Chapter Thirty-One
It took Frida a moment to mentally catch up. For a few seconds, she just stared after them, the terracotta dragon’s keening creeping into the gaps between her atoms and making a home there. She wondered if she’d ever unhear it.
Moth let out a dramatic sigh.
Frida startled, not having realised the spider had lit upon her collar.
Dian slipped through the darkness.
‘I believe,’ Moth mused, his tiny paws tickling her neck, ‘Dian meant to say: Oh, yes, Frida Rose, I appreciate your suggestion. Thank you for your help. I agree that it might be a good idea to try what you propose. Shall we go, then? After you.’ He paused drily, before finishing with, ‘Alas, the tree-born aren’t really a please-and-thank-you kind of species. ’
Frida laughed; a wheezy noise that was half laugh half sob.
‘But I expect you have friends you want to throttle sometimes too.’
Frida fixed on the memory of Antony and Hamish like a lodestone, holding them close as she set off after Dian. ‘I do have friends like that, Moth,’ she said shakily, under her breath.
Moth skittered up a strand of her hair, bouncing merrily.
He hummed and after a few beats began to weave a little web.
Her hair was just one big knot now; the tie of her braid probably lost in deep time.
As he wove, she didn’t know why the oh so delicate strands of silver in her filthy fringe made her feel better.
They did though. Until, that is, they caught up with Dian, and the fairy took in what Moth was doing.
She watched their dark eyebrows knot, first in confusion, then fury.
Dian baulked, looking from Frida to Moth and back again, and then, without another word, they flared spectacularly into nothing.
Frida gave a cry, spinning on the spot.
Moth sighed, vibrating into the shell of her ear, ‘Pay them no heed. They are still here, whether they wish you to think it or not.’
Frida exhaled sharply. She suddenly realised she’d been expecting them to leave her ever since the stables. But as each second had passed and they’d stayed solid, and real, she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge how relieved she’d been. But now, they’d done it. They’d left.
‘Where are you, Dian?’ she exclaimed.
There was no reply though.
‘Come on,’ Moth urged. ‘We shouldn’t linger.’
With a curse, Frida set off helplessly down the pathway.
She tried not to think about where Dian was or wasn’t.
As she wove between the yew hedges, she saw no one else – human or fairy.
Whether Forge House was open to visitors, she didn’t know, but it was night now anyway.
Above her, the sky was all black and she took a moment to marvel over the spilled glitter of the Milky Way.
There was no moon, just a billion unblinking stars, and she couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen stars quite so fierce, or so close.
For a split second, she wondered what they might look like to Dian in the raindrops, then she pushed that thought away, for she knew Dian would never tell her.
Instead, she concentrated on her inner map. Even though she’d only been here once, she remembered it like it was yesterday: the curve of the drystone walls, the spectacular layout of the rose gardens, the perfectly manicured hedges.
What she didn’t remember were the cages.
She sensed the first from the way her head started to pound even before she’d rounded the corner.
When the iron bars appeared, she stopped sharply.
This was a zoo, after all, so she shouldn’t have been surprised.
This was her zoo. But the sight of the two broonies, their eery moon-like heads bobbing in a pile of golden hay, twisted Frida’s gut.
When she’d last been here, she could have sworn this had been a croquet pitch.
‘Are these—’ Her breath caught, and she swung her head around helplessly, looking again for Dian. But they were nowhere to be seen. She almost couldn’t bring herself to voice what she wanted, and dreaded, to know. ‘Are these your friends, Moth? Are these who you came to find?’
‘No,’ the little spider murmured from somewhere in her hair.
Frida was about to move on, her throat very dry, when Moth amended, ‘They are someone’s friends though.’
Frida had no way to answer that.
Around the next turn, they found a blue-blond hippogriff, and a carbuncle and a jackalope after that.
In the hippogriff’s cage, a tall leafy oak filled the space, and that was where he sat perched in the boughs watching the stars.
The carbuncle’s cage brimmed with exotic ferns, plant life and winding earthen tunnels perfect for the South American rodent.
The jackalope – part hare, part antelope – looked relatively content in a huge nest of wild grasses.
But at each cage that terrible ocean of pain enveloped her, and she couldn’t stop the memory of the dragon’s desolation.
She tried to console herself with the fact that these animals didn’t seem to be in pain, but many of the animals at the LEZ hadn’t either.
The truth was that wild animals were great at masking pain.
It was a survival mechanism. This notion, one she’d learnt early on as a zookeeper, now made her stomach roil.
It seemed impossible to her that anyone couldn’t feel the wrongness oozing off these places. She had to remind herself that for the last five years, she’d been swanning in and out of cages just like these, blind to the agony that lay buried within what she’d thought was a miracle.
Three pure golden stags.
An elephump.
Twelve sapphire friperits.
At each cage, Frida knew she should be trying to point out all the good things to Moth.
The fresh hay and flowers, the clean feeding troughs, the toys made of sticks, the hanging boughs of fruit, the buckets of grain.
But at the thought of Dian watching her from the raindrops – she could only imagine their awful expression – she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
All she asked was the same question, over and over again, and Moth gave her the same answer.
No, I do not know them. But someone does.
She could hear the echo of her boots on the path, the faint rustle of the hedgerows, the occasional whinny or caw or bark of an animal.
When Forge House came into view again, this time from the other side, curving out of the darkness unexpectedly, she caught her breath.
The light of warm oil lamps poured across the grass, and she heard the distant sound of laughter, the clatter of wheels on the driveway, and the soft neigh of horses.
Her heart gave a leap as she drunk it all in.
These were human things, and she almost leapt out across the grass towards them, throwing caution to the wind, when an invisible hand curved urgently around her elbow.
‘Not that way!’
Frida jerked, feeling like a ghost had just touched her. She peered through the darkness but could see no sign of Dian. Heat rising in her cheeks, she turned away from the house.
‘Sorry, yes,’ she murmured dumbly. ‘Not that way.’
Maybe she caught a flash of the edge of Dian’s sleeve, but that was it as she headed away again, feeling breathless.
Turning left, she went through a little coppice of trees, over an artful bridge, past a Grecian temple.
She thought Henry Gladstone’s laboratory must be only just round the next corner when Dian flickered back into existence, lurching out of the darkness like a very sparkly phantom.
‘Shit, Dian!’ Frida gasped, her hand at her throat. This fairy was going to give her a damned heart attack.
Moth, hidden in the folds of one of Frida’s shirt pockets, purred, ‘oh, hello Dian. How nice to see you again.’
But Dian only growled, ignoring them both, and swung left, through a gate into what Frida thought was yet another stone-walled rose garden, common to ancient houses like these.
‘That’s not the way!’ she cried after them.
But when there was no reply, she let out a resigned sigh. The walls enveloped her as she followed. There was no hint of candlelight here, no sound of carriages or laughter. It felt like they were in another world entirely, heavy with creeping vines and the aroma of lavender.
Like the other cages, she didn’t expect these ones either.
Two of them. They rose up before her, silvery starlight reflecting off the bars. Her skin turned to gooseflesh as she took in the basilisk in the closest cage.
A basilisk! Could this be the basilisk, the one who’d been responsible for so thoroughly terrifying Queen Victoria?
She wouldn’t have been surprised – this serpentine monster was enormous.
So much bigger than the two male basilisks they had in Melody.
Scales the bright blue of a spring morning, thick tail wrapped in elegant coils as she slept.
Frida was so busy staring – as if she’d just encountered a celebrity and might, in all seriousness, ask for an autograph – that she almost missed the flash of white at the back of the garden.
Dian didn’t, though.
Suddenly, ice crawled up Frida’s neck as she realised Dian had drifted over to the other cage and was standing before the bars, their spine ramrod straight in a way that belied the fact that their entire body was trembling.
As if her feet weren’t quite her own, Frida moved too, until she was standing next to Dian, and then her mouth dropped open.
There was a unicorn in this cage.
Frida was so accustomed to thinking of Issy as the very last unicorn, that it took her a while to convince herself of what she was seeing.
Of course, there had still been unicorns in the world at this time.
Not many, but some. But Frida had never, not once, not in all the histories of the LEZ, heard that there’d been a unicorn at Forge House. Not only a unicorn, but—
‘A male,’ she breathed.