Chapter Forty-Two
‘Move over, Charles, let me see it.’
Frida moaned.
‘Come come, hurry. What does the meter say?’
‘High, Sir. There’s extraordinary in it, I’m certain of it.’
She fought the darkness.
Someone was close to her. Their breath smelled of champagne and cigars.
Something perfumed. Sandalwood and citrus.
Their salty skin was warm as they touched her face.
She tried to fight them, but they held her head like a vice.
She couldn’t open her eyes. Panic rose and broke, waves against the rocks.
Somewhere she heard the low concerned voice of someone else, a cat perhaps, a dry whiskery whisper, and she wanted to cry out to them, beg them to help her.
But then they faded again, smoke on the breeze, and she could have wept.
‘Would you hazard a guess as to what species it is?’ The voice was deep, smooth and melodic, pouring out like aged whiskey.
‘I couldn’t say.’ Tobacco and sweat. She knew that smell, registering with visceral fear. Knew the voice too, dry as sandpaper. But even though she flinched away, she was more afraid of the other voice. With its melodic sureness, it made her skin crawl.
‘Some kind of demon, I would hazard.’
‘Oh yes. On the surface it looks like a girl, but that’s a trick, I think. See the way it glows?’
‘Yes, Charles. Yes indeed. We must be careful.’
The man who’d cracked her skull open, the wiry muscular man from the Forge, was called Charles then. She didn’t know who the other person was though.
‘Look at these inkings.’ Somewhere, at a great distance, she felt her left arm being lifted. She wanted to howl. ‘Never seen anything like it. It looks like one of those savages.’
‘It does. A real barbarian.’ The melodic voice paused.
There was a steady tapping, like fingers drumming on wood.
‘I wonder if there’s power in those tattoos, if that’s what they are.
I must look it up, mayhap someone has written about such a phenomenon.
I’ve never heard of it myself though. In time, we might want to take some of these off to give to Henry to study.
Then we’d be able to see how much extraordinary they contain. ’
‘No!’ Frida managed to cry, forcing the word through her gummy lips. ‘No,’ she mumbled desperately. ‘No.’
‘It speaks, Charles!’
‘Yes, I did warn you.’
‘Most fascinating!’ The musical voice turned serious. ‘A demon indeed. What more has it said?’
‘Not much. I thought it could be another fairy in disguise at first, but I’ve never heard of a fairy speaking in plain English. Have you, Sir?’
Another fairy. Oh god. Another fairy. Had they found Dian?
‘No, indeed I have not heard of such a thing.’
‘Gives me the fear. Not like one of those other dumb beasts . . .’
She writhed at her invisible binds, but the darkness was sweeping her away again, and although she tried to fight it, screaming over and over in her head for them to let her go, when she woke up again, they were gone.
Everything was silent and for a long while she just lay curled in a ball, the ground cold beneath her.
Everything hurt, not just her head. Her head was the worst. This made the headache she’d had back in the LEZ look like a walk in the park.
Spikes were drilling into her skull, over and over, and for a time she just whimpered, her head cradled in her hands.
Breathe, Friduska, her mum’s voice seemed to say, from a long distance. Breathe.
She breathed.
Eventually, she was able to open her eyes and raise her head enough to look around.
She was in a cage.
Dian and Moth weren’t here and everything had a faint shine to it, a steely sheen that she recognised.
The shine came from the metal bars, and from her.
Just like those jars in the Old Forge. When she put her hand out, experimentally reaching towards the iron, she hissed and pulled back sharply.
It felt like she’d just put her hand in flames.
She was in a warded cage.
And then the memory of those voices came back to her, and in a fog of panic, she started touching her arms, her legs, checking that they hadn’t taken her tattoos from her.
Then – Dian. Dian and Moth. When she started to think about them, possibly also in a cage somewhere, she began to hyperventilate.
The panic grew and grew like a kettle whistling on the hob, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
‘No,’ she hissed out through gritted teeth.
With a colossal effort, she wrestled her breathing under control.
Lowered her quaking hands from her ears.
No. Dian must have escaped. That was the only outcome she could consider. Dian and Moth escaped, and they’d gone back to the woods. Anything else was too awful. They had to have gone back to the woods, to find the others.
And left her.
A voice in her head laughed bitterly.
Well, she thought, swallowing the hollow hole inside her.
That was well and good. She deserved nothing less.
Dian should have left her. Maybe they were talking to Lucky and the other fairies.
Or maybe they’d gone back home to their hawthorn tree, in the groves of hangferns, never to spare her another thought.
She clutched her head. Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up!
She twisted to sit up, but the moment her head came too near to the bars, she keened through her teeth, the pain flooring her.
Unable to do anything else, she rolled herself into as small a ball as possible, her head against her knees, her arms around her legs.
A metal mug had been placed beside her. Glancing inside, she saw it contained water.
Suddenly, her throat roared with thirst, and she’d drained it in two gulps before she considered that it might be poisoned.
With a cry, she threw the mug clattering aside and lay, shivering and dazed, in the centre of the small cage, careful to keep every part of herself from brushing against the bars.
It wasn’t easy: the cage was tiny. She might have been able to stand up, but barely.
She had about six feet grace, she guessed, and no more.
She squeezed her eyes closed, trying to think.
She knew she hadn’t used the toilet in far too long and that glass of water was now at risk of unbalancing a carefully poised situation.
Trying to cool the panic spiralling up and up and up, she touched her head gently.
When she looked at her hand, she was surprised that it came back clean.
She’d thought that the man must have smashed her skull open.
Maybe he had done, but they’d cleaned her up while she’d been unconscious.
She shuddered at the thought of their hands on her; at what they’d threatened to do to her. At what they’d called her.
Demon.
Anything to avoid her thoughts spiralling, she studied the cage.
There was a warded gate in front of her, but it was locked.
Even if she knew how to jimmy it open, she couldn’t touch the bars, let alone sustain enough contact to fumble at the no-nonsense padlock.
Beyond the bars, everything was dark and muffled, like they’d covered the cage with a cloth.
Within, that cold steely light seemed to ooze off the bars, and off her own skin, making her want to claw at her own body parts to get rid of it.
The hue brought to mind the LEZ’s fake moonlight.
The colour just designed to look like the very essence of extraordinary.
Breathing felt difficult. The low background hum she’d become so expert at tuning out – gone.
When she tentatively reached her magic out, there were no eager dogs hunting for scraps, no droll cantankerous cats under chairs, no adventuring earwigs in the floorboards.
No rats composing poetry. No mice with electric tingles in their whiskers.
No owls speaking to the moon. No worms burrowing for darkness.
Nothing. And though she had tried so hard not to listen to them, now their silence felt like the loss of a limb.
If Dian and Moth were on the other side of these bars, she realised she wouldn’t be able to hear them either.
Just like the terracotta dragon had not been able to hear her.
Her mouth went dry. This was it, then. This was the reality of all these animals that she’d called her friends, that she’d had tattooed all over her body, without even asking them if they minded.
The crushing silence of a magicless world.
But – as if through a long dull tunnel – she heard human voices.
She realised this with dawning fear as she strained her ears.
Quiet, but not too far away. The cold steely light made everything disorientating, but as her eyes adjusted, she saw something flickering through the cloth, like nearby candlelight. She pulled her knees in tighter.
‘ . . . Getting tired of this performance, my dear. Come now. Show us what you have.’
Frida fought down a whimper. A male voice. Booming and slurred.
A woman’s voice replied, tinkling with merriment.
‘Yes, dear brother. Come along! Arabella is keen to go to sleep already. It is late and we are all tired. You have fed us half to bursting, now stop being so dramatic and show us your prize.’ A burst of laughter followed, making Frida shrink back so far, she almost hit the bars.
But when the next voice cut through, her breath squeezed out of her chest as if she’d been kicked.
‘Ah, dearest.’ The voice pooled like aged whisky. Melodic and smooth. ‘You say you are fit to bursting, sister, but you seem perfectly content to continue eating these little cakes, do you not?’
There was another hearty round of laughter.