Free First Aid for Fairies and Other Fabled Beasts by Lari Don

bag?” Dad asked gently.
    “Green bag for picnic. Teddy bear picnic.”
    “Nicola! That’s Mummy’s …” her Mum’s voice started to rise.
    Helen broke in, “No, Mum!” She didn’t want Nicola taking the blame for her nighttime adventures again. “No, Mum, Nicola doesn’t mean your green bag. Remember she has a wee green bag with flowers on it, and she uses it for pretend shopping and picnics. That’s the bag she means. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you borrowed it though, for your plasters and stuff.”
    “It’s got much more important equipment in it than plasters and stuff, as you would know, young lady, if you ever paid the slightest attention to what I do for a living.”
    “I don’t have to pay attention, Mum, I don’t want to be a vet. I want to be a musician.”
    “For which you will have to practise a bit more,” reminded her Dad. Feeling got at from both sides, Helen put her half-finished bowl of porridge in the sink and clomped off to pack her school bag.
     
    Helen didn’t get a chance to sneak into the school library until lunchtime. As soon as she had finished her packed lunch, she went into the oldest part of the school, which had once been the original village hall. It wasn’t used for teaching any more and she noticed that it was starting to smell quite musty. The library was much bigger than her classroom.There were lots of old books on high wooden shelves, and a ladder on wheels to reach them, but the books that the pupils usually needed were easier to reach, on grey metal bookcases in the middle of the room.
    Helen searched the history and geography shelves and found several books on stone circles and other Neolithic remains from four or five thousand years ago.
    She was dismayed to discover that there were hundreds of stone circles, stone rows and standing stones in Britain, but then she remembered that she was looking for a shape without end, so she limited her search to circles.
    Stonehenge was the most obvious circle, but a photo in a recent book showed it surrounded by barriers and cameras, so it would be hard to get into, even at night, even with the help of a dragon. She had to hope that the Book’s clue came from another, less touristy, circle.
    She picked up an old book with yellow crinkled pages containing sketches of stone circles. She flicked through it, back to front, as she always did with serious books, hoping to get to the good bits fast without having to read the introduction.
    As the sketches passed her in a cartoon blur of stones moving and dancing, one shape caught her eye. She stopped flicking and turned back half a dozen pages to find the picture that had leapt out at her.
    She saw a huge stone circle, a perfect, beautiful circle, even though there were gaps where some stones had fallen.
    It was called the Ring of Brodgar, and was on the mainland of Orkney, the group of islands just off the very top corner of Scotland. But what Helen had noticed was the small sketch in the corner of the page; a drawing of just one of the massive stones. It had a rune carved on it, in the same branched tree style as the rune on Sapphire’s block. The notes underneath said a smaller stone with a rune on it had gone missing from Brodgar years ago.
    “We could take it back to Brodgar tonight!” she said out loud, delighted to have solved the riddle.
    Helen glanced quickly through the rest of the book, but there was no other circle that answered the riddle. So she returned to the Ring of Brodgar, and copied the layout of the circle, including the deep ditch round it and the lochs either side of it, into a notebook she’d brought from home.
    She was just sliding all the books back into their spaces when the bell rang for the end of lunchtime. She ran down the corridor between the old building and the new classrooms. As she turned the corner and pushed open the heavy fire door, she heard a noise behind her. She whirled round quickly, and saw something vanish round the corner.