Read Online Circle of Stones by Catherine Fisher - Free Book Online Page A

go.
    Forrest snorted. I had hoped he would make some comment, but he said nothing. He takes his disappointments bitterly to heart.
    I prompted him. “Will he invest, do you think?”
    â€œIf he does not I’ll build the Circus anyway.”
    I stared at him. “With your own money?”
    â€œWhy not? I can certainly sell the building contracts. I tell you, Zac, my street of the sun will be the finest street you have ever seen. I will lay out the secrets of the ancients like sigils on the land. I have wanted all my life to create such a city. A puppy like Compton won’t stand in my way.”
    I was silent. It would be risky to proceed without investors. If he was to lose everything I would be out of my apprenticeship & back to poverty. Perhaps he saw my doubt, because he gave me his rare smile. “But we are out of town, Zac. Now we can ride!”
    It was a glorious day. Cold for autumn, so that the wind stung tears to my eyes, but the sky was blue & the leaves gusted around us in great golden tempests. We climbed by steep paths up to the downs, scattering the great flocks of sheep that grazed amiably, & disturbing hares that fled as we rode by. From here we could see all the city below, the way it huddled in the saucer of its hills, the tangle of roofs & chimneys around the hidden hot spring at its heart.
    â€œDo you know the story of Bladud?” Forrest asked suddenly.
    â€œI never heard it,” I said wearily, knowing I was about to.
    â€œHe was a king & a druid and he suffered from a terrible illness. Leprosy, perhaps. His people cast him out, & he wandered these hills in great distress, in the cold & rain, & the only work he could get was as a swineherd. But he saw that the pigs he guarded went each day to a spring in a valley & rolled in the water, which came from the earth hot, & that it kept their skins pure & white. So he enticed them out with acorns & entered the water himself.”
    â€œAnd was cured.” The ending was obvious. I wondered that he believed such old flim-flam.
    He looked at me as if my curtness had spoiled it for him. Then he said, “Yes. He was cured.” He turned the horse & walked on & I came after him. I felt a little sorry, so I said, “And that is how the spring came to be a site of cures, I suppose. But this was when the Romans were in these lands?”
    â€œBefore. Long before.” He sounded terse but I knew he could not help himself on this subject, & soon his enthusiasm burst out. “I believe this was a place of magic long before the Romans. That the druids ruled a great kingdom here. We have theories of this—if we could dig below the baths, who knows what might be found. And we believe  .  .  .”
    â€œWe?” I said.
    He fell silent. We had come to a gate & he leaned down to open it, his gloved hand slipping on the frosty wood. “Other antiquaries. Fellow scholars.”
    He considered himself a scholar. It was true he had written books. And yet he had never been to the university, as my father had, or as I had been intended to, so, out of spite, I said, “Like Master Stukeley?”
    â€œStukeley!” His anger was explosive. “That fool wouldn’t know scholarship if it fell on him like a tree! And his drawing of Stonehenge! A child could do better. Don’t mention that toad’s name to me, Zac, I cannot bear the man.”
    He rode in front of me & I confess I smirked at his back. My master’s book on the druids had been mocked by this Stukeley, who had called its ideas “Whimseys of a crack’d imagination.” And yet they were both as crack’d as each other to me.
    It took just over an hour to reach the turnpike road. We clopped along it between overgrown hedges until we turned aside at a tiny conical tollhouse, where the payment was a farthing each. The lane led down into a village tucked into a crook of the downs, its church tower rising above trees & its