Page 12 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

Frida felt dizzy, barking out a wild laugh. Irma, the LEZ’s head vet, would be furious. Tea spilled over samples was the kind of thing to send her into a bloodthirsty rampage.

‘We have to take more bloods before he wakes up. Can you be over here in ten minutes?’

Frida was already racing for the gate. ‘Yes!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m coming right now. Don’t do it without me. I’m coming!’

Sora laughed. ‘Copy that, Swan2.’

Frida had to run back, having forgotten to leave Raz’s food for her, wrapped up in little packages in the management area. She paused on her way out, her hand on the lock.

‘Bye Raz,’ she whispered, the pain in her head suddenly spectacular. There was no reply. Of course there wasn’t. Raz was a cat.

This job was going to be the death of her. She really needed to sleep through the night at some point. Frida left feeling more bewildered than ever, but she couldn’t dwell on it.

She had a dragon to meet.

Chapter Nine

Frida jumped back on her bike and headed for Dragon’s Deep. A number of times, she felt her hand drifting towards her phone, aching to talk to Antony and Hamish about what had just happened. But she’d left their chat on mute, not able to face another conversation about her needing a day in bed. Instead, she pushed the strange encounter out of her mind and, trying to breathe through another bout of dizziness, propped her bike against the wall of the unassuming cobbled courtyard where a grey door led to the heart of Dragon’s Deep. It was meant to be a secret, but secrets lasted as long as an unattended chocolate croissant in this place. The courtyard was packed with Extraordinaires, LEZ nerds dressed in sparkly merch, trying to peer through whatever notches in the soundproofed fencing they could find.

In her Forest uniform, she was spotted within seconds.

‘Has the dragon woken up yet?’ an eager enthusiast, wearing fake wings and a jaunty witch’s hat, demanded.

‘When can we see him?’ called another in full wizard’s robe and Gandalf beard.

‘What’s his name?’ a third coaxed, sporting a Lagarfljót Worm beanie.

Frida shook her head with regret. Basking in their attention, she felt like a minor celebrity. ‘I’m sorry,’ she exclaimed. ‘I’d lose my job if I told you!’ The word Lucky blazed through her, and she had to bite down on it with a grin. She was lucky. If she wasn’t wearing khaki, she’d be right there with them in a purple dragon onesie.

Sighs of disappointment followed her as she placed her thumb on the door’s security panel. She had to take a moment on the other side, steadying herself against the wall, her head spinning again. She wondered if she was about to faint. As long as you didn’t count last night, she’d never fainted in her life. She had the constitution of an ox. Once she’d eaten twelve tofu-dogs, washed them down with a chocolate cake and two bottles of wine, and run a marathon the next morning to raise money for the conservation of endangered green-tongued frootelies. She’d been fine.

But the scent that hit her as she moved through the labyrinth of corridors was enough to clear her dizziness. It registered in the deepest part of her memory, the smell of her childhood. It was countless hours, days, months, years, hanging outside Fireheart’s enclosure with her mum, just watching that terracotta miracle basking in the sand and sending smoke rings up into the skies. It was heat and sulphur and all her dreams wrapped into one scaly package.

When she pushed open the final door though, she blinked, momentarily blinded by something vivid and green, fluttering through her with the ephemerality of a hummingbird. Raz? She rubbed her eyes. No. Taking a few slow breaths, she grounded herself. Just the green of the jungle, locked behind a thick layer of heat- and power-resistant glass. Nothing cryptic about it, just the maze of palms and ferns, vines and banana leaves that she’d helped to plant.

‘Swan2!’

She grinned. Cliff looked incandescent. She stumbled towards him across the long, tarmacked avenue. This was the ‘behind the scenes’ of Dragon’s Deep, where they kept the bits no one was meant to see: the vet materials, the foods stores, the tool supplies. The air around her was thick – a heady, meaty conflagration of sweat, humidity and noxious sulphurous fumes.

‘All ok with Raz?’ Cliff asked as he towered over her.

On a normal day, she would have told him everything, spilling like an overturned teacup. But this wasn’t a normal day. She was just staring past him, unable to say much of anything past, ‘Gaaaahh.’

Cliff chuckled. ‘What did I tell you?’

Her mouth opened and closed. Purple.

He was so purple. Amidst the shifting, sun-blanched forest, she took in the purple of his forked tail. The four purple splayed-out legs, the two mammoth purple wings. A tapestry of every shade of purple ever imagined; aubergine, plum, violet, amethyst, mauve, lilac, wine, maroon. . . She was sure, in that moment, that even a lifetime of studying the colour purple could not prepare someone for its meaning – not until they saw him.

‘Oh. My. God,’ she whispered.

Cliff bobbed his head. ‘Isn’t he magnificent?’

Frida felt as if she might take off. Suddenly everything else was wiped away and all that mattered was this. ‘He’s resplendent! He’s dazzling. He’s beatific.’ She bit back tears. ‘Thank you.’ She didn’t think she’d ever meant two words as much.

Cliff’s beam grew. Then another zookeeper named Zuzka beckoned to Frida, and Cliff waved her away, returning to his personal reverie. Frida drifted over, unable to look anywhere but through the glass. Even sleeping, the dragon looked menacing. His tail, which twitched like a dog’s, was lined with razor-sharp spikes and was as long as a bus. His intricate scales gleamed, mother-of-pearl. His coal-black claws glinted in the sunlight, sharp enough to make her catch her breath. She couldn’t believe he was just a baby. Barely a hundred years old. Most dragons stayed with their fathers for the first two hundred years of their lives. Nobody had been able to find out what had happened to this dragon’s father.

Not for the first time, something cracked inside Frida at the thought.