The Puzzle Ring (14 page)

Hag-stones are curious pebbles that have naturally formed holes running right through them. The holes were created by the friction of running water over many centuries, which may explain why they are such a powerful protection against dark witchcraft and the forces of evil, as it is well known that such forces cannot cross running water. Hag-stones are also linked with faeries, and are often regarded as keys into the Faery Realm. They allow the owner to see faeries and the Faery Realm, and have the power to bind a faery to the owner's service
.

Hag-stones are used for healing and to make healing water. Hag-stones can help you be understood when you speak, and understand when you listen. When tied to a cord and swung above the head, hag-stones can chase away storms. Hag-stones will bring a person to you, or send them away. They are also used to bring luck and wealth to you, or to send it away
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Hag-stones have the power to reveal the truth from lies when held as pledge-stones, and reveal the true nature of any person or creature viewed through the stone's hole. As wish-stones, they are held in the palm of the left hand and rubbed with the right thumb while wishing. Hag-stones can only be found or given with love, never bought or stolen
.

Putting her hand in her pocket, Hannah touched the hag-stone in wonder. She drank the rest of her hot chocolate—now only lukewarm—and flicked through the pages until she found another section that was not written in code. There were descriptions of fairies—banshees and hobgoblins and kelpies and selkies; a recipe for a smoke bomb—sugar and saltpetre cooked together and then allowed to cool in a mould made from aluminium foil; and an account of the Wild Hunt, which rode out at the beginning of each quarter of the year and would often steal humans away to fairyland.

On one page, her father had written:

Leylines are ancient paths that led in straight lines from places of power, like Stonehenge. These leylines cross the earth like a mathematical grid, intersecting at circles of stones, ancient monuments, high hills and sacred sites. Experiments show these leylines—and the points of power—are imbued with higher than usual magnetic force
.

The folk traditions of the Scottish Highlands believe that such sites are ‘thin places', places where the membrane between the worlds is insubstantial, where time stands still and two worlds meet. People
who have a heightened psychic awareness can often ‘sense' such vortex points, and many legends attest to the possibility of these points being gateways to the fairy realms or even, perhaps, to different times
.

Her father had scribbled in his notebook, under this reference,
Fairknowe a thin place?

Hannah felt a surge of excitement. She pushed her chair back and went to look out the window at Fairknowe Hill. Could it really be a ‘thin place', a gateway to another world, or even another time? It seemed impossible.

Hannah sighed and rested her elbows on the windowsill, looking at the green cone of hill with its black, thorny crown. It had stopped raining, and the mist on the hills had lifted. A ray of sunlight pierced the clouds and reflected brightly off something on the hill. Hannah squinted, then bent and looked through the telescope. Someone was lying on the top of Fairknowe Hill, watching Wintersloe Castle through binoculars. A woman, short and dumpy, dressed in nondescript clothes and large glasses. Miss Underhill!

Hannah quickly stepped away from the window. Her heart was beating uncomfortably fast. She did not like the idea their house was being spied on. Suddenly the tower room seemed too small and dark. Hannah ran out, locking the door behind her, and raced down to the kitchen, her boot heels rapping urgently on the floorboards.

The kitchen was toasty warm and smelt deliciously of soup. Linnet was stooped over the table, pounding something in her mortar and pestle.

‘That woman from the fairy shop is spying on us,' Hannah burst out.

‘Miss Underhill?' Linnet looked up and smiled. ‘Och, don't you worry about her, she's all right.'

‘Belle says she's a ghoul.'

‘Oh, well, my lady didn't like that wee book of hers. She thinks the curse is family business.' Linnet hopped down from her stool and began to sweep the floor with her tiny broom.

Hannah sat on the edge of the table and swung her foot. She was so full of questions that she did not know where to start. She looked up and saw Linnet's cloudy green eyes fixed on her enquiringly.

‘Linnet . . . do you believe in magic?' she burst out.

Linnet smiled. ‘Of course! Why, there's a flame of magic inside everything, in every stone and every flower, every bird that sings and every frog that croaks. There's magic in the trees and the hills and the river and the rocks, in the sea and the stars and the wind, a deep, wild magic that's as old as the world itself. It's in you too, my darling girl, and in me, and in every living creature, be it ever so small. Even the dirt I'm sweeping up now is really stardust. In fact, all of us are made from the stuff of stars. Ask your mother. She's the one who first told me that.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes, indeed.'

‘But Mum doesn't believe in magic.'

‘No, I know she doesn't. But she has a great feel for the wonder and mystery of the world, don't you think? That's why your father loved her so.'

Hannah felt a sudden and most unexpected sting of tears in her eyes. She blinked them away grimly, telling herself she was tired after her disturbed night.

‘So hasn't anyone tried to break the curse?' she asked.

‘Many people. They've brought in all sorts of folk over the years, with holy water and who knows what else. And then, of course, many people tried to find the broken parts of the puzzle ring.'

‘My father found one part, though, didn't he?' Hannah demanded. She thought her great-grandmother had told her so last night, although there was so much else to remember, Hannah was not completely sure.

Linnet went to open the door, looking all around outside, then came back to stand very close to Hannah, taking her hand in one of her own, bony and age-spotted and trembling. ‘Yes,' she whispered. ‘He wouldn't tell me how or where, he said it was too dangerous. He hid it somewhere safe. With the rose of the world, he said.'

Hannah nodded eagerly, recognising the phrase from the final entry in her father's notebook.
Its bewildered quarter I left safe, with the rose of the world, my double rose
. . .

‘He was so happy. He said he knew where the others were too, and that he would go and find them. But he never came back.' Tears swam in the old green eyes. ‘That black-hearted witch got him, that's what I think.'

‘Irata?'

Linnet looked around anxiously. ‘Don't go saying her name, my chick. Names have power. Names are for calling.'

Hannah gave a superstitious shiver. She sat in silence for a while, thinking. It thrilled her to think her father may have found one quarter of the puzzle ring, for it proved to her that his notebook was not just nonsense, that it did indeed have the secret to breaking the curse hidden within it. She
wondered where he might have hidden the quarter of the puzzle ring that he had found. Somewhere here at the castle? She would have to start hunting in earnest.

Linnet busied herself washing up and Hannah went off into a dream where she found the missing loops of the puzzle ring, joined it together again and broke the curse. After a while she asked: ‘Linnet, do you ever hear a dog howling?'

The stooped old woman titled her face up to stare at Hannah. ‘You can hear the dog? Howling as if its heart were breaking?'

Hannah nodded, and on an impulse slipped her hand into her pocket and brought out the hag-stone. Linnet took it from her with trembling fingers. ‘Glory be, where did you find this?'

‘A toad gave it to me.'

Hannah felt a flush of embarrassment burning her cheeks, but Linnet seemed to find nothing odd in her words. ‘But where, my lamb?'

‘At the witch's pool.'

Linnet sat down on the stool as if her legs had suddenly grown too weak to hold her up any longer. ‘But that is how your father found it, not long before you were born. He said the toad brought it to him at the witch's pool. It had been gone so many, many years . . . I had thought it gone forever.'

‘Eglantyne threw it in the pool, didn't she?' Hannah asked, remembering what her great-grandmother had told her.

‘Yes. The night of the Wild Hunt . . . the night she cast the curse.' Linnet gently rubbed her thumb over the hag-stone. ‘More than four hundred and forty years ago.'

‘And so the toad gave it to my father, before I was born?' Hannah felt a sharp thrill of excitement. ‘When was that?'

‘It was late October,' Linnet said. ‘Bobby had brought your mother home, to meet my lady and me. He went walking one evening by the pool, and the toad brought him the hag-stone. Your father had always declared he would be the Red Rose to break the curse, and had spent a lot of time in his teens studying all the old folklore and fairytales, looking for clues. He'd stopped by the time he was in his late teens, but finding the hag-stone brought all his old dreams back to life. And I suppose he wanted to make sure the curse would not hurt your mother or you, once you were born.'

‘So he went through the gateway then, and found one quarter of the puzzle ring,' Hannah said slowly.

‘Yes. He went through at sunset on Halloween. I was that worried about him! He came back safely the next morning, though, and told me that he'd had a grand adventure, and that the hag-stone had even greater powers than he'd imagined. He said he'd found one of the quarters of the puzzle ring, but would not show me, or tell me where he'd hidden it. He said he wanted to go back to try to save Eglantyne and to find the other three parts of the ring. Six weeks later, at the winter solstice, he went again, but this time he didn't come back.'

Linnet looked down at the hag-stone in her hand. ‘So I would like to know where that old toad found the hag-stone, for your father took it with him that night. I thought it had gone missing with him.'

‘What happened that night? What happened to my dad?' Hannah spoke fiercely.

‘I don't know. It was winter's solstice, a time when the walls are thin. He said he was going to break the curse, once and for all, and undo all the harm that had been done. Something went wrong. I don't know what. It's an evil place now, that
green hill. You mustn't go there, my chick, not on your own, and not at noon or midnight, or dawn or dusk, and definitely not on any of the thin days. You—'

‘Thin days? What do you mean by that?'

‘The days when the gateway opens, my lamb. You should know those days. Midwinter and midsummer, the midpoints of spring and autumn, and the days that mark the halfway points between—May Day and Candlemas, Lammas and Halloween.' Linnet drew a circle on the tabletop, quartering it once and then again so it looked like a wheel with eight spokes. ‘It's on those days that you can cross the threshold . . .'

‘. . . and go where?' Hannah demanded.

‘To the Otherworld, of course.'

Hannah could not keep still. She put on her raincoat and went out into the garden. First she went to the ruined castle and looked at the rosebush growing upon the wall, marking the grave of a long-dead fairy hound. When she put the hag-stone to her ear, she could hear howling. When she put it to her eye, she saw the limp corpse of a little white and red dog dangling from the archway, twisting slightly in the breeze. She caught her breath in horror and quickly dropped her hand.

She went next to the yew tree, black in the rain, and smelling of graveyards. She hid within its hollow heart, and closed her hands about the hag-stone, not daring to look through it or listen. Some of its magic seemed to have taught her ears, however, for she could hear yelling and taunting laughter and the sound of a woman weeping and pleading for her life. Hannah wanted to jam her fingers in her ears.
Audacia
, she thought, and slowly lifted the stone to her left eye.

Hannah saw a crowd of people in old-fashioned clothes, shouting and shaking their fists, their faces distorted with hatred. A young woman, wearing a filthy white shift, with long dark hair knotted and snarled down her back, was chained to a stake in the midst of a great pile of firewood. She was heavily pregnant. Snow flurried down from a leaden sky, weighing down the branches of the yew tree. The pool was filmed over with ice. It was dusk, and the woods were filled with swaying shadows.

A tall, stern-looking man, in a long dark robe, with a white ruff pushing up his pointed beard, raised high a flaming torch, the only colour in all that cold, dark landscape. He pointed at the distraught young woman and intoned words of damnation and hellfire. She lifted her voice and screamed for her father.

As if seeking to drown her voice, the man in black robes flung the torch into the pyre. Flames at once shot high, and thick smoke billowed. Eglantyne screamed. Hannah gasped and dropped the stone, and found herself back inside the yew tree, damp and shivering, the hag-stone at her feet.