Chapter Thirty #2
The dragon didn’t lift her head from where it was twisted awkwardly, she didn’t open her eyes. Only that sound that kept pouring out of her, that metallic shriek like claws on a tin roof sharp enough to cut through space and time. Frida’s gaze darted towards Dian helplessly.
‘Try again,’ they insisted.
Frida bit her lip. ‘Please,’ she lifted her voice, pleading. ‘We just want to talk to you. If you tell us what happened, we can help.’
Nothing. And then, it hit her. The magic wasn’t working. Quickly, she rose from her crouch and wrapped her fingers around Dian’s wrist, blankly feeling the edges of their strong bones. ‘She can’t hear me,’ she said, dumbstruck.
‘Well, try shouting louder!’ Dian exclaimed, their eyebrows at their hairline. They shot a disbelieving look down at where Frida gripped their arm.
‘No,’ she said, shaking them, heedless of what she was doing.
‘She can’t hear me. She can’t hear my words.
It’s the wards.’ Helplessly, she dropped their silken wrist and started chewing on her thumbnail.
If Fireheart had had anything to do with the wards being down in the LEZ, it was clear that this dragon wasn’t able to do anything like that now.
‘However loudly I yell,’ she said as she paced back and forth, ‘that dragon in there is not going to hear what I’m saying.
Not in any way she’d understand. The wards are stopping the magic. My voice can’t get through.’
Dian’s eyes grew rounder. She watched the devastation pool over their face.
She had to find a way to talk to Fireheart.
But to talk to Fireheart, she needed to turn off the wards.
To turn off the wards she had to find out how they were powered.
She’d always thought it was electricity so, effectively, she just had to turn off the electricity, but as she gazed again in the direction of Forge House, she shifted uncertainly.
Not least because she wasn’t certain if electricity was even a thing in 1835, but more importantly – could she simply go in there and ask?
If she did, would they believe her? Could she find some early version of keepers and explain?
But if she was them, and a tattooed woman burst in, claiming that she was from the future, and could talk to animals, and that they had to turn off all the wards right now because they were hurting the creatures . . .
She gnawed again on her thumbnail, hard enough to draw blood.
She remembered her mum, pointing reverently to the ornate portraits in the New Library, telling Frida the names of the Beaufort sisters: Hannah, Georgiana, Dahlia, Charlotte, Eleanor, Arabella, Jane.
The sisters would listen to her! But when she looked at Dian, her heart sank.
Would they if she had a fairy in tow? Fairies were just as dreaded in this century as they were in her own.
Lest she forget, Dian had put magical Miracle-Gro on the LEZ.
What they might do to Forge House if they felt threatened gave her a full-on panic attack.
Briefly, she thought about trying to slip away to go into the house on her own, but even if she could manage it, Dian’s mistrust would only spiral.
In silence, Dian watched, stiff-limbed, as she started looking around.
‘What are you doing?’ Moth asked, dancing around her feet.
‘I’m looking for . . . a ha!’ With a skip of satisfaction, she pointed towards some primitive-looking insulated wires leading up to the fence.
Moth zigzagged over the grass in morbid curiosity. ‘What is it?’
‘Wires. They’re powering the cage I think,’ Frida told him, hunkering down on her heels.
During their training, she’d had to sit through the same induction films as everyone else: What to do in a Code Red; Why Guests are ALWAYS RIGHT; The History of the LEZ.
She remembered the time and place of the wards invention: the late 1820s, and here at Forge House.
She knew all about how they’d revolutionised zoos across the world, but what she did not know was how they were made.
She realised, too late, that she’d never really thought to ask.
She reached for one of the wires, thinking that she might be able to cut it somehow (forgetting for a second that she was not, by any means, a qualified electrician), but the moment she drew close, she felt the same blinding pain in her head which had floored her by the doors.
She stumbled back, panicked. ‘Fuck,’ she hissed.
She couldn’t see where the wires led to, since they just disappeared under the ground. But she had an idea. The laboratory where Henry Gladstone had worked was in Forge House’s gardens. It couldn’t be that far from here, and standing by this cage helplessly was torture.
‘Come on,’ she said, starting to angle away, already sifting through her memories of the grounds. ‘I think I know what we can try.’
‘What?’ Dian said weakly. They didn’t move.
She gazed back at them, opening her arms in desperation. Make this pain go away, that was all she could think. ‘I think if we can find the source, the building where these wards are coming from, we might be able to turn them off from there. Then we’ll be able to help her.’
Dian still didn’t budge. Their eyes darted between Frida and the cage. ‘How could someone do this, to anyone?’
Frida swallowed hard. It felt as if the whole world had dimmed, and it was just her and Dian standing there in the smoke and ash, with the question hovering between them. ‘I don’t know,’ she rasped. ‘I truly don’t.’
Disbelief filled the obsidian core of their eyes. ‘Humans left her here, like this.’
She nodded. It was true. She let out a shuddering breath.
‘I expect the people here just didn’t know what to do.
They’ve brought her here to help her. I know it might not look like that to you, but her home is .
. .’ Frida glanced towards the dragon’s shape, motionless, recalling Fireheart’s agonised story back in the cave of the LEZ.
‘Her home is gone. There’s nowhere else for her to go.
These people aren’t the ones who took her wings.
Humans aren’t all the same,’ she repeated finally, her voice breaking.
Dian still looked uncertain. Their gaze darted between the keening dragon, oblivious of their presence, and back in the direction where, far away, the rest of the creatures might be waiting in the raindrop mist. ‘Maybe we should call the others?’ Their gaze snagged on the fence again.
There was a shadow of anguish on their face, which was much too familiar.
‘I don’t think any of us thought it would be like this.
These – wards?’ They shuddered. ‘Maybe if we come back together, we’ll be able to free this dragon! ’
Frida suddenly saw all those creatures from the woods storming down here, an avenging army of teeth and horns and claws and magic. Lucky too. Would Lucky insist on going with them? Would he be hurt? Captured? How many humans would die in the process?
‘No!’ she exclaimed. No, that wasn’t how it was meant to happen. ‘Please. Just let me try my way first. Give me a chance.’
Their brow knotted. ‘I don’t know.’ Suddenly, they looked so young, no older than she was, and without thinking, she lifted her trembling hand towards them.
Not touching – not daring – but hovering in the space between them, close enough to sense the heat off their chest, to imagine she could feel the staccato pounding of their heart.
The light that caught in their cobwebs made her hand look blue, her tattoos shining starkly.
‘If you get the others now, how many of them will end up in these cages?’
‘Frida Rose is right,’ Moth whispered, the complicated pattern he’d been weaving in the dip of Dian’s collarbone glinting.
Dian’s eyes flared so wide, she would have seen the whites if there’d been any. They looked raw and cornered. A muscle in their jaw ticked, fingers flexing at their sides, indecision written all over the taut lines of their face.
‘I know you think you can’t trust humans,’ Frida rushed on, ‘and I can’t expect you to trust me, but I truly think if we try it my way, we might be able to get inside this cage without anyone else getting hurt. I know that’s the most important thing right now, right?’
‘You know?’ Dian snarled, wind-swept locks trembling with their sudden fury. ‘I don’t know anything! I think humans always think they know everything.’
The violence in it struck her like a storm.
‘Dian,’ Moth soothed, hovering under their left earlobe.
But Dian had screwed up their face, scrunching up their aquiline nose.
It was so un-fairy-like, it made Frida feel as if she was slipping, although the ground was solid.
For a few heartbeats, Dian stared down at her like they wished to peel off her very skin, to see the contents of her bones.
She didn’t know what they saw in her expression.
Desperation, probably. But finally, their shoulders sagged and they turned away with a growl.
Then they just set off without another word down the grass in the direction Frida had indicated, their curls streaming behind them in a river of emerald-green.