Chapter Twenty-Five
‘WEEEEEEEEEE!!!’ Lucky’s bellow filled the world.
When he banked with inches to spare, Frida could pretty much feel her bones being shattered into a thousand pieces. Her stomach lurched into her mouth, down into her toes, up into the clouds. She tasted sea spray, and then they were flying.
Up, up, up.
At first, she just squeezed her eyes shut, gripping onto the trusty spike, the one that she could now confidently say had saved her life.
But after a few terrifying moments, she managed to crack her eyes open and squint through the lashing wind.
Sunlight bounced off the frothy waves, now many metres below, and she gaped as Lucky’s wings astoundingly kept them aloft.
‘Lucky,’ she breathed, hunching over his glimmering scales. ‘You’re a miracle.’
He giggled, panting hard. ‘Flying is fun!’ he shouted, before executing a full loop-the-loop.
Frida screamed, but when he righted himself, she was laughing too.
Laughing like she hadn’t laughed in a really, really long time.
She threw back her head and howled, gulping the cold air into her lungs.
They were in the clouds now, so high. Her face stung, but Lucky’s scales warmed, emitting a toasty heat, and she pressed in close.
Below, through the mist, she could just make out flashes of green. Lucky craned his neck to peer fondly at her, his golden eye resplendent as the clouds reflected in his fiery pupil.
‘You know where we’re going?’ she asked, not quite able to believe the impossibility of it as the wind whipped her words away.
It didn’t matter. He heard. ‘Oh yes!’ he exclaimed, before catastrophically losing his balance.
Within a split second, they were plunging downwards again.
Frida almost lost her grip, howling at him to look where he was going.
He quickly righted himself, apologising, his wings pumping desperately.
Then he let out another delirious shriek, and she watched, dumbstruck, as his scales seemed to melt into the palest of purples, leaching their colour as if becoming the clouds themselves.
He seemed to disappear within the very sky.
The English countryside was devoid of motorways, cars, high-rises or concrete.
Lucky sang to himself, a soaring canary’s warble, as they zoomed along, and Frida caught snatches of woodland, a sparkle of an estuary, a meandering canal.
It was almost like being in a plane, except without walls, seat belts or stewards offering G&Ts.
For a time, a murmuration of starlings flew with them, forming their own black dragon that swooped and contracted, so close that there were times when Frida could almost reach out and touch them.
Blazing with collective magnitude, they sung of cloud currents and earth fields.
It was so beautiful, it brought tears to her eyes.
It was too soon, and not soon enough, that she realised Lucky was starting to slow, the heavy white mist beginning to thin.
Below them a forest stretched for miles, thick, green and dark.
On the horizon a smudge of smoky darkness grew larger, the landscape dotted with majestic spires and chimneys puffing out black fog.
A thin glint of a river snaked through its heart.
She rubbed her eyes, catching her breath. London.
London in the 1830s.
They weren’t headed for London though, she didn’t think. Not quite.
As if on call, the trees below them cleared to reveal the first sight of a winding serpentine lake in the distance.
She caught her breath, a ribbon of excitement rising in her chest, bright and fragile as a golden dragonfly.
It seemed inconceivable. And yet . . . The water of the lake held the deep inky hue of a lochan.
In the middle of the lake was a small island, its gothic folly designed by the famous architect William Dryfus – she remembered studying him in school.
Her eyes widened as they passed the island’s notorious crumbling tower and then, there on the lake’s northern shore, stood the elegant Elizabethan house that had featured in so many of her dreams. Its grand facade might as well have been stamped on the inner flap of her brain.
She remembered all of it. The crunch of the long gravel pathway over the grounds, the network of perfectly landscaped yew hedges, the dazzling scents of the flower gardens.
‘Forge House.’ She gripped Lucky’s mist-damp scales, her knuckles white.
Ten years ago, and two centuries in the future, her class had taken a coach here and eaten cardboard egg sandwiches.
Her schoolmates had whined the whole way that Wembley, or Birmingham, or the beach, would have been so much cooler.
There aren’t even any animals here anymore, they’d complained, driving the teachers mad.
But just sensing the creatures who’d once lived here had been enough for her, and she’d been unable to think of anything else for months afterwards: the cast iron dragons woven into the fence posts, the unicorns sculpted into the walls, the rusted horseshoes hung over the stables, which had once belonged to the sisters’ kelpies.
‘They saved over two thousand species from extinction,’ she said softly, the frozen air biting her lungs.
‘Sir Joshua and his sisters, Henry Gladstone, Laurence Harding, Edward Caval, James Gaunt, William Cliff.’ She recited the names of all the LEZites, the zoo’s founding board, like it was a prayer.
She could see people down below, little dots on the grass, and she almost shouted to them in excitement, until she realised that if they could see her, they’d be the ones screaming.
Even two hundred years ago, dragons wouldn’t have been flying willy-nilly through the skies.
She lightly touched the leached misty colour of Lucky’s scales, wondering.
Maybe he truly had become the same colour as the sky.
She’d have a lot to tell Cliff, when this was over.
The thought helped clear her head. Lucky had to be getting tired, and they couldn’t just drop into the middle of the lake and say, Oh, hi Sir Josh, we’re looking for the Jewel, any ideas?
Sir Joshua probably wasn’t even here, she reminded herself, refusing to get her hopes up.
In reality, he’d not spent much time at Forge House, as he was mostly away on research expeditions.
He’d founded rescue centres all over the world, many of which later became the first Extraordinary Zoos.
Besides, he can’t have known about the Jewel.
A discovery that big would have entered the history books.
Then looking down at herself, she winced.
She was head-to-toe khaki, with enough tattoos to make her look like a dock worker.
She may know everything about the Beaufort family, may have spent her whole life fantasising about them – but they had no idea who she was.
And she most certainly did not look like she could just wander unchecked through their grounds. She had to be smart about this.
‘Lucky,’ she began. ‘Maybe we should head back into . . .’
But he was already banking. ‘This way, little stink! I know where to go.’
She relaxed, keeping her eyes peeled, searching for any signs of the enclosures, but the estate passed too quickly. She was just beginning to make sense of the hedges and fences when they shot back over the woods, leaving the house and its valley behind.
‘The King’s Wood,’ she murmured, the dark swathe of trees pooling below her.
Young Frida had stood down there, eyes searching, imagining silver stags in the beech groves and goomews in the burrows.
In her time, there’d only been a tiny remnant of the wood left, but here, now, if she’d wanted, she might have walked to Cambridge under its canopy.
‘Let’s not go too far,’ she cautioned.
But Lucky just continued, pumping his wings in determination. She could feel his lungs labouring under the exertion. She gave a yelp when a great grey cloud heavy with the scent of rain started to grow. It was approaching fast.
‘Lucky!’ she squawked in warning, praying that he’d bank around it.
He did no such thing.
‘Weeeeeeeeeee!’ he cried.
Frida braced when they sped into the cloud.
The rain hit cold and furious. As if they’d been slammed into a waterfall.
Within a split second they were out the other side, but she was soaked, the biting rainwater drenching her.
She caught her breath as she looked around.
They were inside the cloud, but she knew instinctively this wasn’t like the others they’d flown through.
This cloud smelled of the spaces between the stars.
She could hear nothing except the ragged beating of Lucky’s wings and her own heartbeat. A mist of raindrops drifted in the hoary darkness as if weightless, colours shifting like steel blue diamonds.
‘Lucky,’ she breathed the uncanny fog into her lungs. ‘What is this?’
He craned his neck to look back at her, his golden iris shining within the grey.
‘Raindrops,’ he whispered, awed.
Then, without warning, he crash-landed in the most spectacular and gruesome fashion, which – Frida suspected – only a baby dragon was really capable of.