He chattered on excitedly. ‘Heckle repeats what other people and animals think rather than what they say – which isn’t usually a good thing. Last week she told a chimpanzee that his wife thought he was a—’
‘—Pig-headed know-it-all who never did his fair share of the washing-up,’ Heckle cut in matter-of-factly.
The little boy giggled. ‘And for that you very nearly got yourself eaten!’
Heckle pecked innocently at a leaf.
‘I’m Iggy Blether,’ the boy said to the twins, ‘and I can’t believe that I’m the one welcoming the Faraway heroes to Jungledrop!’
Fox couldn’t recall anyone, ever, being excited to see her, let alone someone assuming she was a hero. It was quite a nice sensation and she very nearly smiled, until she remembered that smiling and being nice never got you anywhere, so she adopted her familiar scowl instead.
‘They say you get the best view of the jungle from up on the Hustleway,’ Iggy continued. ‘But who knew I’d see the candletree’s prophecy come true from up there, too!’
Fox glanced up at the turquoise creepers and saw that there was, in fact, a strange sort of order to them. They zigzagged through the trees, connecting each one to the next to form a vast network and, in the far distance, silhouetted against the glow of the rainforest, Fox could make out dozens of unicycles nipping back and forth between the trees.
‘There I was, out beyond the Boundary for Safe Keeping, way past curfew because Heckle had flown off – again – and I saw the dragon roar!’ Iggy pointed to the cave the Here and There Express had come through and grinned. ‘I can’t believe you’re finally here to save us!’
Fibber took one look at the cave behind him and bolted through the undergrowth towards his sister. ‘Dragon?!’
Heckle coughed. ‘The one with the black handbag—’
‘BRIEFCASE!’ Fibber snarled before tripping over a log and falling flat on his face.
‘—Is worried he might throw up if the jungle starts roaring. The one with the red hair is secretly rather excited about the idea of being a hero, but is pretending not to show it.’
Fox glared at Heckle, then turned back to Iggy. ‘What’s this about a prophecy?’
The little boy’s eyes glittered. ‘Eight years ago, a few weeks after I was born, the Lofty Husks read a prophecy in the wax of the candletrees and now everyone here knows it by heart because it’s our last hope to be safe from Morg.’ Iggy took a deep breath.
‘When trees fall dark and start to groan,
Morg has come to make her home.
Her power will grow until it seems
Hope is but a lost-long dream.
Then listen for the dragon’s roar:
Help will come from far-off shores.’
Iggy paused for effect, but the twins looked blankly back at him.
‘The dark, groaning trees are the forest in the far north of Jungledrop which we call the Bonelands,’ Iggy explained. ‘This forest has been dying my whole life and we Unmappers believe it’s because Morg travelled from her old home in Everdark – a hidden land halfway between your world and mine – to Jungledrop and now she lives in the Bonelands.’
Fox considered this. If the harpy was on the loose in this kingdom already, perhaps it was worth finding out a little more about her in case they came up against each other when they were looking for the Forever Fern. ‘So you’ve seen Morg in Jungledrop then?’ she asked.
Iggy shook his head. ‘No. But we’ve seen her spies. The Midnights, we call them. It’s thought Morg is in the Bonelands because she hasn’t got enough strength to get any further. But her Midnights come snooping through Jungledrop most days after the sun has set.’
Fibber stole a glance up at the night sky poking through the trees, then edged a fraction closer to the others. ‘So these… Midnights could be close now?’
‘No one’s sounded the alarm,’ Iggy replied, ‘so we should be all right, but it’s not like in the olden times when apparently the Unmapped Kingdoms were safe places.’
He took in Fox and Fibber’s blank faces.
‘I forgot that you wouldn’t know anything about our worlds!’ he exclaimed. ‘You see, before Morg invaded the Unmapped Kingdoms, a phoenix ruled from a place called Everdark – so my parents tell me. They said the bird would watch over the four kingdoms, granting them their magic, then every five hundred years the reigning phoenix would die and a new bird would rise from its ashes to renew the Unmapped magic.’ Iggy sighed.
‘But all that changed when the last phoenix died and Morg sprang up from its ashes instead. Now every Unmapper lives in fear. She tried to attack Rumblestar first, and now she’s come here to Jungledrop. Her Midnights have been raiding the rainforest for as long as I can remember…’
Fox looked around at the trees, plants and shrubs. ‘What are they raiding? Flowers?!’
‘For the first few years, it was our thunderberry bushes,’ Iggy replied. ‘The Lofty Husks said that leaving Everdark to come here would have taken nearly all of Morg’s strength. So she used the last drops of her magic to conjure her Midnights, then she sent them out to steal our thunderberries to restore her power.’
Fibber scoffed. ‘You’re saying Morg got her strength back all because of a diet of berries?!’
From her perch on the branch above, Heckle cleared her throat. ‘The one with the briefcase, and indeed the one with the red hair, are doing an awful lot of doubting when we really should be getting back to—’
‘—Shut it, parrot.’ Fox turned back to Iggy. ‘Finish telling us about these berries then, in case it’s stuff we need to know for our quest.’
Fox wasn’t sure how exactly heroes were meant to behave, but she assumed being bossy, rather than being pushed around by a gobby parrot, was probably a safe place to start. Stamp
