“Ahhhhh!” he shrieked, and jerked his head around looking for the frost sprite.
Kyla was still lying in the air next to him, one arm supporting his head, his elbow resting on an invisible pillow of air.
“Can I be of some service?” the icy man grinned. David didn’t think he sounded helpful at all. His voice was frigid. But who else could he turn to?
“Help!” David yelped.
“What would you like me to do?” Kyla asked, wickedly ignoring the boy’s plight.
“Stop me from falling!”
Kyla tilted his head, glancing first at David, and then below, measuring the distance between the boy and ground. He looked bored. Finally, with a shrug, he extended his arm.
“Take my hand.”
David snatched at the crystal man’s frosty palm.
The whine of air in his ears abruptly quieted; David knew that the sprite had stopped their fall.
“How come you can fly and I can’t?” he asked, after catching his breath.
The sprite stared without expression at David. His eyes were now black stones set in shards of glass.
“We do have
some
magic. Now, where would you like to go? To the top of a mountain? As far from your father and mother as possible, yes? To the North Pole?”
David shook his head. “No, it’s cold there. How about someplace warm. Like Hawaii?”
The sprite threw his head back and laughed. “You’d be swimming right through me in about two minutes if we went to Hawaii. What do you think I’m made of, plastic?”
David’s face fell. “You’d melt, huh?”
“Let’s just say I wouldn’t be very solid company.”
The sprite put a finger to his forehead and tapped, once, twice, five times.
“Ever fly like a bird?”
“Not before today,” David giggled.
The sprite gripped David’s hand tighter and swooped down and to their left. David could see the geometric outlines of fields and subdivisions below, colored like a brown and white checkerboard quilt. Then, directly in front of them, he saw it.
Brown and black, with eyes of golden, untouchable fire. It looked as large as a plane, but its wings were flapping fast and hard, and no plane David had ever seen had wings that did that.
It was a robin, just like the kind that had divebombed his head last year in the backyard because he’d disturbed a nest of babies in the hedge. David fingered his forehead absently, where the mother robin had pecked a bloody, painful hole before he had managed to roll to the ground and escape.
They flew alongside the robin. Inches from that sharp, pale orange panting beak. Slowly its eyes swiveled to track them, never pausing an instant in its flight. David cringed, but the sprite laughed.
“You’re only an inch tall once in your life, right? Live a little. Wouldn’t you like to wrap your arms around that bird’s neck and squeeze? Hard?”
David shook his head and the sprite laughed.
They moved in closer.The bird opened its beak to bite.
“Noooooo!” the boy shouted, as the yawning blackness of its maw stretched wide to descend on his head. But the clack of its beak closing came a second later from beneath them. Then they were astride the bird, grasping oily smooth feathers as the surprised creature swooped up, then dove down, trying to dislodge its unwanted passengers.
With a firm but reassuring grip, Kyla held David by the upper arm, pushing the boy’s face down into the musty black fuzz of feathers at the angry bird’s neck. The ground swam dizzily closer as the bird shrieked and flew madly at the earth.
“We’re going to crash!” David cried.
“Hold on,” the sprite whispered in his ear, and then he was gone.
David looked up and saw the sprite spark like a dart of light in front of the bird. The bird squealed and banked to the left, then cawed and swooped to the right. But no matter which direction it moved, the sprite was there, dancing an irritating, airy jig just out of reach of the bird’s beak.
David could see a look of madness enter the bird’s golden eyes. The kind of look a mouse made when it was caught in a trap behind mom’s couch. David felt sorry for the mice, even though it was he who set the traps. Mom couldn’t look at a dead mouse, she said, so he had to take care of the rodents. Otherwise they’d get in his Captain Crunch and he wouldn’t have anything left for breakfast.
Finally, after what seemed like hours of frantic dodging and diving, he felt the bird’s wings slow their frantic pace. They were really barely treading air when the frost sprite tapped a finger on the tip of the exhausted bird’s beak and then flipped himself end over end to land astride its neck.
“So where do you want to go?” Kyla asked, and pulled sharply on a neck feather with his left hand. The bird flinched. David felt a shiver in the twisting spine beneath him, but the bird seemed to change its course accordingly.
“Dunno,” the boy mumbled, thinking about the look in the bird’s eye. He kept seeing the mice he killed, and feeling the bad pit in his stomach that he felt every time he emptied a trap. The same pit he felt when he entered his dad’s apartment last weekend.
“Maybe we should let the bird go.”
“After the trouble I just went through to tame him? I should say not. Now come on. What would you like to see? The top of a mountain? The Frost City of the clouds? An ice dragon?”
David considered for a moment. He wondered if his dad had even noticed his absence yet. Would he be worried about him? Or would he just go on reading his stupid paper? He shook a tear from his eye and blinked. He was free now. He could go wherever he wanted, and not have to worry about what Mom or Dad would say.
“Let’s see them all!”
“Now you’re talking, kid. But we’ll need to change horses. This old bird will never make it to the top of a mountain. Ready?”
Before David could finish a shrug, the sprite had whisked them off the bird’s back and high into the air. David felt a pang of relief as the bird shot away from them in the opposite direction, happy to be free of its passengers.
“Mountain first,” the sprite announced, and David gripped Kyla’s cold hand tighter in his own.
Time seemed to stretch shorter and wider as they swam through curls of cloud and bursts of blue sky. The sun melted to purple on the horizon, and then David saw the peak. It was
below
them!
Mt. Everest coming up.”
David had fantasized before about climbing a mountain. In his dreams he was tall, strong and bronze, with muscles bulging from his arms and a steely, macho glint to his eye. He would hammer and pick his way up the cruel granite face, leading a band of other climbers up from below. When he reached the top, he’d plant a bright yellow flag and stand proudly surveying the world below him; he would be the tallest man on earth. When he pulled the other climbers up with a rope, they would thank him and tell him he was the best. The strongest mountain climber ever.
But when David and Kyla landed on the top of Mount Everest, there wasn’t much about it that resembled his childish fantasy.
The mountain top was rocky and icy and not very pleasant at all. Nobody proclaimed him a hero. He didn’t feel very strong, either. Heck, Kyla had to hold onto his arm to keep him from blowing away.
David’s teeth chattered as the sprite led him along the spiky, slippery tip of the mountain. “Even I can’t make you feel very warm up here,” Kyla apologized. “Not enough air. Not enough magic. But look. You can see the sunset.”
The sprite was right. David turned to the west to stare, as the solid orange globe of the sun crept closer and closer to the edge of the earth. The sky merged from red to purple to black above them as the dot of fire grew smaller, weaker, and then abruptly went out. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he was the most uncomfortable he’d ever been.
“Sometimes you have to suffer a little for the reward,” the sprite announced. “Had enough?”
David nodded quickly, and they were airborne again.
“Hidden in the Western Aerenvil Mists is the lair of an ice dragon,” Kyla announced. “His name is Hrrrl and he’s a very cross beast. They say his dreams are the source of nightmares to children all around the world. And those are his good dreams.”
David’s eyes grew wide as golfballs. “Is it safe to go near him?”
“You’ll soon learn that nothing in life is safe, child. But you can approach any sort of beast with caution and, if you’re lucky and brave, come away with all your limbs still attached.”
“Why go near the beasts at all?”
The sprite laughed, his cackle the sound of ice breaking and shattering.
“Why, indeed! Why have you come near me?”
“You’re not a beast!”
“Aren’t I?” The sprite grinned again, teeth glinting like daggers. David shivered.
“Know this, boy: approach any beast with a cool head and a brave heart and you will, at the very least, earn its respect, even if it still slays you. Try to avoid a beast and it will seek you out when you least expect it, and sink its fangs into your back before you even know it’s there. It will toy with you and tease you, and mock you for your fear.”
David thought about that for a moment, imagining himself spearing a snorting, howling, scaly dragon with the tip of the broom his mother kept behind the door in their utility room. He’d pretended in the past that the broom was a lance, and the pile of laundry a deadly dragon. But now that he was actually to meet up with a real dragon, and not a collection of smelly socks and shirts and underthings…
“But what if I’m not strong enough to beat the beast?” David asked. “Shouldn’t I hide?”
“Strength comes from the heart, not the biceps, boy. You can beat any beast if you believe deeply. If you run away to hide all the time you’re likely to become a beast yourself.”
“How could I become a beast?” David asked. “I’m a kid!”
“Beasts aren’t born as such,” the sprite replied. “But as they grow, they hide and plot and fear. They stew poison and watch it curdle in hidden spaces. Their faces draw up grey and wrinkled. Sometimes they grow scales and fingernails the size of lawn darts. Sometimes they turn to ice. Whatever they grow into, they rarely like to face the light. And they rarely admit what they have become.”
“Was Hrrrl a boy like me once?”
“Why don’t you ask him? He’s right over there.”
Kyla pointed to their right, and David sucked in a sharp gasp. Towering above a mountainous cloud was the largest dragon he’d ever seen. Well, it was the
only
dragon he’d ever seen, but it was truly monstrous. It was a jeweled beast, geometric scales of ice stretching from haunches to head in a blinding prism of violet and electric blue and emerald. But mostly, Hrrrl was ice white. And his eyes, which looked larger than David’s whole body, flashed from crimson to black as the dragon became aware of its visitors.
Hrrrl’s legs and tail disappeared into a dense canopy of fog, but there was no mistaking the beast’s intentions. Its forelegs stretched, and twin iridescent wings unfurled from its sides like gargantuan kites. The dragon was readying itself to pounce.
“He’s going to kill us!” David shrieked.
The beast’s mouth opened, and from it issued the loudest, most terrifying sound David had ever heard. It was louder than the engines of a jet taking off, more tortured than the wail of train brakes when the engineer sees a car blocking the tracks just a couple hundred yards ahead. With the sound came a blast of arctic cold that washed over David and Kyla like a tidal wave.
David felt his eyelashes turn to ice.
“Ask him.” Kyla said again. He squeezed David’s hand.
“I can’t,” the boy cried. “He’s going to eat us!”
Without so much as a “See ya,” the sprite vanished. The dragon roared again, this time taking two steps through the clouds so that his monstrous snout leveled with the boy’s eyes. David could have reached out and touched the beast’s frozen teeth. They spiked up and down in its mouth like the icicles hanging off Mom’s gutters at home. He floundered in the air, waving his arms like a drowning infant. In terror he looked up and down and around for the sprite, and called out the little man’s name.
“Kyla! Kyla, help!”
Then he thought,
I’ll fall. And if I fall, I’ll get away from the dragon. Then I’ll be safe for awhile.
But David stared into the burning blue eyes of Hrrrl and knew that he wasn’t going to fall this time. He could not run away. For a second, he wondered if his own eyes mirrored those of a trapped mouse. Or the bird.
In his head, he heard Kyla’s earlier admonitions.
“Strength comes from the heart. You can beat any beast if you believe.”
And, “
Ask him
.”
In front of him, the stakes of ice gleamed, slowly drawing apart. Hrrrl was preparing to eat him. David shrugged his shoulders,
What have I got to lose
?
“Were you ever a boy like me?” David said, his voice a tremulous whisper.
The dragon dipped its head, raising a frosted brow. “Eh?” it growled.
David repeated his question. Louder this time. “I said, were you ever a boy, like me?”
Hrrrl didn’t move. Didn’t answer. One eyelid closed. Then the other.