Page 43 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

She could hear nothing except the ragged beating of Lucky’s wings and her own heartbeat. A mist of raindrops drifted in the hoary darkness as if weightless, colours shifting like steel blue diamonds.

‘Lucky,’ she breathed the uncanny fog into her lungs. ‘What is this?’

He craned his neck to look back at her, his golden iris shining within the grey.

‘Raindrops,’ he whispered, awed.

Then, without warning, he crash-landed in the most spectacular and gruesome fashion, which – Frida suspected – only a baby dragon was really capable of.

Chapter Twenty-Six

It was a miracle nobody was hurt.

‘ARE YOU ALIVE, LITTLE STINK?’ Lucky cried, dusting himself off. His booming chirp echoed off the claggy wetness.

‘I think so!’ Frida exclaimed breathlessly, picking damp pine needles out of her hair. Somehow, she’d managed to keep her seat. All around them, primordial boughs swayed, clattering and storm-tossed, an emerald so bright amongst grey coils of vapour. By some luck, they’d come down right into a clearing. But the next moment, power flooded her vision, and as if they materialised out of the very fog itself, a wall of flesh, wings, horns, fur and teeth suddenly appeared before her.

‘Fuck,’ she cried.

It was not an empty clearing.

All around them, there were creatures. It was the small ones she saw first, because there were just so many of them. The foxes, rabbits and wild cats, mice and rats, a boar, deer and more birds than she could number, all staring at her and Lucky in a way that was most unsettling. Then the others came in focus. The grey shapes of elves, the globular forms of brownies, the tawny hue of a pack of chimeras. Holy hell, were those two and three necked grunkles?! Gnomes with owls on their shoulders. Goblins sitting on the backs of gigantic spiders. Woodland sprites. A pack of black wolves the size of cars! The only time she’d seen so many ECs together was when she’d watched An Extraordinary Planet on the BBC with David Attenborough. And that hadn’t even begun to prepare her for the sheer weight of such a sight, as if starlight flared every time she turned her head. Magic, this was truly magic.

She couldn’t take it in fast enough – the roving will-o’-the-wisps, the loping form of a Davidson’s slope-backed hare, and was that a snow-white angel stag in the shadows? In the oak tree above them, a group of one-eyed pixies leered. Her hand flew to her unprotected throat. Blue skinned with jagged teeth, they leapt from bough to bough, rabid celestine shapes no bigger than her fist.

‘So many friends!’ Lucky chirped gaily.

Frida whimpered. Firstly because, well – pixies! But secondly, there were so many voices, she couldn’t identify whose was whose. The spiders ticked, then there was someone who sounded like nails on a chalkboard (the pixies?) Another was like a waft of wild garlic (the goblins?), another like booming thunder (the wolves?) Someone cantankerous sounded like twigs snapping. A group of elves vibrated with the tinkle of a timbale, and there was a blaze of scarlet that reminded her of Raz. It was all there, around her, words that she shouldn’t have been able to understand. But she could. She could understand all of them.

Lucky, clearly recognising the cataclysmic expression on her face, nudged her companionably with the edge of his left wing. ‘You’re a linguist, remember?’

She might have hugged him, since he looked so adorably earnest, but then one of the pixies squealed violently, and swooped in close enough that Frida could smell the fetid odour of the creature’s breath. She was big, one of the biggest of the pack. The matriarch, biggest of the pack.

‘What a disgusting lizard!’ she crowed, swinging from her demon-pointed tail. ‘You almost squashed us! You weren’t invited to this meeting, no lizards, and no humans!’

Lucky reeled back, shocked. Hurt flared over his face as he dipped his head, golden eyes very round. ‘I’m sorry,’ he sniffled through a shine of tears.

The pixie bared her needlepoint teeth and went to snap at him.

‘Hey! He didn’t mean to. Back off,’ Frida shouted, lunging forwards to try to protect him.

The shock that reverberated around the clearing was almost physical. Every single one of the creatures descended into stunned silence.

The pixie recovered first. ‘What did you say?’ Her single red eye was wide with fear.

Frida looked embarrassed. ‘I – uh . . . I just said—’

‘She speaks,’ the pixie breathed.

‘The human speaks,’ another growled.

Lucky shifted nervously beneath her, and she pressed against him for reassurance. Then everyone started talking at once, the clearing exploding with the noise. God, she thought, pressing a hand to her head, how did dragons handle this?

‘I can understand her!’ someone screeched.

‘Me too!’

‘And me!’