Chapter Fifty-Three
Frida knew they were back in the LEZ. She came back to consciousness as Lucky whimpered softly beneath her.
She’d concocted so many scenarios for what they’d find – death, destruction, despair, that for as long as she could bear, she stayed with her cheeks pressed into his frosty scales, her arms wrapped around the back of his neck, not wanting to look.
It felt as if they’d been pushed back through the earth, the pockets, and the space-time continuum like they’d been lubricated like hangferns and sent through a slip ’n’ slide.
She held all the pockets close to her, taking a moment to cherish the memories, and then she shelved them for later.
For a pitcher of margaritas at the Crown and Anchor.
‘We’re back, my love,’ she whispered.
Lucky slowly lifted his head, his whimpering subsiding.
Pearlescent light rippled under his scales, and she could smell animals, manure, hay and sweat, along with pine trees and the heady aroma of flowers.
It was familiar, but also different. Smaller.
Staler. The smell of plywood, rather than woodland.
She swallowed hard, listening.
The creaking of trees seemed quieter – everything did.
Placing a gentle kiss to Lucky’s muddy neck, she raised herself up and looked around.
All was dark and still. There was no longer the eternal presence of the Narnian lamps.
The only light came from Lucky’s inner fire and an uncanny drifting glitter, that shimmered like embers from a fire.
It sparked a feeling of recognition that settled deep in her bones. Everything is as it needs to be.
They were back in Forest. She would have known it anywhere.
A familiar carved wooden sign greeted her. Nailed beneath the branches of an old oak, it said: ‘Welcome and beware. All who enter this wood, prepare to be enchanted.’ The oak and sign were still standing.
‘It’s the same,’ she said to herself.
Lucky gazed back at her, his mercurial eyes guttering as he placed his head on his oversized paws.
He looked exhausted. Here and there, zealous tree roots had broken out of the yellow cobbles, upturned benches, wrapped around bushes.
Her gaze trailed over the sleeping bodies spooning the capsized rubbish bins.
She expected to be afraid, like she’d been before.
Before, the wood had felt like a horror movie alien parasite.
Now, she only saw peace in her friends’ faces.
Cliff starfished over the grass, Gloria curled around the vines of a white rose bush, Zuzka’s pink hair entwined with ivy, Sora, cuddling one of the exposed leathery roots. There was—
She let out a cry and slipped off Lucky’s back. Her boots hit the uneven cobbles with a slap, jarring her knees, but she was running, leaping bushes, benches and bins.
‘Antony!’ she cried, falling to her knees. ‘Hamish!’
Her two friends lay amongst the others, snuggled up together in a way that almost broke her heart.
Hamish’s leg thrown over Antony’s, Antony’s arm tucked around Hamish’s willowy shoulders, Hamish’s cheek soft against Antony’s broad chest. As if they’d always been there, like that.
She pressed her face to Hamish’s, breathed in Antony’s familiar scent of laundry powder and mint.
She touched Hamish’s soft pale hair. Patted Antony’s neat brown beard.
‘You’re here,’ she gasped as snotty tears ran down her nose. ‘You’re here!’
They rested on a carpet of dewdrop leaves and the yellow bells of daffodils.
As if the trees themselves had carried them here and laid them amongst the rest for safekeeping.
She stared up at the thorny storm of branches above.
She wasn’t afraid. This wood was a galaxy, brimming with every kind of brightness and darkness, and her friends as much a part of it as that oak tree over there holding up the sign.
She could almost feel the power of the dreams wafting off them, wrapping around and around like the ribbons on a maypole.
‘It’s not the same,’ Lucky murmured from where she’d left him, over by the grass.
After giving Antony and Hamish a kiss on both their cheeks, she returned to Lucky.
‘What’s that, love?’
He sighed, peering at her from where his head lay on his paws. A new heaviness weighed him down, as if the grief had settled into his young bones, his paws sinking profoundly into the soil. ‘You said it was the same,’ he told her. ‘But it’s not. Because we are not the same.’
His words coiled around her.
We are not the same.
No. He was right.
All around her the wood teemed, an orchestra of snores and babbling breath.
With complicated feelings, she ran a finger along the sleeve of her shirt, streaked with dirt from a thousand worlds.
Then she traced the lines of her tattoos, understanding that each one was magic.
Not of capture and ownership, but of love.
The grootnecks, the slug, Issy. The rose on her wrist, shining brightly in the plum light of Lucky’s scales.
Dian had been right: nothing was just a picture.
Then she raised her hands to her face. She couldn’t see, but she knew that her eyes were blazing violet. She gave a low, sad laugh. ‘No, we’re not the same at all.’
Lucky mumbled something about the small brains of humans, and she gave him a tight hug.
When she pulled away, her eyes fell to the yellow cobbles beneath her.
She’d once thought them the very essence of whimsy.
She couldn’t have pictured a future without them.
Now, she saw the road for what it was: staged.
The thinnest illusion. But the roses that Dian had conjured?
She touched one of them. The petals felt like velvet.
It felt more real than anything. Somewhere, she caught the scent of a long-ago memory of moss and the afterglow of rain.
Dian.
They hadn’t told her their name. They hadn’t trusted her enough to do that.
She knew that. She knew she had no way to help them.
But something in her heart leapt when she saw the velvety petals of those roses.
They hadn’t trusted her, but they’d still made this incredible forest of roses, just for her.
‘Lucky,’ she said, trying to steady the pounding rhythm of her blood. ‘Will you be alright staying here for a bit? I’ll try not to be too long.’
Lucky had already curled up, the oak trees lifting their branches to make room for him. Waving her away with his left wing, he snuggled down and settled in amongst the other sleepers. Those strange embers floated around him – pink, she suddenly realised – drifting on an unseen wind.
Hope blazed inside her.
Dian. Maybe, after all this, they had left her something.
Some clue as to what to do. Something she’d missed before, but that they’d known she – the Frida that she was now – would be able to find.
Something, like the roses, that were just for her.
She approached the wood, seeing immediately that it had bedded down, an impenetrable knot over the hillside fathoms deep.
She had no idea how she would get through, but as she moved towards that hallowed darkness, she was surprised when the first boughs lifted tentatively.
She spun, thinking that Lucky must have come with her.
But no, there he was, his snores and dragon dreams already mingling with the others.
The trees gave a low swishing sound and when she looked back, they’d raised their tawny branches a bit more.
Heart-shaped leaves of all colours. Frosted greys and emeralds, red summer fruits and autumn’s fiery russets.
Come on then, they seemed to say. You want in?
For a moment, she just stood there, on those liminal edges.
She took in the hulking shapes of the rugged trunks, their ageless branches stretching up, up, up.
The sentinels of ancient beech trees. Ash, drooping willow, birch and chestnut, trunks mingling with hues of sapphire, leaves radiating a soft luminescence.
No light filtered through the canopy yet beams of iridescent colours danced on the forest floor.
The air should have been alive with the purr of unseen wings.
Robins, tits, and woodpeckers should have been flitting from branch to branch, butterflies and moths pirouetting. But it seemed they were asleep too.
The hairs on her arms rose. Here we go, she thought to herself.
Then she slipped inside. The branches didn’t part for her as they might have done for Lucky, but they lifted enough for her to squeeze through, occasionally scratching her cheek with a thorn or catching her hair.
Primroses scattered like pale yellow stars, adders and slow worms slept in patches of shadow.
The little streams tinkled but the bustle of life was dimmed: no pond-skaters, no dragonflies.
A blackbird should have warbled, woodpigeons cooed.
It was almost like the world of Dian’s pool.
A dreamworld.
Caps of fungi splayed out, an ocean of blues and oranges.
She followed them breathlessly, thinking of Antony, who would have loved this so much he would have been having palpitations.
And Hamish, at Antony’s side with their brand-new mushroom collecting sack.
For a split second, for the first time in her life, she was jealous of them.
The feeling was so sharp and unexpected, she had to stop, disoriented in the darkness and still drifting embers.
She wasn’t jealous of them – she wished her friends nothing but joy.
But that’s when she realised that for a teeny tiny moment, she’d also looked into someone else’s gorgeous, infuriating, baffling face – a face that didn’t belong to a unicorn, or a street cat, or a ghost-lynx – and seen somewhat she might want to welcome into her life.