Page 92 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

The congregation of creatures gazed back at her. It seemed the collapse of the world paused, just for a moment, and then the oak-supreme inclined their chin. The collective weight of the creatures began to subside, and she realised that they were starting to slip away. The pad of a wolf’s paw, the tick of a spider’s legs. The flutter of a robin’s wings. The gentle prose of the angel stag.

The urgent thud, thud of Lucky’s mismatched wings, turning through the soil and the darkness.

The fairies were the last to fade, their edges crumbling like the earth beneath her feet. Frida reached out a hand and touched the oak-supreme’s arm, shivering as her fingers grazed the pale mycelium threads. Soft as angel hair.

‘Will you fight?’ she whispered. ‘Will you stay and fight?’

The oak-supreme tilted their head, and their lips, smooth and dark as an oak tree’s core, lifted into a sad, twisted smile. ‘Would you, Frida Rose? If you were us?’

Frida’s chest tightened. She shook her head helplessly. ‘I don’t know.’

The oak-supreme bowed their head. Was this the way the fairies would disappear from the world then, fading gracefully into mist? They were almost all washed away when Frida called after them into the ether and the roiling storm, ‘Please tell Dian . . .’

The oak-supreme hovered, on the cusp of being and not being.

She wanted to say she wished Dian had stayed, that she wished they’d had more time. She wanted to say that she ached to spend another few seconds at their side. She wanted to say thank you, to say that she was sorry, for everything that she’d done, and hadn’t done, and would do, and wouldn’t do. She wanted to say that she missed them already. That she—

Fuck.

In the end, she just smiled through her tears and said, ‘Tell them to keep the dragon’s heart safe, if they can.’

With a distant expression, the oak-supreme nodded. And then, like the rest, they were gone. In the far distance, Frida could still see the outline of the house, but it was hazy, just like everything else. There was more emptiness than not. But there were stars blooming in the darkness below her now, as if infinite galaxies twinkled just out of reach. The only sounds were the heavy thud of soil as Lucky dug, and the breathy gasp of his labours. A high-pitched chirping filled her heart, although she heard his fear too, stark as a fox’s scream. She raced for his mountainous body.

He was already beginning to sink, his golden eyes flaring with relief to see her. But in the depths beneath, she saw the broken silhouettes of trees. She saw dead and empty fields, a million streams, their water choked. She saw men in uniforms marching into the distance with guns on their backs, the explosion of bombs, the crumbling of entire cities. She saw parched and ravaged landscapes, stretching for eternity.

A billion broken roots. A billion broken hearts.

‘Little stink! Come on!’

Swirls of Lucky’s magic, the purple fire of his soul, flickered weakly as his wings trembled with exhaustion. She took short, ragged breaths that tasted of rotten, foetid earth. She just managed to stop herself from falling, wrenching herself away from that oblivion. Then she took a flying leap, landing with an oomph against his mud-slick scales.

Crawling frantically, she eventually tumbled into the dip at the base of his shoulders.

‘I missed you so much Lucky,’ she cried, pressing herself to him.

‘I missed you too, little stink,’ Lucky whispered back.

The two of them stared, marvelling, into the dark starry depths below. A single crack of silver lightning lit up the world for a split second. Then, like a frozen lake splintering, the entire ground beneath Lucky’s paws disappeared and they fell through the fabric of the earth.

PART FOUR

Chapter Fifty

The last time Frida and Lucky had plunged headfirst through time, she’d been unconscious. This time, it was reminiscent of her experience of the Kraken’s Rift on Melody’s pier. Frida almost bit half her tongue off as they spiralled. Stars whizzed by like fireballs, and in the opaque darkness, pockets of time opened up around them.

Memories. Floating like bubbles in the black soil.

The time when Frida took her first step.

The time when she and her mum had made that ice cream cake and it had melted all over the sofa.

The time when she’d first met Antony and Hamish.

All of it whooshed past and she cried out, desperately trying to reach for them, to grasp those moments which seemed to be happening all at once and all together. But they were being pulled downwards. Pocket after pocket, time after time tumbled by, as if they were being dragged deeper and deeper by some gargantuan beast. The time when Moira the manticore had tried to snap her hand off. The time when her mum had cried when she’d heard that David Bowie had died. The time when she first saw the golden LEZ Gates. There were other worlds too, worlds that weren’t hers, that she was given glimpses of. Hamish, no older than eight sitting on a doorstep alone, crying. Raziel, curled up on a teal velvet sofa being fed sugar cubes. Lucky chasing capybaras. Her mum as a teenager on the shore of a lake, with wild blue hair and piercings. A man Frida didn’t know stepping off a ten-storey roof and tumbling, end over end, onto the tarmac. She screamed when she saw that, her throat burning, as tears ran down her cheeks. And there was the terracotta dragon, bursting through the cloud on wings of scarlet.

Deep soil and water, sky and fire, everything, everything and nothing. She breathed it in with great gulping breaths, all that time and earth and life and death and love and loss and magic. And her heart ached as she stretched her fingers towards the ones she most yearned for, not quite able to reach them.

She didn’t feel the bump coming.