Casper straightened up and placed a hand on the stone. It felt suspiciously warm for the time of day. And it was only when he craned his neck out of the stone arch that he saw what he had been leaning on: the back of a very large gargoyle perched on a plinth of stone just beneath the top of the turret. Its wings were tucked in by its sides, its back was ridged and covered in scales. Casper gulped. Could this be . . .? He leant as far out of the tower as he dared just to be sure – and there, hanging down beneath the gargoyle, was a forked tail and two large talons.
Casper froze. This was a dragon.
As soundlessly as he could, Casper pulled himself back into the turret and tiptoed across the flagstones towards the stairs. Because dragons were wild, dangerous, unreasonable and – what had Frostbite said? – fond of eating and squashing. But as Casper placed a foot on the first step, he found himself thinking about magic. It was unpredictable and full of risk and often it was so very strange it left the cleverest of grown-ups stumped by its ways. So, what if the Lofty Husk had been wrong? What if this particular dragon hadn’t come for the marvels but had come instead to take him home? Because it did feel very much like the creature might be waiting for someone, and Casper couldn’t help feeling that that someone might just be him.
But would the dragon know where Casper lived? Or, if he even managed to climb aboard it, would it dump him somewhere horribly confusing, like London? Or somewhere hopelessly out of the way, like Wales? Casper shuddered, then he clenched his fists. If this was his only way home, he had to give it a try.
He tiptoed to the edge of the tower and peered over as far as he could. For a moment he wondered how he could have ever thought the gargoyle was made of stone, because now that he looked closely he could see that it was leathery and speckled silver. Casper stayed exactly where he was for several minutes. He wasn’t quite sure how you went about hitching a ride with one of the most unreasonable creatures in Rumblestar. Then the dragon, sensing Casper’s hesitation, hope and fear all bound up together, turned its scaled head toward Casper and looked at him with wide, gold eyes.
Casper swallowed but didn’t move. The dragon’s pupils were long and black, like openings to a cave, and as Casper held the dragon’s gaze, he saw in those burning eyes the wildest kind of magic – the sort that rides on the wind and revels in moondust. The dragon dipped its head, and with his heart clamouring in his throat, Casper climbed out of the turret and put a shaking hand on the dragon’s back.
It was warm but sturdy and at the touch of Casper’s palm the dragon let out a rumbling breath. Casper hoisted his leg between two of the silver ridges scoring the dragon’s back until he was sitting astride the dragon. And no sooner had Casper breathed out than the dragon rolled its shoulders, flexed its muscles then launched off into the sky.
Casper clung to the ridges on the dragon’s back as the creature beat its mighty wings higher and higher into the sky but he didn’t scream or faint or start panicking about to-do lists or safety harnesses. He just let the dragon carry him and as he felt his way into the dragon’s rhythm, he threw back his head and laughed. Riding in Zip had been fun (and the hatches were nothing short of genius) but riding a dragon was like letting your spirit gallop along with the wind.
Nobody saw Casper soaring over the castle that afternoon – the Bottlers and the Ballooners were too busy rushing about their business – nobody, that is, except the girl and the miniature dragon looking out of the bedroom window on the sixty-third floor. Casper and Utterly waved at each other until their hands ached and even when the dragon flew out over the Neverlate Tree and off The Edge, Casper turned to see that Utterly was still waving him goodbye.
The dragon flew on and on over the Boundless Seas and Casper lost all sense of time. He let the wind rush through him and once or twice he cupped handfuls of cloud. After a while, though, the sun began to wane and a twilight settled pink and orange on the clouds around them. Then, as the light began to change, Casper noticed that through the openings in the clouds the landscape below him was changing, too. It wasn’t only an ocean down there now. There were fields and farms, train tracks and villages. And rain.
Casper’s heart thumped. He recognised this.
‘England,’ he breathed. He must have crossed one of the magical links between the Unmapped Kingdoms and the Faraway!
Suddenly it wasn’t twilight below the clouds. It was a drizzly afternoon and Casper was home again. He took in the familiar flattened forests and churned-up roads, but the air, despite the rain, felt calm. There was no breeze at all and the few clouds that were clumped in the sky hung lazily where they were. And when Casper looked down again he saw that people were going about their day as carefree as they had before the terrible winds started: a couple were walking a dog over a field, a man was cleaning his car in his driveway and a handful of children were playing tag in a park.
Casper blinked. Was this the same afternoon he had crossed into Rumblestar? Utterly had said that a day here was a month in the Unmapped Kingdoms, so if he’d been away for a week, was that just an hour or two back here? Or had time not been different back home after all? Maybe days had gone by . . . Casper stiffened. What did that mean for his parents? Were they safe? Was the school still standing?
The dragon flew into the clouds for a while but when it emerged and once more the landscape came into view, Casper gasped. Far, far below was an avenue of beech trees – some of which had obviously been torn down by the winds – and they led to a very large and very old stone building. Beyond that were the remains of a cricket pavilion and a copse of partly destroyed woodland backing up against a tumbled-down stone wall.
‘Little Wallops!’ Casper cried in relief.
And there was his parents’ car parked in front of the school and the outbuilding his dad used as a workshop for his Design and Technology classes and there – just there! – was the turret Casper lived in. Casper peered down at the window to see his mum and dad walking around the flat! His heart surged. He had no idea what day it was but he had come home, at last, and it looked like his parents were safe.
The dragon circled the school high in the sky. For a second, Casper thought about Candida and Leopold and their stinging words. Again and again they had told him he didn’t belong here and he never would. But that was before Rumblestar. Before he had met a whole kingdom full of people and creatures who had been nothing like him but who had still treated him like one of their own. Things will be different now, Casper told himself. Because he was brave and he had learnt that his timetables, and all the hiding in Lost Property baskets that came with them, weren’t the way to stamp down evil.
The dragon dipped suddenly, and Casper felt sure the groundsman dismantling the sirens on the roof of the school or the gardener clearing branches from the football pitch would look up and scream. But neither did. Because when you’re not expecting a silver-scaled dragon to glide over your school, you don’t look up and search for it.
The dragon made for the copse of woodland before the wall closing in the school grounds, but it showed no signs of slowing as the oak trees loomed closer. Casper bent low to the dragon’s back and held his breath as they careered towards the branches, but just at the last minute the dragon tucked in its wings and slipped through the canopy of the trees still standing, landing seconds later with a thump on the ground.
The dragon shook its scales and Casper slid down its leathery back. As his feet touched the ground he breathed the woodland in – it felt good to be home.
He walked round to the dragon’s head. ‘Thank you.’
The dragon dipped its head and at the movement Casper noticed something behind it that he would have missed before his adventure in Rumblestar. But now that Casper had learnt to look at the world more carefully he saw that there was a small hole in the wall, a space where the stones didn’t quite meet, and it made him think about something Utterly had said about the weather scrolls: Dragons leave them in the overlooked corners of your world – like cracks in the wall, holl
ows of trees and deep inside caves. And had Casper arrived home at sunrise, he might just have seen the wax-sealed parchment scrolls tucked into the crack there melting into thin air as the sun came up.
The dragon before him stretched out its wings to prepare for flight, then it paused and its enormous ears swivelled. Casper listened. Then he heard it, too.
Twigs snapping. And voices close by.
The dragon backed away behind a large oak and Casper nipped behind a half-toppled elm beside it. And then, to Casper’s surprise, his classmate Sophie came running through the trees. Her face was stained with tears and she was clutching half a book. The other half lay in the hands of Candida, who was stalking through the trees after her, with Leopold panting at her high heels.
‘There’s no point running away!’ Candida snarled. ‘You know as well as I do that you’ll have to stop running when you get to the wall!’
Sophie turned to face Candida and Leopold. ‘You . . . you didn’t have to tear my book in half,’ she sobbed.
Candida climbed over a fallen tree, then plucked a page from the half of the book she was holding. She let it fall to the ground before stamping it into the soil.
‘Good one,’ Leopold sniggered. ‘You totally, like, ripped her book.’
Candida took a stride closer to Sophie, whose shoulders were bunched up around her ears. ‘All I want to know is where Casper is. Leopold just sat through an hour of detention because of him and when I snooped around Casper’s flat earlier his wretched dad came back so I had to scarper. But I had a good enough look round the place to know he wasn’t there. Are you telling me he’s legged it off campus now the Met Office have given the all-clear and the lockdown is over?’
Casper flinched. It was still the same day he had left! Utterly had been right about the time differences between her world and his – only an hour or two had passed since he hid inside the grandfather clock – and somehow the Met Office back here knew that the storms were over. But how when before they’d struggled to predict them at all? It didn’t make sense but Casper didn’t have time to think about that now, because Candida was curling her lip at Sophie.
‘You know Casper as well as anyone in the class,’ she spat. ‘Where is he?’
Sophie shook her head. ‘I’ve already told you. I don’t know. I just came out here to read when the headmaster announced the storms were finally over. I haven’t seen Casper all afternoon.’
Leopold peered at the pages of the book Sophie was still holding, then he squinted at the cover, just visible between Sophie’s shaking hands.
‘I know that one,’ he grunted. ‘That weirdo librarian, Mrs Whereabouts, made me read it in detention once. The Lion, the Witch and the whatsitcalled – the window, windmill, wall, washing machine? Nope. Can’t remember.’ Then his eyes lit up. ‘Got it! The Lion, the Witch and the Watermelon. Total rubbish from start to finish.’
He walked up to Sophie, grabbed what was left of the book, bit it – which Casper thought was odd as well as outrageous – then hurled it into the trees.
Sophie started sobbing uncontrollably then, and Casper knew that Candida and Leopold were having so much fun they probably wouldn’t notice if he darted through the trees back to his flat. But there was Sophie to think about. And the fact that Leopold had just bitten a book. And the fact that Casper had learnt what it meant to stand up against wrong.
He stepped out from behind the elm. ‘Leave Sophie alone!’
Candida’s face broke into a delighted smile and Leopold blurted out a statement so crashingly obvious even Candida winced.
‘Look! It’s Casper.’
For a second, Casper hesitated. Was he really going to take on Candida and Leopold at the same time? Sophie gawped at him, then began hastily picking up the pages of her book and stuffing them into her school bag. But she didn’t run away. She was small and shy and often overlooked by her peers and teachers, but Sophie was standing her ground in the woods. She wasn’t leaving Casper alone quite yet. And nor was the dragon. It was hiding still, otherwise the others would have screamed, but Casper could feel its presence behind him, like an invisible but very strong shield.
Candida took a predatory step toward Casper. ‘Why are you wearing dungarees covered in ash?’ she spat. ‘And how did you slip out of Little Wallops without me seeing?’
‘Yeah,’ Leopold grunted. ‘Dungarees. Little Wallops.’
Casper bit his lip. Leopold was running out of words again and he knew what happened when his words ran out. His fists stepped up to play . . . Casper ducked as Leopold swung a meaty one toward him and Leopold looked surprised at Casper’s lightning-quick reaction. But then again, Leopold didn’t know that Casper was fresh off an adventure which had involved dodging a sky full of griffins.
‘Back off,’ Casper said, as fiercely as he could. ‘Both of you.’
Candida circled him. ‘Or you’ll do what?’
Leopold readied his fists again. ‘Yeah, what?’
And now Casper didn’t just feel the dragon’s presence behind him. He heard it, too. A low growl at first, which grew in sound so that the leaves on the trees around them shuddered and the ground beneath their feet shook.
Candida and Leopold backed away several steps.
‘What . . . what was that?’ Candida glanced at Leopold.
The growl came once more, loud and rumbling and full of fight.
Sophie’s eyes widened and Candida clutched Leopold’s arm. ‘It’s . . . it’s a wild boar or an angry cow!’ she hissed. ‘Make it go away!’
Leopold reached into his pocket and drew out his most trusted weapon: a fistful of five-pound notes. He hurled them toward the tree where the noise was coming from. But the dragon was not interested in money.
There was a loud thud, and though Casper knew the sound was the dragon thumping its large, scaled tail against the ground – he’d heard the same sound when the creature landed in the grounds earlier – the others had no idea what was going on. Only that the ground was still juddering after the thud and the growling had started again. Then an enormous scaled foot ringed with claws curled round a tree and shook its trunk, and Candida started to scream.
‘Run!’ she yelled, flinging her ponytail back from her eyes and bolting out of the trees.
Leopold followed as fast as he could, which wasn’t very fast because his pockets were filled with so many coins it meant moving at any sort of pace was problematic. But he and Candida ran nonetheless, howling as they went, back to Little Wallops. There was a rush of wind behind Casper, then a whrum of beating wings and then a sort of hushed silence that is often left in the wake of magic. The dragon had gone and so had Candida and Leopold, which only left Casper and Sophie, who was squinting at the tree the dragon had been hiding behind.
‘The strangest thing,’ she said quietly. ‘I could’ve sworn I saw something enormous and grey with – with claws and wings – bursting up out of the woods.’
Casper paused. There were a lot of things he could have told Sophie that afternoon – about dragons and drizzle hags, snow trolls and cloud giants – but he felt like there were other things he wanted to say first. Normal things. Like asking if Sophie wanted to hang out over the Easter holidays, which, he imagined, would be back on now the weather seemed to have returned to normal and the lockdown was no longer in place. Or whether she wanted to team up again for the science project next term. So he didn’t say any more about the dragon than this: ‘Could’ve been a pigeon? A very large one. Like Leopold, only more feathery.’
Sophie giggled. ‘You stood up for me,’ she said, after a while. ‘No one’s ever done that before.’
Casper picked up the last few pages of Sophie’s book from the ground and handed them to her. ‘Well, I think it’s time we started.’
‘But Candida and Leopold are terrifying . . .’
‘Just because we’re frightened, it doesn’t mean we can’t be brave,’ Casper said. He thought of how he’d jumped into the Witch’s Fingers after Arlo and the
moment he had plunged the sword into the grandfather clock. ‘Sometimes you’ve just got to do things scared.’
Sophie thought about this. ‘I suppose it might be easier if there are two of us standing up to them at the same time.’
Casper smiled. ‘It won’t be nearly as bad. Because with two of you, you can face almost anything.’
They walked back through the woods together. Casper’s mind was buzzing with questions about how on earth the Met Office had known to give the all-clear, but thanks to his training with the stormgulper, he knew that firing questions at someone early on in a friendship wasn’t the best way to start. Instead he said: ‘Isn’t it amazing that the storms have finally gone?’
Sophie nodded. ‘When the teachers started cheering and calling us into any room that had a television, I knew something exciting was happening – but actually seeing the hurricanes in Europe stop mid-spin and the tornados in America unravel in front of us was incredible. Everyone is saying that we can’t be sure that the terrible weather has gone for good but for now it seems like it’s returned to normal.’
Casper listened, spellbound. It was hard to believe that he, Utterly and Arlo had been the ones to save the world. Yet they had.
And so happy was Casper in that moment that that he didn’t give a second thought to the dangers still lurking in the Unmapped Kingdoms or to the harpy who was, at that very moment, crawling through the depths of a dark and knotted forest . . .
Because whilst the battle to save Rumblestar may have been won when Casper plunged the sword into the clock face – destroying the door to final endings, and making the tree in Everdark vanish, taking Morg’s trapped wings with it – there would be more courage, hope and faith needed in the future to rid the Unmapped Kingdoms of evil for good. For harpies are not just known for being greedy; they’re known for being cunning, too, and Morg had already begun to plot and plan. Her wings were gone, but all she needed was to find a way to conjure up new wings, which may not prove as powerful as her own but would allow her to fly up out of Everdark all the same. It might take years, decades, centuries even, but the harpy would escape. And, when she did, her sights were set on the kingdom of Jungledrop and the Forever Fern that grew there – a mythical plant that could grant immortality and restore her power. The inhabitants of Jungledrop were, of course, unware of Morg’s plan, because dark magic rarely comes knocking in advance, but soon they would need to be ready . . .
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