Page 20 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

She could hear them, giggling through the trees.

‘Come on, Fri,’ Antony called. ‘You’re missing it!’

‘Last one to the top buys the next round at the Crown!’

Frida burst through the thickets, her breath ragged. Still trying the ineffectual radio, fumbling too with her phone with her other hand, but for the first time in her life at the zoo, she had no signal. With a wail of despair, she cried out after her friends. ‘Please! Come back!’

There were so many berries and flowers, it was as if someone had scattered gems across the forest floor. All the perfect yellow cobbles had been swallowed, turned into a jungle. Impossibly tall ferns bit her cheeks; brambles whipped past her. Frida heard more robins warbling, she heard the rush of tiny birds’ wings, the scuffling of small creatures. A fluffy white rabbit hopped happily along beside her.

‘It smells of spring!’ Hamish crowed.

‘And winter and summer and autumn, all at once!’ Antony called back, distant and dreamlike.

‘Please wait!’ Frida shouted. But their voices had faded, leaving a profound and chilling silence. The sense of the spaces between the stars bourgeoned, galactic. Her mind raced with horrific visions: Antony and Hamish with a thousand bloody thorns through their chests, strung up from the Hawthorn with their veins slit, blood dripping into a cup as a fairy danced, singing, around their corpses. She’d forgotten she held her phone in her hand, forgotten everything apart from this, apart from the knowledge that this was all her fault.

Please. Please no.

She pounded over the mossy ground, pushing the creepers and ivy out of the way, the brambles and thorns until finally, oh god finally, she felt the ground start to level out, and she burst out of the trees at the top of the hill with nothing but a sense of doom lodged in her throat and an ice-cold fear in her heart.

Chapter Twelve

When she found the two of them sitting side by side in the meadow making daisy-chains, all the swearwords Hamish had ever taught her exploded from her lips.

They only giggled, and Antony tried to hand her a lapful of daisies.

‘Come on, do you want to help?’

‘No,’ she moaned, grabbing their arms to pull them up. ‘We’re leaving, right now.’

‘Killjoy,’ Hamish muttered out of the side of their mouth, although they patted her hand fondly. ‘Just like when she tries to stop us going on the rollercoaster.’

She was going to kill them. Literally kill them if the fairy didn’t get there first. ‘That rollercoaster will be the death of you,’ she said through gritted teeth. The Kraken’s Rift was on Melody’s pier, and it consistently failed its safety checks.

But then her eyes lifted, and she drew in a sharp breath.

‘Oh my god,’ she whispered, as all other thoughts whooshed out of her. Everything Lucky said was true. The Coffin was shattered. The Hawthorn, her mum’s beloved Hawthorn, looked dead! The tree’s burnt canopy lay in ragged pieces as if it had been attacked with an axe and set on fire. A chill seized her spine, and suddenly she couldn’t stop shaking. Unconsciously she raised a hand to her head. For the first time, she really understood that she’d been hit by lightning too. As she stared at the brutal crack down the centre of the Hawthorn’s trunk, she felt like she was right back in the raging storm, thunder and lightning shattering her all over again. She couldn’t see any green-haired fairies, but the smoky stench of scorched firewood was overwhelming. The air felt as if it was sizzling, tight with the uncanny scent of spaces between the stars. An odd, silvery sort of glitter that left pink shadows on the backs of Frida’s eyelids danced just outside of her vision. She blinked a few times. The tree was hard to look at for too long. It was like looking at someone’s innards. And yet, she couldn’t look away.

‘Are you seeing this?’ she said under her breath.

But when she turned, her friends were singing a little song together, laughing as if someone was about to whip out a picnic basket filled with waffles. She was in a nightmare.

She turned back to the tree, unaware that she’d been moving towards it.

As if in a dream, she tried the radio, but once more all that came back was static.

She raised her hands, and that strange glitter streamed through her fingers. It twinkled in the air, sparkled in the leaves of the trees, and danced along her palms.

Magic.

In her mind’s eye, she saw Lucky say the word, his sweet high-pitched chirp, and suddenly it felt as if she was back in the mist, golden smoke rippling around her, a chasm threating to open beneath her feet. Magic. Nobody spoke of magic anymore. It had gone out of fashion as the most magical creatures faded out of the world.

‘Frida?’

Frida jumped, giving a little shriek as her hand flew to her mouth.

She hadn’t realised she was almost at the centre of the meadow.

Someone was propped against the ravaged stump of the Hawthorn, nestled amongst the listing, lightning-scorched canopy.