Chapter Twenty-Seven
Every atom in Frida’s body seemed to liquify. The fairy with the green hair’s eyes grew wide at the sight of Frida and Lucky in the middle of the clearing.
‘By all the seas,’ the rowan-fairy muttered audibly with a scowl. ‘Late again? Do they do it on purpose, do you think?’
The yew-fairy next to them gave a mean cackle. Then another of their comrades, a devilishly handsome fairy with the reddish-brown skin of a pine tree, joined in with a laugh so wintery, it felt like icy needles raking Frida’s eardrums.
The fairy with the green hair flushed the devastating colour of overripe plums.
‘I would have come earlier if I could,’ they exclaimed. The royal-oak-supreme shot them a look of such contempt, in any normal situation Frida would have felt sorry for them. But she had more pressing concerns. Like the fact she was about to have a minor aneurism.
This was Dozy.
They had the same hair, the same oval dappled face, the same hooded bistre irises, the same emerald lashes.
Yet her Dozy had been like a broken tree, with enough grief in their ravaged expression to make anyone’s heart bleed.
But this Dozy? They looked quick to laugh, their mottled lips tilted upwards, their cheeks bright.
‘Young,’ she whispered, the word resounding through her. Young. About two hundred years younger to be exact. But there was no mistaking them. Their face was imprinted forever in her memory. She couldn’t stop staring. Wow.
They moved with ease, a person completely comfortable in their skin.
She took in the voluptuous curve of breasts and statuesque, muscular thighs, the strong line of their neck and supple curve of their shoulders, like an awesome figure from a Pre-Raphaelite painting.
This was someone who spent their days sleeping happily in meadows, bedecked in flowers, drinking homemade wine, riding wild horses at sunrise and dancing at sunset.
Their face was luminous, despite the chastened blush that coloured their cheeks.
Their hair, which in the LEZ had been a matted clump, was now all wild curls flowing to their shoulders, and shaved at the sides, perhaps to keep it off their face.
The cut highlighted the chiselled line of their jaw and the healthy curve of their cheekbones.
She saw no greys in their hair, no tilted crown of hawthorn leaves, no lip piercing.
Just the same uncanny lace clinging to their body as if it had been woven by a team of glamorous spiders for the catwalk.
No holes or tatters. Only a few rogue brambles caught in their sleeves, which they were surreptitiously attempting to remove.
They looked, quite frankly, spectacular.
Lucky nuzzled in behind her, all wagging tail and lolling blue tongue, and chirped in her ear, ‘Look, little stink! I did it. I know you wanted to go to that house, but Dada said I should follow my instincts. And when I felt the fairy pathways – very different from dragon pathways you know, they are made of raindrops – I just knew it was the right thing to do. And look! Now everything is turning out just as it’s supposed to. Just like Dada said it would.’
Frida sagged against him.
Just as the oak-fairy snapped, ‘What did that dragon just say?’
Frida looked up.
The oak-fairy’s features had gone dangerously still. ‘What did he say about the house?’
Frida looked to Lucky for help, but he was trying to catch falling leaves in his mouth now, squealing as they fluttered harmlessly out of his reach. When she turned back unenthusiastically, she saw with a sinking heart that Dozy had joined the other fairies, slipping seamlessly into their ranks.
With an effort, she drew herself up. ‘Well, yes. We were going to Forge House, the one that’s through these woods. Do you, uh, know of it?’
There was a long, weighted silence, broken only by the rustle of someone’s wings, the scrape of a sharp claw.
When the oak fairy finally spoke, their glacial tone set Frida’s teeth chattering. ‘We know of that house.’
Frida didn’t think this was a good thing.
She looked hopefully at Dozy, but the way they were glowering at her, with such a furious scowl, made her pale.
Before she could figure out what to say, the rowan-fairy had shoved their way through the crowd and was whispering in the royal-oak-supreme’s ear.
Whatever they were saying, the pixie on their shoulder was delighted by it, a sight that made Frida’s stomach sink like a stone.
That pixie was bad news. Soon, all the fairies were in a heated huddle, along with a few of the others – three wolves, a singular elf, a handful of sprites, a ginormous spider.
That damned pixie. They sure took their time too, filled with animated gesticulation, clumsy translations she couldn’t make out.
As she watched, she felt as if she was unravelling, thread by thread. Some elves started passing around loaves of a nutty bread, wrapped in fat oak leaves, and the smell of it made her swoon. Behind her, Lucky had become distracted by a stick and was chewing on it happily.
‘No!’ Dozy shouted.
Frida startled, just as Dozy began to storm up and down the line of fairies, gesticulating wildly. Their eyes flamed. ‘I won’t do it! I won’t.’
Frida did not like the sound of this. She had the very distinct feeling of a pattern she didn’t understand closing in around her. And the other fairies had smug expressions on their too sharp, too cruel faces.
‘Surely, you are not all in agreement?’ Dozy exclaimed. ‘You cannot really think I will do it.’ But as Dozy desperately looked around at the group, there were whispers as someone translated, and then the unanimous bobbing of heads.
‘What’s going on?’ Frida called, trying to catch someone’s attention.
Dozy just let out a howl and came to a halt before the oak-supreme. ‘I won’t do it!’ they repeated with a brutal hiss. ‘This was not what we agreed when this meeting was proposed. We haven’t even started the debate yet.’
‘Yet it is a fitting solution,’ the oak-supreme answered, their eyes sliding towards Frida.
There was enough frost in their voice to make Frida wonder if they had an ice fairy somewhere in their family tree.
‘The human is here. We adapt, cousin.’ They said the final word, cousin, with enough disdain to make Frida shiver.
Dozy went wan, their jaw clenched tighter than Cliff’s. Their ethereal beauty seemed to fade as they stood there, and Frida could have sworn she heard a tremble in their voice as they said, barely audible, ‘Please?’
The oak-supreme did not even flinch. ‘It is decided.’
For a few seconds, Frida thought Dozy would continue to argue. But then their head dipped, and all the strength seemed to go out of them in a whoosh. The hairs on the back of Frida’s neck lifted. Tentatively, she inched closer.
‘Uh,’ she said a bit too loudly. ‘Hello? Hi?’
The whole unpleasant group turned their faces towards her.
She held her ground. Just. ‘Can I ask what you’re talking about?’ She smiled obligingly, trying to channel Antony’s unfathomable ability to make every person in the room want to be his friend.
It was not successful. No one would look at her apart from the pixie, who was doing some kind of evil pixie-dance on the oak-supreme’s shoulder, single red eye gleaming.
Finally, the oak-supreme stepped out of the crowd with a creaking, suffering sigh, wet crystalline droplets sparkling in their hair.
The trees around them seemed to lift in symphony, as if the entire world did nothing without their permission.
They uttered, almost as if it pained them, ‘We have decided not to kill you, human-not-a-human.’
‘Oh,’ Frida said, blinking. ‘Right. Well. That’s kind of you.’
The oak-supreme nodded, as if they really believed it was. ‘But we do not trust you.’
She thought to argue, then saw the hatred ingrained on Dozy’s face, directed squarely at her. The way their soft, upturned lips had firmed into a sneer, the twist to their jaw as if they were chewing on something distasteful.
‘I understand,’ she said.
The oak-supreme’s lip curled. ‘Do you? We are looking for our families.’ They spread their arms, indicating the whole incongruent group.
‘And there is a place, near here, where some of them are being held. The house of which you speak. You say you are going there. But why would a human and a dragon be going to such a place?’
Her ears suddenly felt a bit muffled, like she was listening through a long tunnel.
One of the wolves tilted his mammoth shaggy head, training his huge yellow eye on her.
All she could hear was the determined crunch of Lucky’s oblivious chewing, and the oak fairy’s words echoing.
What did they think, that she was taking Lucky to Forge House to be captured?
It was just a giant misunderstanding then!
She might have laughed, except it wasn’t funny, not in the least. Not if they thought that Forge House had taken their families.
She was already shaking her head to refute it. ‘If your families are in that house, they’re there because they were in danger, and there was nowhere else safe left for them to go. I know the people who live there. I can vouch for their intentions.’
Someone, one of the elves, scoffed.
She swung around. ‘It’s true!’ But a feather of fear ran down her spine. She could see, from their perspective, how it might look. And the oak-fairy’s white eyes seemed to grow frostier with every second.
‘It is a fortunate thing you have such assurance,’ they said, their lips lifting with studied cruelty. ‘Because you and my cousin will be going together to make certain of it.’
Frida stopped dead. ‘What?’
Dozy snapped their teeth at her, their hair rippling like many-coloured leaves, and Frida stumbled backwards with a yelp.
‘If you wish to go in that house,’ the oak-supreme barked, ‘you will not go alone. My cousin will go with you, and you will show us these intentions of which you speak.’