Page 54 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

Too close. They were too close.

When Dian finally dropped her hand, it was almost a relief. She came back to herself, panting, as the glittering veil collapsed and the colours muted, the sounds of the wind and the trees and the crunch of gravel beneath her boots jarring painfully. She tried to remind herself that Dian was Dian, and the last thing she wanted was to be any closer to their unearthly magic. But she couldn’t help feeling completely lost at the same time, as if she’d just seen the world as it was meant to be, and this harsh real thing was a hard substitute.

‘Oh, thank goodness,’ Moth’s silken thready voice jerked her back, and Frida could have hugged him. She realised the spider was perched on her left shoulder, rubbing his glittering pedipalps as if to shake off the rain from his fur. ‘I don’t know why fairy magic has to be so showy,’ he groused into Frida’s ear, finishing with a knowing purr, ‘It’s damned hard to think through all that glitter, don’t you agree?’

Frida’s ears went pink. ‘Uh huh.’ Quickly, she focused on looking around and gathering her wits. Miraculously, her clothes were dry.

Moth chuckled.

They were under the boughs of a small grove of ash trees. They couldn’t have come too far, she thought, for it hadn’t been like the first time when Dian had seemed to whip them from A to B with a blink. Turning, she saw some sprawling wooden buildings not too far away and guessed those were the stables. Behind them, in the gloaming – for it was dusk now, the air grainy with the dying sunlight – she felt a raw feeling in her chest as she saw the creamy shape of a big unmistakable house lower down in the valley.

‘Forge House,’ she whispered, awed. ‘You did it, Dian.’

Dian, however, wasn’t listening. They were angled away, their body arched as if their limbs had locked, their head turned towards something through the trees that Frida couldn’t see. Dian’s ears swivelled rapidly as Frida tried to catch a glimpse through the foliage too, but all she could see was green, opaque in the fading light.

‘What is it?’ she asked, suddenly queasy.

Dian ignored her, instead pushing past and hurrying down a small winding path.

‘Hurry Frida Rose,’ Moth called, bobbing on Dian’s shoulder.

With no other choice, she chased after them, her heart sounding in her throat, even though she didn’t know why. Within moments, the air started to feel wrong, and it wasn’t just the transition from sparkling raindrops back to reality. She should have been able to hear birdsong, the sound of rodents rustling, bees buzzing in the heavily laden summer trees. But there was nothing. Only silence.

Then, as if the trees suddenly remembered their own power, the boughs pulled back and sound rushed in all at once.

That’s when she heard a low terrible keening, recognisable in any language.

Chapter Thirty

‘Oh no,’ she heard Moth exclaim, his beautiful tiny voice mirthless for the first time, simply repeating over and over. ‘Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.’

Frida stumbled after them, out into the dusk on the other side of the grove.

She wished she’d stayed in the ash trees.

She wished she’d turned in the other direction and run as fast as she could.

They stood at the edge of a big, manicured lawn, enclosed by tall yew hedges which looked ridiculously familiar, and elegantly arranged flower beds. Splashes of colour, still visible in the vanishing sun: marigolds, blue and pink hydrangeas, the sharp flare of roses.

Filling up about half the garden was a cage, made of tightly woven iron bars, probably no bigger than forty metres across and thirty long. Far too small to hold any creature that might have once sheltered in the wooden structure collapsing within it. The cage was a wasteland: the splintered edges of the shelter, the blackened stumps of dead trees, the earth churned up, the air drifting with sooty flakes of ash. The smoke was so thick it was hard to see anything, as if a fire had raged through mere moments before, and all of it saturated with that continuous, metallic keening, like pain personified, coming from somewhere amidst the smoke.

Ten years ago, her tour guide at Forge House had recounted how each habitat had been designed with perfect care, collaborations between the creative Beaufort sisters and the architect William Dryfus. She felt sick. A familiar rancid smell wafted towards her that she knew in her DNA: sulphur, rotten eggs. She was just a few yards from the fence now. The odour stuck in her nostrils, clouding her brain. She took another dizzying step closer and suddenly it felt as if a vice had wrapped around her skull.

She let out a cry as her vision blurred. She grabbed her head with both hands, pain howling through her. It felt so similar to how her headaches had materialised at the LEZ that she swayed, memories of the remembered pain slamming into her until she couldn’t distinguish past from present. Desperately, she struggled to look around, searching for Dian. She found them a few feet away, fallen on their hands and knees, moaning into the grass. Frida gasped, her pain receding at the sight of theirs.

‘Dian!’ she cried, stumbling over. ‘Are you ok?’

‘It hurts,’ they whispered.

For a moment, Frida was confused. Not able to understand why Dian was also in pain. But then Fireheart’s words came back to her, all of a sudden. Can’t you feel it, zookeeper? Can’t you feel the way your magic shrinks from it, whimpers in pain.

Frida hadn’t known what Fireheart had been talking about. But as she stared at Dian’s ashen face, and saw the swirling terror in their eyes as they looked at the fence. . .

Oh god.

And then Frida heard it, threaded amongst the inescapable keening coming from within the smoke. She would have recognised it anywhere. Not the keening – she’d never heard anything like that in her life before – but the low hum in the air. She’d heard and felt it on every enclosure she’d ever entered. There was nothing good about that hum now though, nothing reassuring about that miraculous feeling of safety as her headache spasmed again. Helplessly, she tried to recall what had happened in the LEZ. When she’d first registered this pain.

‘The Noz’s enclosure,’ she whispered. That’s when she’d felt it first. Then Raziel’s, Lucky’s – even the library which, because of its proximity to Level 8s, was one of the most warded places in the LEZ. She remembered the wards flickering on and off in Ocean, her headache flickering with them.