The Puzzle Ring Read online

  ‘She must be freezing. Maybe she’s got hypothermia,’ Max said. ‘Do you hallucinate if you’ve got hypothermia? I’ll have to look it up.’

  Miss Underhill made a sound of disgust, but before she could speak Roz came running, wild-eyed and white-faced, and flung herself on Hannah. Scarlett and Genie were close behind.

  ‘Hannah! Hannah!’ Roz cradled her daughter in her arms, rocking her.

  ‘What happened?’ Genie dropped down on one knee. ‘She’s soaking wet! Did she fall in the loch?’

  ‘But what is she doing all the way over here?’ Scarlett said. ‘She was right beside me a minute ago!’

  The clamour of their voices washed over Hannah in waves. ‘They chased me . . . there were hundreds of them . . . they want to stop me . . .’

  ‘She’s feverish,’ Roz said. ‘She must be half frozen! We’ve got to get her home. How could this have happened? I only took my eyes off her for a second . . .’

  Her gaze fell on Miss Underhill, and she frowned, puzzled. The next moment she saw the knife, and her frown deepened. She cradled Hannah closer.

  ‘I heard the splash as she fell in,’ Miss Underhill said, drawing the knife towards her and tucking it away in the pocket of her big coat, which lay discarded on the stones. She drew it around her, shivering. ‘I was not so far away. I jumped in, and was lucky enough to catch hold of her and drag her out.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Roz said, trying to smile. ‘But what were you doing out here, on such a cold night?’

  ‘It’s the winter solstice,’ Miss Underhill said. ‘I was casting circle for Yule. I like to do my rituals out in the open.’ She hunched her shoulders against the biting cold and got to her feet. ‘I’m glad I could help. I’d best get home before I get hypothermia.’ She bent and said to Hannah, ‘Did I not tell you? It’s a dangerous night to be out wandering in the mist.’ Then she stumped away up the slope, hands thrust in her pockets.

  Genie was pressing numbers on her phone desperately, then she cried out in frustration. ‘Why won’t my phone work? It’s ridiculous! What’s the point of having a mobile if it won’t work in emergencies.’ She shook her mobile phone furiously, as if that would help. ‘We need to call the ambulance!’

  ‘It’s the black witch,’ Hannah murmured, shivering uncontrollably under the damp coat. ‘Watch out!’

  Donovan bent his head over hers. ‘You saw her? Really saw her?’

  Hannah remembered that one glimpse, of windswept hair and a cold, pale, pitiless face, and a white hand gripping a spear of polished jet. She nodded her head, though her neck felt as if it were in a vice of iron, and her temples pounded dreadfully. Chills ran all over her.

  Somehow Donovan and her mother lifted her up, and supported her between them. With the others pressing close, shocked and afraid, they managed to stumble back towards the road.

  Hannah barely remembered how they got her home. She saw pale beams of headlights, and faces hanging over her, and whirling trees, and then the march of walls hung with paintings and antlers, and then at last the soft blue walls of her own room. She was laid down on her own bed, and then Roz and Linnet fussed about her, drawing off her wet, stiff clothes, towelling her frozen limbs, dressing her in warm, dry pyjamas, and tucking her up in bed with a hot-water bottle. Genie came back with something hot for her to drink, and she was made to swallow some kind of medicine from a spoon.

  Hannah cried out to Linnet, ‘My stone, my stone!’

  ‘It’s all right, darling, it’s all right,’ Roz said, smoothing back her damp, tangled hair, but Linnet bent and searched rapidly through the pile of clothes Hannah had thrown on the chest that morning, and found the hag-stone and the key in the pockets of her cardigan. She thrust them into Hannah’s frantic, outstretched hands.

  With a groan of relief Hannah clutched them to her, rolled herself into a ball and fell fathoms deep into sleep.

  The Old Straight Way

  At eleven minutes past eleven o’clock, on the second day of the second month of the new year, Hannah’s alarm clock shrilled out into the dark, cold night.

  It took a few seconds for the sound to penetrate Hannah’s sleep stupor, but then she sat bolt upright and looked at the clock: 11:11. She smiled wryly. When she had set her alarm earlier that night, she had purposely chosen this palindromic time, remembering that the Unseelie Court was confounded by order and symmetry. Tonight of all nights Hannah wanted them confounded.

  It was Imbolc, one of the thin days, the cross-quarter day poised halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Tonight, at midnight, the gateway between worlds and times would open, and Hannah intended to try to follow in her father’s footsteps and go back to the days of Mary, Queen of Scots.

  It was bitterly cold outside, for blizzards had swept Scotland all month, causing chaos on the roads and bringing down power lines so that Wintersloe had been without electricity for days. Hannah and her friends had built snowmen, had snowball fights, and slid down the slope towards the loch on flattened-out cardboard boxes. Hannah had even tried skiing with her mother at the Glenshee ski resort an hour or so to the north. Although she knew, with a secret smile to herself, that Glenshee meant ‘valley of the fairies’ she did not say so to her mother. Hannah was being very careful not to mention anything about curses or witches or fairies to her mother, who had very nearly packed Hannah up and taken her home to Australia after her midwinter swim in the loch.

  Had Hannah not come down with a nasty cold afterwards, and had the roads not been so blocked with snow, she probably would not have given into Hannah’s begging and pleading to stay. Hannah’s explanation that she had gone quietly into the forest to relieve herself behind a tree, and then got lost in the fog, did not seem at all satisfactory to her. However, Lady Wintersloe told many stories—both tragic and funny—of people who got lost in the Scottish mists, and Linnet worked her own subtle magic in the kitchen and the house, so that eventually Roz had promised Hannah they would stay just a little longer. The days turned into weeks, and then into more than a month, and all that time Hannah had quietly made her preparations to go back in time.

  She was glad now that she had not tried to cross through the gate on Midwinter’s Eve. The extra six weeks had given her a chance to finish decoding her father’s book, read through her father’s books on fairy lore, magic and history, and plan her journey. She had studied as hard as any scholar swotting for an exam, and now felt she was as expert on the subject as she could be.

  Hannah had worn her warmest clothes to bed that night. All she had to do was drag on her new winter coat and slip her feet into her sturdy black boots, fumbling to do the laces up with fingers stiff with cold and apprehension. She slid her left hand under her pillow and took out the hag-stone and the iron key, and stowed them carefully in her pockets, then picked up her backpack. For weeks now Hannah had been slowly filling it with all she thought she might need. She had packed an old blanket, a change of thermal underwear, two pairs of warm socks, a soft packet of tissues, a torch, a box of candles and two boxes of matches, a travelling sewing kit, a packet of crackers, a small jar of peanut butter, some cheese in blue wax, some muesli bars, the Santa chocolate she had got in her Christmas stocking, two plastic bottles of water and a pair of stout wire-cutters that she had taken from the garden shed.

  She had removed one of the antique daggers from the hallway and secretly sharpened it in the kitchen while Linnet was busy elsewhere, and hung it from her belt in its worn leather scabbard. She fumbled now in the darkness to strap it around her waist. The feel of it bumping against her hip made her feel, more than anything, as if she truly was living inside one of her books.

  Lastly she picked up the sturdy walking-stick that had once belonged to her great-great-grandfather, and hung her guitar over her shoulder. It was a strange thing, but the strap Linnet had given her made the guitar so much easier to carry. It hardly seemed to weigh a thing.

  Hannah did all this in darkness, for she dare not turn on h
er light in case it should signal to any watcher that she was awake. She wanted nobody—or no thing—to know what she was planning.

  She went silently through the dark, sleeping house, knowing what steps to avoid putting her weight on and being careful not to knock her hip against the old sideboard in the hall. Hannah knew where Linnet hid the key to the kitchen door. It was a matter of only a few moments to unlock it and look out into the snowy garden.

  She paused and listened. All was quiet. Hannah raised the hag-stone to her left eye and looked all around, but nothing moved. Slowly, quietly, she pulled the kitchen door shut behind her, and stepped out into the snow.

  The cold took her breath away. She huddled her chin into her scarf, and slogged across the snow, glad of the help of the stick. As she walked, she ran over all she had learnt about Imbolc, the second day of February. Also called Candlemas because traditionally candles and lanterns were carried in procession, it was a day that honoured the Celtic goddess Brighid, spirit of poets and smiths, healing and the hearth. It seemed right to Hannah that this was the day that she would try to cross through the gateway.

  The stars were like points of white fire in the frosty sky. Once or twice Hannah looked back at the dark shape of the house, sure she had heard something slipping along behind her. It made her stomach clench with anxiety, but she saw nothing except tree shadows wavering over the snow.

  The yew tree loomed above her. Hannah stepped inside its gaping belly and fumbled for torch and wire-cutters. She wanted to go through the gate in the yew tree to reach Fairknowe Hill as people had been doing for centuries in the hope it would help them cross into the Otherworld. Back through the winter gate I must go . . .

  After a hard struggle, Hannah managed to cut through the padlock and chain with her wire-cutters and ease open the gate. It squealed loudly, and she wished she had thought of oiling it first. She switched off her torch and stood listening, but heard nothing save the pounding of her heart.

  So Hannah swung her backpack on again, and glanced at her watch, hesitating. She could tell by the luminous glow that it was still ten minutes to midnight.

  A rustle of branches behind her. A soft footfall. Hannah’s pulse leapt erratically. She swung around, pulling out her dagger.

  ‘I told you she’d be here!’ Scarlett’s voice came out of the darkness. ‘I knew she’d be crazy enough to try and do it.’

  ‘You don’t really think you can go back in time, do you?’ Max demanded. ‘Scientifically speaking, it’s just not possible.’

  ‘It is so,’ Hannah protested, her heart filled with joy and relief. She slid the dagger back into its sheath. ‘You of all people should know that.’

  ‘Yeah, well, the special theory of relativity is all very good, but it’s perfectly ridiculous to think that there’s some kind of time tunnel here in Fairknowe. It’s beyond the bounds of belief.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Hannah said. ‘But I thought I’d try anyway.’

  ‘Testing your hypothesis,’ Max said. ‘Yeah, that’s why I came too. My scientific reputation would be secured forever if I was the first to prove the wormhole theory. I could skip secondary school and go straight to uni. Get my PhD at the age of thirteen.’

  ‘It’s my wormhole,’ Hannah said. ‘I’d be the one with the PhD.’

  ‘What use is a PhD to a soul singer? Very uncool. No, better leave it to me.’

  Hannah peered through the darkness at the third shadow, standing quietly to one side of the yew tree. He was almost invisible in his black jeans and coat. ‘I’m glad you came,’ she said to no one in particular.

  ‘You should have told us what you planned,’ Donovan said in a low, angry voice. ‘We had to figure it all out by ourselves.’

  ‘Lucky Donovan remembered that Candlemas was one of the days that the gateway is meant to open,’ Scarlett said exuberantly. ‘We had to go and ask Miss Underhill when that was. Else we’d have missed you.’

  ‘Hopefully I’d have been back before anyone missed me,’ Hannah said.

  ‘You should’ve known we’d have wanted to come too,’ Donovan said. He sounded like he was scowling.

  ‘Yeah, fancy leaving us out of an adventure like this,’ Scarlett said. ‘It’s just plain mean.’

  ‘It’s my curse,’ Hannah said. ‘I have to be the one to break it.’

  Again she looked at Donovan, willing him to understand.

  ‘No reason we can’t help you,’ he said. ‘I brought my flugelhorn just in case.’

  ‘I brought the little pipe from the music room,’ Max said. ‘You know, the one that’s like an old-fashioned recorder. I’ve been playing it heaps this winter.’

  ‘And I brought the tambourine,’ Scarlett said with satisfaction. ‘We’ll be travelling minstrels.’

  ‘It may not work,’ Hannah said. ‘You might all be out here in the cold for nothing.’

  ‘Oh, well, it’s still an adventure,’ Scarlett said. ‘I had to sneak past my parents’ bedroom and then I dropped one of my boots, bang! right outside their door. I just about had a heart attack.’

  ‘I had to walk here,’ Donovan said. ‘I couldn’t risk Dad hearing my bike. I haven’t walked up that hill in ages. And I was carrying a really heavy backpack.’ By the tone of his voice, Hannah could tell he was smiling.

  ‘Come on,’ Hannah said. ‘Let’s give it a go. It’s almost midnight. If it doesn’t work then we can all go back to bed and get warm again.’

  ‘But if it does work . . .’ Max said.

  ‘We’ll be going back in time,’ Donovan said dreamily.

  ‘To the time of Mary, Queen of Scots,’ Scarlett cried in glee. ‘I hope we get to see her! Everyone always talks about how beautiful she was, but she looks plain as anything in her portraits.’

  ‘It’s not a tourist trip,’ Hannah said sternly. ‘It’ll be dangerous. That’s why I didn’t tell you.’

  ‘Danger is my middle name,’ Max said in what he fondly thought was a sinister voice.

  ‘Come on, stop mucking about, this is serious,’ Donovan said.

  ‘So what do you want us to do, noble leader?’ Max said to Hannah.

  She thought quickly. ‘Let’s light a candle. I do have a torch, but I thought candles would be more suitable. It is Candlemas, after all.’ She rummaged in her bag and took out a candle, which she lit with some trouble, as a cold wind was blowing and her hands were shaky. Outside all was silver and black, but within the hollow yew tree warm golden candlelight flickered mysteriously over the cracks and fissures of the ancient wood and the solemn faces of her friends.

  She saw they were all dressed for a hike in the mountains, in thick coats and jeans and boots, with heavy packs on their backs. Scarlett’s parka was hot pink, with pink fluff lining the hood and cuffs. Max’s was grey and black and olive, while Donovan wore his usual long black coat.

  ‘We’d better all hold hands,’ Hannah said. ‘Girl, boy, girl, boy, so we’re as symmetrical as possible. Four’s a good number. Like the points of a compass or a cross. I’ll go first.’

  Donovan seized her hand and held out his other for Scarlett, who took it, giggling.

  ‘Aw, do I have to?’ Max said as Scarlett held out her other hand. ‘All right. I guess sacrifices have to be made in the name of scientific research.’

  ‘I’m going to sing a song,’ Hannah explained, her cheeks growing hot. She did hate to look ridiculous. ‘In all the fairy stories they always say things in rhyme.’ Sing a song of spells, there is reason in rhyme . . .

  Self-consciously, she half spoke, half sang:

  Open, open, high green hill,

  on this night of winter chill.

  Open, open, winter gateway,

  let us walk the old straight way,

  Back to the year fifteen sixty-seven,

  By tree and stone and stars in heaven.

  Hannah had rewritten her rhyme over and over again, and learnt it off by heart, and now, as she spoke, she pushed open the iron gate in the yew tree and lead her fri
ends through.

  Hand in hand, they marched past the dark, glimmering pool and through the tangle of shadowy trees, all too aware of the strangeness of the wood at night and the sense that unseen watchers lurked in the shadows. Hannah would have liked to have scanned the woods through the hag-stone, but both her hands were occupied. She turned her face from side to side, starting at every rustle and creak, and felt Donovan squeeze her hand in reassurance. She paused at the gaping crack in the hillside. Her frail little candlelight did nothing to penetrate its blackness. When she chanted her rhyme again, her voice trembled noticeably. She cleared her throat, gripped her candle tightly, and led her friends into the dark gaping chasm in the side of the hill.

  Her candle illuminated a narrow passageway, formed naturally in the rock. Graffiti was scrawled all over the walls near the entrance, but disappeared the deeper they went within the hill. It was bitterly cold, and their breath smoked whitely from their mouths. There was no sound but their rapid breathing and the scrape of their boots on the rock, which echoed behind them in a very spooky way. Hannah sang her rhyme for the third time. Three times is the charm, her father had written.

  The passageway climbed and fell, twisted back on itself, opened into a little antechamber, then narrowed again into a mere crack that Hannah could barely squeeze through. Beyond was another long, crooked, narrow passageway that led them down in a series of rough steps and falls, back to the cave they had first entered. Weary and disappointed and baffled, Hannah stumbled out onto the hillside, her friends trailing along behind her. Her candle blew out and they were left shivering in the moonlit darkness.

  ‘Did it just go in a big circle?’ Scarlett asked. ‘Or did we go the wrong way somehow?’

  ‘Should we go through again?’ Max said. ‘Maybe we took a wrong turn.’

  ‘I don’t think we did,’ Donovan said in a low voice. ‘Look!’

  They all turned and looked out over the valley.

  The loch gleamed silver under the moon, with the familiar black shapes of islands floating like scattered lumps of ebon. They could see the snowy peak of Ben Lomond and the distant lines of hills to the west, just as they had seen them a thousand times before.