The Puzzle Ring Read online

  The cottage was built low to the ground, and grass and heather grew on its roof so that it looked like a mossy boulder that had been there forever. It was ridiculously easy to climb onto the roof, giving her a clear view in all directions.

  ‘Um,’ Hannah said, holding the hag-stone to her left eye. ‘Where’s the puzzle ring?’

  Hannah was whirled around, as if by an impatient hand playing blindman’s bluff. Her vision swam dizzyingly, as far-distant landscapes and people spun in and out of sight. She lost her balance, and tumbled down the roof and to the ground again. Luckily the roof was so low to the ground, she was only a little shaken and bruised.

  ‘What happened?’ Scarlett and Max came running outside, looking startled.

  ‘You okay?’ Donovan said, helping her up.

  ‘Mmm-mmm,’ Hannah grunted, too winded to speak. She was scowling. First time she tried, she saw nothing. Second time, she saw too much. What was she doing wrong?

  ‘You’d probably better be specific,’ Donovan said. ‘If the ring has been split in four and thrown in four different directions, the hag-stone won’t be able to show you it all, will it? Try asking for just one direction at a time.’

  Hannah grunted again. It was good advice, but she was angry she had not thought of it herself.

  ‘I need paper and pen,’ she said. ‘I’d better ask in rhyme. It seemed to work for the fairy gate.’ She found the little pad and pencil she had packed, and sat down again, scribbling on the paper. Every few seconds she would stop, squint up at the leaden sky, and mutter a few words. ‘Ring, sing, sling, king, bling.’

  ‘I think “bling” is a bit modern,’ Scarlett said helpfully.

  Hannah ignored her. ‘East, beast, feast, least. Sun, bun, fun, done. Oh, how can I say this?’

  Eventually she had something that satisfied her. She did not try to climb the roof, having no desire to fall off again, but walked up the gentle slope of the hill behind the house till she could see across the bare hillside to the east.

  Show me, show me, magic stone,

  where one quarter of the ring was thrown,

  east where the new sun does rise,

  help me to find the golden prize.

  It was not very good poetry, but it was the best Hannah could do on short notice. To her delight, looking through the hag-stone as she chanted the words, she saw the landscape rushing towards her as if she were flying over the moors in a helicopter. A walled grey town hurried towards her. Before it crouched a great hill, shaped like a sleeping lion. Closer she came, until she saw a spring of water bubbling down into a small carved bowl.

  ‘Surely that was Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh?’ she murmured. ‘Though the town was so small.’

  ‘Edinburgh would be much smaller then . . . I mean now,’ Max said.

  When she described what she had seen, Angus nodded his grizzled head. ‘I’ve heard tell of that spring. They say it’s got magical healing properties. It’s called Saint Anthony’s Well.’

  ‘If it’s the spring of water I know, it’s far older than your Saint Anthony,’ Linnet said, coming barefoot through the snow with the porridge pot on her hip.

  ‘So you know the place I saw?’ Hannah demanded.

  Linnet nodded her head. ‘Aye, many’s the time I’ve danced on that hill on May Day. Though not for many a long year.’ She handed Angus the pot and he hung it to his satchel, along with a big leather bottle of water—which Max had insisted he boil first—and a flat griddle pan.

  ‘So are you going to come with us?’ Hannah asked eagerly, the hag-stone in her hand. ‘You’ll stay until we join the puzzle ring again, won’t you, Linnet? And you too, Angus?’

  There was a strange silence for a moment. Linnet was pale, her green eyes wide in her small, wedge-shaped face. Then she surprised them all by going down on her knees before Hannah, heedless of the mud on her skirt, and bowing low her head. ‘As you bid, so shall I do,’ she said, her voice husky. ‘However long it takes.’

  Angus glanced up. ‘For sure, lassie,’ he said irritably, slinging a tall bow over his shoulder and picking up a quiver of arrows. ‘Haven’t I said so? Come on, let’s be getting on the road! Plenty of time for blethering while we walk.’

  Hannah, standing astounded with Linnet kneeling in the mud before her, suddenly remembered what her father had written in his diary: Hag-stones have the power to bind a faery to the owner’s service.

  What have I done? she wondered in dismay.

  Arthur’s Seat

  All that day Hannah was haunted by the possibility that she had just bound Linnet to her service for the next four hundred and forty years. Is that why Linnet had grown so very old? She had spoken impulsively, but it was clear by Linnet’s reaction that she took the pledge seriously. Hannah tried to apologise and tell her not to worry, but Linnet just said gently, ‘I was bound to my Lady Eglantyne, and now I am bound to you. I will serve you well, my lady.’

  Hannah was too cold and exhausted to worry for long. It was a long, hard day, following rough paths that wound through tangled forests, over boulders and rocky streams and patches of bog that oozed black mud. When Hannah stumbled and fell to her knees, she had to haul herself up and keep on walking, cold and muddy though she was, her guitar banging uncomfortably on her back. There was nothing to eat but cold leftover porridge, cut into slices they ate as they walked.

  A magpie followed them for some distance, making Hannah feel quite apprehensive, but then Linnet spat at it, crying, ‘I defy thee!’ seven times. In a welter of feathers, the magpie somersaulted backwards as if flung by a sudden gust of wind, and flew away, squawking loudly. Hannah smiled faintly, and Linnet told her that if she ever saw a magpie again, she was to do the same thing.

  ‘It is the black witch’s spy, that bird,’ she told Hannah. ‘My lady’s cousin slit its tongue with a silver knife and then trickled a drop of her own blood into the wound, so that the bird could speak to her. You must always beware of magpies.’

  Hannah nodded, remembering the black and white bird that had attacked her in the garden at Wintersloe, plucking a strand of hair.

  Max and Scarlett had been quiet and morose all day, only speaking to complain of the ache in their legs, or how cold they were, but Donovan walked with a long easy stride, his head held high, his eyes bright with pleasure.

  ‘I wonder if we’ll see any wolves,’ he said. ‘They weren’t extinct nowadays.’

  ‘You’ve got to get your tenses sorted,’ Max said gruffly, taking off his glasses to wipe away the sweat. ‘They aren’t extinct these days.’

  ‘Wolves. Just what we need,’ Scarlett said.

  ‘I’d love to see a bear in the wild too,’ Donovan said. ‘And look out for beaver dams. Can you believe they hunted beavers to extinction?’

  ‘All I want to see right now is a Pizza Express,’ Scarlett said tartly.

  Donovan cast her a look of contempt. ‘Typical.’

  The forest was far thicker and darker and wilder than the woods Hannah had explored with Donovan back in their own time, and there was no distant sound of traffic, or the white trails of airplanes in the sky. If it had not been for the heavy confinement of her petticoats and skirt, she could have believed they were just out for a hike and would soon go back to Wintersloe for a cup of hot chocolate and some marmalade cake. It made her feel very frightened and alone to think the house with its mismatching towers and crow-stepped gables had not even been built yet.

  When at last Angus called a halt, it was dark and bitterly cold. Hannah’s hands and feet and face were frozen, and her whole body ached. Yet there was nowhere to sleep but on the ground. The children huddled together, too cold and exhausted to even speak, as Angus cut fronds of brown bracken and heather with his knife, and Linnet gathered together kindling.

  Angus scowled at them. ‘Do you expect to be waited on hand and foot? There’s water to be got, and a meal to cook. And it’ll be a cold night if you don’t cut yourself some bracken to sleep on.’

 
‘Surely we’re not sleeping here!’ Scarlett said. ‘Out in the open!’

  ‘We’re still too close to Wintersloe Castle to risk finding shelter,’ Angus replied tersely. ‘Lord Montgomery will hang me if he finds me.’

  ‘Just for quitting your job?’ Max demanded.

  Angus was surprised. ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s not just Lord Montgomery we need to worry about, but the black witch’s spies,’ Linnet said. ‘Luckily the gate is now closed again, which gives us another six weeks before the black witch can send her host against us. Her spies will still be watching for us, though, so we must try to keep you hidden, at least till we are well away from Fairknowe.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be lighting a fire at all tonight if it wasn’t that you look so cold,’ Angus said. ‘But if you want the fire to last more than an hour or two, I’d be gathering up some wood!’

  As Hannah got up stiffly, she looked out at the dark, cold, shadowy forest with a sense of misery approaching despair. There was still snow on the tops of the hills and in the furrows under the trees. Surely they would freeze to death?

  Their dinner was little more than a mug of hot water in which a few turnips had been boiled and mashed. Cold and hungry, the children wrapped themselves in their plaids and lay down on piles of old bracken and heather, as close to the fire as they could. It was so cold their breath puffed white. Hannah could not stop shivering, so that the dry bracken beneath her rustled noisily, poking her through her clothes.

  Linnet came and spread her own plaid over the two girls, and then heaped more bracken and heather upon them. ‘Sleep, my lambs,’ she whispered, gently touching Hannah’s brow. Somehow, Hannah did.

  The next day was the same. All day, they walked and walked and walked. At midday they ate what Angus called ‘brose’—uncooked oats shaken up with water—and walked on till it was dark, when they shared a thin broth made with water and limp vegetables, and, hollow with hunger, rolled themselves in their plaids to sleep.

  Hannah woke in the morning, stiff and sore and cold, to find Angus once again stirring a pot of plain porridge flavoured with nothing more than a pinch of salt. She groaned loudly. ‘Not porridge again!’

  Angus looked affronted. ‘Nothing better to stick to the sides of the stomach.’

  ‘What I wouldn’t give for some bacon and eggs and sausages,’ Donovan said.

  ‘I’d love a hot croissant,’ Scarlett said. ‘With lots of butter and strawberry jam.’

  ‘Cinnamon rolls with hot chocolate,’ Hannah said longingly.

  Angus had been scowling ferociously all this time. At Hannah’s words, he burst out, ‘The Lord preserve me! It’s cinnamon they be wanting now! Where am I meant to be getting the gold for that? A king’s ransom, it costs!’

  Hannah stared at him in surprise as he got up, seized his bow and arrows, and stumped off into the forest.

  ‘What’s up with him?’ Scarlett wondered.

  Linnet knelt and stirred the porridge. ‘By the stars, it must be a wonderful place, your world,’ she said. ‘To eat meat every day like a lord, and cinnamon like a queen.’

  ‘Why, don’t normal people get to eat bacon and eggs, and cinnamon, and stuff?’ Max asked.

  Linnet shook her head. ‘Only the rich eat meat every day, while cinnamon is rare indeed. The queen loves dates flavoured with cinnamon, I know, because Lord Montgomery took her some as a gift earlier this year and it cost him a pretty fortune. Why, we do not even know where cinnamon comes from. The merchants keep it a closely guarded secret.’

  ‘Wow,’ Hannah said. ‘We can buy it any old place.’

  ‘Well, here all we have is what we can grow or catch with our own hands,’ Linnet said. ‘So, come eat your porridge while it’s hot and let us be on our way. Angus will catch us up when his temper has cooled.’

  The old man did not join them until late in the afternoon, and then he carried two fat red birds hidden in his plaid. ‘Let us hope no one sees us till we’ve eaten every last scrap of them,’ he said dourly. ‘I have no desire to lose my ear.’

  The children winced and did not know what to say, feeling bad that it was their complaints about the food that had led him to poaching.

  ‘I’ll cook us up a feast tonight!’ Linnet cried, clapping her hands. ‘And make us some proper soup with the bones. Thank you, Angus!’

  ‘Thank you!’ the children echoed.

  The roast grouse that night seemed the most delicious thing Hannah and her friends had ever eaten in their lives, and they were lavish in their praise of Angus’s hunting and Linnet’s cooking, so much that the old man seemed to forgive them their complaints of the morning. The children sucked every last scrap of meat and fat from the bones, and then Linnet put them to boil with the leaves of wild garlic and some carrots so that their broth the next day should taste a little more flavoursome.

  At dusk on the following day, they came to Stirling, with its grim grey castle towering over the town and the river. The children were very excited by the sight of it, and began to talk animatedly about inns and fires and hot stew and soft beds, but to their disappointment Angus said he did not have the money for them to live in the lap of luxury, and he marched them past the town and back into the forest for another night shivering on the iron-hard, iron-cold ground.

  ‘But why?’ Scarlett raged. ‘It’s so unfair! Why couldn’t we have a night inside for once? We could’ve done the washing-up or sung for them to pay for it!’

  ‘Better no one sees you,’ Angus said shortly. ‘I don’t want any talk.’

  ‘But surely they’re used to people travelling by?’ Max said. ‘Why would we cause talk?’

  ‘You’re bound to be noticed,’ Angus said.

  ‘But why?’ Scarlett demanded. ‘We’ll all catch pneumonia if we sleep outside every night.’

  ‘You don’t catch pneumonia from getting cold,’ Max said. ‘Pneumonia is caused by bacteria, usually. We could get hypothermia though.’

  ‘I think I’ve got hypothermia now,’ Hannah said, huddling her plaid around her. ‘I am so cold! Please, please, can’t we just spend a night in an inn somewhere? I’d wash a hundred plates for a nice soft bed!’

  ‘No,’ Angus said.

  ‘Why not?’ Scarlett demanded. ‘It’s so unfair!’

  ‘Your manners are too bad,’ Angus snapped, as if goaded beyond all patience.

  Scarlett was affronted. ‘Our manners aren’t bad! We say “please” and “thank you” and “excuse me” if we burp!’

  Angus pressed his lips together, looking very dour.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Hannah demanded, feeling quite as affronted as Scarlett looked. Her mother was always drumming the need for politeness into her, so much so that Hannah felt she was half crippled by the need always to be courteous. Most teenagers were not half as well mannered as she was, she thought.

  ‘Do not be angry, my lambs. Angus does not mean to upset you,’ Linnet said gently.

  ‘But what does he mean?’ Max demanded. ‘We haven’t been rude, have we?’

  ‘You argue with him a lot,’ she said unwillingly.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Hannah said, surprised. ‘But . . .’

  ‘I don’t know what children are permitted to do in your day,’ Angus said huffily, ‘but in our day children listen to their elders and do what they’re told.’

  ‘Oh, all that stuff about children being seen and not heard!’ Scarlett said scornfully. ‘That’s so old-fashioned!’

  There was a little silence, then the four friends exchanged guilty looks.

  ‘We didn’t mean to be rude,’ Hannah said. ‘That’s just how we talk.’

  ‘And as a matter of fact,’ Max said, ‘your manners aren’t so hot either. You wipe your mouth on your sleeve, and blow your nose in your fingers, and then we all have to eat out of the same pot, which must be simply seething with germs . . .’

  ‘You do not raise your hat,’ Angus said angrily, ‘or stand and bow when I come by, or say your prayers upon goin
g to bed, and not once have you waited for me and Linnet to finish our meal before you begin yours. Such rudeness would raise eyebrows in any village we stopped by.’

  ‘We didn’t know,’ Hannah said. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘I didn’t wish to be rude,’ Angus replied gruffly.

  The children laughed at that and, once they began laughing, could not stop. Linnet laughed with them. After a moment Angus’s face relaxed and he allowed one corner of his grim mouth to lift in what may have been a smile.

  ‘You’d better give us lessons in manners,’ Scarlett said. ‘What a hoot! Maybe you could teach us how to curtsey too, Angus, and flutter our fans.’

  ‘Fans?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘What’s a fan?’

  The next morning, the children were dumbfounded to realise that the main road in Scotland was little more than a muddy cart track through the forest, so deeply rutted you could have hidden a baby in some of the potholes.

  ‘You should see the M9 now,’ Max told Angus and Linnet. ‘It’s got three lanes in either direction. Cars and trucks and buses just whiz along. It takes less than an hour to get to Edinburgh from Stirling.’

  ‘You’re trying to make a fool of me,’ Angus said suspiciously. ‘It’s just not possible!’

  He would not believe any of their stories of the marvels of modern life, though Max was in his element, telling him about landing on the moon and heart transplants and submarines and escalators till the old man was puce in the face.

  It took the weary travellers another long day’s hard walking to reach Edinburgh from Stirling. Upon its ramparts, the castle glowed like a great golden crown with irregular peaked roofs and windows glittering like diamonds. It seemed a much greater and more magnificent building than Hannah had seen in her own time, surrounded as it was by empty snow-dusted fields and winter-bare woods instead of sprawling suburbs.

  A suspicious-eyed guard let them through the gate in the stout grey wall after Angus told him they were just travellers passing through. Within the wall was a different world, a warren of narrow stinking alleyways and courtyards, stairways and vaults and cobbled squares, with filth pooling in the gaps between the stones and running down the walls from the windows. The streets were crowded with people, some of them dressed in doublets and ruffs and codpieces and pointy shoes, just like people in paintings. Pigs rooted through the rubbish, and a skinny dog chased a squawking chicken down an alley, chased by a barefoot urchin with a grubby face. A huge black rat with a white belly and feet raced between their feet and up a wall, turning to stare at them with beady eyes before swarming along the wall beside them. Max yelped and jumped backwards, and both Scarlett and Hannah screamed, much to the amusement of everyone around them. A fat woman whacked at the rat with a broom, and it disappeared down a drain.