Page 99 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

They rested on a carpet of dewdrop leaves and the yellow bells of daffodils. As if the trees themselves had carried them here and laid them amongst the rest for safekeeping. She stared up at the thorny storm of branches above. She wasn’t afraid. This wood was a galaxy, brimming with every kind of brightness and darkness, and her friends as much a part of it as that oak tree over there holding up the sign. She could almost feel the power of the dreams wafting off them, wrapping around and around like the ribbons on a maypole.

‘It’s not the same,’ Lucky murmured from where she’d left him, over by the grass.

After giving Antony and Hamish a kiss on both their cheeks, she returned to Lucky.

‘What’s that, love?’

He sighed, peering at her from where his head lay on his paws. A new heaviness weighed him down, as if the grief had settled into his young bones, his paws sinking profoundly into the soil. ‘You said it was the same,’ he told her. ‘But it’s not. Because we are not the same.’

His words coiled around her.

We are not the same.

No. He was right.

All around her the wood teemed, an orchestra of snores and babbling breath. With complicated feelings, she ran a finger along the sleeve of her shirt, streaked with dirt from a thousand worlds. Then she traced the lines of her tattoos, understanding that each one was magic. Not of capture and ownership, but of love. The grootnecks, the slug, Issy. The rose on her wrist, shining brightly in the plum light of Lucky’s scales. Dian had been right: nothing was just a picture.

Then she raised her hands to her face. She couldn’t see, but she knew that her eyes were blazing violet. She gave a low, sad laugh. ‘No, we’re not the same at all.’

Lucky mumbled something about the small brains of humans, and she gave him a tight hug. When she pulled away, her eyes fell to the yellow cobbles beneath her. She’d once thought them the very essence of whimsy. She couldn’t have pictured a future without them. Now, she saw the road for what it was: staged. The thinnest illusion. But the roses that Dian had conjured? She touched one of them. The petals felt like velvet. It felt more real than anything. Somewhere, she caught the scent of a long-ago memory of moss and the afterglow of rain.

Dian.

They hadn’t told her their name. They hadn’t trusted her enough to do that. She knew that. She knew she had no way to help them. But something in her heart leapt when she saw the velvety petals of those roses. They hadn’t trusted her, but they’d still made this incredible forest of roses, just for her.

‘Lucky,’ she said, trying to steady the pounding rhythm of her blood. ‘Will you be alright staying here for a bit? I’ll try not to be too long.’

Lucky had already curled up, the oak trees lifting their branches to make room for him. Waving her away with his left wing, he snuggled down and settled in amongst the other sleepers. Those strange embers floated around him – pink, she suddenly realised – drifting on an unseen wind.

Hope blazed inside her.

Dian. Maybe, after all this, they had left her something. Some clue as to what to do. Something she’d missed before, but that they’d known she – the Frida that she was now – would be able to find. Something, like the roses, that were just for her. She approached the wood, seeing immediately that it had bedded down, an impenetrable knot over the hillside fathoms deep. She had no idea how she would get through, but as she moved towards that hallowed darkness, she was surprised when the first boughs lifted tentatively. She spun, thinking that Lucky must have come with her. But no, there he was, his snores and dragon dreams already mingling with the others. The trees gave a low swishing sound and when she looked back, they’d raised their tawny branches a bit more. Heart-shaped leaves of all colours. Frosted greys and emeralds, red summer fruits and autumn’s fiery russets.

Come on then, they seemed to say. You want in?

For a moment, she just stood there, on those liminal edges. She took in the hulking shapes of the rugged trunks, their ageless branches stretching up, up, up. The sentinels of ancient beech trees. Ash, drooping willow, birch and chestnut, trunks mingling with hues of sapphire, leaves radiating a soft luminescence. No light filtered through the canopy yet beams of iridescent colours danced on the forest floor. The air should have been alive with the purr of unseen wings. Robins, tits, and woodpeckers should have been flitting from branch to branch, butterflies and moths pirouetting. But it seemed they were asleep too.

The hairs on her arms rose. Here we go, she thought to herself. Then she slipped inside. The branches didn’t part for her as they might have done for Lucky, but they lifted enough for her to squeeze through, occasionally scratching her cheek with a thorn or catching her hair. Primroses scattered like pale yellow stars, adders and slow worms slept in patches of shadow. The little streams tinkled but the bustle of life was dimmed: no pond-skaters, no dragonflies. A blackbird should have warbled, woodpigeons cooed.

It was almost like the world of Dian’s pool.

A dreamworld.

Caps of fungi splayed out, an ocean of blues and oranges.

She followed them breathlessly, thinking of Antony, who would have loved this so much he would have been having palpitations. And Hamish, at Antony’s side with their brand-new mushroom collecting sack. For a split second, for the first time in her life, she was jealous of them. The feeling was so sharp and unexpected, she had to stop, disoriented in the darkness and still drifting embers. She wasn’t jealous of them – she wished her friends nothing but joy. But that’s when she realised that for a teeny tiny moment, she’d also looked into someone else’s gorgeous, infuriating, baffling face – a face that didn’t belong to a unicorn, or a street cat, or a ghost-lynx – and seen somewhat she might want to welcome into her life.

And then they’d left, without even saying goodbye. All around her, cobwebs laced the darkness and as the memory of raindrops sparkled whenever she closed her eyes, she had a terrible thought that maybe this wood was their goodbye.

That’s when she started to run, going as fast as she could up the slope, pushing through thorny vines and labyrinthine roots, not caring if she hurt herself. Far below her feet, she tried to imagine her mum making an ice-cream cake or reading a dense book about merpeople and, before she knew it, she started to feel the slope levelling out.

The meadow had been swallowed by a grove of brambles. For a moment she had to pull up short, her breath ripped away from her at the magnitude of it. But then the brambles started to lift, just a tiny bit, as the trees had done, and she launched into movement again, slithering forwards, determinedly brushing aside the sharp bite of the thorns. When she almost tripped over a charred branch, her brain went into hyperdrive.

‘Dian!’ she cried.

There was an ashen, faintly bitter scent on the air. The scent of decay. Dread ratcheting up, she forced her way through the final thickets and emerged into a patch of wild grasses so tall, they reached her chest. Lifting her eyes, she found herself in a cave, made from the shipwrecked carcass of the Hawthorn and wreathed in ivy. The roof blended together to create a deep, impenetrable black. The air seemed thickened with the gaps between stars and, as Frida proceeded, those embers flared. Like fireflies. Like starfire. Gathering wild and thick around the broken, devastated shape of the tree.

The hawthorn, from whose roots Dian had been born.