Page 41 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

And yet, her eyes dropped to where Melody should have been. Instead, what she saw was a small village nestled in a nook between two rolling hillsides, a sparkling river meandering down to meet the sea. There was a long dirt track, and she could just make out a horsedrawn cart trundling towards the ocean.

‘Lucky,’ she said, her voice dangerously low.

He’d cocked his head and was watching her with eagerness. Those blasted dragonflies twinkling around his face. ‘Do you understand, little stink?’

She sagged, her knees turning to jelly. Either this was a parallel universe, or . . .

‘Did you actually burrow through time?’ she whispered. Saying it out loud, oh sweet shrimps. But they were definitely not in the LEZ, and there below was vintage Melody-Upon-Sea: a sleepy seaside town with no tourist coaches, no blinding multi-coloured arcades, no wind farm, no Italian restaurant with legendary ice-cream. No LEZ. Just cobbled streets and horsedrawn carts.

Desperately, she fumbled for her phone, but then she realised she’d left it behind, discarded it right before they’d swan-dived through the earth. Swan-dived through time!

‘Yes, little stink!’ Lucky wagged his tail encouragingly. ‘I knew you’d understand. It really is an adventure, isn’t it?’ He looked around, his eyes wide with exhilaration. ‘Dada told me what to do, and he promised you’d be ok, but I wasn’t sure. I’ve never done such a thing, and I don’t know if any human has either. It is very very dangerous for you to travel the dragon paths.’

Frida could only gawp at him.

You need to go back to the beginning.

Suddenly, the little postcard pinned to her bedroom wall of Forge House came back to her, and her head swum. She’d had no idea what Fireheart had meant, but . . . She gazed up at Lucky, comprehension and excitement dawning. If those were truly GGG dragonflies, flitting around his head, then they must be at least two hundred years in the past. That would fit with the horse drawn carts – it all looked very Jane Austen.

She gazed across the sea.

Where had Fireheart been in the 1800s? Somewhere out there?

Or . . . slowly, Frida turned to look back in the other direction, across the rolling hills, peopled with the occasional little coils of chimney smoke, green swathes of woodland, patchworks of fields, and a blue-grey blur of mist on the far distant horizon. Her mind seemed to blaze with sunbeams.

You need to go back to the beginning.

What beginning?

She was standing where the LEZ should have been. But the LEZ wasn’t here. It was far over that horizon, in a mansion house made of creamy stone. Forge House. Fireheart had been brought there in 1835, which fit the horsedrawn carts perfectly. Maybe the Jewel had been broken during her capture, but if the old dragon had managed to keep it with her, it might have ended up there somewhere, hidden, at Forge House. It was a beginning, anyway.

If she was wrong . . .

She didn’t want to be wrong.

‘There.’ Frida pointed inland, towards that distant, smoky horizon.

Lucky’s reaction made her want to leap for joy. ‘Clever little stink!’ he crowed as he bounced on his front legs, the impossible dragonflies zipping around him. When he flapped his wings, a sulphurous wind lifted the braid from Frida’s neck. ‘Get on my back, little stink! We’ll go right now!’

He was already wriggling backwards to get more distance between him and the edge of the cliff. Seagulls wheeled above, squawking in alarm. And . . . were those bloobodecks she could see, swooping through the air currents? Bloobodecks had survived a bit longer than the dragonflies, and it was still possible to find them in the wildest of places, if you were lucky. But she’d never seen one. Local historians said they used to nest in the cliffs around Melody. The unmistakable translucent sheen of their bodies rippled as they shrieked their indignation at being disturbed. Part water, part air, and a great deal of feathers, the tiny creatures swooped in and out of the holes they’d made in the cliffs. Frida didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

‘Lucky,’ she gasped, ‘are you going to fly?’

‘OH YES!’ His shout of exultation sent even more animals scattering and Frida’s head swam with the squeals of the bloobodecks, the droning purr of the dragonflies, and the cloying scent of sulphur as Lucky beat his wings harder.

‘Have you done this before?!’

He was propelling himself in lopsided circles.

He panted, ‘Yes!’ Then he amended, ‘A few times. Only once. But it’s not hard! Dada said I was very, very good.’

Frida paled, but before she could do anything, Lucky unceremoniously scooped her up by the back of her shirt, grabbing on with his teeth, and dumped her between his shoulders with an ungainly thud. Drool dribbling down her back, she was too shocked to squeal. She just clung on as he took a running leap towards the cliff edge.

Bloobodecks, dragonflies and seagulls scattered in their wake.

When he began to plummet, she finally found her voice, but the wind whipped the screams from her lips as they dropped like a stone towards the pebbly beach below.

Chapter Twenty-Five