Zeb was starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable, because there was truth in the elephant’s words. He knew the memory Trampletusk meant. It could stop him in his tracks when walking to school. It could bring on an Outburst in seconds. But he never spoke about it. Not to Derek Dunce or the Orderly-Queues or any of his teachers at school. Looking up at Trampletusk, he couldn’t speak. He knew they needed to summon a dragon—and fast—but it had been ages since his last Outburst, and he knew talking about this particular memory would only bring on the tears.
“Come, boy,” Trampletusk said as she turned toward the trees. “Walk with me.”
Oonie took a small step forward. “If he goes, I go too.”
Zeb’s skin tingled. He had kept Oonie safe in the jungle and now she was doing the same for him. Being in a crew, he thought, was a bit like wearing a shield.
“Very well,” Trampletusk said. “But the Memory Trees won’t permit anyone else. Not even the chameleon. Too many newcomers and they’ll tighten their hold on the memories, and the one you want will never be released.”
Mrs. Fickletint flashed a multitude of colors from Oonie’s shoulder. “But—but I go everywhere with Oonie!”
“She can rest a hand on my side,” Trampletusk said. “I give you my word that until the sun rises and you have the memory you want, I will not let either of these children come to harm.”
“They’ll be away overnight?” Mrs. Fickletint cried.
Trampletusk nodded. “You cannot rush a memory out.” She glanced at Zeb. “Not when it’s as powerful as the first sunrise.”
Mrs. Fickletint rung her paws. “Oh, Oonie. If I’d known you were going to wander off without me for a whole night, I would have made you a packed supper, I would have knitted you some emergency bed socks, I would have written you a goodbye card, I would’ve—”
Oonie stroked the chameleon, then set her down on the ground. “Don’t fuss, Mrs. Fickletint. I’ll be fine.”
“They’re in good hands with Trampletusk,” Dollop said. “And to take our minds off Morg while they’re away, we can indulge in a bit of treetop yoga.”
Mrs. Fickletint shot the goblin a withering look. “The end of the world is looming, Dollop. Now is not the time for yoga.”
“You must think of a way to conjure a piano,” Trampletusk said. “For when the Faraway boy returns, he’ll need one to play the first sunrise.”
Zeb’s heart quickened. Up until this point, he had been trying his very best to believe it was simply a coincidence that he had been the one the harpy dragged into the Unmapped Kingdoms. But now there was a task opening up in front of him, one that seemed almost made for him. He felt for the Stargold Wings around his neck. Oonie had wondered whether the phoenix magic inside these wings had searched out her and Mrs. Fickletint for a reason. Was the same true for Zeb? Had the phoenix magic known about him all along? Had it been secretly believing in him when he thought there was no one in the world who seemed to care?
Dollop turned to Zeb. “Can you even play the piano?”
Zep snapped out of his thoughts. “Yes,” he replied. “As a matter of fact, I can.” He looked at the others. “I mean I can’t read music or anything, but I can play tunes from memory. It was the one thing I enjoyed in the Faraway.”
“Not quite the heights of optimism I was hoping for,” Dollop muttered, “but it’ll have to do.”
Mrs. Fickletint, meanwhile, was having trouble controlling her scales. They were flashing so frequently, she looked more like a police siren than a chameleon. “Be careful, Oonie. One hand on Trampletusk’s side—at all times.” She turned to the elephant. “And do be gentle with Zeb. He tends to fall apart under extreme magical pressure.”
But as Zeb walked off into the trees with Trampletusk and Oonie, he knew that it would not be magic that made him fall apart that night. It would be the memory—the one he kept locked inside the tightest chamber of his heart, the one he knew he had to share if they wanted to find the Ember Scroll.
Chapter 17
Zeb and Oonie walked on either side of Trampletusk as they made their way beneath the Memory Trees. The feather-tailed monkeys and prattleparrots were quiet now. Just the waterfalls sounded, spilling over rocks dotted between the trees and lapping gently against the banks of the lagoon.
Zeb watched the memories flickering inside the bottles. Had Trampletusk stored the conversations between Zeb, Oonie, and Mrs. Fickletint on the Kerfuffle inside them already? Was yesterday’s victory against the fire kraken now tucked beneath the trees?
Trampletusk led them on, one heavy footstep after another. And though Zeb was frightened, he realized there was something comforting in the way the elephant walked, her steady plod like the thuds of a giant heartbeat. Zeb craned his head round to look at Oonie.
“Cover your ears,” he said. “Only Trampletusk gets to hear the memory.”
“What?!” Oonie hissed. “I can’t see, and you want me to cover my ears as well?! I think I’ve got enough to be dealing with.”
“Nonsense,” Zeb replied. “You’re great at multitasking.”
“Fine,” Oonie sighed. “I’m not listening.”
But she very much was. Because Oonie was beginning to realize that she and Zeb had something in common: What they said wasn’t necessarily what they meant.
Zeb spoke, very quietly, into Trampletusk’s ear: “I think I know the memory you want. But it’s—it’s stuck inside me. All sorts of people have tried to make me talk about it. Foster parents, social workers, that kind of thing. But it hasn’t worked. The memory won’t budge.” He paused. “I think there might be something wrong with my windpipe.”
Trampletusk considered this. “Memories can weigh a lot,” she said. “In fact, some can be so heavy they sink down into our toes. But we can always bring them up again. If we want to.”
Zeb scuffed his sneakers through the undergrowth. The elephant was wise. Zeb knew that his memory wasn’t really stuck—whatever he told himself. He was just scared of bringing it up. He had always managed to pull himself together after an Outburst. A brief stint of blubbing and then on he went. But if this particular memory came out, he worried the Outburst that followed might never end.…
Trampletusk turned her large head toward Zeb. “Memories can sting, especially if they’re filled with love. And it’s a searing kind of pain that makes you want to howl, like when you whack your elbow.”
Oonie, who had given up pretending not to listen, piped up at this. “Elephants have elbows?”
“Unfortunately so. I knocked mine against a rock last week, and the pain was so intense I very nearly fainted.” Trampletusk stepped beneath a tree and under the light of a hundred memories, she lowered herself to the ground. Zeb and Oonie sat down on either side of her, and the waterfalls rippled around them. “What if I told you that you can tell me the memory locked inside your toes and that you can fall apart afterward, but that falling apart won’t last forever. The tears will stop. And Oonie and I will be here, ready to pick up the broken pieces.”
Zeb felt the Outburst swell inside him.
“And then every time you think of the memory in the days, weeks, and years afterward,” Trampletusk said, “you will know that falling apart isn’t the end. It’s the beginning. Because that’s where courage starts.”
Zeb was doing everything he could think of to stop the tears from coming: jaw clenches, balled fists, and moody eyes. But they had already begun to fall now. He tried to brush them away, but then more came. And still more after that. It was time, at last, to let the memory out.
He took a deep breath. “My mum died when I was a baby,” he sniffed, “and I never knew my dad. The welfare agency gave me a photo of my mum, something to remember her by, but it got left in the Faraway, in my rucksack, when Morg stole me away. It was never the photo that brought her back to me, though.” The tears rolled down Zeb’s cheeks. “It was the music. A tune that used to come to me every time I thought of her. And when I taught myself to play the pian
o, I found myself playing that tune. Because my memory”—Zeb swallowed—“is of my mum singing it to me over and over again.” He thought back to the piano in the theater. “I’ve no idea how I remembered the tune, because I was only a baby when she died, but whenever I play it, the rest of the world fades away, because I can see her: a smiling face with sparkling blue eyes.” He sobbed harder. “And I—I remember then that once upon a time I was loved.”
Zeb cried and cried, and though she knew she wasn’t meant to be listening and she was still very much on a trial run, Oonie felt her way round to Zeb and clasped his hand tight.
Trampletusk wrapped her large ears around the children. “Let it all out, Zeb,” she whispered. “Let it all out.”
And Zeb did. All the pain and the hurt and the disappointment that he had buried inside him for so long. Oonie didn’t move. Neither did Trampletusk. They simply held Zeb tight as he wept for everything he’d lost.
* * *
Zeb had no idea when the tears had stopped and sleep closed in. But when, eventually, he opened his eyes again and Trampletusk unfurled her mighty ears, he saw that night had passed and the twilight before dawn—when the world is neither dark nor light—had arrived. Zeb sat up and rubbed his eyes. The Outburst had passed. Oonie and Trampletusk were still there. And he hadn’t, as far as he could tell, fallen apart completely. He thought of his mom. The sadness hadn’t gone, but he noticed it didn’t weigh quite as heavily inside him as it had before.
Zeb looked up at Trampletusk. “My memory—it’s not in my toes anymore, is it?”
Trampletusk shook her head. “It’s in your heart now, Zeb. And hearts are bigger than toes. Memories can breathe a bit more easily in there.”
“But don’t you need to take Zeb’s memory?” Oonie asked.
Trampletusk smiled. “I take the echoes of memories. To strip a person or a kingdom of their past would be to erase them altogether.” She looked at Zeb. “And you don’t deal with a difficult memory by getting rid of it. You deal with it by learning to live alongside it.” She tapped Zeb’s chest with her trunk. “In here.”
“Hearts seem to require quite a lot of work,” Zeb said cautiously. “And up until now, I’ve been mostly focusing on my biceps.”
Oonie snorted. “REALLY?”
Zeb scowled at her. “You’re still on a trial run, Oonie. Despite the hand holding. So please try to remember that.”
Trampletusk smiled. “It is your heart, not your biceps, that is your strongest feature, Zeb.”
A tickling sensation was sliding over Zeb’s chest now. He gasped as a silver wisp, just visible in the twilight, drifted out from his T-shirt. It floated up toward a bottle hanging from the branch above them, then it slipped inside it. There was a fizzing sound, then a crackle, and the memory that had been stored in that bottle squeezed out past Zeb’s memory and hung in the air beneath the trees.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Zeb whispered. “The very first sunrise in the Faraway?”
Oonie smiled. She couldn’t see it, but she could hear sounds tinkling.
The memory drifted down toward Zeb and settled, weightless but shining with magic, in his palm. The Stargold Wings flickered inside their pouch as Zeb bent his ear to the wisp. He had been expecting to hear the whispers and giggles that he had heard in the sunchatter back aboard the Kerfuffle, but perhaps they would have been used to conjure a small amount of sunlight, like a single sunbeam. This, though, was different. This was a melody full to bursting and one so pure and clear it could have been spun from glass.
Then, just like that, the melody stopped and the wisp vanished.
“Where’s it gone?” Zeb cried. “We need that memory to summon the Crackledawn dragon!”
Trampletusk nodded. “It is inside you now, Zeb. And if my ears do not deceive me, I think that’s the rest of your crew calling.”
Zeb and Oonie couldn’t hear what Trampletusk could, but they hurried back, on and on beneath the trees toward the lagoon until, finally, they arrived to find Mrs. Fickletint hopping up and down on Dollop’s head.
“You’re back!” the chameleon cried. “And all in one piece, too!” She looked at Zeb. “So, did you do it? Did you get the very first sunrise in the Faraway?”
“Of course he got it!” tutted Dollop. “Just look at the boy! He’s positively basking in inner peace!”
Zeb grinned.
“Then there’s not a moment to lose!” Mrs. Fickletint called. “Because Dollop and I have conjured a piano!”
Chapter 18
After a hasty breakfast of bananas filled with chocomelts (chocolate balls with gooey middles, which seemed to grow in abundance on Rickety Gramps’s sweet-tooth trees), Mrs. Fickletint and Dollop led the way up a winding path to a clifftop looking out over the sea.
The sun hadn’t risen yet and the sky was a dusky pink, but in the dawn light Zeb could see the ocean stretching on and on—black like a pool of ink. There was no land in sight to the south of the island, but the Final Curtain was out there, somewhere. And watching over all of this, from the clifftop, was a piano.
It was nothing like the sleek instrument Zeb had played in the theater. This one was smaller, upright, and it was made out of twisted wood. Zeb took Oonie’s proffered hand and led her, excitedly, toward it.
Oonie ran her fingers across the keys, then she stroked the chameleon on her shoulder. “How did you manage to conjure this?”
“After a brief spot of meditation”—Mrs. Fickletint arched her brow in Dollop’s direction—“we realized we needed a DIY tree.”
Dollop pointed proudly to the only tree on the clifftop. Zeb noticed that instead of leaves dangling from the branches, there were all sorts of practical objects like wrenches, nails, scissors, and duct tape.
“A Dream It Yourself tree,” Dollop explained. “Once we’d plucked off the essential parts of a piano—a hammer, some string, and a few keys—we simply closed our eyes and dreamt up the real thing!”
Mrs. Fickletint nodded. “It didn’t seem to matter that the keys were very obviously house keys and the hammer was meant for bashing nails—the magic seemed to know exactly how to iron all that out!”
“Well done!” Oonie cried as Zeb high-fived Dollop.
It was Trampletusk who moved the celebration on. “With just one more night until the full moon rises, you need to press on and find the Ember Scroll.” She looked at the piano. “Zeb must play—now—if you are to summon a Crackledawn dragon in time.”
Zeb took a deep breath, then he sat down on the wooden stool. He looked up over the piano and across the sea. He’d never played for anyone else, and for a moment he felt painfully shy. What if he played the melody wrong and no dragon appeared? It wasn’t as if any of the others had managed to summon one before.… But if he did nothing, Morg would win, and Fox and Oonie and Mrs. Fickletint, and even Dollop and Trampletusk, would be no more.
Zeb raised his hands to the keys, tried to ignore everyone watching him, and played. The melody came to him instantly, and it was one of the most beautiful tunes anyone on the clifftop had ever heard. Fluttering, higher notes at first, and then the melody grew into something big and full, something that seemed to hold in all the possibilities of a new day dawning.
Closing his eyes, Zeb imagined the music stirring the Faraway into life. He thought of mountains rising and trees appearing, of animals stretching and people awakening. The tune swelled, and the melody that rang out was so impossibly beautiful it brought a tear to Mrs. Fickletint’s eye. Only Zeb knew, though, that there were parts of this tune that echoed the one his mother had sung to him as a child, and he found himself wondering whether it was possible that he had been born for this very moment. He opened his eyes, and as he played, he watched the pink sun inching above the horizon, streaking the sky with gold.
And then it came.
Just a speck on the horizon, at first. But moments later, it was a silhouette. A silhouette with wings and a great forked tail. Zeb squinted into the sun as the mel
ody grew bigger and louder and the Stargold Wings around his neck danced. Then the silhouette swooped down to the sea, raking talons through the waves before soaring up into the sky again and letting out a cry. The noise rose with Zeb’s melody until it seemed that the whole of Crackledawn rang out with the sound of hope.
Oonie gasped. Mrs. Fickletint gave in and wept. And Dollop and Trampletusk smiled.
“A dragon!” Zeb breathed. “We—we summoned a Crackledawn dragon!”
The dragon was more magnificent than anything Zeb could have imagined. It was the color of emeralds and peacocks, and its wings beat like the sails of a mighty ship. It wheeled above them, its scales aglitter in the sunlight, and Zeb stopped playing then and watched, spellbound. This was the wildest magical beast in the Unmapped Kingdoms, and at his call, it had come to help them.
The dragon circled the clifftop before gliding down toward the group. Its webbed talons crunched onto the cliff in front of the piano, and as it folded in its wings and settled back on its hind legs, Zeb gaped. The dragon had looked large in the sky, but now that it was right there in front of them, it seemed outrageously big. Even its teeth, razor-sharp and snaggled, were the size of tusks, and large spikes ran from its neck to its tail. In a single swipe, this dragon could send them all tumbling off the clifftop.
It watched the group warily, its large amber eyes, flecked with sunlight and split down the middle with a black dash, resting on Zeb. It wrinkled its snout as it gave him a good long sniff, and Zeb didn’t move a muscle because he knew from Dollop that dragons didn’t follow rules, which meant this one could blast fire at any moment.
“You—you answered my call,” he whispered, hardly daring to believe it.
The dragon dipped its head in reply, and Zeb found himself smiling. A creature this huge and wild and magnificent had come for someone as unimportant as him.
Trampletusk stepped forward. “It was good of you to answer our call, Snaggle. From the memories I have collected over the years, I have seen that you are one of Crackledawn’s most loyal dragons.”
Zeb Bolt and the Ember Scroll Page 12