Chapter Forty-Five
She hadn’t been expecting Dian to do something quite so dramatic, but as the fairy made the bars fly across the room, and one of them almost impaled Georgiana in her satin-ruffled chest, Frida gave a whoop.
Before she even staggered onto the carpet, she felt an invisible hand wrap around hers, and then the raindrops surged.
Relief flooded her, along with the wondrous silver of Dian’s magic.
‘What a mess!’ Moth tinkled with glee.
She could have danced. ‘Hi Moth.’
The little spider leapt onto her shoulder and crawled up her neck, rubbing his furry paws against her damp skin. She looked up into Dian’s water-dusted face, the patch of silvery brown across their left cheek glimmering.
‘Hello Dian,’ she whispered. She’d hoped. She’d really hoped when she’d seen those sparkles hovering in the air, but she hadn’t dared believe until they’d altered space and time to blow the doors off her cage the moment she’d managed to dissolve the wards. ‘You came back for me.’
‘Don’t think they did it all on their own,’ Moth groused. ‘I was there too.’
Frida barked out a laugh. ‘I don’t doubt it.’
Dian looked as if they were torn between laughing too, shouting at her in resplendent fury and – sea and skies – kissing her.
In the end, they just raised the hand that wasn’t holding hers and, ever so gently, brushed one of the tears running down Frida’s face.
The feeling of their calloused thumb jolted through Frida’s body like a lightning strike.
She remembered it, in her bones. The feeling of their hand on her cheek, a thousand worlds away.
‘I came back for you, Frida Rose,’ they breathed.
The next moment, their hand fell, and the world snapped back into chaos.
Moth was right, it really was a mess. Outside the veil of raindrops, the sisters were screaming.
Georgiana howling, Dahlia in a dead faint.
Freed golden dragonflies were zooming this way and that for, Frida realised, Dian must have exploded their jars, too, along with her cage, and that – like in the laboratory – their jars hadn’t been deemed important enough to be warded.
The men were yelling; Sir Joshua was brandishing a poker, trying to strike at the gleeful dragonflies.
Henry, she saw out of the corner of her eye, was trying to slip out of the room unmarked.
The servants were either cowering in a corner or trying to help Sir Joshua.
She was certain Charles was going to appear at any moment.
She didn’t want to know how much energy, how much courage, how many of Moth’s cobwebs it had taken for Dian to follow her into this room and blow everything to bits. She let them half drag, half carry her towards the open windows, until her head cleared a bit, and she cried out.
‘What is it?’ Dian exclaimed.
‘I forgot something!’ She was already twisting free.
Before they could stop her, she’d slipped out of their grip and was racing out of the raindrops.
Without thinking, she lunged across the room, grabbing another of those vicious pokers as she went.
The screaming, which had begun to ebb, burst back in full force.
Someone tried to tackle her, dimly she felt it – but she was the wind itself.
Swinging the poker around her head, she spun, tearing it right through the bell jar at full speed.
She felt strong enough to carry an army of grootnecks across the world.
This bell jar was no match for her, and since her magic was still locked in her rosewood box, the wards couldn’t touch her. Glass shattered over the room.
‘STOP THAT CREATURE!’ Sir Joshua bellowed.
Magic pounded its claws on the lid of her mind, but she gritted her teeth and held on, swerving this way and that.
‘Just a moment more,’ she whispered to the glittery swirls of violet inside her, and then she plunged her hand through the ruins of the glass jar – like a coffin, she thought suddenly, and at that moment, she wished more than anything that she’d been the one to shatter the Hawthorn’s Coffin, rather than waiting for Lucky to do it.
As she wrapped her hand around the Jewel, she made a promise to herself.
She wouldn’t stand by anymore; she wouldn’t be weak.
She’d wouldn’t wait those extra few beats.
She held the terracotta dragon’s heart in her hand, and it pulsed as if in witness.
The next heartbeat, she’d slipped the Jewel in her pocket, and she was running again. Past the slippery figure of James Gaunt, over the plum-satin body of Dahlia. Past the fumbling servants, the other weeping sisters.
‘On your left, Frida Rose!’ Dian cried.
Frida swerved just in time to avoid a poker in the face from Edward Caval. She skidded, just catching herself from ending up in the fireplace, and then she was moving again, running full pelt for the window.
‘Go!’ she cried. ‘Go, you ridiculous fairy!’
Dian waited though, holding the window open for her, one dark eyebrow arched. Frida grinned wildly. The Jewel pulsed in her pocket, fuelling her speed. Sir Joshua’s disbelieving face passed in a blur, as if he couldn’t fathom how these demons had outsmarted him.
She leapt out of the window into the night, never more pleased to feel the fresh air on her face, Dian’s raindrops tumbling back around her.
Together, they raced across the moon-drenched grass, and she opened her rosewood box, the sounds of the world flooding back in as her emotions exploded.
Like the layers of the earth, the dust at the top going first, her grief over the discovery of Sir Joshua’s machinations, her panic at being caged, her anguish believing that Dian had left her, her joy at learning their quirks: the twinkle in their eye when they smiled at her, the way they played with the soft downy hair around their ears when they were nervous, the rough scrape of their calluses against her own.
Then down, to deeper places. The way Dian’s voice could sound like summer leaves if they willed it.
The way Lucky’s beard felt when it pressed against her cheek, the chirp of his giggles, the devastating loss of his dada.
Antony’s compassion, Hamish’s wit which hid so much hurt, their beloved faces lost and buried in the vines.
How Dian had looked in the LEZ, wounded and terrified, the icy touch of their hand against her cheek.
Her mum’s face when she’d told Frida she was dying.
All of it flew out into the sky, the joy and the hurt, the pain and love, her magic raging through her.
Fiery, and her own. She couldn’t stop her moan of relief to hear an owl’s choral chants.
A mouse, hiding under a bush and boasting about his pretty new nest. A rat, composing mindful poetry as his babies slithered and squeaked through their dreams. A cat, muttering about all this noise as he tried to sleep.
She beamed, her smile stretching from ear to ear.
She may be a demon, but her magic was the colour of violets, and she was extraordinary.