The two of us other humans each had a hand under one of poor Sadie's arms and we were both saying, Look, are you sure you're okay, you don't have to do this, you don't have to stay. It's hard on us old timers too, watching a newbie go through the initiation hazing and of course in this case we felt guilty because it wasn't her idea, we'd asked her to come. But she was saying, No, this is fascinating, this is amazing, don't you dare take me away, wow, I  never imagined. . .

We got her down the long first tunnel and into the hearth-room, and she met Bud and Gulp and Lois. She had to sit down — there are a couple of decent human-chair-sized rocks near the hearth, with hollows where your bottom goes, full of shed scales: I had a furniture-moving party with a couple of dragons a while back — but even though she was a little floppy her eyes were obviously focusing as she looked around, and she didn't throw up or pass out or anything, which, trust me, is very good for a first timer. Martha did the out-loud version of why we were there with the hand gestures, which was as much for Sadie's benefit (yes we do talk to them, the rumors are true) and then I put my hand inside Bud's lip and tried not to shriek at him, and he did the dragon equivalent of murmuring "there, there" and the funny thing is I actually did feel a little comforted.

It sort of seeped in, the "there, there" — like the answer-feeling, like trying to find out the dragon word for "rock." It was like the misery was a specific quantity, like forty bales of hay, and someone had coolly backed in with a large truck and smuggled thirty of them away. When I looked at Martha she was wearing the same fragile haven't-smiled-in-a-long-time smile that I could feel on my face.

Sadie went really quiet when we got back to Farcamp though and I made coffee and offered the aspirin and thought about feeling better, and Martha held Sadie's hands like you might a lost little girl's (while the person at the info booth puts out an all-points for Mom and Dad over the loudspeaker). You could see Sadie kind of coming back to herself and the first thing she said was, "Light. . . we're going to have to do  something about having enough light." And the second thing she said was, "You're going to have to give me a job, you know, if this gets out, they'll have my license off me so fast it'll leave tread marks."

Martha managed not to look at me triumphantly, but I said, or rather squeaked, "What if something goes wrong?" Sadie barely glanced at me — she was deep in thoughts of practical planning — and said, "Have a helicopter standing by, of course. You don't have to tell it what it's standing by for, do you?" Which in the new Smokehill was true, we didn't have to. We hadn't told the pilot why we were taking Sadie out here, for example. Mostly we still make everybody go the old slow route, including ourselves. But as soon as Martha got too big to make the hike she'd need the helicopter to get out here anyway. Anyone not on the Smokehill grapevine would assume it would whisk her away if she went into labor. Avoiding the question of why she'd want to be joggling around in a chopper going to Farcamp at all.

"It's still a long flight to the Wilsonville hospital — longer to Cheyenne," I said, failing to be reassured.

Sadie came back from wherever she was, and paid attention when she looked at me. "Yes. But I can minimize the risks as much as anyone outside a big hospital and all its equipment can. And after that, Jake, I'm sorry, but you have to make the choice."

I looked at Martha, but I already knew I'd lost. I didn't like it but in the end I believed Martha's vote counted more than mine.

So that was that. But do I think Bud. . . yeah, yeah, I would think Bud did something. But . . . once you're kind of used to answer-feelings, to getting your answer as a kind of slow leak . . . once the headaches have softened you up and made you spongy, so you can soak up all kinds of stuff, like pancakes in maple syrup (which is the nicest image I can think of, since spongy doesn't sound too great), I don't know . . . but I don't know how I let it go, even if I did think Martha's vote counted more. Justice and fairness don't mean shit when you're in love and scared to death. And I knew Martha wasn't dumb enough not to be worried. But I've told you why I named Bud Bud in the first place. He does kind of have that effect. Maybe Martha and I should have gone out there first thing and told him all about it at the beginning.

And once Martha had won there was no stopping Katie. Bud has to have done something to Dad. Dad never gives up, once he's made up his mind.

And then, about five weeks before Martha was due and nine weeks before Katie was, Gulp's babies made their first public appearances. I'd walked past Zenobia on door duty at Dragon Central and even my stupid thick human radar could pick up the excitement, but I didn't know what it was about till I rounded the corner into the big hearth-space and there were six small greenish and blackish blobs making slow lurching forays over the more-or-less level floor to one side of the fire — they're so (comparatively) small still at that age that it takes a lot of dragons staring at them to make you realize they're not just odd fire shadows, which is your first thought, but in that case why are all the dragons staring — ? Oh. . . . Gulp had made herself into a half-crescent and the open side was toward me. Lois was a rusty-pink gleam beside her, and I realized one of the blobs was sitting between her forefeet. Which is when I figured out what they were.

I stopped dead when I first caught sight of the whole scene, and then really couldn't move a second later when I realized what it was I was seeing. At about the time that I was going to sit down on the ground and make dopey chirping noises at them the way you might a litter of puppies, one of them peeled off and came straight up to me. I'm embarrassed to say that I no longer knew which blob it was I'd picked up at the end of that long bumpy weary terrifyingly thrilling windblown night, but he sure knew who it was had done the picking up of him. I did know he was a he, the way I'd known Lois was a she, and I knew why he'd come up to me once he had . . . well, because I knew.

As I started to kneel down to him it was like I could see the setting moon in his little red eyes, and for a moment I wasn't standing in the hearth space of Dragon Central, but outdoors in the Bonelands, and there was a cold gritty wind blowing, and then I wasn't there either but standing by a dying dragon near Pine Tor. . . . If I learn a word for the knowing, I'll put it in the dictionary. And with what he's going to grow up to add to the conversation between dragons and humans, that dictionary may eventually be really worth having after all. Then I sat down and he hoicked into my lap, so like the way Lois used to, and I could feel the new little blob in my head that was this dragon, this dragonlet. And he said Rrrrrrrreeep. I mean, he said it, out loud, the way Lois used to. Dictionary here we come.

We're going to do this, you know? This cross-species communication thing. We really are.

Well, you've had the baby dragons, and now I'll give you the baby humans, and then I'm out of here. But like I said at the beginning — the real beginning, not just this epilogue — there's some stuff I'm just not going to tell you. No way. Watching Martha's and my baby get born is one of those things. No, there weren't any complications, and Martha was in labor only about six hours, which everybody keeps telling me is short, but it didn't feel short at the time. Sadie was brilliant. The dragons were brilliant. Martha was the most brilliant of all. And it happened all over again for Katie, and the look on Dad's face. . . . And we're all really happy, okay? This is the happy-ending part — I just hope it continues, like through the next book, since I think I'm going to have to write another one, and maybe a next one after that. . . . But life is just so amazing, and when you think it can't get any more amazing it does, like when you hold your own baby for the first time, the world just stops, and you hang there in the very absolute center of the universe, and never mind Galileo and Newton and all those spoilsport scientists, you and your baby are the center of the universe for just that moment. And everything changes. And that's the way it's supposed to be, or it wouldn't be that way.