Chapter Twenty-One
Frida ducked under the devasted fence and set off at a sprint after the others.
Chasing after Fireheart’s fiery belly, she couldn’t help feeling as if what Fireheart had said was true.
Whatever happened now, the world as she knew it was gone.
She could never go back to the Frida that hadn’t walked into a dragon’s enclosure.
As she climbed, it seemed that every time she glanced upwards, Dozy’s uncanny cavern of leaves grew closer, the emerald darkness blurring where the stars should have been.
Not wanting to look, she focused simply on keeping up.
Soon, the slope was near vertical, and Frida didn’t know how Fireheart managed it, or how long it took before they reached the top.
Finally, she hauled herself onto the ledge where Fireheart was waiting for her and collapsed in a rain of loose pebbles and dust.
‘Ree, Ree!’ Jellybean leapt around her in encouragement, his white mohawks kindling.
Fireheart was inspecting the minute details of the cracked edges of her sharp red claws with imperious nonchalance, her terracotta scales perfectly camouflaged against the shelf of sandstone.
The air was thick with the smoky scent of sulphur and, as pinkish-brown fumes coiled around her, Frida somehow managed to haul herself up to sitting, laughing desperately as she dropped her head on her knees, spent.
‘How did you do that?’ she panted. She was fit – she could hike all day in sturdy boots.
But Fireheart might have considered entering an Iron Man.
Although Frida supposed Fireheart was used to it.
She’d been under the LEZ’s care since 1835 and had even spent a few years at Forge House before they’d moved her to Melody.
But she’d been in this enclosure since 1952, when it had been built especially for her.
She must know these cliffs like the back of her own paw. This thought sobered Frida.
But then Fireheart gave a chesty chuckle. ‘Impressed, hmm? Didn’t expect someone as ancient as I to move so fast?’
Frida flushed and gave a shy what-are-you-going-to-do shrug as Jellybean plopped into her lap. She gathered him to her, pressing her face into his mohawks.
Fireheart waited, kind enough to let her catch her breath, before she lifted herself back up and Frida heard the audible groan of her arthritic bones.
‘Azizam.’ The word was a rusty hiss. ‘Come. That was the easy part.’
Frida gazed at the dark opening in the cliff face behind her. And gulped.
On the Swan’s group chat, there was an emoji they used when something particularly amazing happened.
Like if some biologist discovered a new type of fairy mushroom, or Hamish managed to feed the root lizards without getting bitten.
It was the pink flamingo emoji. Antony had once gone to Brazil with his family, a few years ago, and he’d not been able to stop talking about pink flamingos for weeks afterwards.
It had become a joke between them, and now anything wonderful was synonymous with the flamingo.
She’d only ever felt so simultaneously happy and heartbroken at the same time once before: the day she’d cried tears of joy when Cliff had told them about the baby dragon, then tears of grief for her mum who would never know that Frida was going to be a dragon keeper.
And now, she was on top of Fireheart’s cliff, about to go inside Fireheart’s cave.
This was where Fireheart was pictured on all the posters.
This was where Frida had sat in her daydreams as her imaginary friend – the old terracotta miracle the size of a Lamborghini – taught Frida to fly, to breathe fire, how to find her dad, the faceless man who’d gotten her mum pregnant.
It was up here that Fireheart had given her the confidence to apply to be a zookeeper.
This place was the holy grail of dragon nerdology.
She wanted more than anything to send Antony and Hamish a flamingo emoji – their group-chat shorthand for anything too incredible for words.
But then she imagined them, lost in the weeds, their faces covered with ivy and mushrooms and thistledown.
And she knew it was entirely possible she’d never get to send them a flamingo emoji again.
With difficulty, she managed to stand.
They were high up here, high enough that the endless canopy seemed so close, she had the dizzying sensation that if she rose up on her toes, she might feel the brush of leaves across her face, the jumbled branches made of a thousand different rust-reds, ochres, golds and greens.
When she did lift her hand, she shuddered, drawing back quickly as she touched empty air.
She knew that the trees were still a long, long way off.
Shoving away vertigo, she made herself look down, taking in the view to the south.
The LEZ still blazed in patches, countless moon-white silver spotlights like inverted galaxies illuminating familiar networks of roads and yew hedges.
She saw the shimmer of Ocean, the flat shine of Lake, the fields of Grass.
The deep colours of Forest shifting as habitats moved from jungle to Mediterranean to boreal.
But amongst the silvery brightness, huge swathes of darkness bled out, where she knew the electricity must have failed.
The consequences too catastrophic to countenance. Lights, climate controls, wards . . .
‘He gave you a gift.’
Frida whirled.
Fireheart was wreathed in smoke.
‘You asked what the hatchling did to you. I am telling you. He gave you a gift. You would not be here now if he hadn’t done such a thing.’
Frida felt the burn of the old dragon’s caustic judgement.
She wanted to shield herself from it but forced herself, using every ounce of her will, to meet Fireheart’s gaze head-on.
She’d asked, so she would hear the answer.
The dragon’s charred nostrils flared in something like approval as she growled,
‘Dragons are the only creatures able to speak as many languages as there are worlds. We are hatched with them on our blue tongues.’
Frida could almost feel the talons of smoke tightening around her roaring heart.
‘We are now speaking High-Winged Dragon. You have not learned it, or earned it, but there you have it. No other human in millennia has spoken High-Winged Dragon. If I didn’t know better, I’d be shocked you’re alive. Your head should have exploded. But there is no undoing it now, I’m afraid.’
Her words crashed into Frida like molten rocks.
And then Fireheart just turned and crawled into the darkness, as if she hadn’t just altered Frida’s entire reality.
What could Frida do, but follow?
High-Winged Dragon.
As many languages as there are worlds.
No undoing it.
She stepped inside the cave. As the air seemed to change from gas to liquid, a scalding heat burrowed deep inside her lungs.
Coarse rock walls closed around her, and she could just make out the faint shapes of the monkeys, hovering up ahead.
Thick tendrils of ochre-tinted smoke coiled like living beasts.
Suddenly, she remembered that tornado of fire she’d first seen when she’d been six years old, bursting from Fireheart’s charred throat, and might have run straight back out of the cave, screaming for her life, if Jellybean hadn’t scurried back for her and slipped inside her shirt, snuggling up right next to her heart with a determined squeak.
The soft feeling of his fur against her skin helped her to breathe and she focused on the layout of the cave, the schematics of which she’d studied a thousand times.
They weren’t in the cave proper yet, but the winding entrance tunnel, which was just large enough for Fireheart to crawl through.
After about thirty yards though, it would open up to become a dark cavern about the size of a squash court, built right out of the sandstone.
With a rugged floor and a dry, honey-coloured ceiling, it was where Fireheart came to get away from the eyes of the guests.
But that was the limit of Frida’s knowledge.
Somehow the LEZ cameras never worked properly in here, the feed always on the blink, driving Management up the wall.
Sulphur seemed to infuse every grain of sand, every atom of the darkness.
Time seemed to slow down as shadow and smoke entwined, strands of gloom and ash wrapping like limbs around the walls of the rock, around Fireheart, around her.
Frida lifted her shirt over her nose, trying not to choke on the stench.
Her uniform was less of a uniform now, more a smorgasbord of sweat, old meat, rotten eggs, monkey fur, Nuckelavee spit.
She took off her cap and tried to wipe her hair, but the thick tendrils were plastered to her scalp.
She could just see the scaly bulk of Fireheart, haloed by monkey-fireworks.
‘Anytime now, azizam dear,’ the dragon’s voice sliced through the smoke. Frida could positively hear the creak of her bones, reverberating through the sandy rock.
‘Yeah,’ she choked out, hurrying to catch up, her boots slipping over the stones, sanded down by Fireheart’s belly. ‘Sorry, sorry!’
Jellybean had climbed up her collar and was hanging off her neck, trying to use his little hands to fan her face.
Fireheart gave them both a scathing look, before lumbering onwards around a sharp corner with an iridescent puff of steam.
A metallic tang filled Frida’s nose as she took one tentative step after her, the feeling of the rocky walls receding.
Then the world lit up.
The cavern was suddenly a glittering symphony of tiny floating embers, all the colours of a desert under the stars.
The monkeys zoomed around with delight, trying to catch the dancing lights.
Ochre, quartz, terracotta, apricot, coral, copper, dusty yellow, sapphire . . . Frida drew in an awed breath.
‘What in the world . . .’