The Dragon at the North Pole Read Online Free PDF

tumbled down off the back of the sleigh and scrambled onto each other’s shoulders to reach the reindeer’s harnesses. It took a team of four elves to wrestle the harness off each animal and lead it away.
    Jesse stepped out of the sleigh and up the palace stairs. He ran his hands over the walls. “They’re ice. Solid ice, Daisy,” he said. He stood back and stared up at the palace. “The whole thing’s made of ice.”
    Daisy joined him. Jesse was right. Every part of the palace—the walls, the roof, the window frames—was made of ice.
    “Ice is the only building material here,” Santa said as he stepped up to the big front door. It had a doorknob the size of a cantaloupe and required both of Santa’s big gloved hands to turn. It opened with a loud creak, just like a wooden door.
    Jesse and Daisy stepped into the vast entrance hall. In the center of the room was a life-sized ice sculpture of Santa Claus presenting a package to a small child. An icicle chandelier hanging from the domed ceiling seemed to sparkle from within. The slick ice walls glowed pale blue as if there were tubes of fluorescent light behind them. Twin grand staircases wound up to the right and left. An open door to the side offered Daisy a peek into a vast room in which there was a long table made of ice with a long ice bench on either side.
    “Kindly remove your snowshoes, my wee little tykes,” Santa said. “Mrs. Claus wouldn’t want you to scuff up my nice ice floors!”
    Jesse and Daisy consulted each other silently. The snowshoes had gotten them to the North Pole. Maybe now that they were under Santa’s roof, they wouldn’t need them. They untied the snowshoes and left them by the front door.
    “This way,” Santa said. Big boots jingling, Santa set off down a wide corridor.
    Jesse and Daisy followed him. On the walls were ice carvings of candy canes and reindeer, one of them sporting a large bulbous nose.
    “Rudolph,” Daisy said to Jesse. Even inside the palace, her breath made plumes of condensation. Now that they’d taken off their snowshoes, she noticed that her feet, in her white fuzzy boots, had begun to grow numb from the cold. The walls and floor and ceiling of the corridor all glowed with the same pale blue of the entrance hall. If there was a light source, she thought, maybe there would be a heat source wherever Santa was leading them.
    The corridor branched out like an icy maze, but Santa kept bearing left, leading them past more ice carvings of elves, swans, wreaths, garlands, and Christmas stockings. Daisy rubbed her hands together as they walked. Her fingertips were tingling from the cold. She looked over at Jesse. His teeth were chattering and his eyes, beneath his shaggy brown bangs, were watering.
    Daisy gave her scarf an extra wrap around her lower face and reached over to do the same for Jesse. He flashed her a grateful look as Santa took another left turn at an ice statue of a snowman with a top hat, ice carrot nose, and ice pipe sticking out of its mouth.
    “Frosty,” Daisy said through her scarf. “Now I know how he feels.”
    “So far, I’ve counted sixty-three doors and fourteen staircases,” Jesse said to her through his scarf. “I wonder where they lead.”
    “To toys?” Daisy asked. She didn’t even play with toys anymore, but the thought that Santa’s actual workshop was located somewhere in this building made her heart pirouette like a ballerina.
    The hallway widened. In the center of the space was a sculpture of two happy children skating, their arms linked. Opposite the sculpture was a door. Santa opened the door and stood to one side. “I’ll let you two wee tykes settle in. I think you’ll find everything you need. Make yourselves at home.”
    “Can we see Emmy?” Jesse asked.
    “In a bit. I’ve been keeping her busy,” he said with a wink.
    Daisy wondered how Santa was keeping Emmy busy. Using her flame to heat this place would be agood start. Jesse and Daisy stepped through the