Page 77 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

No. Dian must have escaped. That was the only outcome she could consider. Dian and Moth escaped, and they’d gone back to the woods. Anything else was too awful. They had to have gone back to the woods, to find the others.

And left her.

A voice in her head laughed bitterly.

Well, she thought, swallowing the hollow hole inside her. That was well and good. She deserved nothing less. Dian should have left her. Maybe they were talking to Lucky and the other fairies. Or maybe they’d gone back home to their hawthorn tree, in the groves of hangferns, never to spare her another thought.

She clutched her head. Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up! She twisted to sit up, but the moment her head came too near to the bars, she keened through her teeth, the pain flooring her. Unable to do anything else, she rolled herself into as small a ball as possible, her head against her knees, her arms around her legs. A metal mug had been placed beside her. Glancing inside, she saw it contained water. Suddenly, her throat roared with thirst, and she’d drained it in two gulps before she considered that it might be poisoned. With a cry, she threw the mug clattering aside and lay, shivering and dazed, in the centre of the small cage, careful to keep every part of herself from brushing against the bars. It wasn’t easy: the cage was tiny. She might have been able to stand up, but barely. She had about six feet grace, she guessed, and no more.

She squeezed her eyes closed, trying to think. She knew she hadn’t used the toilet in far too long and that glass of water was now at risk of unbalancing a carefully poised situation. Trying to cool the panic spiralling up and up and up, she touched her head gently. When she looked at her hand, she was surprised that it came back clean. She’d thought that the man must have smashed her skull open. Maybe he had done, but they’d cleaned her up while she’d been unconscious. She shuddered at the thought of their hands on her; at what they’d threatened to do to her. At what they’d called her.

Demon.

Anything to avoid her thoughts spiralling, she studied the cage. There was a warded gate in front of her, but it was locked. Even if she knew how to jimmy it open, she couldn’t touch the bars, let alone sustain enough contact to fumble at the no-nonsense padlock. Beyond the bars, everything was dark and muffled, like they’d covered the cage with a cloth. Within, that cold steely light seemed to ooze off the bars, and off her own skin, making her want to claw at her own body parts to get rid of it. The hue brought to mind the LEZ’s fake moonlight. The colour just designed to look like the very essence of extraordinary.

Breathing felt difficult. The low background hum she’d become so expert at tuning out – gone. When she tentatively reached her magic out, there were no eager dogs hunting for scraps, no droll cantankerous cats under chairs, no adventuring earwigs in the floorboards. No rats composing poetry. No mice with electric tingles in their whiskers. No owls speaking to the moon. No worms burrowing for darkness. Nothing. And though she had tried so hard not to listen to them, now their silence felt like the loss of a limb.

If Dian and Moth were on the other side of these bars, she realised she wouldn’t be able to hear them either. Just like the terracotta dragon had not been able to hear her. Her mouth went dry. This was it, then. This was the reality of all these animals that she’d called her friends, that she’d had tattooed all over her body, without even asking them if they minded.

The crushing silence of a magicless world.

But – as if through a long dull tunnel – she heard human voices.

She realised this with dawning fear as she strained her ears.

Quiet, but not too far away. The cold steely light made everything disorientating, but as her eyes adjusted, she saw something flickering through the cloth, like nearby candlelight. She pulled her knees in tighter.

‘ . . . Getting tired of this performance, my dear. Come now. Show us what you have.’

Frida fought down a whimper. A male voice. Booming and slurred.

A woman’s voice replied, tinkling with merriment. ‘Yes, dear brother. Come along! Arabella is keen to go to sleep already. It is late and we are all tired. You have fed us half to bursting, now stop being so dramatic and show us your prize.’ A burst of laughter followed, making Frida shrink back so far, she almost hit the bars. But when the next voice cut through, her breath squeezed out of her chest as if she’d been kicked.

‘Ah, dearest.’ The voice pooled like aged whisky. Melodic and smooth. ‘You say you are fit to bursting, sister, but you seem perfectly content to continue eating these little cakes, do you not?’

There was another hearty round of laughter.

Frida started to shake. This couldn’t be real. But she pictured him sitting at ease at his desk chair, writing letters to his childhood friend. Smoothing a stray auburn lock back from his high forehead, studying the map on the wall, twirling the jade statue of the woman in his sure hands. And her scaffold of reality as she knew it, which had been hanging by a thread as it was, came down at last, and the pieces broke into smithereens.

‘You are quite right, brother, however you mock me.’ Whichever of Joshua’s sisters this was, her voice sounded amused, as if she never quite stopped laughing. ‘These cakes are a delight. I shall congratulate Mrs Evans myself in the morning. But come now! We are on the edge of our seats. Will you tell us what it is you are hiding? Lest we wither away, and you find yourself speaking to a room full of corpses.’

‘Ah, my dear Georgiana, I hardly think there is any risk of you withering away.’

Frida swayed. This was a waking nightmare. Designed especially for her.

‘But I suppose you are correct.’ Sir Joshua’s whiskey voice – she knew it was him now, knew it was him who’d threatened to take her tattoos – dripped though her skull. The famous, auburn-haired animal-rights activist, whose portrait she’d kowtowed to every day of her tenure as a zookeeper. He’d put her in a cage. An actual cage! There was a clink, perhaps of a glass being put down, and the muffled sound of deliberate footsteps coming closer. Frida shook so violently, her teeth were chattering.

Sir Joshua said softly, too close for comfort, ‘You are all well aware of how tirelessly some amongst us have laboured in pursuit of the grand ambitions of Forge House.’

She wanted to cover her ears, and yet she couldn’t help tilting her head, compelled to listen.

‘Well, the rumours are true. With the diligent work of our dear friend – and I daresay, our very saviour – Mr Henry Gladstone. A round of applause, if you please.’ There was a pause for hearty clapping, and a few amiable hear hears and huzzahs.

‘Now I charge you to recall how seized we were with excitement two summers past, when at last we laid our hands on the most extraordinary prize – the holy grail of magical law, the famed dragon’s Jewel. It took a lot of work, and blood, and tears, and Mr Caval and I travelled long distances to find the dragon in its lair, but eventually, the endeavour was a success, despite all the odds against us.’

It was quite possible Frida’s heart stopped beating. Sir Joshua. It had been Sir Joshua who’d found the terracotta dragon. Sir Joshua who’d taken her. Not rescued. Taken.

‘And though we have succeeded in powering our cages with this Jewel for over a year – thanks be to God – it remains, I confess, a far from perfect system.’