The Dragon at the North Pole (9 page)

“So even deep under his spell, there was a part of you that resisted Beowulf’s power,” said Daisy.

“A really strong part of yourself,” Jesse added. “Emmy, we’re proud of you.”

“That’s why he wants to be my Keeper,” said Emmy sorrowfully. “If he is my Keeper, I can deny him nothing, including the Thunder Eggs. He can also get me to work the machine and bring in
more
Thunder Eggs whenever he wants.”

“Don’t worry,” said Daisy. “We won’t let him be your Keeper, will we, Jess?”

“
We’re
your Keepers, Em. And always will be,” said Jesse. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand. I can understand how easily Daisy and I fell under Beowulf’s masking spell, but how did he get to you?”

Emmy thought for a moment. “I think,” she said, “that Beowulf might have been the Fang Fairy.”

“What?”
Jesse and Daisy chimed.

“Remember the fang I lost? I’m betting Beowulf stole it and used it to work a powerful spell on me. Of course, it helped that I wanted to believe in Santa with all my heart.”

“I guess it figures,” Daisy said. “Fake Santa. Fake Fang Fairy.”

“The next thing you know,” Jesse said, “he’ll be
putting on a pair of long fuzzy ears and pretending to be the Easter Bunny.”

“I think he’d rather be my Keeper,” said Emmy.

“So where did you hide the eggs?” Daisy asked.

Emmy held her paws palms up. “In the snow!”

Jesse rolled his eyes. “This is the North Pole, Emmy. There’s nothing
but
snow.”

“In a mound, in the snow, I don’t know, I can’t remember where! I was under a spell and my brain was all furry.”

“Fuzzy,” Jesse said.

“Oh, I am a very bad dragon,” she howled. “I
deserve
to have Beowulf as my Keeper.”

“Don’t say that, Emmy!” said Daisy. “You need to have a positive attitude, and we need to have a plan.”

But before they had concocted so much as a glimmer of a plan, there came a deafening pounding on the door.

“It’s him!” Emmy whispered frantically. “Quick! Hide!”

Emmy picked them up and put them on her ice bed, covered them with a fur quilt, then tossed the tinderbox and the backpack in after them. With one finger, Jesse held up a corner of the quilt so they could see out. Just before the door opened, the room lit up with a sudden green flare of light.

The man who stormed into Emmy’s room no longer bore the slightest resemblance to Santa Claus. He didn’t even look much like the man in the photographs in the man cave. Or rather, he was a supercharged version of that man. Instead of a suit, he was wearing a stiff leather skirt and a leather vest. His arms and thighs were bare, scarred, and bulging with muscle. He wore scuffed leather gauntlets on his hands and high leather boots on his feet. Beneath an ox-horned helmet, his beard was white and his hair was plaited into two thick braids.

While he might have been wearing a woman’s hairstyle, there was nothing womanish about him. The strong bones of his face looked chiseled from stone. From beneath bushy white eyebrows, his pale blue eyes burned with a fierce, predatory light. This, as anyone with sense could see, was a warrior. And the heavy broadsword hanging from his studded belt confirmed it.

“Where is my Christmas present?” he said to Emmy. “I have waited long enough.”

“You’re not Santa Claus,” Emmy said, leaning against the sagging mantelpiece. “What’s more, you’ve been a bad, bad boy, and you don’t deserve a present from me or anyone else.”

Beowulf regarded Emmy through narrowed
eyes. “I see my spell needs some touching up.”

“You can’t help it if your powers are puny,” Emmy said, smiling and showing all her fangs.

Daisy fumbled for Jesse’s hand and squeezed it hard. Jesse’s heart was hammering so loudly he was afraid the big man would hear it.

Beowulf walked over to what was left of the fireplace and poked the ashes with the toe of his boot.

“They were here,” he grunted. “Where are your Keepers? I’ll draw up another contract, and this one, they will sign under duress.”

Emmy blew on her talons and polished them on her chest. “There’s a fat chance of that,” she said. “And oh, by the way, I love your dress.”

“WHERE ARE THEY?” he thundered.

“You just missed them,” Emmy said, yawning widely.

Beowulf stalked around the room, flinging open doors and peering beneath the table and the chairs. Finally, he came over to the bed. Jesse could hear the angry breath whistling in and out of his nose. They were lying as flat as they could, but would he see suspicious lumps under the quilt?

Jesse squeezed his eyes shut.

Beowulf whipped the quilt off the bed. Jesse felt the frigid air hitting his back. When nothing
happened, Jesse dared to open one eye.

Beowulf was leaning down, staring right at him with eyes of searing icy blue. He was so close that Jesse could see the red veins on his nose and smell the red meat and mead on his breath. Jesse opened his mouth to yelp, but Daisy clamped her hand over his face.

Beowulf straightened and continued to search the room. Daisy looked at Jesse and mouthed the words “invisibility spell.”

Suddenly, Jesse understood. The green flash just before the door had opened—Emmy had cast an invisibility spell over them.

The cousins lay there not daring to move a muscle lest Beowulf sense a stirring in the air even if he couldn’t see them. After he completed his search, Beowulf returned to Emmy and unsheathed his sword. It had a gem-studded hilt and a long blade with a jagged line running diagonally across it where it had been mended.

“Come with me, she-dragon!” Beowulf said.

Emmy drew herself up on her hind legs. Just as she took the deep breath that came before she summoned a spell, Beowulf touched the tip of his sword to Emmy’s chin.

Instantly, Emmy deflated like a blow-up dragon
with a steady leak. She dropped down off her hind legs and hunched onto her elbows. The light in her eyes dimmed and her scales faded from green to gray.

The cousins were all too familiar with what they were seeing, sadly. It was iron poisoning. Dragons are strong and magical beings, but iron makes them as weak and powerless as lambs.

Jesse thought he saw a stuttering green light rise up around the bed. He suspected that Emmy’s invisibility spell had weakened. If Beowulf were to turn around, he would see the two of them huddled on the ice bed. Jesse held his breath, but Beowulf marched Emmy out the door and slammed it behind them.

Jesse pressed his hot, sweaty cheek to the cold, hard surface of the ice bed. “That was close,” he said. “I think that was Naegling.”

“What?” Daisy asked, sitting up. “Now I’m really confused. I thought that was Beowulf.”

“It was. Naegling is the name of his sword,” Jesse said. “Beowulf had a few swords. The sword called Hrunting was engraved. Naegling had gems studding its hilt, and he broke it once. I guess its blade is iron, which is why Emmy weakened.”

“And he’ll use it to finish her off if we don’t
figure out a way to rescue her,” said Daisy.

“He won’t kill her,” Jesse said. “He wouldn’t get his dragon eggs without her.”

Daisy hugged herself and shivered. “And what are we supposed to do? He’s a big, scary brute in a leather skirt with a sword.”

Jesse clucked his tongue. “If the professor could hear you now, do you know what he’d say? He’d say, ‘Stop blubbing!’ ”

Daisy squared her shoulders. “He’d say, ‘You are Dragon Keepers. Figure it out.’ ”

“Exactly,” said Jesse. “Let’s start by getting our snowshoes back.”

“Really?” Daisy asked in surprise.

“I don’t know about you,” said Jesse, “but when Beowulf came through that door, I sweated my thermal pads into warm Jell-O.”

Daisy nodded and shivered. “Me too.”

“Remember how when we first arrived at the North Pole, the snowshoes kept us warm?” Jesse asked.

Daisy nodded. “Until he made us take them off. Then we were freezing until we put on his snowsuits.”

“Without Miss Alodie’s blue goo cracker, those snowshoes are the only magical advantage we have,”
Jesse said. “And I figure we need all the help we can get.”

“Let’s go get them, then,” Daisy said. She grabbed the backpack and slid off the bed.

Jesse tucked the tinderbox into the side pouch. They opened the door and headed back toward the main entrance, passing a sculpture of a troll where there had once been Frosty, and a wolf where there had once been Rudolph.

When they got to the entrance hall, they found their snowshoes exactly where they had left them. The statue of Santa and the child that had been in the center of the room was now a statue of Beowulf and a troll.

Daisy fell upon the snowshoes and fastened them on. “Oh, Jess,” she said, a blissful expression spreading across her face. “I’m warm again.”

Jesse bent over to put on his snowshoes. Daisy was right. No sooner were the snowshoes back on his feet than he felt the blood rushing back into his fingers and toes. “Okay! Let’s go get our dragon back,” Jesse said.

They were just climbing to their feet when a band of trolls appeared at the other end of the hall. The trolls were armed with ice axes. When they saw Jesse and Daisy, they came pounding toward
them, brandishing the axes and yodeling and gurgling with a sound like bubbling oil. Oddly, they still wore Santa’s-helper hats on their hideous lumpy heads, so as they bore down upon Jesse and Daisy, the sound of their claws scratching the ice was accompanied by the cheery jingle of holiday bells.

There was only one way for Jesse and Daisy to go. Together, they pushed open the front door and fled into the never-ending arctic night.

Jesse and Daisy flew across the arctic crust as if Miss Alodie’s snowshoes had sprouted wings. Daisy caught a brief glimpse of their pursuers over her shoulder. With their long fangs and their bulbous eyes, their humped backs and their
gangling limbs, they looked like giant, hairy spiders.

The snowy terrain was full of surprises. There were rolling hills and icy ramps leading to sharp drop-offs, which they leapt, flying through the air and landing flat on their snowshoes at the bottom. Now and then, there were breaks in the snow where they had to leap over pools of freezing water and land on the other side without breaking stride.

At first the trolls moved slowly, dragging their ice axes behind them. Then they wised up and shoved the ice axes into their shoulder straps. After that, they barreled along on their hairy knuckles, their claws digging into the snow and lending them speed and traction. The gap between them and Jesse and Daisy narrowed.

Before long Daisy could smell them, a mixture of decaying fish and steaming tar. “Wait a minute,” she said, gasping for breath. “Stop.”

“Stop?” Jesse gasped in return. “They’ll be all over us!”

“In that book from Miss Alodie’s store? It said trolls fear live flame.”

Jesse slid to a halt. He reached into the backpack’s side pouch and took out the tinderbox. “Get me something to make a torch.”

Jesse knelt over the tinderbox while Daisy tore into the side pouch of the backpack. “What about
this?” She held up the bandana soaked with dragon tears and boogers.

“That could work,” Jesse said.

Daisy dug out the flashlight and tied one corner of the bandana around it, making a kind of torch.

Jesse struck the flint against the ring, and a spark leapt up.

“I hope it will burn. It’s still kind of soggy,” Daisy said.

With the next spark, the bandana burst into flames. Daisy held the makeshift torch at arm’s length.

“Wow!” Jesse said, little orange flames dancing in his eyes. “It really worked!”

“It’s about time you summoned us,” a familiar voice called out.

“Who said that?” Jesse asked, looking around.

“I think it’s coming from the torch,” Daisy said. “Look!”

Out of the torch’s fire poked a pointy orange head made of flame.

Daisy grinned. “It’s Spark!”

“Hey, you guys!” another voice said. This voice belonged to a small flame that flickered white one moment, blue the next. It was the Fire Fairy named Flicker.

Then a third voice called out, “Let’s show these
trolls how we do things in the Fiery Realm!” Jesse and Daisy saw a little red ball of flame next to the other Fire Fairies. It was their friend Fiero.

“You guys scram,” Fiero continued. “We’ll take it from here.”

Daisy and Jesse had made friends with the Fire Fairies when they’d followed Emmy down a volcano’s crater into the Fiery Realm, where they prevented St. George and Sadra from mining the gems in the Great Grotto. Ever since, the fairies occasionally popped up in a fire to say hello. This visit was most fortuitous.

“You sure you’ll be okay?” Jesse asked.

“Are you kidding?” Fiero said. “Dragon snot makes great fuel. We might just burn forever.”

“You kids run along and do what needs doing,” Spark told them.

Daisy shrugged, then put the torch down on the snow. She and Jesse took a step backward.

Tha-whump!
A wall of flame shot up. Jesse and Daisy watched as, the very next moment, the band of trolls came vaulting over the rise.