Chapter Forty-Six
They raced towards the yew trees with Moth shouting directions on Dian’s shoulder, but it wasn’t until they were fully encased in the safety of the dark needles that Dian dropped their magic with a jagged, exhausted gasp.
Suddenly, Frida felt ridiculously shy. Dian had just saved her. Dian, who’d doubled over to catch their breath, tilted their head to look back up at her, and shot her a wide, beaming grin that dissolved the raging fury in their eyes, and turned her knees to water.
‘Thank you,’ Frida whispered.
‘Well,’ they said dryly, trying to hide the flush in their cheeks as they straightened. ‘I did think about leaving you.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Moth said with a snort. ‘Not for one second.’
Frida giggled, lightheaded. Every bone in her body felt like jelly. But when she glanced down at the LEZ logo on her shirt, it felt like being doused in cold water. She wanted to burn the cursed thing.
‘Dian.’
‘Yes?’ they replied, leaning against the nearest trunk.
It might have looked casual, if it hadn’t been for the taut line of their muscles, and the way they almost seemed to dissolve into the shadows.
She had to squint to keep hold of them. They touched the edge of their downy hair, and she thought she saw a faint tremble in their throat when they swallowed.
‘Back there, in the house. I . . . Did you . . . Could you hear . . .’ They couldn’t have heard, she told herself. She’d been speaking English, untranslatable through the wards.
But she watched their throat work as they wound their fingers through their curls.
‘I understood,’ they whispered. ‘I heard what you said. Some of it, anyway.’
‘But I was in the cage, and the wards, and . . .’ But at their face, she trailed off. ‘You did?’
‘I – speak a little of your language.’
Frida blinked, then she realised they were speaking halting English. Normally, their voice sounded soft and crackly, slipping right into her head like summer leaves on a breeze, autumn foliage underfoot. She’d grown so used to it that hearing them speak in a human tongue felt bizarre.
‘I thought you’d never met a human,’ she said in confusion.
Dian wrinkled their nose. ‘No, no I haven’t.
’ They slipped back into whatever their own language was, Raindrops on Hawthorn Boughs, perhaps.
Frida relished the sound of it swishing through her again, but they were staring at the ground, continuing to wind their curls around one long finger fretfully.
‘After my . . . After Gia was taken . . .’ Their shoulders heaved a heavy sigh.
‘After that, my other root-kin insisted. We travelled far and found a fairy who had some knowledge of the languages of this land.’
‘Someone who was somewhat less nasty than the others,’ Moth added helpfully.
A small smile tugged at Dian’s lips. ‘Somewhat.’ Then their eyes caught and held Frida’s, and the darkness was full of memories. ‘I spent a year with them. My kin thought it might be useful, someday.’ Their brows knit. ‘I wonder if they knew,’ they said softly.
A shiver ran down Frida’s spine.
Far away, she could hear shouting through the open windows, signs of the house mobilizing.
Someone would come looking for them soon, but she couldn’t go another second without Dian knowing the full truth.
She imagined she could hear Dian’s heart.
Or maybe it was her own. Before her, the cliff yawned.
She could make the leap, or retreat. But then she realised, maybe she’d already jumped.
‘I have to tell you. I –’
‘Do we know each other in the future, then?’ Dian interrupted.
Frida startled at the abrupt question. Trembling, she inclined her chin.
‘And it’s bad?’
She paled.
They angled their face up to the yew boughs and sighed. ‘I thought so.’
The huge trees were like caves. She wished they could crawl into one together. Better still, go back to that enchanted pool. Forget everything. Forget that house, forget the shouts that seemed to be getting closer. Forget the alarm bells that were now ringing. Forget the future.
Moth crawled up one of Dian’s curls, the colour of spun grass, and asked, ‘How bad, exactly, are we talking?’
Grief swelled up inside her chest. The whole story was there, from a hawthorn ending in the zoo, to the lightning, to Lucky digging her into the earth.
She was about to answer, ready for all of it to tumble out of her, when Dian took a quick step backwards and shook their head, raising their hands as if to protect themselves. ‘No, I don’t want to know.’
‘What?’ Moth exclaimed. ‘Why not?’
‘I can’t,’ they said shakily, their voice a thin reed of a thing. They were gazing at Frida as if she was the only thing keeping them standing.
‘But you’re the guardian of the smallest fairy territory on this island!’ Moth glanced at Frida, then back to Dian in disbelief. ‘Frida Rose is offering us a chance to know what might come. To have an advantage! Are you certain no is your answer?’
Dian’s nostrils flared. ‘You think we could change the outcome, even so? I do not. There are some fates that cannot be changed. I know those wards in there will rip through the worlds, no matter what we do. I know terrible things are going to come to pass!’
Moth paused for a long moment, as if trying to collect himself, before he cocked his tiny head and said slowly, ‘I thought it was only humans who claimed to know too much. Anything can be changed, Dian.’
Anguish ravaged their face. ‘No, they can’t. And I do not wish to know how our worlds will perish.’
Frida raised her hand as if to reach for them, but Moth gave a warning squeak, Dian already taking a shaky step back.
Frida froze as they gestured towards the grounds where the caged animals slept, their lower lip trembling.
‘If this is my future, do not tell me about it. I have seen that there is no fighting such a thing.’
Frida was already shaking her head as Moth cried, ‘But we did fight it. We did! You saw how Frida Rose denied their power? We watched, and she was able to—’
‘I’m not her!’ Dian exploded. ‘That was strange magic, dragon and human, and I do not know if anyone in this existence has such powers, other than her. If we’d been inside that cage, I—’ They turned to Frida. ‘I don’t even know how you did it!’
In her mind, Frida traced the sharp edges of her rosewood box and closed her eyes.
It took her a while to gather herself, before she managed to say, ‘When my mum died, I did a really good job of hiding everything away inside. Hiding myself away.’ She couldn’t stop the shudder that ran through her.
‘I learnt how to do it. But in that cage? I realised that everything I’d hidden – all the things that make me me – I realised that was what they needed.
’ She opened her eyes again and felt the fire inside her blazing. ‘So, I took it from them.’
Something like understanding danced over Dian’s face. ‘That is powerful magic,’ they said, awed and more than a little afraid, and Frida wasn’t sure what to do with that. In the end, all she could do was reach into her pocket to pull out the terracotta dragon’s Jewel.
Silence fell over them.
‘We still have time,’ she whispered to Dian. ‘We can change the future.’
The Jewel balanced on her palm. Whole.
Moth spun in rapid circles from a strand of Dian’s hair. ‘What is that?’
Frida held the Jewel up. The smooth edges shone.
Round and smooth as a goose’s egg, the Jewel’s power was vast, at once deafening and utterly silent.
Smoke curled beneath the surface like ringlets around a fire, and Frida could feel the desert, the rippling twilit sand that stretched for miles.
She could smell the heat of earth, feel the rustle of palm leaves on her cheeks, see the twinkle of an oasis, the whirl of dust storms. The cacophony of thousands of insects and plants and peoples, millennia stretching forwards, backwards, wrapping around her in bright ribbons.
And then she heard the passionate beating of the fiery heart, a rasping, smokers cough. A drumbeat in her ears.
Her tattooed fingers curled around the rounded edges of a desert, a whole world.
‘Where I come from,’ she said, her violet eyes alight.
‘This–’ She raised the Jewel before her, ‘is broken. But it doesn’t have to be.
That’s why I was brought here, I think. To understand that.
’ She looked up into Dian’s face, and their haunted expression made Frida feel as if every one of her limbs were floating away.
She’d give anything to ease that expression, to change what would come to pass for them, and now she could.
Now she had the power to do so, resting in her palm.
‘I know you think futures can’t change,’ she said, willing them to believe, ‘but I think you’re wrong. ’
Was that a flicker of hope flaring in those eternal pools of their eyes?
If it was, Dian quenched it quickly, but she could have sworn she’d seen it.
Suddenly, her head was fizzing with pink.
The little rosewood box in her mind was empty, all her love and light and brightness and power and grief bursting from her in a firework display.
And it was ok. It was ok to let Dian see it.
She reached between them, taking their hand.
Their eyes widened, but she stepped closer, willing them to hear her.
‘I believe,’ she said fiercely. ‘I believe Moth, I believe my mum. She used to say we could do anything. She said even amongst all the shit, we could make our own worlds. And I . . .’ Her throat swelled but she pressed on despite it.
‘I do still believe that.’ Although Dian’s forehead knotted, Frida didn’t stop.
‘In my world, this dragon,’ she raised the Jewel again, pink light flaring across the bottoms of the trees, ‘is called Fireheart, but that isn’t her name.
I don’t know what her name is. In the zoo, we call all these creatures by our own names, we take them from their homes, their .
. .’ Her voice broke. ‘Their hearts.’ She was begging Dian to understand.
‘This dragon told me to come back here to find her heart. I thought she wanted me to bring it back to her, but maybe she didn’t mean that.
Maybe we just need to give this to her now; give it to the version of her that’s here. Maybe that will change everything.
‘They’ve been using this Jewel to power their wards. That’s what Joshua said. So, I’m going to guess that the wards on the cages are broken. What we saw in the laboratory, those awful jars – he said they couldn’t use them anymore. They’ve been depending on this Jewel.’
Suddenly, that thread of hope was back. It rose across the twilit hue of Dian’s cheeks. ‘You think we can free the prisoners?’
Frida nodded. ‘Yes.’ She squeezed Dian’s hand. ‘I do. All of them.’
Moth gave a delighted squeak, racing up and down his webs.
She thought she heard the animals on the edge of her hearing quiver too, just a little bit.
Maybe the very worlds themselves quivered as she wrapped her fingers around the Jewel and felt the blazing, sulphurous, dry desert heat of it.
Beneath the shelter of the yew trees, Frida looked up at Dian, and said tentatively, suddenly unsure if her plan was a terrible one, and Dian would send it crashing down around her with one scathing, fairy remark.
‘What do you think?’
Dian didn’t say anything for a long time. They just gazed down at her, their rosy lips slightly parted, their breath coming in shallow starts, their eyes night-swollen and unreadable. Then, finally, a broad smile began to stretch over their lips.