Page 76 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

She fought the darkness.

Someone was close to her. Their breath smelled of champagne and cigars. Something perfumed. Sandalwood and citrus. Their salty skin was warm as they touched her face. She tried to fight them, but they held her head like a vice. She couldn’t open her eyes. Panic rose and broke, waves against the rocks. Somewhere she heard the low concerned voice of someone else, a cat perhaps, a dry whiskery whisper, and she wanted to cry out to them, beg them to help her. But then they faded again, smoke on the breeze, and she could have wept.

‘Would you hazard a guess as to what species it is?’ The voice was deep, smooth and melodic, pouring out like aged whiskey.

‘I couldn’t say.’ Tobacco and sweat. She knew that smell, registering with visceral fear. Knew the voice too, dry as sandpaper. But even though she flinched away, she was more afraid of the other voice. With its melodic sureness, it made her skin crawl.

‘Some kind of demon, I would hazard.’

‘Oh yes. On the surface it looks like a girl, but that’s a trick, I think. See the way it glows?’

‘Yes, Charles. Yes indeed. We must be careful.’

The man who’d cracked her skull open, the wiry muscular man from the Forge, was called Charles then. She didn’t know who the other person was though.

‘Look at these inkings.’ Somewhere, at a great distance, she felt her left arm being lifted. She wanted to howl. ‘Never seen anything like it. It looks like one of those savages.’

‘It does. A real barbarian.’ The melodic voice paused. There was a steady tapping, like fingers drumming on wood. ‘I wonder if there’s power in those tattoos, if that’s what they are. I must look it up, mayhap someone has written about such a phenomenon. I’ve never heard of it myself though. In time, we might want to take some of these off to give to Henry to study. Then we’d be able to see how much extraordinary they contain.’

‘No!’ Frida managed to cry, forcing the word through her gummy lips. ‘No,’ she mumbled desperately. ‘No.’

‘It speaks, Charles!’

‘Yes, I did warn you.’

‘Most fascinating!’ The musical voice turned serious. ‘A demon indeed. What more has it said?’

‘Not much. I thought it could be another fairy in disguise at first, but I’ve never heard of a fairy speaking in plain English. Have you, Sir?’

Another fairy. Oh god. Another fairy. Had they found Dian?

‘No, indeed I have not heard of such a thing.’

‘Gives me the fear. Not like one of those other dumb beasts . . .’

She writhed at her invisible binds, but the darkness was sweeping her away again, and although she tried to fight it, screaming over and over in her head for them to let her go, when she woke up again, they were gone.

Everything was silent and for a long while she just lay curled in a ball, the ground cold beneath her. Everything hurt, not just her head. Her head was the worst. This made the headache she’d had back in the LEZ look like a walk in the park. Spikes were drilling into her skull, over and over, and for a time she just whimpered, her head cradled in her hands.

Breathe, Friduska, her mum’s voice seemed to say, from a long distance. Breathe.

She breathed.

Eventually, she was able to open her eyes and raise her head enough to look around.

She was in a cage.

Dian and Moth weren’t here and everything had a faint shine to it, a steely sheen that she recognised. The shine came from the metal bars, and from her. Just like those jars in the Old Forge. When she put her hand out, experimentally reaching towards the iron, she hissed and pulled back sharply. It felt like she’d just put her hand in flames.

She was in a warded cage.

And then the memory of those voices came back to her, and in a fog of panic, she started touching her arms, her legs, checking that they hadn’t taken her tattoos from her. Then – Dian. Dian and Moth. When she started to think about them, possibly also in a cage somewhere, she began to hyperventilate. The panic grew and grew like a kettle whistling on the hob, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

‘No,’ she hissed out through gritted teeth.

With a colossal effort, she wrestled her breathing under control.

Lowered her quaking hands from her ears.