Page 58 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

‘No,’ the little spider murmured from somewhere in her hair.

Frida was about to move on, her throat very dry, when Moth amended, ‘They are someone’s friends though.’

Frida had no way to answer that.

Around the next turn, they found a blue-blond hippogriff, and a carbuncle and a jackalope after that. In the hippogriff’s cage, a tall leafy oak filled the space, and that was where he sat perched in the boughs watching the stars. The carbuncle’s cage brimmed with exotic ferns, plant life and winding earthen tunnels perfect for the South American rodent. The jackalope – part hare, part antelope – looked relatively content in a huge nest of wild grasses.

But at each cage that terrible ocean of pain enveloped her, and she couldn’t stop the memory of the dragon’s desolation. She tried to console herself with the fact that these animals didn’t seem to be in pain, but many of the animals at the LEZ hadn’t either. The truth was that wild animals were great at masking pain. It was a survival mechanism. This notion, one she’d learnt early on as a zookeeper, now made her stomach roil.

It seemed impossible to her that anyone couldn’t feel the wrongness oozing off these places. She had to remind herself that for the last five years, she’d been swanning in and out of cages just like these, blind to the agony that lay buried within what she’d thought was a miracle.

Three pure golden stags.

An elephump.

Twelve sapphire friperits.

At each cage, Frida knew she should be trying to point out all the good things to Moth. The fresh hay and flowers, the clean feeding troughs, the toys made of sticks, the hanging boughs of fruit, the buckets of grain. But at the thought of Dian watching her from the raindrops – she could only imagine their awful expression – she couldn’t bring herself to do it. All she asked was the same question, over and over again, and Moth gave her the same answer.

No, I do not know them. But someone does.

She could hear the echo of her boots on the path, the faint rustle of the hedgerows, the occasional whinny or caw or bark of an animal. When Forge House came into view again, this time from the other side, curving out of the darkness unexpectedly, she caught her breath. The light of warm oil lamps poured across the grass, and she heard the distant sound of laughter, the clatter of wheels on the driveway, and the soft neigh of horses. Her heart gave a leap as she drunk it all in. These were human things, and she almost leapt out across the grass towards them, throwing caution to the wind, when an invisible hand curved urgently around her elbow.

‘Not that way!’

Frida jerked, feeling like a ghost had just touched her. She peered through the darkness but could see no sign of Dian. Heat rising in her cheeks, she turned away from the house.

‘Sorry, yes,’ she murmured dumbly. ‘Not that way.’

Maybe she caught a flash of the edge of Dian’s sleeve, but that was it as she headed away again, feeling breathless. Turning left, she went through a little coppice of trees, over an artful bridge, past a Grecian temple. She thought Henry Gladstone’s laboratory must be only just round the next corner when Dian flickered back into existence, lurching out of the darkness like a very sparkly phantom.

‘Shit, Dian!’ Frida gasped, her hand at her throat. This fairy was going to give her a damned heart attack.

Moth, hidden in the folds of one of Frida’s shirt pockets, purred, ‘oh, hello Dian. How nice to see you again.’

But Dian only growled, ignoring them both, and swung left, through a gate into what Frida thought was yet another stone-walled rose garden, common to ancient houses like these.

‘That’s not the way!’ she cried after them.

But when there was no reply, she let out a resigned sigh. The walls enveloped her as she followed. There was no hint of candlelight here, no sound of carriages or laughter. It felt like they were in another world entirely, heavy with creeping vines and the aroma of lavender.

Like the other cages, she didn’t expect these ones either.

Two of them. They rose up before her, silvery starlight reflecting off the bars. Her skin turned to gooseflesh as she took in the basilisk in the closest cage.

A basilisk! Could this be the basilisk, the one who’d been responsible for so thoroughly terrifying Queen Victoria? She wouldn’t have been surprised – this serpentine monster was enormous. So much bigger than the two male basilisks they had in Melody. Scales the bright blue of a spring morning, thick tail wrapped in elegant coils as she slept. Frida was so busy staring – as if she’d just encountered a celebrity and might, in all seriousness, ask for an autograph – that she almost missed the flash of white at the back of the garden.

Dian didn’t, though.

Suddenly, ice crawled up Frida’s neck as she realised Dian had drifted over to the other cage and was standing before the bars, their spine ramrod straight in a way that belied the fact that their entire body was trembling. As if her feet weren’t quite her own, Frida moved too, until she was standing next to Dian, and then her mouth dropped open.

There was a unicorn in this cage.

Frida was so accustomed to thinking of Issy as the very last unicorn, that it took her a while to convince herself of what she was seeing. Of course, there had still been unicorns in the world at this time. Not many, but some. But Frida had never, not once, not in all the histories of the LEZ, heard that there’d been a unicorn at Forge House. Not only a unicorn, but—

‘A male,’ she breathed.

Dian made no sign that they’d heard, taut as a harp string where they stood beside her. The unicorn didn’t stir either, asleep as he was in a far pile of tawny hay, his face buried under a foreleg, his back hooves slung out across the grass. Unicorns had always been rare, as long as there’d been human records to say so. One of the most elusive of creatures, they didn’t adapt well to captivity and often died in ways their keepers couldn’t understand. Before Issy, the last unicorn who’d survived longer than a few years had been Francie, at the San Francisco Extraordinary Zoo. She’d lived an astonishing twenty years before dying in 1944, just weeks after her beloved keeper was sent off to fight in the war. The keeper had died in the Battle of the Bulge, and Francie of a lung infection. This was the official reason, anyway. Unofficially, the keepers said it was heartbreak.