Page 93 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

One moment, lost in the pockets and unspooling ribbons, clinging to Lucky.

Then – bump.

It didn’t hurt, per se, but it was a very big bump. It took her a long time to realise she was alive. For a while, she just lay there, on that spongy wet ground. One breath, two breaths, another minute, and she remembered what oxygen was. She rubbed her eyes. She blinked. She rubbed her eyes again and drew in a disbelieving gasp. Jungle everywhere, and not Dragon’s Deep jungle either. This was a green as far as she could see. This was a green that was wound through the fabric of the very atoms themselves. This was a green that contained multitudes. A cacophony of life and death, much like the spiralling galaxies they’d just plummeted through. This was real. This was not the LEZ.

All around her was the thunderous roar of insects, the cries of birds, the howls of jungle cats. The snuffling of a giant anteater, the ticking vociferous bellow of a colony of ants. The drone of mosquitos. The air was heavy, and thick steam twirled between the boughs. Sunlight blazed through the canopy of emerald that seemed to go on forever. A scarlet macaw flew overhead.

‘Little stink?’ Frida heard Lucky’s beloved chirp.

She spun, breaking into a huge smile. Lucky was lying behind her, nestled in a patch of slanting sunlight, his neck craning upwards as he, too, watched the macaw’s red wings arch across the sky. Peachy-bronze light played over his glassy scales. He had a blissful look in his saucer-like eyes, and a happy mauve blazed in his belly. She was about to throw her arms around him, so overjoyed was she to see him, when something moved in the bushes to their left. Both their heads snapped around, Frida drawing instinctively into Lucky’s chest. Quickly, he pressed his wings around her, pulling her close.

‘What’s that?’ she murmured, peering through his talons towards the undergrowth.

‘There are many scary things in forests.’ Then he paused, collecting himself. ‘But I am not afraid.’ Although he didn’t sound very sure of it.

‘Me neither,’ she said, gripping a dribble-coated strand of his beard in her fist and pressing herself even tighter into the freezing place beneath his neck, the leathery scales across his belly now a dull, terrified maroon. She could hear his heart like a booming drum. Then she heard the unmistakable padding of heavy paws coming towards them, and the massive trunks of prehistoric trees bowing backwards, as if asked to do so by a voice neither of them could hear. Then something – or someone – loomed out from behind the lianas, and for a moment, silver blazed across Frida’s eyeballs, blinding her.

‘DADA!!!!!’ Lucky shrieked.

Frida was nearly trampled as Lucky burst forward, galloping through the undergrowth, straight for a small, silver-scaled dragon. Her eyes widened in disbelief. This wasn’t a silver like Dian’s, or the corrupt silver of the LEZ. This dragon was a colour that seemed to belong in the brown soil itself, that ran in seams through the rock and earth, a molten primordial silver that coiled around her mind with talons and smoke.

The jungle seemed to go dim, and quiet.

Inches away from flattening him, Lucky pulled up short, his sides heaving. ‘Oh Dada,’ he whimpered. ‘I missed you so much.’ Great swollen tears welled in Lucky’s golden eyes.

Frida gulped down a sudden knot in her throat. ‘Your dada,’ she mouthed in wonder. How could that be possible? But even as she thought this, she looked around. They were in the Amazon. And this was Lucky’s father. Alive! She digested all of this as she marvelled at the silver dragon. He was a lot smaller than she’d expected, barely a third of the size of his son, smaller even than the terracotta dragon. Frida quaked in her boots to think how large Lucky’s muma must have been. But despite his size, a Godzilla-sized power oozed off him. She remembered the lightning above the woods, the leaden clouds, the silver stars that had seemed to drag them down, and down, and down, and she wondered.

‘My son.’ His voice was like Thor’s silver hammer, and his eyes were the same molten ore as Lucky’s.

Lucky let out a cry of joy, thrusting his adoring snout into his father’s chest, giggling like a desperate wild bird. ‘Dada!’ he chirped. ‘Oh Dada, I thought I’d never see you again.’

Lucky’s father chuckled, a deep rumble of a massive rock shifting below the earth. Gently, he nuzzled his son, as Frida tried to surreptitiously brush away her tears, but they’d been falling thick and fast. She was bone-tired. Overjoyed for Lucky, yet acutely aware of a stab of pain so sharp it felt like a broken rib. A fragment of her own loss, floating in her chest.

When the silver dragon turned his ancient, whiskered face towards her, she caught her breath. There were so many wrinkles around his scarred face, his eyes were almost wholly lost. He might have been older even than the terracotta dragon, she thought. But those golden slits weren’t marred by milk. They were sharp and fixed on Frida.

‘So,’ he murmured. ‘Here you are.’

Frida bowed clumsily. ‘Ah, hello, uh – most esteemed, venerable, dragon, sir.’

The crinkles around his eyelids deepened. He was Dragon-Gandalf.

Lucky righted himself and bounded over to Frida excitedly. ‘Little stink, this is my dada! I knew it was him all along, really. I was just pretending to be afraid!’

The silver dragon made a low growl in the back of his throat. It made the hairs on Frida’s neck rise and Lucky immediately looked mortified.

‘I’m sorry, that’s not true. I didn’t know it was you at all. And I was very afraid!’ He hung his head, peering down at them both adorably through long golden eyelashes.

The silver dragon shared a long-suffering look with Frida, making her heart swell as he dipped his snout into his big silver beard to hide his smile. ‘Babies are meant to try us, are they not?’

‘I’m not a baby, Dada!’ Lucky squealed.

His father inspected him with all seriousness. ‘Are you not? How strange. Are you sure?’ He made a big show of looking beneath Lucky’s armpits, between the cracks of his wings, within his scraggly beard. By the end, Lucky was giggling so riotously, a family of capybaras snuffling in the undergrowth had to turn and flee.

When the silver dragon stopped, Lucky lay panting in the leaves and the silver dragon turned his attention back to Frida. She tucked her hair nervously behind her ears – windswept was not the word for it now. It was more like space-and-time-swept. But when the silver dragon spoke, she forgot all about that. There was such sorrow in his golden eyes.

‘I think my son is right, he is not a baby.’

‘No,’ Frida said quietly. ‘His bravery has done you credit, sir.’