The Polar Bear Explorers' Club Page 10

  Ethan frowned at him. ‘How do you know all this stuff? It’s not normal.’

  ‘I like facts,’ Beanie replied. ‘You know where you are with facts. Besides, if we don’t take the trouble to learn about the mistakes of past explorers then we’re more likely to make the same mistakes ourselves.’

  ‘Sixty-three explorers poking their own eyes out with spears,’ Ethan said, shaking his head with a smirk. ‘What a hopeless bunch.’

  One of Stella’s adopted cousins belonged to the Jungle Cat Explorers’ Club and, feeling offended on his behalf, Stella said, ‘Beanie, why don’t you tell us how many Ocean Squid explorers have died from eating too many eels in the last century?’

  ‘Forty-three,’ Beanie replied promptly.

  Ethan’s smirk vanished. Stella stuck her tongue out at him.

  ‘Excuse me for interrupting,’ one of the frosties cut in, ‘but if we can get back to the subject at hand, I can assure you that we have no horned geese here. We only have spotted geese. They can’t fly because their wings are too small, but they make up for that in other ways. Come along and we’ll have tea.’

  The frosties fluttered off and the explorers followed them, their boots crunching on the winding white shingle path. The geese were quite a noisy bunch and kept up a continuous honking in the background. They walked through the trees to where several tables were set with crisp white tablecloths and china teacups. The tables were all different sizes, ranging from human-sized to fairy-sized.

  ‘I thought you said you didn’t get many visitors?’ Stella said.

  ‘We don’t, but we like to be prepared just in case,’ the frosty replied. She gestured towards the largest table. ‘Please do sit down.’

  The explorers took their seats and Koa settled herself at Shay’s feet. Stella peered at the nearby trees and decided that they were quite odd-looking, with their leafless branches, and trunks as smooth and white as bleached bone. Multi-coloured glass jars hung from the branches, and Stella thought they were lanterns at first, but then some of the frosties fluttered up, pulled egg cups out of them, and set them on the table before the explorers.

  They were, without doubt, beautiful egg cups, fit for a king in gold and royal blue, with intricate scrollwork and embedded crystals that put Stella in mind of the jewelled egg Felix had brought back with him from the Orient. But, even so, she couldn’t help being a little disappointed. When the frosties had mentioned a tea party she had imagined tiny cupcakes, and iced buns, and jelly dragons, and sticky jam roly-polies. Perhaps even some cream éclairs and purple macarons. Stella had a great fondness for purple macarons. But, instead, the frosties announced that they were to be having goose eggs for tea.

  Stella didn’t want to seem ungrateful for the goose eggs, so she made sure to thank the frosties again for their hospitality before asking if they knew of anywhere nearby where they might be able to find more food.

  ‘We lost most of our supplies when we were split up from the rest of our expedition,’ she explained, ‘so we’re going to need to stock up on provisions.’

  A frosty sat on one of the overturned teacups, twirled his moustache and said, ‘You’ll get food and other supplies at the Yak and Yeti.’

  ‘The Yak and Yeti?’

  ‘It’s a luxurious hotel,’ the frosty said. ‘The most luxurious hotel you’ve ever seen. They’re very friendly there. And helpful.’

  One of the frosties perched in the tree above giggled and was quickly shushed.

  ‘How do we find it?’ Stella asked.

  ‘It’s on the other side of the rainbow.’

  Ethan narrowed his eyes suspiciously. ‘Is that a riddle? I hate riddles.’

  ‘It’s not a riddle. Just follow the rainbow and you can’t go wrong,’ the frosty said.

  The others returned with the goose eggs, and Stella immediately saw that these were no ordinary eggs: the eggshells were completely gold, and spotted with shiny silver freckles. The explorers each received an egg and then a basket of cutlery was put in the centre of the table. Instead of the teaspoons Stella had expected, she saw that there was a total jumble of utensils – everything from steak knives to oyster forks to honey stirrers. She also saw a set of wooden chopsticks, as well as a popcorn fork, cookie dipper and pickle spoon.

  ‘What does this one do?’ Ethan asked, reaching for one of the utensils. ‘Remove warts?’

  ‘That’s an artichoke scraper,’ the moustached frosty said politely.

  ‘When do you need scissors to eat your food?’ Beanie asked, holding up a silver pair and frowning at them suspiciously.

  ‘Sounds like another riddle,’ Stella said.

  ‘Those are grape scissors,’ the frosty replied. ‘And before you ask, these other ones are a marrow scoop, asparagus tongs, cake breakers, pitta bread opener, lobster cracker, crab pick, folding fruit knife and, of course, that one there is a moustache spoon.’

  ‘A moustache spoon?’ Stella snatched it up curiously. ‘But what’s it for?’

  ‘To protect a gentleman’s moustache when drinking soup, of course,’ the frosty said. ‘Really, don’t you have fine dining where you come from?’

  ‘Do you really need all this stuff for eating goose eggs, though?’ Ethan said, poking at the cutlery with his finger. ‘I mean, are there any egg spoons in that lot or is it all just stupid things like banana forks and parsnip scissors and bacon prongs?’

  A tall frosty walked out onto the middle of the table, smiling. ‘These are magic eggs, my young friends,’ she said. ‘All you have to do is think really hard of what food you would most like to eat, and the egg will provide it for you.’

  They all gaped at her.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Stella said at last.

  ‘Quite serious,’ the frosty replied. ‘Each egg will provide you with one savoury course and one dessert course. You just have to picture it inside your head. Imagine it so hard you can almost smell it in the air or taste it on your tongue. Then use a spoon to crack it open, just like you would with a normal egg.’

  Stella stared down at the egg in front of her. After going through the various options in her mind she finally decided on soup, mostly because she wanted to use the moustache soup spoon, but also because it would help warm her up. She closed her eyes and thought as hard as she could of the hot, fresh, creamy tomato soup that she and Felix enjoyed at home, with little croutons floating on top. When she could practically taste it she opened her eyes and used the moustache spoon to break off the top of the egg.

  The gold shell came away easily and tendrils of steam rose up, along with the delicious smell of piping hot tomato soup. Stella exclaimed in delight and, having seen her success, the others were quick to grab utensils from the basket and conjure up meals of their own.

  Beanie had a fish finger sandwich, Shay had barbecued chicken and Ethan had oysters, which the others all thought smelled terrible and looked like snot. The magician pointedly ignored their remarks and picked them neatly, and rather elegantly, from the egg using the silver oyster fork. Once they’d finished their savoury course, they all thought of a dessert, which magically appeared in the egg. Stella had jam roly-poly, Shay had some kind of fried banana pancake, Ethan had chocolate cake and Beanie had jellybeans which, of course, he separated into various coloured piles before he ate them.

  Stella was feeling satisfyingly full, and was just thinking that it was a really good thing that they had trusted the frosties, and not listened to Ethan when he’d been all suspicious before – when one of the frosties said, ‘We’ve made up your beds in the guesthouse.’

  ‘Beds?’ Stella repeated. ‘Oh, well, thank you but we can’t stay. We’re explorers, you see – we need to get going.’

  ‘But didn’t you say that you’d lost all your supplies?’ the frosty persisted. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to spend the night here in a warm bed, and leave in the morning?’

  ‘Exploring isn’t really about spending the night in a warm bed,’ Shay said. ‘Besides, it’s far too early
to go to sleep just yet. Thank you very much for your hospitality, but I’m afraid we really must be on our way. We have a lot of adventuring still to do.’

  Shay stood up. Despite his relaxed tone, he had a wary expression on his face. The frosties seemed too still, too silent. All of a sudden, Koa was on her feet, her lips pulled back in a snarl. Stella could hear a low growl rumbling in the back of the shadow wolf’s throat. She and Ethan both stood up quickly, and Stella nudged Beanie, who was tidying his last pile of jellybeans.

  ‘Come on, Beanie,’ she whispered. ‘We’re going.’

  ‘We can’t,’ he replied. ‘I haven’t finished organising my jellybeans.’

  ‘We’ve already made the beds,’ the female frosty said again, suddenly sounding far less friendly. ‘It would be very rude of you to go without sleeping in them.’

  Stella was suddenly very aware of the rows of silent frosties standing on the branches of the trees above them, staring down with a look that seemed almost … hungry.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but we really can’t stay,’ Shay said. ‘Places to go, things to see, and all that.’

  ‘That is a pity,’ the female frosty said slowly. ‘Because it would have been far less painful if you’d been asleep.’

  ‘What would have?’ Beanie asked, suddenly looking up from his jellybean pile.

  The frosty smiled – smiled properly for the first time since they’d arrived – and Stella was horrified to see that her mouth was full of row upon row of glittering, needle-sharp teeth. ‘Frostbite,’ she said.

  Stella had, of course, heard of frostbite. It was hard to live with a polar explorer for ten years and not do so. She knew that sometimes explorers came back from expeditions to the Icelands having lost entire fingers and toes to frostbite, and that it could be very dangerous. If it was left untreated and led to hypothermia, it could even kill you.

  ‘But frostbite isn’t an actual bite,’ she protested. ‘It’s caused by exposure to extreme cold.’

  The frosty grinned even wider, exposing another set of teeth. ‘Is it?’ she said.

  And then, quick as a flash, the frosty flew at Ethan, who happened to be the nearest explorer – or perhaps the frosty simply found him the most irritating of the four children. The magician threw up his hands and a blast of magic flashed blue. Stella wasn’t sure what Ethan had intended to do, but she was fairly sure it hadn’t been to create another polar bean.

  The bean’s shrill giggle turned into a shriek as the frosty’s fangs impaled it, and Stella watched as lines of ice spread out from the bite. The bean froze solid in seconds. The frosty withdrew its teeth and threw the bean on the floor in disgust, whereupon it promptly shattered into hundreds of frozen, broken pieces.

  Stella saw Shay’s eyes widen in shock. Beside him, Koa was snarling ferociously, but having no substance, she was no threat to the frosties. The whisperer’s wolf at Shay’s throat opened its gleaming red eyes, and Stella really hoped that meant he was calling the wolves. They had to get out of there. Right now.

  Then everything happened at once. The frosties from the tree all came swooping down at them, claws curled, teeth bared. The geese ran about, honking and flapping in panic and generally getting in everyone’s way. Shay whipped the boomerang out of his cloak and threw it through the cloud of frosties, knocking them from the air like stones. Ethan threw more magic at them; a mixture of tiny arrows – which were quite effective at stopping the frosties – and more polar beans, which were less so. Beanie snatched up the red jellybeans before they could get mixed up with the blue ones, and began hurling them at the frosties, which didn’t work much better than Ethan’s polar beans.

  Meanwhile, Stella snatched up the only weapon within her reach, which happened to be the moustache spoon. It was actually quite an effective object for smacking any frosty that came near, and the thud they made when they hit the spoon was extremely satisfying. There must have been a hundred frosties, though, and it was a difficult thing for four young explorers armed only with a moustache spoon, a boomerang, some jellybeans and unreliable bean-and-arrow magic to fend them off forever.

  As Shay reached up to catch the returning boomerang, Stella noticed, to her horror, that there was a frosty heading directly for him, mouth open and teeth gleaming, moments away from biting.

  Fortunately, Ethan saw it too. ‘Watch out!’ he cried, shoving Shay out of the way. The frosty missed him, but it got Ethan instead, clamping its fangs firmly into his finger. The magician yelled, and dragged the frosty from his hand, flinging it away from him – but the damage had already been done.

  Stella was so horrified that she didn’t notice the frosty flying towards her until Beanie – who’d ran out of red jellybeans and moved on to blue – shouted out a warning. She tried to raise the moustache spoon, but could already see that she wasn’t going to manage it in time. The frosty was almost on her, fangs bared – but then the strangest thing happened. When the frosty reached her, it didn’t sink its pointy teeth into her arm, like she’d expected. Instead it gasped and gave Stella a frightened look, as if she’d just done something particularly fearsome. Then it clamped its jaws firmly shut and flew away from Stella as fast as it could.

  She didn’t have much time to puzzle over its odd behaviour because just then the wolves arrived. Stella heard them before she saw them: a ferocious mixture of howling, snarling and barking that made the hairs on her arms stand on end. The whisperer’s wolf around Shay’s throat still had its eyes open, gleaming blood red, so Stella guessed that he must be talking to the wolves and telling them to attack the frosties. The wolves did so with a vengeance, snatching the horrible creatures from the air and crunching them up between their teeth. They were still attached to the sled’s harness, and had in fact brought the sled down with them, but it didn’t seem to hinder them much.

  The frosties sought the safety of the trees, gathering together on the highest branches and staring in terror at the snapping wolves below. The explorers raced for the staircase – all except Ethan, who was hunched over his injured hand and groaning. Shay grabbed his arm and dragged him along after them, and Stella took the opportunity to snatch up one of the golden-spotted geese as she ran past the pond.

  Stella didn’t agree with stealing normally, of course, but if someone bit a member of her expedition and tried to freeze his finger off, then surely that left her perfectly free to steal their magic goose and moustache spoon in return.

  The four of them tumbled out of the golden door and into the snow, the wolves and sled close on their heels. With the honking goose still tucked under one arm, Stella leapt into the sled with Beanie. Shay shoved Ethan in too and then leapt onto the back, yelling for the wolves to run as fast as they could. They sped across the snow, with Glacier galloping alongside them, and the frosty igloos growing smaller and smaller behind them.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It started to snow as they raced away from the frosty igloos, and soon the air was thick with swirling flakes that made it hard for them to see where they were going. After the initial panic wore off and they managed to put some distance between themselves and the frosties, Shay slowed the wolves down before they could all go tumbling off the edge of a cliff.

  It was just in time, too, because all of a sudden a giant wall of colours loomed up out of the snow before them, soaring straight up into the sky. Stella saw orange and red, yellow and green, blue, indigo and violet, and suddenly realised what they were looking at. ‘It’s a rainbow!’ she cried. ‘A frozen one!’

  ‘Didn’t the frosties say that the Yak and Yeti hotel was at the end of the rainbow?’ Shay asked, hopping off the back of the sled and coming around the side to join them.

  ‘Why should we believe a word they said?’ Ethan groaned. His already pale face had gone white as chalk and Stella could see beads of sweat forming at his blond hairline as he hunched protectively over his hand. ‘I told you we shouldn’t trust them! I told you that something wasn’t right. But, no, no, you had to go and s
ee the incredible magic geese and put all of our lives at risk!’

  The goose in Stella’s arms honked importantly and Stella quickly shushed it. ‘How’s your hand?’ she said to Ethan.

  ‘How do you think?’ the magician snarled. ‘It’s frozen! It hurts more than you can possibly imagine!’

  ‘Let me see,’ Shay said.

  Ethan carefully drew his hand out from the folds of his cloak and the others gasped. His index finger had frozen solid. It had turned completely blue and was locked rigidly in place, with frost sparkling across the skin. And, worse than that, the finger next to it had started to go blue as well.

  ‘It’s spreading!’ Stella cried.

  ‘That’s what frostbite does,’ Ethan said, through teeth that had started to chatter. ‘I’m going to end up losing all my fingers to frostbite thanks to you lot. Probably my toes as well.’

  ‘Captain Kieran Caspian Carter,’ Beanie said, ‘succumbed to frostbite in—’

  ‘Beanie, not now!’ Stella said sharply.

  ‘Sorry. Let me see if I can help.’ Beanie pulled off a glove, raised his hand and placed it just over Ethan’s. Sparkling gold light shone from his fingertips and washed over Ethan’s frozen skin.

  ‘Can you cure it?’ Shay asked.

  ‘There’s no known cure for frostbite,’ Beanie replied. ‘All I can do is slow down the spread of it.’

  ‘What use is healing magic if it doesn’t cure anything?’ Ethan complained.

  ‘Magic is useful but it only takes you so far. Science has to take you the rest of the way.’ Beanie drew back his hand and replaced his glove. ‘Besides, healing magic is unpredictable. Sometimes it becomes unstitched. I’ve slowed it down for now, but frostbite is vicious, and there’s no telling how long it will hold.’

  ‘We’ve got to get help,’ Shay said, running his hands through his long, dark hair. ‘Let’s follow the rainbow to the Yak and Yeti. There might be someone there who knows what to do.’

  ‘We don’t even know if there is such a place,’ Beanie said. ‘The frosties might have been lying.’