a dragon's nose rather than a human arm or shoulder. (And for those of us addicted to hand gestures, you still have a hand left over for flapping around.)

The refinement Bud has come up with is that it works better yet if the dragon curls its lip very slightly so the human can put his or her hand on the softer skin there just inside the tough horny outside. It's just about not too hot to bear, although I've begun to suspect that Bud anyway has pretty good temperature control. The first time Bud curled his lip at me of course I thought I was going to die — but he could have eaten me any time for months by then so why now? And if I was going to do something so offensive to dragon culture that I'd get munched in some kind of involuntary reflex (I've told you dragons are amazingly pacific; I doubt they've got any execution laws about anything) I'd probably already done it and hadn't been munched, so this new lip-curling must be something else. I figured it out eventually.

So now Martha and I both put our hands (delicately) on the hot red lip-margin of Mr. Dragon Chief and tried to tell him our news. I was thinking pair-bond-life-[that'showhumansdoit]-children-starting-just-now-hooray, more or less — pictures are better, but how do you put any of that in pictures? and stuff with high emotional content usually gets across the best even if there aren't any pictures — and Martha, who knew what I'd been trying to do with my dictionary almost as well as I did, was thinking something similar because I could actually feel her like an echo, "talking" to Bud.

And Bud, without moving, opened his eyes all the way and gave a huge sort of held-back (don't want to blow your tiny friends a few hundred yards across the cavern accidentally and bang them into the wall by unrestrained breathing) wooooooaaaaw, I mean with sound in it, and I've told you dragons don't use larynx noises much, and it sure sounded like "congratulations" to me. Furthermore Bud's wooaaw had roused the other dragons and there were little soft (little and soft as dragons go) rumbly wooaaws from the moving shadows, and one of the moving shadows slipped away — I'd also got pretty good at learning to hear the diminishing huge rustle of a dragon leaving the vicinity: You'd be surprised how confusing dragon noises are; makes most people dizzy (and nervous) till they get used to it, if they get used to it and while Martha and I were still sort of giggling and saying inane things to each other like "I didn't think dragons would be such romantics" there was a coming-toward-us gentle gigantic rustle and there was Gulp. And about two minutes later Lois was there too and for the first time in a year or so she forgot that she wasn't little any more and knocked me down. So Dad and Katie and Eleanor and Billy and Grace and Kit were only the second people to hear that we were getting married. The dragons were first. (Whatever they actually got out of what we told them.)

Now if you haven't already, this is probably the point where you talk about how it's creepy, me and Martha getting married, we'd grown up together, we were the only boy and girl either of us had ever really known (besides Eleanor, and it's going to take a better man — or woman — than me to tackle her), we should be like brother and sister, and at best we should go out and meet other people first, before we decide on each other, the implication being that then we won't. Well, in the first place, I don't ever remember feeling like Martha was my sister, although never having had sisters maybe I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about one. But while you're sitting there pitying me for being so limited, think about it this way, friend: What if you'd met the girl who was going to be the love of your life when you were four and a half and got to spend the rest of your life with her? Is that the biggest piece of luck you could ever have or not?

Growing up together had also made us able to communicate or anyway react to each other on levels that people who don't get to know each other till they're adults I think probably never can. I'm not using the "t" word again here. But it was like that sometimes — like what I just said about hearing her like an echo when we were trying to tell Bud we were getting married. Martha and I are in this together, and that's a big help. It makes it realer, saner, less just incredible. Even if it's more stuff that can't be taught. We'll figure out the teaching later. I hope.

I think both Katie and Dad had had those "they should meet other people first" thoughts, but life at Smokehill had got even stranger in the last few years and no one would understand any of it except those of us who'd lived through it. (Eleanor is going to use this to get elected president, of course, so her priorities in a partner are going to be different. If she changes her mind she could always marry a really tough Ranger.) And we'd waited till I was twenty-one and Martha was nineteen which meant they couldn't really stop us although we wouldn't have wanted them to try. And they took it really well after all. I could see them both worrying but I could see them both being glad too so that was okay.