‘SHUT UP!’ the twins chorused.
But the parrot was right. Fox may have been trying to work out a plan to get rid of her brother as soon as she found the Forever Fern, but right now she felt glad that she wasn’t alone here in this strange world in the dead of night. She rolled over on her bunk and saw that a small branch had wound its way in through the window. It ran all the way along the ceiling before finishing, in a cluster of small, round nuts, above her bed.
Fox eased the fablespoon out of her satchel. The tree certainly felt safe, and the Unmappers had even built a tree house in it branches, but who was to say that it didn’t have secret magical properties that might catch her off guard in her sleep? She whispered, ‘Please,’ very, very quietly, then held the spoon up to one of the nuts and read the following words inside it:
NAME: SNOOZENUT TREE
CHARACTER: LAZY
RISKS UPON EATING A SNOOZENUT: IN MOST CASES, SENDS CONSUMER INTO AN ENCHANTED SLEEP FOR ONE MONTH. IN RARE CASES—
‘What are you doing up there?’ Fibber asked.
His voice wasn’t cross and challenging, as it so often was. If anything, it sounded like he might just be making conversation. But Fox couldn’t find it in herself to trust her brother. He had lied to their mother back in the Neverwrinkle Hotel as calmly as if he’d been talking about the weather, so she knew how good he was at deceiving people if he needed to.
Fox shoved the fablespoon back into her satchel. ‘Nothing,’ she snapped. ‘Mind your own business.’
And just like that the conversation was closed.
Fox tucked the satchel back under her pillow and pretended to go to sleep. But what she was really doing was waiting. Waiting for Fibber to drift off so that she could pluck a snoozenut from the branch. An idea had formed in her mind. She would use Fibber to help her find the Forever Fern and then, when the fern was in sight, she’d give her brother a snoozenut to eat and he’d fall into an enchanted sleep. Then the Forever Fern would be hers alone to bring back to their parents! Fibber would follow her back home, when he eventually woke up, but by then Fox would have handed the fern over and it would be Fibber off to Antarctica, not her!
The plan was genius and so excited was Fox by its potential that when she did, eventually, pluck the snoozenut from the branch above her, and tuck it inside her satchel, she forgot that she hadn’t read the full description of the risks involved in eating it. She settled down to sleep, her fist closed round the flickertug map, smug in the knowledge that she had a snoozenut and a phoenix tear in her satchel now and the Forever Fern would soon be hers.
Fox and Fibber might have been fast asleep, but beyond the Elderwood – over Fool’s Leap, through a grove of nightcreaks and up past a rotten swamp – in the heart of the Bonelands, a harpy was very much awake.
Morg sat on a crumbling throne in the antechamber of a long-forgotten temple. Her new wings, built from a shadowspell that had taken nearly two thousand years to conjure in Everdark, after Casper Tock had destroyed her original pair, were folded by her sides. They had done what Morg had hoped they would: carry her from Everdark to Jungledrop. But that had been a long journey – she had crossed worlds to make it.
The harpy’s strength was now restored and you could see it in the black feathers that covered her body and glistened like oil, in her eyes, which burned yellow through the sockets of the phoenix skull she wore over her head, and in her talons that shone like polished bone. All this was thanks to Jungledrop’s thunderberries and the tears of the animals her Midnights brought her.
But Morg’s wings were paper-thin and ragged, like scraps of burnt paper. It would take more than berries and animal tears to restore them to their former glory. Her hopes rested on the Forever Fern renewing their power and, because a harpy’s wings hold her darkest magic, Morg vowed to stop at nothing until she found this fern.
Finding it, though, was proving harder than she had bargained for.
‘Bring me the girl and the boy who have come from the Faraway,’ the harpy spat. ‘I cannot risk them finding the Forever Fern before me.’
It wasn’t immediately clear who Morg was talking to. The ruined antechamber no longer had a roof, so the night’s darkness fell about it, filling every corner and covering the vines and weeds that grew over the flagstones.
But at Morg’s words a shape shifted in the shadows and a gravelly voice answered. ‘I will send more Midnights over Fool’s Leap to hunt for the children.’ There was a pause. ‘But, if you listen now, you might be able to hear from our latest arrival down in the crypt, an arrival who, I hope, might provide you with even more power.’
Beneath the flagstones, and the silence, the faintest sound could be heard: a rattling, clanking noise – that of two little fists shaking prison bars – and then sobbing as the child behind those bars begged again and again to be set free.
‘Your increase in strength has allowed the Midnights to break through the Lofty Husks’ protection charms and the ancient phoenix magic into Timbernook,’ the gravelly voice went on. ‘And now we have an Unmapper boy whose tears may possess even more magic than Jungledrop’s animals.’
Morg leant forward. ‘Bring me the child Unmapper’s tears. For if I am to kill the Faraway children and find the Forever Fern, then my wings must contain
