Chapter Twenty-Six
It was a miracle nobody was hurt.
‘ARE YOU ALIVE, LITTLE STINK?’ Lucky cried, dusting himself off. His booming chirp echoed off the claggy wetness.
‘I think so!’ Frida exclaimed breathlessly, picking damp pine needles out of her hair.
Somehow, she’d managed to keep her seat.
All around them, primordial boughs swayed, clattering and storm-tossed, an emerald so bright amongst grey coils of vapour.
By some luck, they’d come down right into a clearing.
But the next moment, power flooded her vision, and as if they materialised out of the very fog itself, a wall of flesh, wings, horns, fur and teeth suddenly appeared before her.
‘Fuck,’ she cried.
It was not an empty clearing.
All around them, there were creatures. It was the small ones she saw first, because there were just so many of them.
The foxes, rabbits and wild cats, mice and rats, a boar, deer and more birds than she could number, all staring at her and Lucky in a way that was most unsettling.
Then the others came in focus. The grey shapes of elves, the globular forms of brownies, the tawny hue of a pack of chimeras.
Holy hell, were those two and three necked grunkles?
! Gnomes with owls on their shoulders. Goblins sitting on the backs of gigantic spiders.
Woodland sprites. A pack of black wolves the size of cars!
The only time she’d seen so many ECs together was when she’d watched An Extraordinary Planet on the BBC with David Attenborough.
And that hadn’t even begun to prepare her for the sheer weight of such a sight, as if starlight flared every time she turned her head. Magic, this was truly magic.
She couldn’t take it in fast enough – the roving will-o’-the-wisps, the loping form of a Davidson’s slope-backed hare, and was that a snow-white angel stag in the shadows?
In the oak tree above them, a group of one-eyed pixies leered.
Her hand flew to her unprotected throat.
Blue skinned with jagged teeth, they leapt from bough to bough, rabid celestine shapes no bigger than her fist.
‘So many friends!’ Lucky chirped gaily.
Frida whimpered. Firstly because, well – pixies!
But secondly, there were so many voices, she couldn’t identify whose was whose.
The spiders ticked, then there was someone who sounded like nails on a chalkboard (the pixies?) Another was like a waft of wild garlic (the goblins?), another like booming thunder (the wolves?) Someone cantankerous sounded like twigs snapping.
A group of elves vibrated with the tinkle of a timbale, and there was a blaze of scarlet that reminded her of Raz.
It was all there, around her, words that she shouldn’t have been able to understand.
But she could. She could understand all of them.
Lucky, clearly recognising the cataclysmic expression on her face, nudged her companionably with the edge of his left wing. ‘You’re a linguist, remember?’
She might have hugged him, since he looked so adorably earnest, but then one of the pixies squealed violently, and swooped in close enough that Frida could smell the fetid odour of the creature’s breath. She was big, one of the biggest of the pack. The matriarch, biggest of the pack.
‘What a disgusting lizard!’ she crowed, swinging from her demon-pointed tail. ‘You almost squashed us! You weren’t invited to this meeting, no lizards, and no humans!’
Lucky reeled back, shocked. Hurt flared over his face as he dipped his head, golden eyes very round. ‘I’m sorry,’ he sniffled through a shine of tears.
The pixie bared her needlepoint teeth and went to snap at him.
‘Hey! He didn’t mean to. Back off,’ Frida shouted, lunging forwards to try to protect him.
The shock that reverberated around the clearing was almost physical. Every single one of the creatures descended into stunned silence.
The pixie recovered first. ‘What did you say?’ Her single red eye was wide with fear.
Frida looked embarrassed. ‘I – uh . . . I just said—’
‘She speaks,’ the pixie breathed.
‘The human speaks,’ another growled.
Lucky shifted nervously beneath her, and she pressed against him for reassurance. Then everyone started talking at once, the clearing exploding with the noise. God, she thought, pressing a hand to her head, how did dragons handle this?
‘I can understand her!’ someone screeched.
‘Me too!’
‘And me!’
‘How—’ cried another.
‘The human speaks!’
‘It’s not possible!’
Suddenly, there was a great crack from between the trees, sharp as bone shattering. It made Frida jump, but the endless chatter ceased immediately. Then the scent of damp earth and petrichor wafted out of the mist and bloomed through her lungs.
‘Fairies,’ Lucky puffed in marked relief.
But Frida didn’t feel relieved at all when, out of the raindrops, seven fairies materialized, large hulking bodies glittering in the eerie fog.
To Frida’s chagrin, she didn’t even realise she’d moved. But she’d already slithered down Lucky’s back and was about to set off at a dead sprint through the trees in the opposite direction when one of them said,
‘Stop.’
She stopped so quickly, she hit the top of her head on Lucky’s wing and tripped. Lucky squinted down at her, his cavernous mouth hanging open, as though embarrassed on her behalf.
‘What are you doing on the ground?’ he whispered.
She gave a little whimper. She could feel countless eyes on her, countless extraordinary eyes that should have been extinct. Unsteadily, she pushed herself upright, before shrinking back into the safety of Lucky’s ample girth.
When the same fairy spoke again, in a voice as sharp as barbs, she recoiled even more.
‘You speak,’ they rasped. It was the fairy in the middle, a tall creature – exceptionally tall even, she suspected, for fairies.
Not that she had much knowledge in the matter, but they were at least two Cliffs.
They had the bearing of royalty, with hair made of oak leaves and a filmy mist that wafted around their body, carpeted in pale mycelium threads from crown to heel.
In a sharp, angular face, the fairy’s eyes were white and cold.
On their shoulder, Frida realised with a sinking feeling, was the blue-skinned matriarch of the pixies, sticking her tongue out gleefully.
Frida considered giving that blue demon the middle finger, but a quick assessment of the situation made her decide against anything of the sort.
The fairies were all terrifying. Different, and yet, similarly tree-ish, if trees might whip out a branch and decide to decapitate you with it.
She searched their faces for anything she recognised from Dozy.
But none of them were Dozy. The one on the far left had six eyes spread across their high brown forehead, each the colour of rowan berries.
Next to them was a fairy that looked so old, as if a thousand-year-old yew had sprouted feet and walked here.
Another was clearly sourced from an apple tree, for they were covered in so many deliciously scented apple blossoms, all Frida could see of their face were two razor sharp woody horns, above a single eye the glossy colour of green apple skin.
‘Are you listening, creature?’ the oak-fairy snapped.
Frida’s head whipped back. ‘Yes,’ she said, flushing.
She was trembling all over. This oak-royal-fairy had a touch of Gloria about them.
Aware she must have looked as if she’d just been pulled out of an overflowing ditch, dragged through a wind tunnel, then soundly drenched, she self-consciously tried to brush the worst of the dirt from her face and tuck her bedraggled hair behind her ears.
Then she forced a semblance of composure and hoped they could all just agree to forget the last few minutes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘And yes, I can talk.’
The fairy hissed so loudly at this that Frida recoiled, even more so when they slid towards her, their wide white eyes narrowing to slits.
Their shadow was a knife slicing down the grass, and it took every fibre of Frida’s being not to squeak.
She was reassured by Lucky’s bulk, but her skin still turned to gooseflesh when the fairy said,
‘You speak like a dragon.’ Their words cracked through the rain-dusted air. ‘You speak like that dragon. With ease. As if you have stolen our words, and our minds.’
Her hackles rose at Lucky’s chirp of dismay.
‘Dragons don’t steal!’ he exclaimed, indignant.
The fairy lifted a six-fingered mycelium thread-covered hand and pointed at Frida, ignoring Lucky completely.
‘I have encountered other humans, and speak some of their languages, and you are not like them. I do not know what you are.’ Their gaze burned into her coldly.
‘Mayhap you are a dragon in disguise. They are the only ones who speak with such blue, slippery tongues. Mayhap you are something else entirely. I have spent my life learning the languages of these worlds, but somehow you speak as if they are yours to claim. I think you are a thief,’ they spat.
Behind her, Lucky shrunk backwards, whimpering.
Her hands fisting at her sides, Frida glared at the fairy.
‘No!’ she cried, her ire rising. ‘I am not a dragon or anything else. I am a human. I was just given a gift. This dragon gave me a gift.’ She glanced back at Lucky and wrapped a reassuring hand around the hard icy edge of his foreleg.
Turning back to the fairy, her eyes flashed.
‘This is the only reason I can speak to you and be understood – by his grace. I stole nothing.’
‘I have never heard of such a thing,’ another fairy – the yew – creaked out, like old roots cracking in the earth. ‘Dragons do not give such gifts. It is likely she stole it.’
‘I didn’t!’
‘Don’t listen!’ The pixie rose on her tiny, clawed toes from her perch on the royal-oak-supreme’s craggy shoulder.
Clearly unable to contain herself, she clutched a strand of oak leaf hair as her pointed tail whipped back and forth.
‘They’re liars. Human or dragon, they’re a liar and a thief!
It steals, all of them steals! We know. This is whys we are here. ’
‘I don’t steal!’ Frida exclaimed for the third time. But as she swung her gaze around the clearing, she realized she was on trial. A thousand and more eyes, a thousand and more terrifying beings, fixed on her in deadly silence. Then what the pixie said struck her.
‘Why are you here?’ she whispered.
The wolves and the spiders, the sprites, the elves, the gnomes, the grunkles, the slope-backed hare, the snow-white angel stag.
In the dark boughs, beady-eyed vampire bats zipped like shards of velvet night.
An Oakley’s owl glowed scarlet, haloed by charcoaled moths.
All of them, out of myth and legend. If her understanding of Lucky’s timing was right, then this had to be in the middle of the Great Disappearing, perhaps barely fifty years after the krakens had invaded London.
What would all these creatures be doing here like this, gathered in one spot?
None of the history books claimed that such disparate creatures had ever gathered together without killing each other. So, for what? Some kind of meeting?
The oak-fairy cocked their head, readying to reply, when there was a great big crashing in the primordial trees behind them and everyone, as one, turned towards the noise.
A few seconds later, half a dozen musk boar burst out of the undergrowth, followed by a giant yellow adder snake, a bedraggled-looking elf, and an extremely harried and very beautiful fairy.
‘Sorry, sorry!’ the fairy exclaimed, scrubbing their hand over their dirt-streaked face, showing flashes of rosy cheekbones and long lashes.
‘Just collecting the stragglers!’ They gave a nervous laugh, trying to wipe away some of the filth as their dark eyes darted towards the royal-oak-supreme, before pushing back a few curly tendrils of green hair.
Emerald City-green, to be precise.