Chapter Fourteen
When Frida reached the dark, churning border of brambles that marked the treeline, she had to steel herself against a rush of vertigo.
There was just a sheer wall of foliage before her, and it gave her the distinct feeling she’d been trapped inside a gigantic green and thorny baked Alaska.
But on the other side, she was certain that Cliff and the others would be waiting for her.
Maybe Gloria would be there too. Cliff on his own could fix anything, but the two of them together?
If they stopped arguing for a hot minute, they’d be unstoppable.
She plunged into the wood.
Antony and Hamish were depending on her.
The viscous shadows thronged with uncanny power.
Down she went, down, down, down. No path, no comforting lights to mark her way.
Jagged thorns ripped her sleeves, tangled undergrowth caught on her hair, chillingly animate branches ripped at her cap.
Sometimes she walked, sometimes she crawled, sometimes she slithered, cursing furiously.
This wasn’t the wood of the Hawthorn. This wasn’t Forest’s wood.
This was a fairy’s wood. and it felt like an age before the ground finally began to level out and she saw the gleam of warm lamplight peeking through the pitch-dark twisted tree trunks.
With a burst of speed, she forced her way between the final thickets.
The release made her cartwheel her arms. She’d just managed to steady herself, hope rippling through her, already hearing Cliff’s exultant boom, her fellow keepers’ shouts, Management and a full SWAT team armed with portable wards, machetes, axes, firearms . . .
A cry of joy and relief hovered on her lips.
Then her eyes lifted.
Hope died bitterly, instantly. There was no Cliff, no Management, no acerbic Gloria. No one was there at all to gather her into their arms.
Only bodies.
She looked around, aghast.
There were bodies everywhere. Along the road, in the grass, on the verges, under the oaks.
So many multicoloured uniforms, and yet they all looked sickeningly monochromatic in the glutinous, oozing shadows.
She understood the scope of it, all in a split second, the thunderous boom making her head ring.
It was a fairytale.
‘And this sleep fell upon the whole castle,’ she quoted, her blood ice-cold. ‘The king and queen fell fast asleep, and with them the whole court.’
She didn’t need to feel their pulses. Together with Antony and Hamish – her king and queen – this court was fast asleep.
Gone, Dozy had said. Is this what they’d meant? Everyone gone to sleep, everyone apart from her. Worse, far worse was what she saw when she raised her head.
‘A forest of thorns, like to be her tomb,’ she murmured numbly.
She let out a half-gasp, half-sob. The irony was that Antony, who loved anything that grew, anything green and rooty and alive, would have loved this.
She couldn’t see the sky. She was entombed.
She should have been able to see the golden wall of the LEZ, topped with warded barbed wire and a constant patrol of brown-uniformed guards.
She should have heard those guards’ footsteps, their voices as they chatted about what they were having for dinner, what was the new hot gossip on the block.
But the wood had engulfed them too, interring them in holly and ivy.
Her eyes trailed upwards, struggling to make sense of the height.
So many trees, like giants rising. They climbed, branch over branch, bough over bough, until they met in the middle far above her, the scale of it making a screeching thunderous howl in her head.
‘Dozy.’ She caught her breath. ‘What have you done?’
This fairy wasn’t a Level 8; they were a Level 8000.
Even wounded, they’d broken the wards – maybe all the wards!
She imagined the LEZ being taken apart bit by bit.
She could feel the branches tightening around her.
By rights, the air should have been full of panicked bellows – the shrieks of the leshies, the howls of the slippery-nosed hangferns, the manticore’s roars.
But the only sounds were the churning earth, the screaming boughs, the hissing of more leaves than the universe held stars, and the awful multidimensional snores of her friends.
She stumbled forwards when she saw a flash of pink hair.
‘Zuzka,’ she cried.
Zuzka was spooning one of the benches, her tattooed wrinkled face soft as she wrapped herself around it like a cat.
The DO NOT RUN tattoo on her forearm glinting in the streetlamp.
Next to Zuzka, Sora was snoring like a steam engine.
Shaking them made no difference. She scanned the road, praying that Cliff wouldn’t be here, that she wouldn’t find his two gigantic black boots poking out from behind a rubbish bin.
But there he was. Her heart sank as she sprinted over, crouching next to her boss and gazing at his tanned face. He smiled woozily, cuddling the bin.
‘Papa Bear, wake up,’ she begged. ‘We need you.’ Her voice broke. ‘I need you.’
Her boss moaned, ‘No, Gloria, Management picked me!’
She sank back on her heels, putting her hands over her ears.
She saw Gloria, sleeping a few feet away.
The Head of Sky should have been too canny to be affected by such supernatural magic, but here she was, an angular lump, limbs flung out as if trying to beat Cliff over the head even mid-coma.
Frida wrapped her arms around her knees as fake night-time fell over them all.
All who enter this wood, prepare to be enchanted.
That’s what the sign still said, hanging wryly beneath the oak tree.
She laughed bitterly, pulling off her cap and gripping it in her lap.
The dark liquid of Dozy’s eyes drifted through her mind as she swallowed a choke.
I trust you.
To do what though? Her whole being sagged like a suitcase that’s been sat on.
Dizzily, she watched Gloria’s feet twitching like a dog’s.
Cliff’s gargantuan nasal wheezing suggesting he might need a breathing apparatus.
She had to be dreaming, but the longer she sat there listening to them, the more terribly real it seemed.
She tried pinching herself, but that didn’t help at all and soon, great swollen tears were falling down her cheeks.
She hadn’t felt this alone since the morning her mum had died.
That day, she’d curled up on the floor of the cold, tiled hospital bathroom and cried herself empty.
If Antony and his family hadn’t come to peel her off the ground, she might have stayed on those cold tiles forever.
There was no Antony to peel her off the floor this time though.
She didn’t know how long passed but finally, the truth settled over her: she was not going to be granted the oblivion of sleep.
So she set her jaw and wiped her tear-stained cheeks.
She couldn’t stay here like a discarded crisp packet.
She was Frida Rose. Dragon keeper and unicorn butler.
Shakily, she lifted herself off the ground, and put her hat back on her head, each determined footstep echoing in her ears as she walked over to Grace, Antony’s zoo buggy.
Getting behind the wheel, the smell of Antony settled around her, clearing her head.
Mint and freshly laundered uniforms. A stack of Hamish’s new mushroom books in the tray on the back brought a smile to her lips.
With steadier hands than she’d thought possible, Frida turned on Grace’s ignition and set out to save the LEZ.