The Dragon at the North Pole (2 page)

“Nothing!” said Jesse guiltily.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Daisy said with an innocent look.

As they walked the three blocks to town, Christmas lights began to wink on up and down Nugget Lane. Jesse checked his watch. It was only four o’clock and already nearly dark. They stopped now and then to comment on the lights. Jesse preferred the displays with a few well-placed lights, while Daisy went for the ones that pulled out all the stops. Goldmine City—which had been a mining town at the turn of the nineteenth century—was festooned with garlands of lights crisscrossing Main Street.

When they reached Alodie’s Alley, Daisy swung open the door and peered inside. It smelled spicy and exotic.

“Welcome, young friends!” Miss Alodie chirped.

Not much taller than a garden gnome, Miss Alodie was perched on a high stool at the back of the store. She was wearing a purple smock with silver stars on it and, on her wispy white hair, a beanie that looked like the top of an eggplant with the stem still on it. On the counter before her, in place of a cash register, was an abacus with amber beads. Next to that were a pot of herbal tea and a
tray of crackers with blue stuff smeared on them. There were crystals hanging from the ceiling, along with bunches of dried herbs and wildflowers tied with colorful ribbons.

There were also wind chimes and dream catchers—
real
ones, not the hokey kind you find in tourist-trap souvenir shops. Tables were draped with colorful shawls displaying stones and gems, blue glass vials containing essential oils, scented beeswax candles and soaps, good-luck charms and talismans, boxes of herbal teas, and jars of jams and bath salts.

“I don’t know where to look first!” Daisy said, standing in the middle of the floor.

“I do!” said Jesse, making a beeline for the table holding the stones and gems.

“I knew my alley would be right up your alley!” Miss Alodie said with a chuckle.

Daisy drifted around, sniffing candles, testing wind chimes, and examining the labels of things. When she came upon the small rickety bookcase, she knelt and skimmed the spines, stopping at a thick volume entitled
The Encyclopedia Fantastica: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Trolls, and Other Supernatural Creatures
. She pulled it out, settled down on the floor, and cracked it open.

Most of the books she found that purported to
be about fantastical creatures weren’t accurate. The dryads, or tree spirits, looked like space aliens, and the hobgoblins looked like Snow White’s dwarves. But in this book, the dryads were pictured as looking like the lumbering, long-haired giants she and Jesse had encountered last spring. And the hobgoblins, which they had met on the same adventure, looked much as she remembered them: anvil-headed little creatures with smashed snouts and three fingers on each hand.

She was going to call Jesse over to show him, when her cousin dashed up to the counter and said, “Can I get this for Emmy? How much does it cost?”

Miss Alodie was the only grown-up in Goldmine City who knew about their dragon. Daisy sometimes wondered whether Miss Alodie might herself be some sort of magical creature. Certainly, the gifts she gave them were almost always magical.

“Oh, I’m quite sure you can’t afford it, young sir,” Miss Alodie said to Jesse, taking from his hand a green rock the size of a kiwi fruit. “This happens to be an uncut emerald from the jungles of Sri Lanka. And even if you had the money, I wouldn’t take it. Let’s just call it a gift from the two of us for Emerald.”

Jesse looked stunned. “Really?” he said.

“Truly,” said Miss Alodie.

“Fantastica!”
Daisy said. When she glanced back down at the book, she saw that it had fallen open to a page about trolls. They had big lumpy heads with sharp fangs and goggle eyes, and long arms and legs with sharp claws. Below the illustration were three words: “Fears live flame.”

“Ugly customers. Hope I never run into one of
them
,” she muttered to herself. Returning the book to the shelf, she joined Jesse at the counter, where Miss Alodie was telling Jesse about the legendary powers of emeralds.

“Their most valuable property,” Miss Alodie was saying, “is that they lose their color in the presence of treachery.”

For some reason, this comment made the hair on the back of Daisy’s neck stand up.

“Neat,” said Jesse. “Emmy will like that, won’t she, Daisy?”

Daisy nodded and rubbed her neck.

“And speaking of Emmy,” Jesse said, “we’d better get going.”

“Right,” said Daisy. Then she gasped. “We almost forgot! We haven’t given you your present, Miss Alodie!”

Jesse turned around so Daisy could pull the blue tube out of the backpack.

Miss Alodie carefully removed the wrapping
paper and stared, mystified, at the cardboard mailing tube.

“Take out that plastic plug on the end and look inside,” Jesse urged her.

Miss Alodie did so and peered inside. “Oh, my!” she said. “What have we here?”

“It’s handmade paper!” Daisy said, too excited to wait a second more.

Miss Alodie reached a finger into the tube and carefully pulled out the paper that was rolled up inside. Jesse cleared a spot on the counter so Miss Alodie could flatten the paper. The cousins crowded around.

The texture was rough and the edges were irregular. After mixing up the pulp in the blender, Jesse and Daisy had poured it into a mold they had made from an old screen stretched across a picture frame. The screen drained the moisture and the frame shaped the sheet.

“We did different recipes for different people,” Jesse said.

“We put dried flowers in yours. See?” said Daisy, pointing to the fragments of pink rose petals. “You can write on it. Or draw on it.”

“Can I
frame
it?” Miss Alodie asked. “A true work of craftsmanship merits a frame.”

Jesse and Daisy looked at each other and
shrugged happily. “Sure, why not?” said Jesse.

“Did you know that the Chinese made the first paper?” Miss Alodie asked. “They originally put their inscriptions on bamboo, but bamboo was too heavy and cumbersome. Silk was light but too expensive. So they mashed up rags and wood fiber and pressed a sheet from it. The ancient Egyptians made their paper from mashed papyrus plant, hence the name paper.

“The invention of paper is one of the most profound in the history of the world. Paper makes it possible to communicate, to exchange ideas and currencies, to write books and paint pictures, and to print out the contracts of agreement that bind us to one another. It’s a miraculous substance, and you children have brilliantly mastered the making of it. Bravo!” she said. Then she picked up the tray of crackers and thrust it toward them.

Jesse pulled back. The crackers looked like chips of white plaster. They were smeared with a paste as bright blue as pool paint. Nothing about the offering looked like food.

“Help yourselves!” Miss Alodie said.

Jesse smiled gamely and took one, remembering how Miss Alodie’s fairy cakes had tasted like dog shampoo. “I’ll save it for later,” he said, stuffing it into the pouch of his hoodie, where he hoped it
wouldn’t contaminate Aunt Maggie’s sesame cracker with goat cheese.

It was completely dark when Jesse and Daisy stepped outside, which made the street’s Christmas lights sparkle all the more brightly. When they arrived back home, the party was still going on but was quieter. They walked down the driveway, cut through the backyard, and crawled through the tunnel in the laurel bushes. When they poked their heads out the other side, they were both so startled by what they saw that they fell backward on their heels.

As if someone had thrown a gigantic switch, the northern horizon shimmered in a dazzling display of green and red light.

Jesse and Daisy exchanged a wordless look. Before they passed through the laurels, they hadn’t
seen these lights. How had they both missed them?

Emmy was straddling the ridge of the barn’s roof. The barn was big, but their dragon covered half of it. Her long, noble snout was tipped toward the heavens.

“Yo, Emmy!” Jesse called up to the dragon.

Emmy looked down at them, her eyes huge and luminous. “Hey! You guys are just in time for the show.… I got us front row seats!”

Emmy popped her wings—green on top, purple underneath—and glided down to the tawny grass. She caught them up in her arms and flew them back up to the roof, where she held them, one in the crook of each arm. Jesse took a moment to adjust to the height and then settled in. Like a curtain rippling and billowing in a breeze, the lights shifted and danced.

“Listen!” Emmy said. “Can you hear it?”

Daisy, eyes on the lights, shook her head.

“It’s light, not sound waves,” said Jesse. “You can’t
hear
light. You can only
see
it.”

“Oh, this light makes a sound, all right,” Emmy said with a canny nod.

All Jesse heard was the wind stirring the trees in the Deep Woods below. “What does it sound like?” he asked.

“Heavenly,” Emmy said dreamily. “But I can’t make out the words. It’s so frustrating!”

Daisy said, “We can’t hear anything, Em. We wish we could.”

Emmy sighed. “I’ve been thinking that it’s Santa Claus trying to get a message through to me. Maybe he’s saying he’ll be here as soon as the snow falls.”

“Oh, Em,” said Jesse. Emmy was so eager. He hated to see her hopes dashed. “Didn’t we explain to you that it doesn’t snow much here?”

Emmy shook her head. “Nuh-uh. It’s going to snow. I can smell it.” She lifted her snout to the sky and sniffed. “Come on. Can’t you guys smell it?”

Jesse sniffed. “Not really, Em.”

“Well,
I
can smell it. It’s going to snow. And when it snows, everybody knows”—Emmy burst into song—“Santa Claus is coming to town!”

Jesse said, “Em, we told you that Santa Claus is just a myth for little kids. And you’re not a little kid anymore.”

“You’re a big girl,” Daisy added, gesturing at Emmy’s double-elephantine bulk. “Very big.”

“You guys! You’re enough to make me flame sometimes!” Emmy shouted indignantly.

“We’re sorry,” Jesse said.

“Not sorry enough,” Emmy said sulkily. When
she pouted, a single fang poked out on the side of her mouth. Then she shook off the sulk and burst into song again: “I better watch out. I better not cry. I better not pout, I’m telling you why.”

“Santa Claus is coming to town,” the cousins joined in.

“That’s the spirit,” said Emmy, looking down at them fondly. “Tell me this: how do you know Santa
isn’t
real?”

Jesse shrugged. “We just know, is all.”

“What about those lights?” Emmy said. “Green and red are Santa’s colors.”

Jesse said, “Scientifically speaking, the color is the result of the collision of electrically charged particles with atoms in the high atmosphere. The light that results is known as the aurora borealis, or northern lights in the Northern Hemisphere, and aurora australis in the Southern. But I have to say, it’s pretty weird that we can see the northern lights this far south. Usually you can only see them in places like Alaska, Siberia, and Norway.”

Jesse had done a report on the northern lights for his science class last year—not that there was actually a “class” when you are an only child being homeschooled in a hut in Africa not much bigger than a toolshed. But he had gotten an A on it.

Emmy didn’t seem to be listening. Her head
cocked, she had ears only for the song of the lights.

Jesse tapped her on the shoulder. “Hey, Em, what do you say we get down off this roof so you can unwrap your Christmas presents?”

Emmy snapped to attention. “Why didn’t you say so?”

Emmy moved so quickly, Jesse’s stomach was still up on the roof when Emmy landed on the grass and set him and Daisy on their feet. She pushed open the barn’s sliding door.

“Now this is what I call Christmas magic!” Jesse said, looking around.

An old glass lantern shed a cozy glow on the Museum of Magic, which consisted of old barn planks lying across a couple of sawhorses. It displayed the cousins’ ever-growing collection of rocks, skulls, feathers, and mysterious found objects, all of which they believed possessed magical powers. Emmy had cleared a spot on the planks and set up a small fir tree decorated with items from the museum, including bird nests, pinecones, and the Sorcerer’s Sphere.

Emmy hunkered down next to the museum and unwrapped her first gift, the cardboard mailing tube wrapped in red. Inside were three sheets of paper made from white rags and dried grass.

Emmy eased the paper out of the tube with a
long green talon. She had told them that dragons came from a place called the Time Before. So the paper Jesse and Daisy had made for her had a sturdy, ancient look that seemed just right.

Daisy pointed to the upper right-hand corner, where in fancy green script she had written “From the Desk of Emerald of Leandra.” Beneath it there was a smiley face with two fangs, which had been the way Emmy signed her name when she was little.

“We made you three big sheets,” Jesse said. As befitted a nearly full-grown dragon, each sheet was poster-sized.