Chapter Fifty-Three #2
And then they’d left, without even saying goodbye. All around her, cobwebs laced the darkness and as the memory of raindrops sparkled whenever she closed her eyes, she had a terrible thought that maybe this wood was their goodbye.
That’s when she started to run, going as fast as she could up the slope, pushing through thorny vines and labyrinthine roots, not caring if she hurt herself.
Far below her feet, she tried to imagine her mum making an ice-cream cake or reading a dense book about merpeople and, before she knew it, she started to feel the slope levelling out.
The meadow had been swallowed by a grove of brambles.
For a moment she had to pull up short, her breath ripped away from her at the magnitude of it.
But then the brambles started to lift, just a tiny bit, as the trees had done, and she launched into movement again, slithering forwards, determinedly brushing aside the sharp bite of the thorns.
When she almost tripped over a charred branch, her brain went into hyperdrive.
‘Dian!’ she cried.
There was an ashen, faintly bitter scent on the air.
The scent of decay. Dread ratcheting up, she forced her way through the final thickets and emerged into a patch of wild grasses so tall, they reached her chest. Lifting her eyes, she found herself in a cave, made from the shipwrecked carcass of the Hawthorn and wreathed in ivy.
The roof blended together to create a deep, impenetrable black.
The air seemed thickened with the gaps between stars and, as Frida proceeded, those embers flared.
Like fireflies. Like starfire. Gathering wild and thick around the broken, devastated shape of the tree.
The hawthorn, from whose roots Dian had been born.
She fell to her knees, slamming into the earth.
Dian lay in the grass before her.
It was as if no time had passed, and at the same time, a century.
An age. The plants that had crept over the fairy were like a shroud, engulfing Dian’s woodland skin, their aquiline nose, pre-Raphaelite features, their rosy cheeks.
No, Frida reminded herself, letting out a low moan.
Not rosy. Not anymore. Ravaged. They’d been ravaged.
‘Dian,’ she sobbed as she pulled at the roots of the plants. The ivy had almost entirely covered Dian’s face, and honeysuckle crept over their legs, up their too-narrow, angular chest. Dog roses curled around their arms and moss carpeted their piano-player’s fingers.
‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Please wake up.’
She untangled it all, piece by careful piece, and then knelt before them with her head bowed.
Their face was grey. Not the emerald-green fairy who’d taunted Charles and his shotgun.
Not the mercurial fairy who’d taken her to dip her feet in that ethereal pool.
Not the one who’d touched the small of her back to reassure her when she was afraid.
Not the one that had enchanted a window and walked out onto a fucking grand staircase in thin air.
There were crow’s feet around this fairy’s eyes, and wrinkles around their chapped lips.
The lines of their bones stood out starkly under their mottled skin.
Their cheekbones were too harsh, their collarbones protruding painfully from beneath their damaged cobwebs.
‘Moth,’ she whispered, knowing somehow he wouldn’t answer. ‘Are you here?’
But there was no tinkling laugh, no long-suffering sigh.
If Moth could have, he would have already answered.
Perhaps he was asleep, but she thought it more likely that he was dead.
She didn’t know how long magical spiders lived, but she guessed it wasn’t two hundred years.
This settled like a chip of ice into her already frozen heart.
She looked blankly at the strands of grey that ran through Dian’s hair and, with a shaking hand, touched one of the strands. It felt like ancient silk.
‘Dian.’
But Dian was not their name.
Helplessly, her gaze fell on the crumbling hawthorn. The places it had splintered oozing a pale, sappy blood. She ran her hands along the sticky ridges of the nearest branch.
‘Please,’ she gasped.
Dian did not stir. Neither did their tree.
She started searching then, looking around frantically.
Desperate to find something, anything that Dian might have left for her.
A clue hidden in the overgrown grass, a word etched into the hawthorn’s bark, an instruction in the patchwork webs of their clothes!
Anything – even the broken pieces of the Jewel buried in the shallow dirt around the charred roots. She didn’t know how long she looked.
‘Dian, I’m sorry,’ she gasped, finally coming back to kneel at their side, knowing it was hopeless. They hadn’t moved, hadn’t stirred. Had they even breathed? Yes, she reassured herself. Yes, she could feel their shallow breath. Just.
‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed, desperately touching the frayed threads of the webs around their wrist. Their skin was so cold. She could almost feel the wood dreaming around her, unspooling in golds and silvers, reds and blues, like tiny mirrors reflecting in the dark.
‘Please, just wake up. That’s all you have to do!’
Pink embers swirled around her, as if from a disturbed campfire. Mocking her. Pink like the Jewel that wasn’t here. Desperately, she sent out prayers, to all the trees and the plants and the creatures she could name. To all that remained of the hawthorn.
‘Please, please, please, just tell me what to do.’
Silence.
Now, when she needed them most, no one answered.
Not a single damned one of them.
Crying softly, she traced the lines of Dian’s broken cobwebs.
Moth was dead. There was no spider to fix the webs over Dian’s heart.
They no longer shone with life. She and Dian and Moth had gambled with everything they had – and lost. It was true that nothing could change.
She thought about the silver dragon’s sacrifice, the humans he’d spoken about, the ones who’d loaned her those beautiful clothes, who’d looked into the future and tried to change the dreadful pattern of it.
She thought about the fairies dissolving into the air, the giant wolves and the spiders slipping into the darkness, Papa Ru and Magie .
. . Had they ended up in some zoo somewhere, too?
They paid the price and all of them had lost.
Tears ran down her cheeks and fell off the tip of her nose.
She touched Dian’s arms gently, which seemed to have just yesterday been warm, curvy and healthy.
Now, she closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against Dian’s heart.
She could hear it beating, ever so faintly.
Not strong enough. Nowhere near strong enough.
She tucked a matted tendril back behind their ear.
The piercing in their lip shone in the eerie light.
She didn’t need to rely on the rosewood box in her mind to lock away her feelings now.
She didn’t want it. She didn’t want to lock anything away.
She wanted to feel all of it. More than that, she deserved to feel all of it.
She deserved to feel the tender touch of Dian’s fingers on her cheek.
She deserved to sink into their arms and press her face to their collarbone.
She deserved to see the pride and the bravery on their face when talking to Moth, she deserved to snort-laugh at their witty, preening jokes, she deserved to be infuriated by their fairy pig-headedness.
She deserved to drink homemade strawberry wine with them, and damn it, if they both wanted to, she deserved to have a fucking orgy with them under the moonlight, as debauched as any druid.
Most of all, she deserved to see them: not like this, but with their tree.
She deserved to see the way they cared for the tree from which they were born, in a world where they didn’t have to hide.
‘I love you,’ she burst out, not caring as her tears fell freely and pooled on Dian’s chest. ‘I don’t know how that’s possible since I barely know you, but I love you.
I want to love you. I want to have a chance to love you.
This whole thing,’ she said, with a hysterical laugh.
‘When we met, I was a na?ve terrified zookeeper, who’d fooled herself into thinking she was keeping magic safe, keeping all these creatures safe.
Really though, I was just keeping myself safe.
I thought it was better to lock everything up inside me, because then I wouldn’t get hurt, I would be safer then!
But I don’t want to be safe, Dian. I don’t want to hide myself away! ’
Unconsciously, she slipped her hand through theirs.
‘I’ve travelled two hundred years to meet you, to meet you for the first time.
I think I will never deserve your love, but if you wake up, I swear I’ll try to earn your friendship.
You’re the strongest, bravest, most infuriatingly mercurial person I’ve ever met, and you’ve made this forest, this galaxy of beauty, keeping all the people I love safe.
But it’s time to wake up. If you don’t, none of this will have mattered.
None of this will be worth it. I need you to wake up,’ she choked out, hot tears continuing to fall.
The image of Lucky’s dada loomed before her, and the incomprehensible price he’d paid.
‘We need you. All of us. Me and Lucky and the terracotta dragon. Issy and Raz and Jelly and Antony and Hamish and all the rest, who I can’t wait for you to meet.
But most of all, I need you, because I love you. I love you.’
From the hollow at the base of their neck came a tiny, barely audible tinkle.
‘Alright, there’s no need to drown me.’