Page 1 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

PART ONE

Chapter One

The day it all went to shit, Frida Rose was knee-deep in unicorn dung. Not that this was unusual. She was, after all, a zookeeper and dung came with the territory. But contrary to popular belief, unicorns did not smell like freshly baked cinnamon buns. They smelled like . . . well, shit.

She was on the early shift and outside the London Extraordinary Zoo, visitors were clamouring to be let in. The zoo’s high golden walls sparkled under a turquoise sky, and the words ‘Extraordinary Creatures Liveth Here’ flashed across the cast iron entrance gates. Fire-breathing dragons and snarling basilisks adorned the red-and-white striped ticket booths. The morning was a chorus of restless creatures: Karen the kraken roaring for her breakfast, the manticore growling. The great white wolves yipping and, from the pools, the watery akhuluts flipping off their keepers with spiked, glistening black tails.

Backstage, the familiar rituals were underway: pancakes being mixed, popcorn popped, and coffee, the primal life force, brewed.

Frida took a moment to wipe the sweat from her brow and watched as Princess Isis, the world’s last living unicorn, rolled end over end through her own primal life force: stinking, malodourous mud. Frida leaned on her shovel and sighed. She’d spent half the morning trying to get that very mud out of the unicorn’s ears. But as Issy kicked up her hooves and raced in uncoordinated circles, nickering in that tinkly, bell-like way of hers, Frida couldn’t help but smile. A smile that lasted precisely until the moment the unicorn skidded to a stop. Her big cerulean eyes tilting impishly between Frida and the mud. The realization hit Frida a half-second before the mud would. She dropped her shovel and took a step back, holding out her hands.

‘No. Not today, Is. Seriously.’

But Issy was already mid-leap, soaring majestically.

*

Frida had seen her first dragon when she’d been six years old. She’d been so excited, she’d vomited in one of the London Extraordinary Zoo’s unicorn-shaped novelty recycling bins. Fireheart, the UK’s only dragon, had unfurled her leathery tail and breathed a plume of fire that twisted twelve feet in the air. From that moment on, Frida’s destiny in zoo-standard steel-toe-capped boots and unflattering cargo trousers had been a done deal.

She’d dreamed of the zoo’s hallowed sections: Sky, Ocean, Lake, Grass, Ice, Desert and Forest. In her sleep, she learned how to give Princess Issy the unicorn belly rubs. She understood which fairy mushrooms would bite your fingers off, which would make you blind, and that when the two-headed storm monkey Jellybean ‘Chaos’ Capone escaped, you’d most likely find him buried in a box of pastries in the zookeepers’ kitchen.

The LEZ was a world away from real life. It was where dragons and unicorns – actual dragons and actual unicorns – existed. Not just the sad-eyed ones she saw on documentaries about climate change. They’d been hunted to near extinction, poached, decimated by disease and habitat loss. A slow heartbreaking silencing. Once upon a time, werewolves and sprites, fairies and elves had danced on the hills and sung on the cliffs. Witches had stirred cauldrons and shape-shifting vampires had walked amongst humans. But under the weight of ‘progress’, that was all gone. Most people she knew seemed to have forgotten that millennia ago, something that had once been called magic might have run in their veins, too.

Frida had been nineteen when her acceptance letter came through the post. Standing on the front step with her mum gripping her hand, the phrases ‘Zookeeper Training Programme’ and ‘Accepted’ had leapt out, along with the single word ‘Forest’. Their triumphant shouts had rung down the street. A few months later – it all happened so fast – they’d moved to Melody-Upon-Sea, the quaint seaside town where the London Extraordinary Zoo, by historical happenstance (and a touch of etymological humour), was actually located. They left behind their London council flat, and found a tiny, dilapidated rental less than half a mile from the LEZ’s entrance gates. Her mum got a new job waiting tables at one of the seaside cafes. She’d always said it was possible that Frida might one day live alongside extraordinary creatures, and Frida had believed her. Now here she was, wiping unicorn shit off her face and smelling of entrails.

And she loved every second of it.

Chapter Two

Frida was heading back to Ground Control where zookeepers did unmentionable things like spreadsheets, mainlining sugar and visiting the toilets aka the Dung Heap, when a familiar shout stopped her in her tracks. A bucket-load of coffee awaited her, but she grinned as she turned back to see Antony and Hamish, her two best friends, trotting towards her down the still-empty yellow-brick roads.

“Morning, Fri,” Antony whispered, wrapping her in a bone-shattering hug. Over six feet tall and muscular with it, Antony had been awarded Most Likely to Break Your Ribs in a Hug at the staff Christmas party four years in a row. Frida inhaled his scent of laundry powder and mint as he squished her to him, feeling the customary tickle of his perfectly groomed beard against her cheek.

‘Ant, you fool. Look at her, she’s filthy!’ Hamish exclaimed at a safe distance in their Glaswegian drawl, scooting handily out of the way as Antony attempted to gather them up as well. ‘Not a fucking chance.’

‘Oh shit, sorry.’ Frida guiltily pulled away and looked ruefully at the patch of dung that she had, unwittingly, imprinted like a Rorschach test onto Antony’s Forest-green shirt. Darting a look at herself in one of the Ground Control windows, she winced. Hamish was right: her pale face was streaked with faeces, so much so that she could barely see her freckles, and her mousy braid was barely hanging on by its hinges.

Hamish gingerly plucked at a particularly pungent piece of shit caked in her braid-not-a-braid, and quirked a deadpan, dusty blond eyebrow at her. Rosy-skinned and willowy, Hamish was a fabulous violet-wigged drag artist in the back alleys of Melody at night, very handy with a shovel by day, and they never got dung on their uniform if they could help it. ‘My love, did you really get into a fight with the grootnecks again?’ they asked dryly. ‘We haven’t even had our coffee yet. Although . . .’ They dramatically wrinkled their nose, sniffing her. ‘Smells more like eau de unicorn, don’t you think Ant?’

Antony looked as though he thought they’d both lost their minds. ‘Are we really talking about dung right now?’ he exclaimed, his face breaking into a dimpled grin so wide, it reached his adorable bucket ears. ‘Today of all days?’

Frida was furiously attempting to rub at his shirt, only succeeding in smearing an even greater circumference of dung. Antony was a soft-spoken, humble, too-kind-for-his-own-good Black Jamaican-Londoner who loved two things with absolute fervour: his friends, and anything containing chlorophyll. Like Frida, he’d moved with his family to Melody to become a zookeeper. Five years ago, on the first day of their Training Programme, she’d been sat at a table on her own, and he’d come up and quietly offered her his blueberry muffin. In week two, Antony had saved Hamish from being attacked by an angry hangfern, and the rest was history.

Frida rolled her tattooed shoulders, hearing the satisfying crack. Fireheart’s wrinkled terracotta tail curled down her right arm, a salubrious pink ghost-lynx on her left. On her knees, grunkles danced, storm monkeys struck lightning down her ribs, and Issy the baby unicorn cavorted over her hands. Gorgonzola, Gouda and Gruyere, the LEZ’s trio of grey-horned grootnecks, were on her neck and the deliciously ghastly visage of the Nuckelavee, the thousand-year-old Orcadian seahorse demon from hell, was on her left shin. Michael the phoenix lit the other leg, snuggling up to his beloved thunderbird Fran.

She grinned up at Antony. ‘The dragon’s coming today.’

Antony’s answering chuckle was a low rumble. ‘Your dragon’s finally coming.’

Even Hamish, leaning laconically against the wall, couldn’t help their lips from quirking.

It wasn’t really Frida’s dragon, of course. But Frida had been waiting for this moment since she’d been six years old. No new dragon had come to the LEZ for a long time. The last had been in the 1930s, when a string of acquisitions had ended in a very public tragedy, and three sea dragons had died within a month of each other. Everyone knew there were only eighty-six documented dragons left in the wild, and only fifteen in captivity in the network of Extraordinary Zoos around the world. Frida had simply assumed that Fireheart, who lived in Sky, was destined to be the only dragon in Melody forever.

Until – everything changed.

Three months ago, Cliff Anderson, the Head Keeper of Forest, had told them the news: a young tree-dwelling dragon had been rescued in Bolivia, and, with much public fanfare, the LEZ had acquired him. Today was the day Frida had been waiting for since she’d been given her LEZ baseball cap and green Forest uniform, since her mum pointed at the TV and said, Look Friduska, D-R-A-G-O-N. They’re real you know, wings, fire-breath and all.

Her mum.