The Puzzle Ring

by Kate Forsyth

  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.’

  Jinx

  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.

  I need to know what happened, she told herself. I need to know the truth.

  Slowly she lifted the hag-stone to her eyes again. ‘Show me true,’ she whispered.

  Once again Hannah saw the snowy scene by the dark pool, but this time she saw a young man creeping out from the cleft in the hill. He was dressed in modern clothes—jeans and a dark hooded parka. His tangled curls were red, and he had the long nose that Hannah had inherited. It was her father!

  The man in the black robes shouted and raised high his flaming torch. He did not see Hannah’s father crouched behind the boulder a few metres away, drawing something out of his parka pocket. It was shaped roughly like a squat brown candle. Robert waited till the man had flung his torch onto the pyre, then he hastily lit a match and applied the flame to the wick of the candle.

  At once thick smoke began to pour out, billowing across the clearing. As the onlookers coughed and turned away, Robert ran forward and leapt onto the pyre. He held a long pair of boltcutters in his hand, which cut through the iron chains as if they were made of paper. Eglantyne collapsed into his arms. Robert carried her behind the boulder, then turned and flung a handful of powder onto the fire. At once, there was a giant flash, blindingly bright. Women screamed, and the crowd all cringed back, shielding their faces as smoke poured out once more.

  A magpie screeched and darted frantically overhead, but everyone was too busy coughing and shielding their eyes from the smoke to notice. Robert lifted Eglantyne and carried her through the long dark crack in the rock, and out of sight. The magpie swooped after them.

  Hannah’s hand dropped. Her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. She thrust the hag-stone into her pocket and ran back towards the house. For the first time in her life she longed for things to be ordinary.

  Haddock and potato soup, and playing Scrabble with her mother and great-grandmother by the fire all afternoon helped make the world seem stable again. Lady Wintersloe won every game, which pleased her enormously, and made Roz rather cross. Hannah was just happy to be warm and comfortable again.

  Around four o’clock Linnet came in pushing the tea trolley, laden with freshly made scones and sticky marmalade cake. Behind her came Donovan, dressed as usual in the colours of a bruise. His T-shirt was too small for him, showing a pale line of his thin, hollow stomach above his studded belt. He was carrying Jinx wrapped up in a towel.

  ‘Jinx!’ Lady Wintersloe held out her arms.

  Donovan laid Jinx on her lap and she stroked the cat’s plush fur. ‘She should be fine. She was lucky. Toads are pretty venomous.’

  Hannah surreptitiously slid her hand into her pocket and pulled out the hag-stone. Hag-stones reveal the true nature of any person or creature viewed through the stone’s hole, the book had said. Hannah lifted it to her eye and looked at the sleeping cat.

  Hannah saw a small grey winged imp-like creature, with stubby horns, scaly skin and sharp claws. The imp opened her round orange eyes and blinked once or twice, then saw Hannah observing her through the hole in the stone. At once she arched her back like a cat, hissed in rage, and leapt from Lady Wintersloe’s lap, racing away through the half-open door.

  Hannah put the stone back in her pocket.

  ‘Looks like Jinx is back to her old self.’ Lady Wintersloe ruefully examined her scratched hand.

  ‘Bogey-cat,’ Linnet said with feeling. She and Hannah shared a meaningful glance. Hannah knew without a doubt that Linnet could see the true nature of the cat as clearly as she had. ‘I’ll get you a sticking-plaster for that. You’re bleeding.’ The tiny old woman went hurrying out of the room, leaving Roz to pass Lady Wintersloe a napkin and a cup of tea.

  ‘Did you see the bloodstains on the palace floor?’ Donovan asked Hannah.

  She nodded. ‘Clear as anything! It’s amazing, isn’t it? Why do you think they’re still there, after so many years?’

  ‘My dad says it’s a fake. He says they must pa
int it there every morning, so the tourists have something to gawk at.’

  ‘My mum says it’s just a natural discolouration in the wood.’

  They looked at each other and shook their heads, both saying, ‘Parents’ at the exact same time, and then laughing.

  ‘So do you like Scotland?’ Donovan asked.

  ‘I love it, what I’ve seen so far,’ Hannah said.

  ‘You’ve got to go out into the wild places,’ Donovan said. ‘You should climb Ben Lomond, or go into the woods, where all the wild creatures are. Or go out on the loch. Do you like fishing?’ Donovan flicked his hair out of his face, his blue-grey eyes glowing.

  ‘I love it,’ Hannah lied.

  ‘What about birds? You have some amazing birds in Australia. All those parrots and . . . what are they called? Those laughing jackasses?’

  ‘Kookaburras.’

  ‘Yeah. I’d like to hear them laugh.’

  ‘Not at five-thirty in the morning, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Yeah, I would. I don’t mind getting up early. I often get up before dawn and go out bird spotting, or looking for foxes and badgers. You should come out with me one morning and see if we can spot any pink-footed geese flying in from Iceland. They come in their tens of thousands at this time of year, honking away. It’s amazing. Or we might see some stags fighting, if we go into the forest.’

  ‘I’d like that. I’ve never seen a stag before.’

  ‘Never seen a stag! We’ll have to go find one for you then. They come down to the lower ground in winter, so they’re easier to find.’

  ‘Okay. When?’

  ‘Tomorrow. I’ll meet you at the gates at six o’clock. It’ll be dark, though, and cold, I warn you. The sun doesn’t rise till after seven.’

  ‘I’ll wrap up warm, then.’