Page 62 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

They glanced at her in surprise. Just as they stumbled, reaching the end of the corridor, and a fluttering light pooled around them. It had a vaguely familiar quality about it, which she couldn’t put her finger on. Sickness oozed from the cold stones though, and Frida and Dian exchanged a look. With an urgent motion, Dian gestured for Frida to let go. Reluctantly, she loosened her hold, and they both waited, uncertain whether Dian was just going to topple back over. But they held their ground despite the hurt ingrained in every line of their body.

‘I’m ok,’ they flashed her a strained grin.

Frida face twisted in disbelief, but she watched as, with a fixed, dogged look, they limped around the corner, through an open door into the main room. She was barely a split second behind, at first so busy worrying about whether Dian was going to collapse, she didn’t really take in what she saw. Golden light fluttered in her peripheral vision, casting shadows that looked like strange, skeletal birds. There was a low wood panelled ceiling, and there were rich red tapestries covering the stone walls. The room smelled clean, like disinfectant, but a deeper aftertaste coiled underneath. A wrongness. She blinked, tearing her eyes away from Dian as she fought a wave of nausea. But it was everywhere. As if the very air was polluted.

Then she heard Dian’s anguished cry, and everything else went clean out of her head.

‘No,’ they gasped. ‘No, no, no!’

Dian had stumbled into the room and was lurching towards one of the lamps on the nearest table. But it wasn’t a normal lamp, not like she might have found back home. Frida’s vision swam. Not a normal lamp. She watched powerless, her feet frozen in place, as Dian gave another wild and terrifying cry. They fell to their knees, hitting the flagstones with a muffled thud. On the low wooden table before them stood four hexagonal glass jars. Each was about the size of a large modern Mason jar, but they were sealed with cork, wax and wire.

Frida couldn’t hear past the hammering in her ears.

Each jar was just big enough to contain a single golden dragonfly.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Sunbeams blazed across the room, lighting up the corners. Dian reached out with a shaking hand to touch the nearest jar.

‘I felt you,’ Dian whispered. ‘But I couldn’t, at the same time. It made no sense to me.’ They turned to look at Frida, stricken. ‘Now I understand.’

These were Dian’s friends, the ones they’d come looking for. Frida understood, and it ripped the breath from her lungs. The dragonflies were just like the ones she’d seen on the clifftops of Melody, skimming delightedly along the glossy sheen of Lucky’s scales. They were the source, she realised, of the endless fluttering on the edges of her senses. It was their wings, brushing against the glass. Quickly, she scanned the room. She counted fifteen dragonflies in total, that she could see at least. Fifteen trapped dragonflies.

Tears streamed down Dian’s cheeks as they ran their fingers over the jars, trying to figure out a way to free them. ‘Aneo,’ they said helplessly, identifying them one by one. ‘Lifith. Prea. Dawe. Allix . . .’

Frida could hear the dragonflies’ high buzz of panic, like captive bees. Not words, just terror. That’s what she heard, spilling out of those lamps, out of the tiny holes someone had made in the glass to ensure the dragonflies lived long enough to be of use. How long could they live inside those jars? She didn’t understand, the picture before her not computing. If these dragonflies had just been rescued, why hadn’t the keepers here released them yet?

‘Help me!’ Dian was begging, choking on their tears. ‘Help.’

Frida was frozen, taking in the room. There were long antique wooden tables, lined up in rows. On every table, there was evidence of experiments in various stages of completion. But if this was a laboratory, why would they keep rescued animals here? As she stood there, it was hard not to acknowledge that the dragonflies had been spread around the room, strategically positioned so that the experiments might be lit by the blessing of their sunlight. She had a terrible thought. Did someone put them outside during the day, to charge up their wings, like a living solar panel? But no! Why would Henry Gladstone have dragonfly lamps, if not to release them? Sir Joshua would never have allowed them to be kept trapped and tortured like this, unless they had literally just been rescued. They must only be waiting for the go-ahead to let them go, or at least to move them to a bigger enclosure. She knew, from bitter experience, how much bureaucracy went along with wild animal releases.

In a trance, she took in the piles of neatly coiled wires. The copper tubing, the rows of stoppered glass jars. The air pumps and microscopes, the huge contraption in one corner she couldn’t even begin to guess at. Jars wrapped in metal foil, tongs, pestle and mortars, scalpels. Everything a well-resourced scientist could want.

‘Help them, Frida!’ Moth’s threads vibrated like taut fabric. The shout brought her back to herself with a thud. The spider was bristling on the wall before her, staring at her with his eight pitch-black eyes, righteous in his fury.

‘Yes,’ she said, not quite hearing herself. ‘Yes, of course.’

She hurried over to where Dian was already struggling with the first jar. With the two of them working together, it wasn’t long before they’d unwound the wires. Grabbing a scalpel, she cut into the wax and levered off the cork with a satisfying pop. Dian gave a shaky exhalation, their whole body sinking back as the trapped dragonfly gave a weeeeee of delight and rushed for freedom. The grateful hum of their wings brushed her mind, blazing like golden ink poured into her brain.

It was quick work to do the others, and soon the room was alight with the buzzing of wings, and the swooping, plunging, sweeping flight of fifteen overjoyed Jurassic insects.

‘YesyesyesYESYESYES!’

Frida sighted a small window, high in the wall. Lunging for it, she scaled a table, sending bottles and wires clattering to the floor, and thrust it open. The summer night drifted in with the full moon, and the dragonflies sailed out, one by one, with shouts of buzzing glee.

‘Fly quickly, my dear friends!’ Dian called, their voice rough with emotion, raw and vulnerable. ‘The world is yours again.’

For a second, the dragonflies blazed across the sky in answer, the whizzing golden fire of shooting stars. Then they were gone, zipping into the trees. When Frida turned back to the room, now almost wholly dark apart from a faint steely light coming from a row of glass bottles in one corner, she could still hear the dragonflies’ ecstasy, ringing through her ears, and the imprint of their freedom against the backs of her eyelids. It was an antidote to the terrible backwards hum that inhabited this place.

‘Dian!’ she said, slipping down off the table. ‘We did it. They’re free!’

Dian was standing very still on the other side of the room. They turned towards her, very slowly, spine ramrod straight. The expression they wore was unlike any she’d seen before; not when the fairies had forced Dian to come with her, not at the sight of the dragon without her wings, not even at the LEZ, when they’d seemed to have a storm raging in their very bones, had they looked like this. It sent an arrow of fear, spearing straight into her heart.

Their eyes had scrunched up; their cheeks leached the sickly shade of a dead tree. They looked as if they’d shrunk in on themselves, several sizes smaller, and may never regrow. Their trembling, which had lifted briefly in the rush to help the dragonflies, was back now, running through the elegant curves of their body.

‘What is it?’ Frida whispered, taking a faltering step towards them. The sickening feeling coming back in a rush, making her stomach revolt.

Dian didn’t answer. They just stared at her, devastation etched across their forehead, the flare of their fine-boned nostrils, the pale curve of their lips. Even their dark irises had dulled to something chalky. When they stepped aside, Frida saw what it was that had made them look like they’d taken two steps out of this world never to come back again.