Page 63 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

Her entire world narrowed to that line of glass jars behind Dian. There were six of them in total. Smaller than the jars that had been used to contain the dragonflies, but not dissimilar in shape. They were connected by coils of wire to another bigger jar, which stood on a shelf behind. Empty, except for the fact that it shone with a steely silver light: raw and cold. As soon as Frida looked, it seemed to burrow into her.

She knew immediately that the light coming from this jar was the wards. This is how they looked. This was what they were made of. Not an invisible electric current, but this strange light. She knew because just a glance made her want to be sick all over the floor, driving stabbing pains through her heart so sharp she had to blink back tears.

And each of the warded jars in front contained a single object.

She took them in, one by one. Her brain locked into a frozen surreal panic, because it felt as though she was looking at the scene from above, as if it were happening to someone else. The first jar contained an eyeball, which she knew instantly belonged to a thunderbird, the pupil made of mist and lightning, shifting and twinkling in the gloom. The second: a phoenix tail feather, turquoise as the sky. The third, a great, fleshy lump – red as the tapestries on the walls. A lung, she realised with a jolt of horror. It still pumped. Her hand found her throat. Could it be the lung of a sooweel? Old tales claimed that a giant sooweel’s breath was one of the most powerful substances on earth.

The fourth item was a grey stump which made her shudder, all veiny and withered. A siren’s vocal cord perhaps, or a manticore’s tongue? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. The fifth was a hoof, pure white and covered in delicate ridges. She presumed, at some point, it had been attached to a pegasus.

And the sixth, the one at the very end?

That was the one that turned her world upside down.

Chapter Thirty-Four

The sixth jar contained the glittering silver horn of a unicorn. About the length of her forearm. To call such an object it seemed wrong, for if a Jewel was a dragon’s heart, then this horn was soul and heart and core of the wounded unicorn sleeping a hundred or so metres away. She knew, in her own heart, that this was the truth. The horn leaned on a tilt against the side of the jar. The tip seemed sharp enough to tear the universe, and the severed edge was like looking at an inverted black hole. The power pulled at her, sucking at her very essence, and the longer she looked, the more of herself it consumed. Everything about this was an abomination. Wrong, wrong, wrong! How could the Beauforts countenance this? They were good – they rescued creatures. They didn’t do things like this.

Dian’s fingers clamped around her elbow. ‘Why are these here?’ Their voice was a thorn pricking the matter of Frida’s brain and scoring a length. Moth had found his way into the hollow of Dian’s throat, the sensitive spot where their heartbeat pulsed, and curled himself into a ball, pressed up against Dian’s ashen skin. She, ridiculously, suddenly wanted nothing more than to do the same. To curl up around Dian’s warm flesh, to beg them to take her back into the raindrops. To get them all far, far away from here.

Instead, she just stared, stomach dropping, at the broken spire of the horn that had been ripped from the unicorn’s body.

‘I don’t know.’ She felt herself teetering on the edge of that spiralling black hole. What kind of people would hold objects like this? Collectors. Hunters. Poachers. Creature haters. Self-obsessed scumbag fuck-ups. Somewhere, she felt her carefully built scaffold start to waver, but she shook herself, telling herself to focus. There was an explanation. There had to be an explanation. Her gaze darted again and again across the objects. Looking closer now, she saw how fragile they all were. The glossy turquoise of the phoenix feather, which had seemed to ripple with the memory of flames – each blue strand as if it might turn to cinders at any moment. The etched map of the ridged hoof was ancient, white keratin crumbling. The eyeball’s lightning ready to wink out, and the lung? It was bloated. Swollen as if it might burst. Ba-boom, ba-boom. She couldn’t actually hear the weak rhythmic pumping through the glass, yet the sound pounded in every corner of her brain.

‘They’re looking after them, keeping them safe,’ she tried hoarsely, but even as she said the words, they sounded brittle, washed in the afterglow of the dragonflies’ caged sunlight. Aware that her hands were shaking, she shoved them deep in her pockets. Dian’s face clouded, the light of the wards giving everything an otherworldly shine, and she bit her lip hard.

‘If it’s not that,’ she stammered, talking as much to herself as to Dian, ‘if it’s something . . . different . . .’ She couldn’t bear to say worse, but she wasn’t naïve, she had to admit that the worst might be true. ‘The people who look after this place, they can’t all know about this,’ she said fiercely. ‘This has to be Henry Gladstone’s doing.’

She’d always been suspicious of the scientist, she told herself. In his portrait, hanging above the cappuccino machine in the Extraordinary Café, he was pictured in an ornate godly tower, a golden manticore in the background, a globe in his pale hands. His slick blond hair was smoothed over his high forehead, like the kind of person who’d have an oily sort of voice. Hamish had always called him the least-likeable of the LEZites.

She shuddered. This wasn’t how you cared for objects that had been rescued. If they’d simply been in jars, perhaps, but the way they were hooked up? As if they weren’t being protected at all, but their magic was being sucked out, causing them to wither. Her eyes darted again, over the set-up. As if . . . their magic was being converted into creating the wards themselves? She was shaking so hard, her mind at once considering all the very worst. Could this be what the wards were? Magic that had been stolen, and twisted and – stored? She wouldn’t have believed it, if she hadn’t felt it for herself; if she hadn’t seen these jars.

Suddenly, she remembered something she’d read in the library. Something about hanging a siren’s vocal cords from the rafters and sprinkling ground-up giant’s teeth across your threshold if you wanted to protect against a fairy. What if this was a version of that? Taking powerful objects and using them in your own protection.

She backed away from the jars. Dian was watching her, their eyes like black coals, as if they could sense her world collapsing.

‘We have to fix this,’ was all she could say, looking to Dian for help.

Something complicated crossed their face, something like pity, just before their pointed ears pricked, swivelling towards the door. The sickly grey staining their cheeks turned positively ivory as they rasped urgently, ‘Someone’s coming.’

Chapter Thirty-Five

They all panicked. Frida’s entire body seized up, and it was a good thing Dian had more wherewithal than she did, because if it was left up to her, she might have just never been able to move again. By the time she heard the sound of a door being unlocked, and the heavy creak of ancient hinges, Dian was already dragging her behind one of the tables, the icy flagstones bruising her knees in their hurry.

A dour male voice muttered something, then they heard slow, measured footsteps approaching down the corridor. Frida and Dian squeezed as far back as they could, finding shelter against the cold stone of the back wall. Frida didn’t need to ask if Dian could conjure the raindrops. The sickly cast to their face and blank fear in their eyes told her the answer. Not in this corrupt place, and not while still recovering from magicking them through the door. In the steel-white wash of the warded jars, Dian’s eyes looked vast and unreal, their pupils darker than the shadows themselves.

Without knowing what she was doing, she reached out a finger to graze the edge of their sleeve, as if she might reassure them.

‘It’s going to be ok,’ she mouthed.

But the faint light that clung to their cobwebs outlined them in earthy blue, and looking down at where she’d touched their sleeve, their expression turned stark. When they lifted their gaze back up, lines of terror radiated from the knot between their brows. Their throat bobbed, and Frida could almost read their thoughts. He will see us. He will find us.

Frida shook her head vehemently. ‘No,’ she breathed.

Moth, at Dian’s left collarbone, was not much more than a blur now. Moving so fast, as if the very act of weaving might tie the threads of Dian back together. Frida inched over a bit, as if she might shield Dian’s light. And then there was the crisp tread of footsteps entering the room and Dian squeezed their eyes shut, letting their head fall back against the wall, their slack face white as death.

Frida turned away, a haze of rage turning her vision unexpectedly violet. What had humans done to Dian, to fill them with such fear? She could hear the footsteps coming closer, the faint clink of glassware, as if the man was inspecting the now empty dragonfly jars. At the noise, Dian went entirely rigid and Frida, after a split-second hesitation, slipped her hand through theirs, hoping her warmth might help. She was braced for them to rip away from her, but when the moment stretched and they kept holding on, she dared to hold tighter. She could feel their panicked gasping slow, though their eyes remined closed, and although their fingers felt brittle as glass, their chest seemed to ease.

Holding her breath, Frida peeked out from beneath their hiding place. Thankfully, it seemed the light from the warded jars hid Dian’s cobwebs, for the moment at least. The person she saw was not Henry Gladstone, nor anyone she recognised from the other portraits. She understood this with intense relief, however whoever this man was, he was assessing the damage that she and Dian had wrought with narrowed eyes. She didn’t think he looked like a servant. He wore no uniform, and his clothes seemed smart and well made. Dark breeches, a tailored coat. Practical. In the half-light, she took in the thick blond hair, the wiry, muscular pitch to his shoulders, the haughty plains of his thin face. Despite his size, he moved with surprising quiet. As her nostrils flared, she smelled tobacco smoke and sweat.