Page 22 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

She jerked her head back.

Their eyes sparkled with unshed tears. ‘You’re going to be really angry with me, I think.’ Her heart flipped over as they ran their unfathomable gaze over her face, over her tattoos where her sleeves had been rolled up, over her braid, wrestled as always into submission. Then down, across the chest of her uniform where the LEZ’s Leaping Unicorn logo was embroidered. She thought she saw a flicker of distaste. When they sank back into the ashen grass, their cheeks had flushed a faint plum colour, almost as if they were annoyed. At her. ‘Even though this was your idea,’ they grumbled.

The glitter seemed to be growing, buzzing in her ears. ‘I don’t understand!’ she exclaimed again.

‘You don’t, do you?’ They gave a low, gut-wrenching laugh. ‘How strange.’

She scanned their face in desperation, trying to find any clue as to what on earth they meant. ‘What is this?’ she begged. ‘What’s going on?’

But they just shook their head tiredly and sagged deeper. Was she imagining it, or was the grass around them growing? They gazed up at her with those deep, dark eyes that she imagined she might fall into. They were like forest pools, twinkling with bright stars. ‘Will you trust me?’

‘Trust you?’ she whispered.

‘I trust you.’ They laughed again, and this time it was like a thousand leaves swishing in the face of a coming storm. ‘Despite everything. Time’s funny like that, it seems. But you truly haven’t the faintest idea, do you?’ With one final anguished sigh, their head fell back against the shattered tree stump, and their eyelids fluttered closed.

Just as something unearthly started to rumble, deep below Frida’s feet.

Chapter Thirteen

‘Shit,’ Frida cried. ‘Shit, shit.’ She shook the fairy desperately, but they didn’t stir. Unconscious, or asleep. Or dying, she didn’t know. With a groan of despair, she lurched to her feet. ‘Hamish, Antony!’ She started running back towards them, leaving the fairy slumped against the tree stump. What else could she do? ‘It’s time to go!’

Antony and Hamish were splayed out on the grass pointing out cloud shapes in the sky, their bright polished nails glinting in the sun, senseless it seemed to the rumbling below their feet. The air felt tight, overstuffed, as if something was about to explode. The grass now whispered above her ankles, getting taller by the second.

‘Cliff, this is Frida!’ She tried the radio again and again. ‘Cliff, there’s a Code Red. I repeat, a Code Red at the bloody Hawthorn! Can you hear me?’

Suddenly, out of the static came a voice that made her heart flipflop, like she’d just been thrown a lifeline: ‘Can you repeat, Swan2? I didn’t quite hear.’

She let out a whoop. ‘Cliff! Oh my god, Cliff. You can hear me?’

‘. . . Yes . . . Not . . . Can you repeat?’

‘THERE’S A CODE. RED. AT. THE. TREE!’ she wailed.

Antony and Hamish were still cloud-spotting.

‘That one’s definitely more of a ten-trunked elephant, Ant . . .’ Hamish murmured, to Ant’s giggle, as if they couldn’t hear the approaching earth-deep thunder. ‘No, it’s a giant drinking coffee, can’t you see?’ Tears of frustration fell down her cheeks as she tried to drag them up, straining against their dead weight. It was as if she wasn’t even there.

The radio went in and out of static.

‘Swan2, can you . . . the situation . . . precisely where you are . . .’

She tried not to howl. ‘Cliff, there’s a fairy at the Hawthorn. The wards are gone. I repeat. There are no wards, and the Coffin is in pieces. The fairy has done something – I don’t know what. It feels. . .’ She drew in a gasp, her voice dipping with fear. The idea of saying the word magic out loud. . . she had to stay professional, but all she could do was gaze at the glittery power moving faster and faster, unspooling like watery ribbons. She had to blink because it was the most beautiful and terrifying thing she’d ever seen. Her hand shook on the radio.

‘Cliff, Antony and Hamish have been bewitched. I can’t move them. I don’t know what to do. Please, help me.’

‘Swan2 . . . don’t panic. . . bringing wards . . . on the way . . . retreat to a safe position. . .’

‘Cliff,’ she let out a gasp.

The radio went dead.

‘It’s magic,” Antony whispered.

She whipped her head around, but the word was out there. Antony had said it. Antony, a scientist who couldn’t even decide on an ice-cream flavour without making a spreadsheet. He was gazing in awe, double dimpled smile on full display, as he watched the glitter coiling ever higher. New shoots bursting out of the earth. Everywhere was the smell of heated metal. The bees were going bananas. Birds did loop-the-loops. Butterflies flocked in their thousands. Hamish’s eyes dilated as they pointed towards where she’d left the fairy, although there was no sign of them now amongst the tall grasses.

‘Your fairy did this,’ Hamish sighed dreamily, leaning their head against Antony’s shoulder and lightly touching the dark curls of his beard. ‘I love your soft beard, Ant. It’s so tidy. How do you do that?’ They looked up at him, as if he was the only person in the world, and there wasn’t glitter exploding out of every orifice of this clearing. ‘Do you comb it?’

Antony giggled. ‘Of course I do.’ He’d been making angel shapes out of the grass, but now he snuggled up against Hamish and his white teeth gleamed as he beamed. ‘Oh Mish, you make me giddy. Do you know that? Sometimes I just want to swoon.’