Prairie Fire Read Free Page B

home. Instead, I had another brass that I could play with a mute.
    Trondheim Secondary School didn’t own a bugle, but they did have several trumpets, with varying degrees of dings and scrapes. Before, I had never really used them much. Most composers feature them a lot, but after three years of watching them get all the good melodies in band, I was happy to relegate them to flourishes and counterpoint. Last November, when we’d stood at the cenotaph on Remembrance Day, one of the veterans had played the last post, and I thought of something that had, until right then, escaped me.
    Before wireless communications and radios, before clocks and watches, and when flags were too untrustworthy, the military had used a series of short bugle calls to communicate things like when it was time to wake up, time to eat, and time to assemble for mail call. Most bases still used a variation of this, though the calls were all prerecorded. The Oil Watch, since it often incorporated dragon slayers who didn’t speak the same language, relied on the call system even more. A trumpet and a bugle are mostly the same, and once you’ve developed the embouchure for a horn you can do anything, so I knew that if I practiced with the trumpet, I would be able to transfer my skills to the bugle easily enough.
    And when you play a bugle, you can do it without moving your fingers.

THE BRAID
    The last month of school absolutely crawled by. Sadie enlisted, with more fanfare than her parents expected, but we all still got up early every morning and ran farther than I thought was reasonable. After school there was Guard practice and then soccer. I was actually on the team this year, with no small amount of pressure from Sadie, and while I didn’t get much playing time due to my extreme incompetence at kicking things in the appropriate direction, I did run. A lot.
    I spent most of my evenings with the trumpet, or with whatever piece of newfangled implement my physiotherapist thought would help my hands. Most of them hurt, skin stretching and muscles trying their best to do the work with less mass, but I couldn’t deny that they had improved my abilities. My right hand was still the worst in terms of looks and pain, since it was the hand I favoured, and the hand that had had the most contact with the hilt of the white-hot sword. The left wasn’t much better, and I was clumsy with it besides, but it was better than nothing, I decided.
    â€œYou know,” Dr. Madison had said, very early during our relationship. “Do you have access to a piano? It’ll sound really hokey, but even if you can only plink out ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ it might help you regain your range of motion.”
    Dr. Madison was lovely, but that morning I very nearly walked out of her office and never came back. She was from London and knew me only as a burn victim at first. I’m not even sure if my mother told her they were dragon-fire burns, though most physicians specialize in either those or mundane burns while they’re in medical school, due to the specificity of chemical contamination that can infect the former. My parents still had notions of preserving my anonymity in those days, until the news cameras came back to Trondheim with a vengeance and showed no signs of ever leaving.
    â€œNo,” I said. Lying for a cause was easier now. I didn’t feel bad about it anymore. “I can’t play the piano.”
    I read up on it later. Dr. Madison was right, of course. Playing would make all ten fingers operate separately and help with muscle strength. But I couldn’t do it. I sat on the bench when Mum and Dad were at work, and opened the lid of the keyboard. It was dusty for the first time in my entire life, and when I hit middle C, I noticed it was out of tune. It had only been two months since I could play the masters, and now I couldn’t even handle “The Old Grey Mare.”
    The current method of