Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
Frida couldn’t help smiling. It was exactly the kind of thing she said to her best friends. The thought of Antony and Hamish pinched – but for a moment the familiar banter made her feel less alone. And Moth’s pit-like, front-facing eyes were oddly kind.
‘Dian is short for guardian,’ the spider whispered. ‘For however much it pains them, they are the guardian of the hawthorn tree, from which they were born, and me and my ancestors are the guardians of them. It is poetic, I think.’
Dian was staring despairingly at the ceiling, looking as if they were considering how bad it would be, really, if they squashed the spider by mistake. ‘You wouldn’t know poetry if you jumped on it, Moth.’
Moth sniffed. ‘That’s rude.’
But Frida wasn’t listening. The hawthorn tree.
The familiar name sent dread spider-walking down her spine.
In her mind’s eye, she saw the LEZ’s Hawthorn of Higgleton Common, hulking out of the meadow like a shipwreck.
Burnt from Lucky’s lightning. Surrounded by the shards of a Coffin.
Did she not need to wonder anymore how the fairy had become trapped inside?
Was the LEZ’s Hawthorn the tree from which they’d been born?
She felt she knew the answer, as surely as she knew her own name, and she didn’t like it one bit.
But Dian and Moth had no idea. No idea that in the future, a commuter trainline worth sixty billion pounds was spearing straight for them.
Suddenly, it felt as if there wasn’t enough air, and it had nothing to do with being trapped in a cellar.
What was she was supposed to do? She opened her mouth to tell them everything, but even as she did so, the world seemed to twist. It felt as if she was standing before a younger version of herself, unaware that in her future, her mum was going to die in a terrible, painful way. Her mouth snapped shut.
‘Are all fairies born from trees?’ It was something to say, anything other than the truth clawing up her throat. The moment she said it though, she flushed, for it felt too intimate a question, but Moth answered immediately.
‘Of course,’ he said fondly. ‘It’s in their nature.
’ He bounded up and down her arm. ‘Take heart, for Dian is not as knotty as some of the others. They may prickle sometimes, but their heart is soft.’ The spider cocked his head and gazed up at her, unblinking and solemn.
‘Like a berry. Squishable. You’ll find out, I think. ’
‘Oh, by the rain and sky . . .’ Dian swore under their breath.
‘Anyway,’ said Moth, escalating into a spider shout. ‘We’ve got no time for your sulking.’
Dian glared. ‘I’m not sulking.’
Moth chuckled. ‘See? Prickly.’ Then he launched himself up Dian’s leg and Frida watched, open-mouthed, as he began to affectionately mend a small rip in the woven threads across Dian’s chest. Dian, after a beat, leaned their head back and their eyelids fluttered closed.
Frida had to admit; it did look soothing.
Then she gave a low laugh, imagining how jealous Hamish would be, having an on-call seamstress who lived on your shoulder.
‘Look,’ the spider went on softly, this time to Dian, his legs working a mile a minute.
‘There is nothing you can do about those crotchety thorns you call cousins, but why let them bully you about? I cannot fathom. And I think you should start being nice to this little-bit-dragon-little-bit-human. She might be able to help us. Leastways, she might get us out of this underground hole you’ve conjured us into. Since you’re too busy sulking to try.’
Dian’s eyes flew open, and they flushed a deep purple that would have impressed even Lucky.
Frida hid a smile.
Moth, now projecting for Frida’s benefit, continued relentlessly, ‘We need to get out of here, do we not? You don’t have to trust each other yet, but you can work together.’ Moth clicked his fangs with audible despair. ‘We’ve got friends out there! Don’t forget.’
‘You think I could forget them?’ Dian hissed. Their shoulders had hunched around their ears, streaks of emerald and teal, apple and sage flaring in the low light. Their cheeks suddenly leaching of all colour as they snarled passionately, ‘I don’t forget, Moth.’
Frida ached to know more. She wanted to know who these friends were, and how they’d ended up at Forge House.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said cautiously, when it became clear that their conversation had stalled. ‘About your friends.’
The look on Dian’s face was a frigid warning.
Frida rubbed the yellow rose on her wrist. ‘Look, we do need to get out of here. Moth’s right.’
‘Finally,’ Moth cried. ‘Someone with sense!’
But Frida didn’t laugh. She glanced at the earthen walls, the very solid ceiling, the locked hatch.
‘Look, is there anything you can do? Can you . . .’ She dipped her voice, still not quite believing that she could say such a thing out loud.
‘Magic us out?’ But they had destroyed the whole LEZ.
Surely, they could get them out of the cellar. She waved her hands in emphasis.
Dian shot her a look of pure disgust. ‘Like this?’ They waved their own hands with enough sarcasm to make Frida wince. Clearly not then.
Moth gave a disapproving tut, then crept towards her over the ceiling. Frida watched as he artfully tied a web around one of the floorboards and descended from it, spinning in rapid, dizzying circles in front of her nose.
‘Listen,’ he said solemnly. ‘I will tell you, if they will not. They cannot do what you ask. The magic here is too distant and strange. They didn’t mean to conjure us under the earth, and it might take them a bit of time to get their bearings.
Fairies are not all powerful, although they might like you to think it. ’
Frida gave a disbelieving snort.
Just as the tension in Dian’s shoulders bristled into a living thing, and they scrambled to their feet.
‘Do not talk about me as if I’m not here, Moth!
You know I hate it.’ Fury etched into their face, they started pacing, the swish of their hair and soft stroke of their bare heels on the earthen floor the only sound.
A few minutes went by where no one said anything.
Moth, clicking his acid-green fangs with concern, returned contritely to Dian’s shoulder, and Frida watched the fairy pace, considering what Moth had said whilst distractedly tracing the shapes of her other tattoos.
The head of the grootneck. The orange slug across her thumb. The fairy mushroom. Issy’s horn.
Finally, the silence grew too much. She let out a growl and leapt to her feet too, startling Dian so much they shrank away from her, sitting back down quickly in a far corner.
Swallowing the awful feeling of unease this gave her, Frida gritted her teeth and set to dragging one of the less rotten crates along the floor.
Dian watched cautiously. Hauling the crate into place, Frida hoisted herself onto it and gave the hatch another – slightly less tentative – push.
Although it didn’t open, it did rattle a bit.
If Dian wasn’t going to get them out of here, then she would have to do it herself.
She tried to dig her fingers under the heavy wooden boards.
As she worked, she imagined that instead of being in this cellar, they were sitting in the Beaufort sisters’ drawing room, in comfortable armchairs by the fire, drinking expensive champagne and discussing the correct ways to care for rescued kelpies.
She was so deep in this fantasy, rolling delicious champagne bubbles across her tongue, that she almost didn’t hear Dian’s question.
‘What are those?’
She startled. ‘What?’
Dian had gone preternaturally still. ‘Those. What are they?’
She glanced down at where they were pointing.
‘My tattoos?’ Quickly, she dropped her arms and flexed her hands self-consciously.
She’d rolled her sleeves up because it was so damn hot.
Fireheart’s terracotta tail wrapped around her right arm, Raziel flew over her left.
Oh, she definitely needed a disguise if she was going to go flouncing around Forge House.
She didn’t think the sisters would serve champagne to tattooed trousered women, however liberated they were.
And Dian? A fairy just emerged from a cobwebbed waterfall.
They’d both be hauled off to a travelling circus.
‘Yes,’ Dian said, still looking at where her tattoos curved over the muscles of her forearms. ‘Are they magic?’
Frida burst out laughing. ‘No, they’re definitely not.
’ But her laughter died at Dian’s guarded expression.
And suddenly she felt inexplicably sad. She realised that when they’d burst out of that undergrowth, all glowing skin and upturned lips, something that she hadn’t known had been aching inside her had, all of a sudden, unknotted. But now . . .
‘No,’ she repeated quietly, shaking her head. She fought the urge to put her arms behind her back. ‘They’re just pictures.’
‘Pictures?’ Dian replied, their voice like gravel. ‘Nothing is just a picture.’
Frida stared at them. There was misgiving ingrained in every strong line of their resplendent limbs.
Feeling awkward, she shrugged and went back to her fight with the hatch, telling herself she hadn’t lied.
They were just pictures. With an effort, she managed to dig her fingers in and set to pressing up with her fists to try and shift whatever was stopping the hatch from opening.
But even with the boost from the crate, she was too short – she couldn’t quite get the full force of her weight behind it.
And Dian’s words crawled over her skin, sinking into the ink.
Her tattoos were hers, a bright rainbowed armour.
Dian’s scrutiny had made them feel like something wicked, had made them something else, something not hers.
She didn’t know why, but the words of the oak-supreme came back to her, its claws in her flesh. Thief.