Free Ravensborough by Christine Murray

there.’
    I was silent for most of the drive into the mountains. It was my first time venturing this far away from Rupert’s house since my arrival in Chesterfield.
    The mountains were rocky, with plenty of wild flowers adding a degree of softness to the otherwise harsh landscape. As we climbed higher and higher I could feel the air getting thinner. My ears began to pop. Gethan and Aradia were busy bickering in the front of the car. I envied Aradia’s easy manner with Gethan. She was so quick and witty and completely absorbed his attention. Everything I said to him sounded hopelessly flat, boring and two-dimensional. I couldn’t possibly hold any interest for him, I thought despondently. And again I wondered why I cared.
    After about half an hour we pulled into a car park we pulled into the side of the road.
    ‘We’re here!’ Aradia trilled unbuckling her seat belt. She jumped down onto the ground. I followed her unenthusiastically. It was freezing cold, and the sky looked like it was holding a fair amount of ice and rain, ready to drop it all at any time. I followed her over a wooden stile into a wide field. A large sign from the Avalonian Historical Trust told me that this was the site of a ring of standing stones. The Morrigan stones.
    'They brought me all the way up here for this?' I thought incredulously. I’m sure they were really proud of their heritage, but I’d seen plenty of old sites like this back in Ireland. Even though I loved archaeology, I wasn’t really sure that it merited an entire trip by itself.
    The three of us walked towards the centre of the circle. I stumbled a bit over the uneven terrain. I shoved my hands deep into my coat pockets in a futile attempt to conserve body heat.
    ‘Dad discovered these a couple of years ago’, Aradia shouted to me over the sound of the wind. ‘See the way they’re stained with earth? They were completely covered with soil. Dad brought a class of his up here for a trial dig in this field, and they discovered this. That was one very excited bunch of students!’
    ‘So this is what you brought me up to see?’ I asked looking around. I couldn’t see anything else of interest anywhere else.
    ‘Well yeah, sort of. But mainly I want to show you that Gethan and I are not crazy. Magic exists. This seemed like a really good way of doing that.’
    Maybe I’d been a little hasty in assuming that I was totally safe with these two. I was miles away from the nearest town, with two nice, but delusional, people who wanted to prove to me that magic spells were real. Oh. My. God. Every horror film I’d ever seen flashed before my eyes.
    Gethan walked over to the centre of the circle and placed a rucksack down in the centre of it. Out of it he pulled a bottle of water, three bowls, some incense, charcoal discs and a box of matches.
    ‘What are you going to do exactly?’ I asked Gethan.
    ‘Aradia is going to call a circle and cast a small spell. You and I are going to watch.’ He poured some water into one of the bowls, and placed some earth in another. In the third he lit the charcoal discs and placed them in the bowl. He added a cone of incense. It took him a few attempts to light the four candles that Aradia had bought in the heavy wind, but eventually he managed it. He placed them in jars to stop them from blowing out.
    ‘What’s all this for?’ I asked him.
    ‘The four cardinal points, north, south, east and west, are represented by different elements. North is earth, south is fire, east is air and west is water. In order to call a circle traditionally you have to put a small piece of each element on each of their corresponding points.’ He handed me the bowl of earth and the jar holding the green candle. ‘Can you put that between those two stones there?’ He pointed them out. ‘That’s north over there.’
    I went over to the spot he’d pointed out and gingerly placed the bowl down, wondering what Rupert would say if he knew what I was doing right now.