Cloud Magic by Linda Chapman Page B

looked as if she might be the woman’s daughter. She had blonde corkscrew curls and a mischievous face. The other girl had lively hazel eyes and skin the colour of milk chocolate. Her hair was a thick mass of dark brown ringlets that reached her shoulders.
    Erin groaned inside. How embarrassing! They must have seen her pretending to ride a horse. ‘Hi,’ she muttered, her cheeks burning. She hurried on past them.
    ‘Come on, Allegra!’ she heard the dark-haired girl call as the three of them passed her, turning down the footpath. ‘Race you back to the village!’
    Erin ran on along the cliff top, glad to leave them behind and be on her own again. The sea was on her left, the waves dragging on the pebbles of the strip of stony beach. On her right there was a patchwork of green and yellow fields divided by grey stone walls and hedges bursting with the white hawthorn flowers that always bloomed in May. In several of the fields were horses and ponies.
    Erin stopped to stroke one pony who had his face over the fence, but the grumpy local farmer was in the field and he shouted at her. Erin hurried on her way.
    Daydreaming about the ponies she would have if she lived in a farmhouse with a stable block and fields of her own, Erin turned on to a path half hidden by overgrown bushes and small trees. It led down to the beach. The stones were rough beneath her feet and the path was so steep in places she had to hang on to tufts of grass, but she had been down it so often she knew exactly where she had to be careful.
    She reached the small beach and walked along it a little way before sitting down on a large dry rock. This was one of her favourite places in the world. It was very quiet apart from the birds, completely different from the busy touristy beach down the coast where her stepbrothers loved to hang out.

    Her eyes followed the jagged headland round. At the furthest tip there was a spit of land that ended in three enormous stones. They jutted up out of the sea, two standing upright and a round one that looked like an enormous Polo. The hole in it was so large that an adult could easily climb through it. The three rocks were known locally as World’s End. It was just about possible to walk to them from the beach, but if the tide was high the spit of land got covered up.
    Erin moved her toes in the stones. They tumbled over each other, grey, white and brown. Her gaze searched across them. Could she see any hagstones? They were stones with holes in the middle, like miniature versions of the round World’s End stone.
    Aunt Alice had told her that in the old days people used to hang hagstones up outside the houses to keep witches away and that they had tried to do magic with them. She’d said that people used to believe that they could be used for working weather magic or healing magic or casting spells of protection. Witchstones , they were called then. Erin had always been very good at finding them.
    There! she thought, suddenly spotting one.
    It was a round, grey stone with lines of white shot through it. She picked it up. In the centre there was one circular hole, big enough for her to fit a finger through. Erin turned the stone over in her hand. It was cold and smooth. Sometimes hagstones had lots of holes, sometimes they had a hole on one side that hadn’t gone through to the other side completely and sometimes there was a small hole blocked by a chip of rock or shell. They were all different. She kept the best ones for her collection at home.

    Erin studied the stone carefully.
    She liked the way the grey and white streaked together and the smoothness of the sides. She would definitely keep this one. As she held it, the rattle of the stones on the beach seemed to grow slightly louder.
    What would it be like if hagstones really could be used for working magic like people used to believe? she thought. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
    Lifting the stone up so that it was pointing at the clouds she looked idly through the