Chapter Forty-Eight
Frida cried out as Dian slipped out of her sight, flickering in and out faster than she could follow.
She swore under her breath. They were going to get captured!
They were going to get killed. Their cobwebs were going to end up in a jar in the Old Forge.
They were going to have their lungs carved out, their tongue stolen, their magic ripped away.
Flicker, gone. Flicker, gone. Like a firefly.
Suddenly, Dian appeared in the middle of a shaft of moonlight. ‘You!’ they yelled, in clear English, barely twenty yards from Charles’s bench.
Charles’s chin jerked towards the fairy.
Tumbling hair, green as a forest canopy at night. Bioluminescent cobwebs. Curling sensual lips. Hooded dark eyes, nearly all black. Wood-mottled skin. Total Pink Flamingos.
Charles gave a low chuckle that Frida heard in her somersaulting guts. He stood up in a leisurely fashion, as if he was used to people waiting on his pleasure. Frida wanted to beat him over the head with his own shotgun. ‘It’s about time,’ he said quietly.
Dian’s eyes flashed. Frida saw it even from where she was hiding. Charles began to advance, his long shadow arcing ominously across the grass.
‘Run, Dian,’ Frida hissed, sinking deeper into the sheltering trunks of the yews.
Dian didn’t move. In that suspended second, they didn’t look afraid.
They looked exhilarated, the ghost of a hawthorn leaf crown framing their rosy, flushed face.
A current of electricity shot through Frida, and she didn’t know if she wanted to hug them, throttle them, kiss them, or just stare forever at their blindingly perfect jawline.
Charles took a step, then another. He hefted his shotgun in capable hands. ‘Are you going to cause me problems?’
Dian gave a high, pealing laugh. ‘Oh yes.’
Charles’s mouth twisted into an ugly smile, and he charged.
Fuck, he was quick!
Dian was quicker.
The fairy disappeared. Charles roared, his blond hair near white in the moonlight. A split second later, Dian flickered back into existence, a few metres away. When Charles lunged again, Dian dissolved, reappeared on the other side of the cage.
‘Over here!’ Dian taunted.
Charles threw himself after them. ‘You can’t do that forever!’
Dian paused, just for a moment, and gave Charles a slow sad smile.
‘You think?’ Dian whispered, and then they turned on their heel and sprinted away down one of the gravel paths, their silvery webs shifting to water, blurring in and out of space.
Charles, pale with rage, set off after them at full tilt.
But Dian was faster. Of course they were.
They were a fairy. A stubborn, brave, infuriating, interminably graceful fairy.
Frida knew she didn’t have a lot of time.
She shot out from underneath the yew needles.
There was a padlock on the cage, but she made short work of it after finding another weighty stone.
A few thwacks and it was off. Without hesitation, she pushed open the metal door, wincing at the squeak of its hinges.
Inside, the ground was pure ash. Only when she was close enough to the dragon to see the thin rise and fall of her frail chest did Frida stop, her boots sinking in the burned ground.
Before, she’d just seen the mess of her wings.
But as the moon played over her scales, Frida took in the long sinuous shape of her.
‘Terracotta dragon, of the desert and the sky, can you hear me?’ she cried, marshalling her courage.
‘My name is Frida. I have something that belongs to you.’ She was gripping the Jewel so tightly, she could feel what she thought was her own blood pounding through it, but it might have been the dragon’s heartbeat too.
The two of them syncopated – two rapid, excited hearts.
Ba-dum, ba-dum. Ba-dum, ba-dum. She inched closer.
The dragon’s scaled face remained hidden beneath her bony paws, but Frida could have sworn she saw the slender curve of her tail twitch just a tiny bit – more muscular than at the LEZ, but just as scarred.
In a few moments it would all be over. In a few moments, the pain of the next two hundred years would be wiped away.
‘I have your Jewel.’ Her voice gained strength. ‘I was sent to give it back to you.’
Nothing. A heavy silence stretched between them.
The dragon’s breathing was ragged, rising and falling, the network of welts like a blue map over the terracotta hue of her back, the colour of baked bricks.
No fire blazed in her belly, no hot forge.
Frida moved closer, confused and afraid.
Why wasn’t she responding? Was she too hurt to do so?
‘I have your Jewel,’ she said, louder.
Suddenly, she felt the rumbling of dry earth bursting up from the ground. And then the dragon erupted upwards, a mountain lifting, her scales blazing into fire.
‘I DO NOT WANT IT!’ the dragon roared.
So loud, so unexpected, it almost blew Frida’s head off.
The dragon’s breath was rotten and hot, burning Frida’s cheeks.
Frida stumbled back, tripping over herself and falling, almost dropping the precious cargo she held.
The Jewel pulsed, pink light slipping from between her fingers, and she couldn’t hear the song.
‘But I have your jewel!’ she cried. ‘I just want to give it back to you.’
‘I DO NOT WANT IT!’
‘But it’s your Jewel,’ Frida stammered, her words thinned with panic. ‘Of course you . . . you must want it. You told me. You said you wanted it back!’
The dragon swung her head around, a red blaze in her inky eyes.
No cataracts, no milky sheen obscured the ink.
Instead, the reptilian slits were molten lava, split and fractured.
Her sides heaved and her broken wings shook.
Her tail lashed, and the air was a maelstrom of ash and dirt and earth and smoke. ‘I. DO. NOT. WANT. IT!’
But Frida could be stubborn too. Although she knew this noise had to be alerting the whole county, she dug in her heels.
Let them come. She would not leave. Not without giving back this dragon’s heart, this dragon’s soul.
She placed the Jewel on the ground before her, her eyes blazing as fiercely as any dragon’s, a swirl of violet and amethyst. ‘They were using it to do awful things. To operate an awful kind of power. But you can leave this place now. You can be free.’
You will ask why I have stayed. But where would I go?
Long-ago words, uttered in a cavern under a woody sky came back to her, but they were barely a whisper as the dragon stared at her, scouring Frida’s very soul.
It felt like a lifetime that they were caught like that together, in that bloody, smoky stillness.
Finally, the dragon slumped her shoulders as if in defeat, and Frida thought it was all going to be ok.
But the next moment, the Jewel gave a weak little splutter. Then the dragon lunged forwards in a flying leap, her paw coming down on top of the Jewel in a thundering CRASH. The Jewel, or maybe the terracotta dragon herself, or maybe the very world, broke.
Frida screamed. ‘No!’
The dragon bellowed.
‘You broke it. You broke your own heart.’ Frida fell to her knees, sobbing helplessly.
The dragon’s face crumpled. ‘It’s already broken. I am already broken.’
Frida watched as something she understood in her DNA settled over the dragon’s shoulders.
Suddenly, she was back on those cold hospital tiles, and she couldn’t find a way to peel herself off them.
The molten fire in the dragon’s eyes died, and the light inside her went out.
She hunched her broken wings around herself and sank back down into the ash, covering her face again, her eyes disappeared beneath the wrinkled map of her skin.
Six pieces of pink diamond lay scattered across the earth, the colour leaching out quicker than Frida thought possible.
She watched them become grey and lifeless.
She watched them cease to beat. As Frida stared into the ragged shards, an impossible grief swelled up inside her too.
The vision of a starlit desert was gone from the facets of the diamond.
Now all it held was the echo of boots stamping victoriously over the earth.
She heard the booming crack of the ground being ripped apart.
She could feel the profound loss as sacred caves were mined, the howl of rivers as they were diverted and sucked dry, the weeping of seas as they were polluted and deadened.
She could feel the crying of tree roots as they were wrenched out of the soil.
The anguish of wings being slashed off. Hearts broken. Souls stolen.
Frida didn’t know how much time passed.
At some point, she felt a hand on her arm but barely registered it.
A leafy voice. ‘Come on! Sea and skies, say something! We have to go!’
She twisted to see Dian hovering over her; their face shrouded in a rainstorm. She felt the world around them starting to crack too. She felt like a ghost. Like she might leach away as well, just like the pink light from the stones.
‘Get up, Frida Rose!’ Moth bellowed.
Somewhere she heard shouting.
The pounding of feet.
The renewed ringing of alarms.
The raindrops enveloped her. Some distant part of her registered Dian gathering up the shards of the Jewel.
There were human scents in the air, sweat and tobacco smoke, sandalwood perfume, the crack of a whip, horses, grease and brandy.
Dian was pulling her up, and Frida knew tears were falling down her cheeks, but she didn’t wipe them away.
She’d forgotten how. Dian gave a cry of fear, before picking Frida up as if she weighed no more than Moth.
‘No, I . . . don’t—’ Frida moaned.
But Dian was running now.
The air whipped past her.
Smoke and sky and rain and starlight.
The earth shook.
Frida pressed her face to Dian’s neck and wept.