Free The Dragon Tree by Jane Langton Page B

alive.
    From Noah’s ark the trunk of an elephant reached out and buffeted the window. The rusty lance of a knight in dented armor missed its aim and punctured a drainpipe, but Hector launched his Trojan spear and shattered the upper sash, Aladdin hurled his magic lamp and the Mad Hatter his teapot, Pilgrim pitched his staff across the gulf, and Arthur hurled the sword he had plucked from the stone. Then Dorothy heaved a brick from the Yellow Brick Road (throwing underhanded like a girl), and at last the colossal head of the White Whale rose on a hill of water and battered an opening in the wall.
    The towering wave deluged Eddy and threw him flat on his back. For a moment the tree house rocked like a cradle, but then, very slowly, it came to rest. Now the shattering winds and driving rain of the mighty storm were racing northwest over the Green Mountains to toss the dark waters of LakeChamplain and rouse the people of Montreal out of their beds to slam their windows down.
    Eddy sat up and tried to get his breath. But then the quaking began again. The floor dipped under him, the board walls creaked. Eddy crawled to the window and saw someone moving slowly toward him on hands and knees. The branch that had shattered the window next door had become a bridge for an escaping prisoner, the green-eyed girl called Emerald, the maid-of-all-work for Mortimer and Margery Moon, the storybook girl with a broom, the sweeper of cinders from the hearth. But as Eddy reached out to lift her over the sill, a stuttering noise broke out below, and then a grinding roar.
    The chain saw belonging to Mortimer Moon was reaching up and ripping through the supporting struts of the house like a knife through butter, severing the planks that Eddy himself had hammered into place with six-inch nails and splitting the braces he had anchored with heavy nuts and bolts. The ruptured braces broke apart, and the house began to droop and sag. The walls tore asunder andthe floor slumped and tipped with a shrieking of loosened nails and a bursting of snapped bolts.
    Emerald gave a cry. Eddy held her and they fell together, while above them the scream of the chain saw died away. Softly Mortimer Moon closed the window of his bedroom and vanished in the dark.

35
THE WRONG PRINCESS
    W ITH THE END of the storm, the clouds parted and a lopsided moon rose from a bank of cloud. As if a drop cloth were lifted from the town of Concord, three church steeples appeared among the silvery rooftops. Patches of moonlight filtered through the leaves and shone on the broken boards littering the ground and on the girl and the boy who had fallen through the tree.
    Afterwards Eddy remembered what had flashed through his mind. Were they falling at the rate of thirty-two feet per second per second, the way they should be? No, he decided, they weren’t, becausethe tree kept catching them in shaggy forks and billowing clouds of leaves. Even so, they dropped violently from the lowest branch and landed with a sickening double thud.
    Eddy’s face was cushioned in a mossy hollow. For a moment he groaned and lay still. Then he pulled himself up on his bloody knees and crawled to the place where Emerald lay on her back in a pool of moonlight, her scratched face bleeding, her green eyes closed.
    Was she alive? To his relief, Eddy saw the front of her shirt—it was green like a knightly tunic—lift and fall. She was breathing, she was alive, she was only sleeping. But perhaps it was the kind of sleep from which she might never wake up.
    Then Eddy remembered another of the fairy tales about miscellaneous princesses in various kinds of trouble. Perhaps he had been thinking of the wrong one all this time. What if Emerald were not Cinderella after all? What if she were the princess who fell asleep for a hundred years?
    If so, then the story had a simple cure, an easy way to wake her up.
    Eddy knelt and tried it, and it worked. Emerald’s eyes opened wide. They were green, just the way Georgie had