The Puzzle Ring (21 page)

‘Hannah! Hannah!' Voices drifted towards her through the bitter night air. Hannah turned her head to look, unable to find the strength to lift herself from the ground.

‘Here!' Miss Underhill cried.

Donovan ran out of the darkness and flung himself down beside her, crying her name. She clung to him with icy-cold hands. ‘What happened?' he cried. He saw Miss Underhill, kneeling beside her, her grey hair hanging in dripping rats'
tails down her face. ‘What are you doing here? What did you do to her?' he demanded. He saw the knife that lay discarded on the stones beside Hannah. It was old and made of iron. He looked at it in horror and then glanced accusingly back at Miss Underhill, who spread her hands placatingly. Hannah had no time to explain, though, for Max came running through the trees, falling over his enormous boots to land on the ground right by her head.

‘She was in the water? But how?' Max cried.

‘They hunted me . . . drove me into the loch . . . didn't you see them?' Hannah could barely speak through the violent chattering of her teeth. ‘Their eyes, flaming red . . .'

Donovan snuggled his long, black coat around her, then unwound his scarf and tucked it under her head. He shouted into the darkness, ‘She's here! We've found her!'

She grasped his hand. ‘Watch out! Watch out! They were just here. They'll be hiding . . .'

‘Who?' he whispered.

‘The fairies. It's the thin time. They want to stop me . . .' She tried to find the words to frame her thoughts but her brain seemed to have frozen. ‘. . . stop me breaking the curse . . . my father . . .'

‘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.

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 her 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.