First Aid for Fairies and Other Fabled Beasts (7 page)

Helen asked, “Are you afraid of that, Yann, even though you’re not afraid of pain?”

“Yes, I am afraid.” He looked directly into her eyes. “I am afraid because it will mean war. A war my people cannot win, and a war your people may lose too.”

Then he galloped off.

Helen woke full of excitement and jumped eagerly out of bed. If she could find the right stone circle today, she would fly there tonight on a dragon!

After buttoning up her school dress, she stood in front of the mirror pulling her thick dark curls into a ponytail. Then she turned to go downstairs for breakfast, and nearly tripped over the green first aid kit in the middle of the floor, where she’d dropped it on arriving home last night in her rush to get cleaned up before suppertime.

The rucksack was slightly scorched and very dirty. She couldn’t possibly put it back in her Mum’s surgery. She would have to replace it. But first she would have to refill it with supplies she might need tonight: a new syringe, more saline, swabs, clean bandages and what else? What could go wrong at a stone circle? What injuries could her new friends suffer? She tried not to think of huge stone slabs falling on small fairies, or even middle-sized schoolgirls.

She shoved the first aid kit under her bed and went downstairs for breakfast.

Nicola wasn’t being a horse today. Today she was being a teddy’s mummy, feeding porridge to a bright pink bear in a bib. “Open wiiiiiiiiiide!”
she said to the bear. Helen gave her little sister a kiss, and got a dollop of porridge on her sleeve in thanks.

Her Dad handed Helen a bowl of porridge, and waved vaguely at the blueberries and honey on the table.

“Mr Crombie phoned last night to make an appointment for his cat’s booster jags. He seemed a bit worried about this solo you’re supposed to be performing at the concert. He says you still haven’t told him which piece you’re going to play yet. Is that right?”

Oops, thought Helen, I should have been
looking
for a tune last night, not crawling about in caves and solving riddles.

“I just haven’t played it for him yet, Dad, that’s all. It’ll be ready by Monday. Don’t worry.”

“Look … Mum and I know you want to be a great fiddle player, but we’re still not sure about this summer school idea. It’s a lot of work, and if you aren’t ready to find, practise and perform a solo, then perhaps you should just wait a year or two.”

“But I can’t wait! These particular violinists might only play together at next year’s summer school, and then maybe never again. I may never get this chance again.”

Helen’s Dad tried to look stern. “Then you need to impress Mr Crombie at his rehearsals, don’t you, rather than make him nervous about his concert?”

“I know, I know.” Helen wanted to distract her Dad from this awkward conversation, so she
asked, “Dad, do you know anything about stone circles?”

“What … like Stonehenge? That sort of thing?”

“Yes. Are there any round here?”

Her Dad thought. “I don’t know of any standing stones nearby. There are a couple of very old burial sites and lots of Roman remains in the Borders, but the big circles are mostly in the south of England, I think. There are a couple in Orkney and the Western Isles though. Why do you ask?”

“Just something I read.” Helen grinned, remembering reading the riddle on the stone in the flickering light of the cave.

Then her Mum marched in, slightly grumpy, as she often was until she’d had her breakfast.

“I’ve lost my first aid kit. The rucksack I use for long distance jobs like sheep on cliff faces, and puppies in septic tanks. The one in the Landrover has just fallen apart, and I can’t find my spare anywhere. Does anyone know where it is?”

Helen didn’t know
exactly
where the rucksack had come to rest under her bed when she pushed it with her foot, so she crossed her fingers and said, “I don’t know, Mum.” Then she filled her mouth with blueberry porridge and started eating very fast.

“Alasdair, do you know where it is?”

“No, Tricia dear. Where did you last see it?”

“It’s usually filled with supplies and hanging on the door of the small animal surgery, but it’s not there.”

“Did you take it with you to rescue the sheep a couple of nights ago?”

“No, it was that barbed wire which wrecked my old one.”

“Nicola, have you taken Mummy’s green bag?” Dad asked gently.

“Green bag for picnic. Teddy bear picnic.”

“Nicola! That’s Mummy’s …” her Mum’s voice started to rise.

Helen broke in, “No, Mum!” She didn’t want Nicola taking the blame for her nighttime
adventures
again. “No, Mum, Nicola doesn’t mean
your
green bag. Remember she has a wee green bag with flowers on it, and she uses it for pretend shopping and picnics. That’s the bag she means. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you borrowed it though, for your plasters and stuff.”

“It’s got much more important equipment in it than plasters and stuff, as you would know, young lady, if you ever paid the slightest attention to what I do for a living.”

“I don’t have to pay attention, Mum, I don’t want to be a vet. I want to be a musician.”

“For which you will have to practise a bit more,” reminded her Dad. Feeling got at from both sides, Helen put her half-finished bowl of porridge in the sink and clomped off to pack her school bag.

Helen didn’t get a chance to sneak into the school library until lunchtime. As soon as she had finished her packed lunch, she went into the oldest part of the school, which had once been the original village hall. It wasn’t used for teaching any more and she noticed that it was starting to smell quite musty. The library was much bigger than her classroom.
There were lots of old books on high wooden shelves, and a ladder on wheels to reach them, but the books that the pupils usually needed were easier to reach, on grey metal bookcases in the middle of the room.

Helen searched the history and geography shelves and found several books on stone circles and other Neolithic remains from four or five thousand years ago.

She was dismayed to discover that there were hundreds of stone circles, stone rows and
standing
stones in Britain, but then she remembered that she was looking for a shape without end, so she limited her search to circles.

Stonehenge was the most obvious circle, but a photo in a recent book showed it surrounded by barriers and cameras, so it would be hard to get into, even at night, even with the help of a dragon. She had to hope that the Book’s clue came from another, less touristy, circle.

She picked up an old book with yellow crinkled pages containing sketches of stone circles. She flicked through it, back to front, as she always did with serious books, hoping to get to the good bits fast without having to read the introduction.

As the sketches passed her in a cartoon blur of stones moving and dancing, one shape caught her eye. She stopped flicking and turned back half a dozen pages to find the picture that had leapt out at her.

She saw a huge stone circle, a perfect, beautiful circle, even though there were gaps where some stones had fallen.

It was called the Ring of Brodgar, and was on the mainland of Orkney, the group of islands just off the very top corner of Scotland. But what Helen had noticed was the small sketch in the corner of the page; a drawing of just one of the massive stones. It had a rune carved on it, in the same branched tree style as the rune on Sapphire’s block. The notes underneath said a smaller stone with a rune on it had gone missing from Brodgar years ago.

“We could take it back to Brodgar tonight!” she said out loud, delighted to have solved the riddle.

Helen glanced quickly through the rest of the book, but there was no other circle that answered the riddle. So she returned to the Ring of Brodgar, and copied the layout of the circle, including the deep ditch round it and the lochs either side of it, into a notebook she’d brought from home.

She was just sliding all the books back into their spaces when the bell rang for the end of lunchtime. She ran down the corridor between the old building and the new classrooms. As she turned the corner and pushed open the heavy fire door, she heard a noise behind her. She whirled round quickly, and saw something vanish round the corner. It looked like a tail, not at floor level, but at the height of Helen’s waist. She’d been the only person in the library and there were only storerooms in this corridor. So who else was here? Helen stood still and listened. In the background she heard the shuffling and chatter of classes filing back in, but nearby she thought she heard breathing. Rasping, gasping breathing.

She clenched her fists and thought about Yann running away from creatures with teeth. She took a step back towards the library, but then heard Mrs Murray shout from the new building.

“Helen Strang! Get to your class this minute.”

Helen called, “Yes Miss,” and ran into the bright light, straight to her classroom.

There was no rehearsal after school on Wednesday, so Helen was back home while it was still light. Her Mum was at a conference at Edinburgh University, and her Dad had taken Nicola
swimming
in Selkirk, so she had the house to herself for an hour.

First, she restocked the first aid kit, adding a few extra bandages and swabs just to be safe.

Then, remembering how hungry she had been by the end of the cave adventure, she made some sandwiches. She didn’t know what her new friends ate, so she chose for them: cheese, tuna, chicken and jam. She wondered what horses would like, and added some salad leaves to the plastic box too. Finally, she hid the rucksack and the sandwiches in a bush by the back fence.

As the sun sank lower, her Dad and Nicola came back smelling of chlorine. Helen sat in her room with her music books and tried — yet again — to find a short violin piece that she felt was perfect for her. She had been enjoying herself too much these past few days to play anything sad, and none of the bouncy pieces were serious enough for someone who was trying to save the world from an evil Minotaur.

She found an old book of traditional Scottish dance tunes that Mr Crombie had lent her and was playing her way through those when she suddenly realized that it was almost dark outside. She put her fiddle in its case, ran downstairs and grabbed her fleece.

She trotted through the kitchen, where her Dad was blowing Nicola’s nose.

“I heard you playing upstairs, it sounded great,” he said smiling.

“That was just a warm up. I should really go out to the garage now, to try some more complex music for my solo. I’ve made some sandwiches, so don’t worry if I’m not back for a while.”

Helen had thought about her words carefully, and was pretty sure she hadn’t actually lied. She should indeed be practising in the garage, and she really had made sandwiches … and she certainly wouldn’t be back for a while.

So she gave her Dad a big kiss, and jumped out of the way of a huge sneeze from her little sister. Then she bounced out of the back door and ran to the garage. She nipped in just long enough to put her fiddle carefully on the couch, and switch on the light so it shone through the dusty windows. From the house, it would look as if she was still there.

She headed for the darkest part of the garden where she found Yann resting on the ground with his legs folded under him, and Rona leaning on his flank, her legs stretched out on the grass.

Rona grinned at Helen. “Was that you playing? It was lovely.”

Helen smiled shyly. “I was just sight-reading, trying to find a new piece to play at my school concert.”

“Enough chatter, girls,” said Yann grandly, springing to his hooves. “We have work to do. The others are in the wood up the hill. We must join them.”

“I made food.” Helen grabbed the box and
rucksack
from behind the bush. “You can eat while I tell you what I found.”

So, as they sat round a tree stump in the old birch wood above the house, Rona ate tuna sandwiches, Yann ate all the salad, Lavender ate little bits of jam sandwiches and Catesby pecked at the fairy’s crusts. Sapphire delicately nibbled the chicken sandwiches.

“You’d really have preferred a whole chicken, wouldn’t you?” laughed Helen.

Then she passed round her notebook so they could all see the sketches.

“The most likely stone circle for our riddle is the Ring of Brodgar on the main island of Orkney, just off the north coast. It’s a huge circle, with almost thirty stones still standing, and at least one of the standing stones has runes carved on it. Also a stone went missing from there years ago, and it had a rune on it too. So we could take the stone home, and find your Book at the same time. The only problem is, how do we get there? It’s about 250 miles north of here.”

Sapphire grunted quietly. Perhaps she didn’t want to roar and set the trees on fire. Rona explained, “Sapphire will fly us. She can fly you
and me on her back, Catesby can keep up with us and Lavender can perch on our shoulders.”

Yann said slowly, “But I can’t go, can I?” He stamped a hoof, and spoke angrily. “I can’t really fit on Sapphire’s back, not for that long, and even at a gallop I won’t get to Caithness tonight. And the currents in the Pentland Firth are too strong for me to swim anyway. I can’t go. The human girl can go, but I can’t.”

Rona patted his withers. “No, you can’t come this time, but you
can
go home, and help prepare for the Gathering and keep our people from worrying about where we are. If all of us are missing every night this week, they will start to think we are up to something.”

“So I go home and do housework, while you face danger and find the Book?”

“Have you found out about those teeth yet?” asked Helen, “The teeth of the creature that bit you? You thought that might be useful.” Yann humphed and turned his back on her.

She tried again. “I think I was being watched at school today, by something with a tail, something that breathed in a raspy way. Perhaps you could spend some time working out what is watching us. That would be more useful than sulking, for example.”

He swung back towards her. “I wasn’t sulking. I was thinking.”

Lavender swooped down and pointed her tiny finger at Yann’s nose. “I had to practise synchronized spells while you leapt into the walled garden. You can go and help stamp out the dance floor while we go island hopping. It’s only fair.”