Chapter Fifty-One
They walked for a long, long time. She was so tired, but she didn’t want to interrupt Lucky’s delighted chirping.
In the end, he lulled her into a kind of daze, the swirls of the jungle rising and falling like an ocean.
The sound was immense. With her magic released, she could barely compute the vastness of it as the voices around her moved up and down, around and around, in and out, in perfect discordant harmonies.
She’d never heard anything like it. It was like the very best symphony, except the instruments were the trees and the clouds and the boiling air, and the musicians had claws and filmy wings, paws, whiskers and tongues, although after a time she thought there was no instrument or musician at all. There was just music.
It spiralled, and she spiralled too, slipping into a kind of waking sleepwalk, the events of the past days drifting around her in spools of strange colours.
The silvery water of Dian’s raindrops, the bioluminescent blue of Moth’s cobwebs.
The auburn of Sir Joshua’s hair. The sickly pale light that had been sucked out of her, the grey iron of the cage bars.
The black of the grootnecks’ eggs. The creamy white of the parchment in the study and the stark ink of those damning words.
The trapped sunlight of the dragonflies.
The flamingo pink of the terracotta dragon’s Jewel.
The dark blood of the dragon’s wings. The warm brown of her mother’s eyes.
Frida’s hand flexed where, in another version of this world, she might have remembered to ask Dian for the pieces of the Jewel.
She thought of the terracotta dragon’s face when she arrived back empty-handed, and the grief curled into her anew.
Maybe in her world, Dian still had the Jewel, but with no way to wake Dian up, she may never know.
Belatedly, she realised that she should have given better instructions to the oak-supreme to relay like, Hey Dian, please hide the Jewel in the Hawthorn of Higgleton Common’s fourth branch from the left or something.
She was so busy spiralling that she didn’t realise that the dragons had stopped until she almost walked into Lucky’s venomous tail.
They were standing on a sheer rocky ledge.
A light breeze brushed her neck, warm and sticky.
Vampiric insects buzzed all around her, scenting her blood.
Politely swiping them away, she gasped to see the vast sweep of a valley below.
The dragons had brought her up onto a cliff edge, overlooking a great, winding brown river.
There was nothing else but trees for as far as she could see.
Behind her was the dark opening of a cave.
The silver dragon smiled at her. His mouth didn’t move, but it was in the tilt of his head, the warming of the lava in his eyes, the comforting blaze in his belly.
‘What do you need, little Frida Rose?’ he asked, his voice that deep silver hammer, but soothing somehow, against the haze that was pressing in around her.
Tears of exhaustion pricked at her eyes and hunger gnawed at her belly.
Thirst burned her throat. ‘I need to get home as quickly as possible! But . . .’ She hesitated, putting her head in her hands.
‘I thought my home was one thing, and now it’s not that at all, it’s a mess, and I just don’t know what to do about any of it.
I don’t know where I am, or why I’m here.
’ Then everything burst out of her as the silver dragon listened: the LEZ, her mum, her friends, the lightning storm, Lucky’s impossible gift of magic, the wood, Dian, the Nuckelavee.
The Nuckelavee was grieving too, as surely as any of them.
She babbled on, speaking about the terracotta dragon, about the fairies, about Moth and the unicorn without his horn.
About getting trapped in the cage. About the lies of Sir Joshua and the other LEZites, about her na?vety, about the Beaufort sisters who she’d idolised.
Finally, about the Jewel, and about the way Dian had left, how much it hurt.
How they hadn’t actually trusted her at all, in the end.
The look of anguish on the oak-supreme’s face.
For once Lucky was quiet and, together with his dada, the two of them waited solemnly, letting her talk.
It took her a long time. She only noticed she’d sat down when the cool of the earth started seeping into her bones.
And that she had a bigger audience than just two dragons.
A family of capybaras, brown as the soil, sat on their haunches, listening intently from underneath some nearby flower bushes.
Above them, a line of bearded monkeys. Two blue macaws perched in a palm tree to Frida’s left – a sight that sent a chill through her, a direct memory of the feathered cloak pinned to Sir Joshua’s study wall.
To her right, she caught the massive coils of a green snake, lying in a patch of sunshine.
When he saw her looking, silver dragon said softly, ‘it’s their story too. Isn’t it?’
She realised he was right. It was.
She’d reached the end now, and she was wrung out, her voice almost gone. Lucky carefully placed a long back talon on her leg and rested his face next to her, looking up with wide-eyed compassion. Her heart almost broke anew.
When the old dragon asked her again, the drooping branches shifting like rivulets behind his silver head, ‘What do you need?’ she didn’t answer for a long time.
Her eyes fixed on Lucky’s, watching the golden rivers dancing.
She opened her mouth to say, home.
‘Sleep,’ was what came out instead. ‘I want to sleep,’ she gasped, wiping an arm across her tear-stained, filthy face.
There was a disaster of unimaginable proportions waiting for her, in one of those billions of pockets they’d passed to get here.
‘And food. I want to drink some water. Maybe bathe but most of all, I would like to sleep.’
The silver dragon smiled, without saying anything.
A mercy for which she was profoundly grateful.
She felt as raw as if the top layer of her skin had been scraped away.
He directed her inside the cave. Lucky wanted to follow, but his dada shooed him away, and Frida was swallowed by a darkness that was warm and safe, and lit with the shining lights of fireflies.
In a corner she found a natural spring, where she drank deep and long.
Next to the spring were piles of food. Many bones and cooked stacks of meat, which she was unwilling to touch, but then her eyes fell on the mountain of fresh berries.
The mounds of roasted roots nestled in fragrant leaves, the rainbows of other fruits, so strange and oddly shaped she couldn’t even guess their names.
They were all so juicy and plump, they sent a lilting sweetness through the air which made her moan.
As she fell upon this pantry, she marvelled at the unexpected bounty.
She knew, of course, that dragons occasionally sampled things that did not walk and talk, but this was something more – as if the silver dragon had known she was coming.
And not only that, had known what she would need, too.
She shook her head in wonder and bit into another mango.
When her stomach was blissfully swollen, she found a pool of water not too far from the spring.
Without hesitation, she unlaced her heavy boots and peeled off her filthy uniform.
She hadn’t realised how desperate she’d been to get it off her until it lay in a muddy, khaki heap on the ground.
Then she slipped into the pool. The water was warm – bath warm, as if it had been heated by some invisible source.
She sighed as she leaned her head back against the smooth rocky edge.
For a second, the memory of Dian’s enchanted pool fluttered over the backs of her eyelids, but instead of pushing it away, as she might have done yesterday, she just swallowed, and embraced it, although it hurt.
She didn’t know how long she soaked for, but by the time she got out, she was wrinkled as a prune.
A few gallons of nuckelavee spit, dragon smoke, gore, earth, mud, blood, fruit juice and sweat lay at the bottom of that pool.
She had no desire to put her uniform back on, but the air was warm and the insects kind enough not to bite her after she asked them not to.
So, she just wrung out her hair and, with bare feet, approached another niche, where she found a pile of velvety soft, aromatic leaves for her to lie upon, along with a fur blanket to cover herself with.
She touched the silken fur, markings of creamy splatters against a sea of black.
She couldn’t guess what animal it had come from, but now that she knew that dragons could speak every language, she wondered: did they talk to their prey?
Did they ask permission? Did they say thank you?
She recalled the odd, almost shameful way Lucky had approached the cow she’d given him at the LEZ. His reaction made sense to her now.
Too exhausted to dwell on it, she just crawled into the impossible bed the silver dragon had prepared for her and whispered softly,
‘Thank you.’
Fireflies fluttered around her like tiny stars, and before her head touched the vanilla-scented leafy pillow, she was asleep.