The Dragon at the North Pole (10 page)

When the trolls saw the fire, they flipped onto their backs and covered their faces with their long, hairy arms, like vampires shrinking before sunlight. They burst into a jibber-jabber of pain and outrage.

“Back to the palace for Emmy!” Daisy shouted.

Giving both the fire and the trolls a wide berth, Jesse and Daisy circled back the way they had come. But every time they crested a hill, instead of seeing the palace’s spires, all they saw were darkness and ice and snow.

“We’re lost,” Daisy said, coming to a hopeless standstill.

Jesse stopped a few feet away from her and nodded grimly. “Pretty much.”

“Doesn’t Blueberry Sal have a navigation tool?” Daisy asked.

“Yeah,” said Jesse, “but I seriously doubt that Beowulf’s palace is registered on GPS maps.”

“Try it anyway, and see what you get,” said Daisy.

Jesse reached around behind Daisy to get the Blueberry out of the backpack, then pulled off his mittens with his teeth and started thumbing the keyboard. The tiny glowing screen cast a pale blue light across his face.

“Anything?” Daisy asked.

Jesse mumbled something around the mittens that sounded like “Gimme a sec.”

Meanwhile, Daisy scanned the starry heavens for some sign of the aurora borealis, but it was nowhere to be found. She thought back to the fire in their palace sitting room. Had the cold green and
red flame been the Aurora trying to contact her? Had she, like Emmy back on the barn roof, been unable to understand it? And having been ignored by both Emmy and Daisy, had the aurora given up?

Jesse took the mittens out of his mouth and pointed to his left. “Blueberry Sal says that the exact North Pole is about a quarter of a mile in that direction.”

“Remember the diagram of the Vortex Interceptor in Beowulf’s man cave?” Daisy said. “It was sitting right on top of the North Pole, wasn’t it?”

Jesse nodded. “Maybe Beowulf took Emmy there.”

They set out, and after a while, they didn’t need Blueberry Sal to guide them. Lights appeared up ahead—neither the cold blue magical lights of the palace nor the colorful lights of the aurora borealis. Soon they came to a ring of floodlights illuminating a structure that looked just like the diagram in the man cave, like a cross between an oil derrick and the Eiffel Tower—only much, much taller.

“I wonder how high it is,” Daisy said.

Jesse’s eyes took on a hard gleam. “I don’t care how high it is. Beowulf created it to intercept and collect Thunder Eggs. As Dragon Keepers, we have only one choice.” He turned to Daisy. “We have to destroy it.”

“But how, Jess? It’s made of metal girders,” Daisy said. “We’re not strong enough to pull them down.”

Jesse glanced around and noticed a pile of tools lying in the snow nearby. He went over and picked up a wrench. “If we can find the machine’s motor and toss this monkey wrench into it, that should take it permanently off-line,” Jesse said.

“Is that really a monkey wrench?” Daisy asked.

“I have no idea, but it will have to do,” Jesse said solemnly.

Daisy scanned the ground underneath the structure. She saw scrap metal and tools, but nothing that looked like an engine. “I don’t see the motor, do you?” she asked Jesse.

“If it’s not at the bottom,” he said, “then it must be …”

They craned their heads as they looked up the side of the tower. The tower was so high, they couldn’t see its top.

There was only one thing to do. Daisy handed the backpack to Jesse and took off her snowshoes. She felt the cold the instant they were off her feet. She held her hand out for the monkey wrench, and Jesse slapped it into her palm. She shoved it into the back pocket of her jeans.

She stood back and examined the structure
again. It was made of countless diamond-shaped struts. Moving to one of the tower’s legs, she grabbed on to the struts with her mittened hands, then fit her left foot in the bottom of one diamond and her right foot in the bottom of a higher one. She started climbing.

“Be careful!” Jesse said.

Daisy nodded. Except for the girders biting into the soles of her fuzzy white boots, the climbing was easy. With the wind whistling in her ears, she climbed higher and higher. She had never climbed anything this high. After a while, she stopped to rest and looked down.

On the other side of the tower, huge fissures stretched across the ice. She called down to Jesse and described them.

“Maybe the Interceptor causes them,” Jesse shouted up. “Or maybe that’s just the polar ice, breaking up and reforming. Are you there yet?”

“Not yet.” Daisy kept climbing.

The next time she stopped and looked down, Jesse looked no bigger than a chipmunk in a plaid coat. Daisy let go long enough to wave. Then she looked up and continued to climb.

She climbed until her hands in their mittens were so cold she could no longer feel them. It was as if she had borrowed someone else’s hands.
Someone else’s hands gripped the icy girders. She hoped that someone else was really strong. It was a long way down.

Finally, she came to within six diamonds of the pointed top of the tower. The topmost girders looked as if a substance like colorful paraffin had melted all over them. On the tip-top, sparks leapt and crackled.

Daisy might not have been afraid of heights, but she was petrified of electricity. This was as far as she dared to go. And still there was no motor to be seen. The mechanism obviously ran on magic. And you couldn’t throw a monkey wrench into magic. Not unless you were a sorcerer.

Disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to shut down the machine, she was getting ready to climb back down when she noticed the lights of the palace off to the right. Now she and Jesse would know which direction to go to get back. But then she noticed something else, too. It was in the snow between the tower and the palace. She squinted. Either her eyes were playing tricks on her, or it was a mound of snow with a big smiley face on it with two fangs.

As always happens, the climb down seemed vastly shorter than the climb up. She was also moving at top speed, in a hurry to get to Jesse and
tell him what she’d seen from the top of the tower.

“Jesse!” Daisy said breathlessly as she reached the ground. “There was no motor, but I think I found Emmy’s hiding place for the Thunder Eggs she intercepted!”

Jesse didn’t answer her and he didn’t move. At first Daisy was concerned that he might have frozen stiff while she was gone. But his eyes were bright and alert and wary.

“Jesse!” she said. “Did you hear me?”

“Shhhhh,” he said, gesturing with his chin.

Daisy turned to see what he was looking at.

Just beyond the perimeter of the floodlights, a pair of eyes glowed red in the darkness.

Daisy caught her breath. “Is that a troll?” she asked.

Jesse shook his head minutely. “It’s a wolf,” he whispered. “It’s been standing there staring at me for the longest time. So far, it hasn’t moved.”

Then, as if it heard what Jesse said, the beast paced forward into the light. Like the ice sculptures outside Beowulf’s man cave come to life, it was huge and white. Its coat was long and shaggy. And it was wearing a brightly colored embroidered harness.

“I think that might be Blitzen,” Jesse whispered. “Santa’s missing reindeer.”

In slow motion, Daisy bent down and slipped on her snowshoes. If St. Nick was really Beowulf and the elves were really trolls, then it made a kind of crazy sense that the reindeer would be wolves.

As soon as Daisy had tightened the last tie on her snowshoes, she straightened and nodded in the direction she’d seen lights. “The palace is that way,” she said quietly.

Jesse nodded back. “Then let’s … run!” he shouted. “Back to the palace!”

The two of them dashed away. Behind them came the steady
thud-thud-thud
of the beast’s feet hitting the snow at a dead run.

We’ll never make it
, Daisy thought desperately.
We can’t outrun a wolf
. She turned and flung the wrench at the pursuing creature but missed and still the wolf came at them. It was like one of those bad dreams where you’re running as fast as you can but it still feels like you’re swimming through molasses.

As they crested the next hill, the towers of the palace shone blue against the night sky.

“There it is!” Daisy panted.

They headed down into another gully. Behind them, the wolf snarled. Daisy could feel the heat of its breath as its jaws snapped at her heels. They ran up the side of the gulley, expecting to see the
turrets of the palace piercing the sky like icicles.

Suddenly, the ground fell out from beneath them, sending them flying through the air. They found themselves sliding down an icy incline, with the wolf tumbling after them. By the time they saw where they were headed, it was too late to stop.

Just ahead, the bottom of the icy slope dropped off into thin air. They had overshot the palace and gone straight to the edge of the abyss.

Daisy reached out for Jesse’s hand. If they were going to tumble into the abyss, they were going to do it together.

Suddenly, right where the ice ended and the nothingness began, a bridge of bright red and green lights appeared in the air. Jesse and Daisy slid directly from the ice onto the light bridge. To their astonishment, the bridge held their weight.

Gingerly, they stood up and tested the light bridge by stamping their feet. It seemed as solid as if it had been made of long strips of red and green stone.

Unfortunately, the bridge also held the wolf’s weight. Jesse and Daisy sprinted along the bridge as the wolf slowly got to its feet, confused. Jesse glanced over his shoulder as they fled, then scooted to a stop.

“Look!” he cried, pointing behind them.

Daisy looked back and saw that as the wolf began to stalk slowly toward them, the lights of the bridge began to fade. With a sudden yelp, the wolf plummeted, head over tail, into the abyss.

That’s when they heard it, a sound like melting icicles, each drop a distinct musical note. It started out as a faint and delicate plinking sound, then swelled in volume as the red and green lights they were standing on rose up and surrounded them with all the colors of the spectrum and a bright, throbbing music.

There were voices in the music, a chorus of sparkling chimes ringing in the icy air. Daisy thought of the lights in the sky behind the barn back home, the lights in their palace room’s fireplace, the lights in the polar sky. They were all, she thought, one and the same. They were the aurora borealis, and they had been calling to them, first to Emmy and now to her and Jesse. Perhaps because she was no longer just looking at the light but submerged in it, she understood it at last.

“Do you hear them, Jess?” she cried out over the music. Jesse nodded.

The voices sang:

The singing stopped. Jesse and Daisy stared at each other, eyes wide.

“Monarch of yore,” Jesse said. “That must be Beowulf.”

“This explains why the Aurora was trying to contact Emmy back in Goldmine City,” Daisy said. “The Vortex Interceptor is hurting them.”

“Not only that, they seem to think it’s endangering the whole earth. I bet it has something to do with the ozone layer. The ozone layer protects the earth from the harmful rays of the sun. If the Interceptor is destroying the ozone, we have to do something fast.” Jesse looked into the lights and said, “What can we do?”

The Aurora didn’t respond. Jesse tried another tack. He didn’t have much of a singing voice and he couldn’t rhyme his way out of a paper bag, but maybe it was the only way to get through to them. He sang:

Daisy gave him a look, but he shrugged. It was the best he could do off the top of his head. And it seemed to work, because the next moment, the Aurora sang:

It was Daisy who piped up this time:

Jesse cleared his throat and said, “Um, Daise? I think we’ve pretty much established that the dude’s Norwegian, not Danish.”

Daisy said, “Lots of luck finding something to rhyme with
that
.” Then she sang on:

This time, Jesse gave her a big thumbs-up.

The lights sang back:

Jesse and Daisy gave each other a look, then turned to the Aurora and said, “We’re in!”