One Saturday morning Spiderdog9
woke up early before anyone else. He put his head down over the side
of the bed to see if his brother in the lower bunk was awake, but he
wasn't. He pulled himself back onto the top bunk and stretched. He
stretched his hands up at the ceiling, stretched his legs out and
then up by his hands and put his feet on the ceiling and wiggled his
toes. Deciding to go find himself some breakfast, he headed out the
door. He was halfway down the hall before he realized his feet were
still on the ceiling and he was hanging upside down.
This was fun. He peeked into
the twins' room. They were asleep, and it was funny to put out
his hand and not be able to quite touch them. He suddenly realized he
would be able to reach the top shelf in the kitchen where the sugar
cereal was, and headed over there. It was easy to get a bowl out of
the cupboard, but not so easy to pour cereal upside down. Just as he
was beginning to get the hang of it he began to feel giddy, like he
might fall. He made it into the living room just in time to drop
headfirst onto the sofa.
His mother, when he tried to
explain later, didn't believe him. “That's the craziest excuse I
ever heard for spilling cereal all over the floor,” she said. “You
get to clean it up.” The twins said they wanted to walk on the
ceiling too, and nearly killed themselves falling off the bunk bed
before their mother put a stop to it. It didn't prove a good topic of
conversation, so pretty soon he clammed up about it.
A few weeks later, talking
to his cousin PonytailGirl about the most fun things he'd ever done,
he mentioned, “Walking on the ceiling.” She shot him a funny
look, didn't say anything for a minute, and then grabbed his arm and
took him off to see her mother. His aunt told him a story even
stranger than his own, about walking on the ceiling and a floating
island with dragons.
The two mothers conferred
and presently he had an appointment to visit the wizards. They were
amazed that someone else had been affected by their gravity accident. A young woman with fluffy brown hair sat quite a while with Spiderdog and
PonytailGirl, holding hands in a circle, talking to them about reaching out with their feelings. They didn't know what she wanted, but besides being a dragon-wizard, she was an Oracle, a person who reads the future. She was trying to read something from them.
A silver-haired lady held their faces between her hands and gazed into their eyes. “Pure of mind,” she whispered. “Free of guile. Clear of eye. Perhaps, yes, perhaps.” These were quotes from the inscription. She was looking for people who could qualify to find the shrines.
A silver-haired lady held their faces between her hands and gazed into their eyes. “Pure of mind,” she whispered. “Free of guile. Clear of eye. Perhaps, yes, perhaps.” These were quotes from the inscription. She was looking for people who could qualify to find the shrines.
The two women, Tessa and Rudna, took the
children to see the giant orb under the Colosseum. They were heading
out to collect Cold dragon eggs, and the children watched as the
image of the island moved from the Rocky Mountains to Greenland.
Suddenly Dravin, the Cold Dragon Master, held his staff out sideways and stopped them
short over the sea. A chain of small islands lay below. The largest
one looked like a leg with a big round foot facing west. Just west of
the knee was a smaller round island, and others were strung out to
the east. “These aren't anywhere on the charts,” he said, eyes narrowing. “This
is dragon territory though. Let's look here before we go on.”
They transported to the knee
area of the big island, onto a hillside overlooking a narrow cove and
the strait between the two islands. Shivering and with their hair being blown back by the wind, they walked over to a small round
lake separated from the strait by a narrow shelf of rock. The lake was
salt. They hiked over to the head of the cove, a narrow space between
two volcanoes. Here they found some overhangs and caves. Spiderdog
ducked into the closest one and heard a
rustling noise, and then a high-pitched whine like a puppy. The light
didn't reach far enough into the cave to see what it was. “Dravin!
Dravin!” he called running out. “There's something in here!”
Dravin lit his staff, which
took a minute of concentration. It took longer, PonytailGirl thought,
than it had taken Bixby when he had used the dragon orb as a boost. At the back of the cave was a pile of tumbled rocks. And in the middle was a baby dragon, a red one with a blue back
ridge. It whined again and wobbled over to them.
“It's a hatchling,”
said Dravin, “and it's hungry. Just a minute." Going back to the mouth of the cave,
he transported a fish out of the water and brought it to Spiderdog.
“Here,” he said, “you found it, you can feed it.”
“Yow!” yelled Spiderdog.
“Not my fingers, you silly! Aw, he wants another one.” It bounced
around and pushed at him, until he gave it another fish.
“This is a real discovery." Dravin said, watching him with the baby. "I've never heard of a red Cold dragon.” They took the hatchling directly to the Cold habitat instead
of the nursery. It was like walking into a big freezer. “We are
having difficulty keeping it cold enough,” Dravin said. “It is too
close to that new Fire habitat. The power balance is not working."
He decided to call the
islands the Palagos Islands, after the volcanic rock there. Spiderdog
named the little dragon Nippy.
Their next stop was at an igloo village where Dravin's journeyman was waiting with eggs she had
collected, or that had been brought in by the camp's hunters. "Hi, Sam," Dravin called. "What have we got here?"
"Most of the eggs we found are blue," she answered, " but we found one white one."
The hunters had stories about the white dragons. “Before we go on the hunt, we leave offerings of fish for them. They bring us good fortune,” said one.
"Most of the eggs we found are blue," she answered, " but we found one white one."
The hunters had stories about the white dragons. “Before we go on the hunt, we leave offerings of fish for them. They bring us good fortune,” said one.
“The Cold dragon is the most intelligent of any of the dragons,” Dravin told them.
“My people honor them
above all. They live in the mountains and we call them the
Grandfathers of the North,” said a second hunter.
“Many years ago Kimzar the
White saw invaders coming in through the mountain passes, and came to
warn us,” said the first. “He flew over the village and roared,
and led our people to meet them when they attacked. If he had not
helped us, we would have been destroyed.”
“A Cold dragon may not exactly act friendly," said Sam, "but if you are its friend, it will be yours."
Back at the nursery, Spiderdog
and PonytailGirl helped oil and rub down all the eggs. The egg stands
were adjusted to keep the eggs cool. When
they hatched, the babies were even colder than the eggs had been. The
Mine was gray, the Ice and Iceberg were blue, the Snow was blue and
white, and the Cold was white. They breathed clouds of snowflakes.
“Don't let them get you,” PonytailGirl called. “They'll freeze
your fingers off! Aah! They're withering the dragonsnaps!”
Nippy was different. He
breathed blue puffs of air. “Come feel this, it's like a hot fudge
sundae!" Spiderdog exclaimed. “Hot and cold together.” Dravin decided Nippy was a Cold and Fire hybrid, and that he was a Frostfire dragon. He became Spiderdog's favorite.
One day Rudna and Dalfgan
talked to the children and their mothers about the engravings on
the Fire Dragon statue Tim had found. “It tells about eight dragon statues," Rudna said. "They are called shrines, because they are magical, but they were lost. The poem says they were hidden from Cyrus. He was a Persian king who attacked the Greeks about 500 BC, so that must be when the shrines disappeared."
“We would like to find the shrines," said Dalfgan. "You have seen Thornbark's orb, haven't you? All dragons are magical, but not many are powerful enough to have an orb. The shrines are supposed to help with that."
“I want to tell you something,” said Rudna seriously. “The prophecy says four people will
find the shrines, and they have to have special qualities. They have
to be pure of mind, free of guile, strong of heart, and clear of eye.
I have tried to think of four people who are like this, but I am not
sure. I think these two children qualify. Perhaps that is why they
have come to us.”
“Perhaps only children
would qualify," Dalfgan added. “If that is the case, it means we
will need to find two other children who are dragonfriends.”
