Page 24 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

What Level was Dozy, she wondered.

She needed to find Cliff. NOW.

With a final blistering curse at the fairy, she hurried back to her friends. They were buried in a thicket of forget-me-nots, tiny flowers caught in their hair and in Antony’s beard. Some foolish part of her thought that if she could just tidy them up, everything would be ok. She straightened Antony’s collar, placed Hamish’s fallen cap back on their head, brushed off a bit of mud from Hamish’s shirt. But as her hand lingered on their chests, feeling the slow rise and fall, she knew they weren’t going to wake up.

Like the fairy, they were asleep.

The canopy had shut out the sun completely.

She let herself drink in the sight of her friends one last time. Antony’s dark lashes, the faint furrow between his perfect brows, the single dimple that suggested he was smiling, even as he slept. Mish’s cheekbones were flushed, the bronze line of eyeshadow set off against a blue stain of mushroom feed on their neck. They were curled together with a tenderness they’d never usually allow unless off their faces on whiskey or, it seemed, fairy magic.

She raised her face to the Hawthorn’s broken canopy, which looked luminous around its charred edges, a terrifying beacon in the dark.

Then she started to run.

PART TWO

Chapter Fourteen

When Frida reached the dark, churning border of brambles that marked the treeline, she had to steel herself against a rush of vertigo. There was just a sheer wall of foliage before her, and it gave her the distinct feeling she’d been trapped inside a gigantic green and thorny baked Alaska. But on the other side, she was certain that Cliff and the others would be waiting for her. Maybe Gloria would be there too. Cliff on his own could fix anything, but the two of them together? If they stopped arguing for a hot minute, they’d be unstoppable.

She plunged into the wood.

Antony and Hamish were depending on her.

The viscous shadows thronged with uncanny power.

Down she went, down, down, down. No path, no comforting lights to mark her way. Jagged thorns ripped her sleeves, tangled undergrowth caught on her hair, chillingly animate branches ripped at her cap. Sometimes she walked, sometimes she crawled, sometimes she slithered, cursing furiously. This wasn’t the wood of the Hawthorn. This wasn’t Forest’s wood. This was a fairy’s wood. and it felt like an age before the ground finally began to level out and she saw the gleam of warm lamplight peeking through the pitch-dark twisted tree trunks.

With a burst of speed, she forced her way between the final thickets. The release made her cartwheel her arms. She’d just managed to steady herself, hope rippling through her, already hearing Cliff’s exultant boom, her fellow keepers’ shouts, Management and a full SWAT team armed with portable wards, machetes, axes, firearms . . .

A cry of joy and relief hovered on her lips.

Then her eyes lifted.

Hope died bitterly, instantly. There was no Cliff, no Management, no acerbic Gloria. No one was there at all to gather her into their arms.

Only bodies.

She looked around, aghast.

There were bodies everywhere. Along the road, in the grass, on the verges, under the oaks. So many multicoloured uniforms, and yet they all looked sickeningly monochromatic in the glutinous, oozing shadows. She understood the scope of it, all in a split second, the thunderous boom making her head ring.

It was a fairytale.

‘And this sleep fell upon the whole castle,’ she quoted, her blood ice-cold. ‘The king and queen fell fast asleep, and with them the whole court.’

She didn’t need to feel their pulses. Together with Antony and Hamish – her king and queen – this court was fast asleep.

Gone, Dozy had said. Is this what they’d meant? Everyone gone to sleep, everyone apart from her. Worse, far worse was what she saw when she raised her head.

‘A forest of thorns, like to be her tomb,’ she murmured numbly.

She let out a half-gasp, half-sob. The irony was that Antony, who loved anything that grew, anything green and rooty and alive, would have loved this. She couldn’t see the sky. She was entombed. She should have been able to see the golden wall of the LEZ, topped with warded barbed wire and a constant patrol of brown-uniformed guards. She should have heard those guards’ footsteps, their voices as they chatted about what they were having for dinner, what was the new hot gossip on the block. But the wood had engulfed them too, interring them in holly and ivy. Her eyes trailed upwards, struggling to make sense of the height. So many trees, like giants rising. They climbed, branch over branch, bough over bough, until they met in the middle far above her, the scale of it making a screeching thunderous howl in her head.

‘Dozy.’ She caught her breath. ‘What have you done?’

This fairy wasn’t a Level 8; they were a Level 8000. Even wounded, they’d broken the wards – maybe all the wards! She imagined the LEZ being taken apart bit by bit. She could feel the branches tightening around her. By rights, the air should have been full of panicked bellows – the shrieks of the leshies, the howls of the slippery-nosed hangferns, the manticore’s roars. But the only sounds were the churning earth, the screaming boughs, the hissing of more leaves than the universe held stars, and the awful multidimensional snores of her friends.