Page 48 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

‘Ok,’ she managed. Keep your cobwebs on. With a poise that would have made her friends applaud, she reached for Dozy’s hand. The instant her fingers closed around theirs though, she saw the fairy recoil. Just for a heartbeat, before they steeled themselves, schooling their face to rigid blankness. Then they tugged her half a step towards the trees.

Only this was no ordinary hand she was holding, and half a step was never going to be just half a step. A flash of heat coursed up her arm, followed by a wash of misty raindrops, and the next thing she knew, she was gripping Dozy’s hand for dear life, emerging into steaming, stinking darkness.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The smell hit her first. A thick overpowering stench of horse dung even Dozy’s petrichored splendour could not mask. Frida was well acquainted with such things – she’d spent most of her life shovelling similar. But Dozy’s schooled composure contorted immediately into rabid horror, and within seconds they’d hunched over and were coughing in strangled bursts like they’d just ingested toxic fumes.

‘By cursed and bloody storms!’ they cried, round black eyes aghast, dropping her hand as if she – too – was toxic. ‘What is that smell?’

Frida rolled her eyes. ‘It’s just horse dung,’ she muttered, collapsing with an exhausted sigh onto the hard packed earth, her body already pummelled with dragon travel, the nauseating lurch of fairy travel just another notch on her belt. One glance at their surroundings was enough for Frida to ascertain that she wasn’t a fan. Damp darkness surrounded them, the only light radiating from the faint bioluminescent shimmer of Dozy’s cobwebbed jumpsuit, and a few chinks of weak daylight filtering through the ceiling. Floorboards, she thought with a sinking feeling. The motionless air, the earthen walls and absence of doors or windows pointed to one thing: they were underground. A cellar perhaps. Judging by the stench, and the muffled clip-clopping of what sounded like hooves above their heads, Frida guessed Dozy had magicked them under some stables.

Whether it was the stables of Forge House, she had no idea. She hoped so.

With a soft thud, Dozy sat down on the other side of the room, perching miserably on a rotten crate. They hung their head, which didn’t inspire confidence, fiddling nervously with the downy, shaved hair around their ears. She had a strong suspicion an underground cellar hadn’t been their goal. She could just see a fine sheen of sweat glistening across their temples. How much had it cost them to travel here, to bring her along with them? They looked hollowed out and Frida felt a twinge of guilt. Now she was sitting down, and her brain wasn’t full of the cacophony of a thousand disparate creatures, she could think more clearly.

This Dozy did not know who she was.

This Dozy didn’t know what was going to happen in two hundred years.

She stared at the fairy’s trembling profile.

Maybe she was meant to win them over with witty jokes and her party trick of making a realistic impression of the Lagarfljót Worm out of balloons. Would that save the LEZ?

‘Are you ok?’ she asked softly.

Slowly, they lifted their head. Their eyes were stretched so wide, yet there were no whites, just endless obsidian. She looked away quickly, pushing herself upright and busily brushing off the dust from her still-wet uniform to distract herself from the mistrust she saw there, so profound it felt like a brand.

First things first. She spun around, trying to make sense of where they were. The room – barely deserving of the word – was about twenty feet square. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out fraying feed bags, a jumble of old tack, a pile of broken shovels in one corner. Above them, the relentless stamp of hooves, the hollow thuds of bodies against stall walls, the musky huff of breath. It was a large stable from the sound of it.

Noticing what looked like a hatch in the ceiling, she considered the pros and cons of trying to force it open. If there was someone on the other side, they might not take too kindly to a fairy and a zookeeper being trapped in their cellar. She was too short to reach it properly, but she gave a half-hearted jump and managed to give it a tentative push. It didn’t budge. Locked, she concluded.

She could just make out voices on the other side, a soft murmuring like a radio turned down low. It took her a moment to realise it must be the horses. Low whiskery conversations dealing with all things equine. Horses aren’t extraordinary though, she thought, pressing her fingers to her temples. Dragons and fairies were one thing – almost starting to make a strange sort of sense. But horses? Then she remembered the sparrows in the sky and she wondered if she’d be able to understand Flipflop now, the stray cat who broke into her flat every morning, or whether she’d be able to ask Peter, Antony’s mum’s poodle, not to eat socks anymore.

She promptly decided to dissect this later over a pitcher of margaritas at the Crown and Anchor. Right now, she was trapped in a cellar with a fairy who hated her.

‘Do you know where we are?’ she asked, keeping her voice low.

Dozy shot her an irritated look, hooded eyes narrowed. ‘Me?’

Frida exhaled slowly. ‘Well, yes. You brought us here. I thought you might have an idea–’

They snorted in a very unfairylike way. ‘I might have brought us but you’re the cause of it.’

Her face heated. Helplessly, she sank onto her own crate in the corner and dropped her head into her hands. God, it was hot in here. Her particular smorgasbord of stenches was becoming almost as pungent as the horse dung. She imagined her ruined uniform steaming like a cartoon cow-pat, and her face grew even hotter. She wished this cellar wasn’t so damn small. ‘I never asked to be trapped underground with you,’ she muttered.

Dozy dragged a hand through their forest-curls, hissing angrily, ‘I aimed as close as I could. Seas and skies, what more do you want?’

From the shadows another voice, like a plucked harp string, said cheerfully, ‘It’s not her fault, you know. There’s no need to be so rude.’

Frida jerked, her eyebrows shooting up. ‘Who said that?’

Dozy looked stricken. ‘Nobody.’ But their gaze flicked to their shoulder involuntarily.

‘Really, that’s not very civil,’ the speaker groused, like a strange silken ribbon vibrating over Frida’s eardrums. It made her skin tickle deliciously.

Dozy made a strangled sound. ‘Hush,’ they hissed, darting another appalled look down at their shoulder. ‘We agreed.’

The voice gave a splutter. ‘You agreed. I want to meet the strange-shaped dragon!’