The Heart and the Hawthorn

Chapter One

The day it all went to shit, Frida Rose was knee-deep in unicorn dung. Not that this was unusual. She was, after all, a zookeeper and dung came with the territory. But contrary to popular belief, unicorns did not smell like freshly baked cinnamon buns. They smelled like . . . well, shit.

She was on the early shift and outside the London Extraordinary Zoo, visitors were clamouring to be let in.

The zoo’s high golden walls sparkled under a turquoise sky, and the words ‘Extraordinary Creatures Liveth Here’ flashed across the cast iron entrance gates.

Fire-breathing dragons and snarling basilisks adorned the red-and-white striped ticket booths.

The morning was a chorus of restless creatures: Karen the kraken roaring for her breakfast, the manticore growling.

The great white wolves yipping and, from the pools, the watery akhuluts flipping off their keepers with spiked, glistening black tails.

Backstage, the familiar rituals were underway: pancakes being mixed, popcorn popped, and coffee, the primal life force, brewed.

Frida took a moment to wipe the sweat from her brow and watched as Princess Isis, the world’s last living unicorn, rolled end over end through her own primal life force: stinking, malodourous mud.

Frida leaned on her shovel and sighed. She’d spent half the morning trying to get that very mud out of the unicorn’s ears.

But as Issy kicked up her hooves and raced in uncoordinated circles, nickering in that tinkly, bell-like way of hers, Frida couldn’t help but smile.

A smile that lasted precisely until the moment the unicorn skidded to a stop.

Her big cerulean eyes tilting impishly between Frida and the mud.

The realization hit Frida a half-second before the mud would.

She dropped her shovel and took a step back, holding out her hands.

‘No. Not today, Is. Seriously.’

But Issy was already mid-leap, soaring majestically.

*

Frida had seen her first dragon when she’d been six years old.

She’d been so excited, she’d vomited in one of the London Extraordinary Zoo’s unicorn-shaped novelty recycling bins.

Fireheart, the UK’s only dragon, had unfurled her leathery tail and breathed a plume of fire that twisted twelve feet in the air.

From that moment on, Frida’s destiny in zoo-standard steel-toe-capped boots and unflattering cargo trousers had been a done deal.

She’d dreamed of the zoo’s hallowed sections: Sky, Ocean, Lake, Grass, Ice, Desert and Forest. In her sleep, she learned how to give Princess Issy the unicorn belly rubs.

She understood which fairy mushrooms would bite your fingers off, which would make you blind, and that when the two-headed storm monkey Jellybean ‘Chaos’ Capone escaped, you’d most likely find him buried in a box of pastries in the zookeepers’ kitchen.

The LEZ was a world away from real life.

It was where dragons and unicorns – actual dragons and actual unicorns – existed.

Not just the sad-eyed ones she saw on documentaries about climate change.

They’d been hunted to near extinction, poached, decimated by disease and habitat loss.

A slow heartbreaking silencing. Once upon a time, werewolves and sprites, fairies and elves had danced on the hills and sung on the cliffs.

Witches had stirred cauldrons and shape-shifting vampires had walked amongst humans.

But under the weight of ‘progress’, that was all gone.

Most people she knew seemed to have forgotten that millennia ago, something that had once been called magic might have run in their veins, too.

Frida had been nineteen when her acceptance letter came through the post. Standing on the front step with her mum gripping her hand, the phrases ‘Zookeeper Training Programme’ and ‘Accepted’ had leapt out, along with the single word ‘Forest’.

Their triumphant shouts had rung down the street.

A few months later – it all happened so fast – they’d moved to Melody-Upon-Sea, the quaint seaside town where the London Extraordinary Zoo, by historical happenstance (and a touch of etymological humour), was actually located.

They left behind their London council flat, and found a tiny, dilapidated rental less than half a mile from the LEZ’s entrance gates.

Her mum got a new job waiting tables at one of the seaside cafes.

She’d always said it was possible that Frida might one day live alongside extraordinary creatures, and Frida had believed her.

Now here she was, wiping unicorn shit off her face and smelling of entrails.

And she loved every second of it.