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PROLOGUE

A Crown in the Chalk

IT WAS BORN in the darkness of the Circle Sea; at first just a soft floating thing, washed back and forth by tide after tide It grew a shell, but in its rolling, tue creatures which could have cracked it open in an instant Nevertheless, it survived Its little life ers of the surf and other floating things brought an end, were it not for the pool

It was a warh on a beach, replenished by occasional storms blown in fros even s It would have got even bigger if it were not for the hot sulare of the sun

And so the little creature died, but its carapace re sharp On the next stored, rolling back and forth with the pebbles and other detritus of the storms

The sea rolled down the ages until it dried and withdrew fro-dead creature sank beneath layers of the shells of other small creatures which had not survived And there it lay, with the sharp core growing slowly inside, until the day when it was found by a shepherdhis flock on the hills that had become known as the Chalk

He picked up the strange object which had caught his eye, held it in his hand and turned it over and over Lumpy, but not luular a shape to be a flint, and yet it had flint in its heart The surface was grey, like stone, but with a hint of gold beneath the grey There were five distinct ridges spaced evenly, al fros like this before But this one seemed different – it had almost jumped into his hand

The little piece tu that it was trying to tell hi It was silly, he knew, and he hadn’t had a beer yet, but the strange object seemed to fill his world Then he cursed himself as an idiot but nevertheless kept it and took it to show his mates in the pub

‘Look,’ he said, ‘it looks like a crown’

Of course, one of his hed and said, ‘A crown? What would you ith one of the’

But the shepherd took his find home and placed it carefully on the shelf in his kitchen where he kept the things he liked

And there, eventually, it was forgotten and was lost to history

But not to the Achings, who handed it down, generation to generation

CHAPTER 1

Where the Wind Blows

IT WAS ONE of those days that you put away and reh on the downs, above her parents’ farh she could see to the end of the world The air was as clear as crystal, and in the brisk wind the dead leaves from the autumn swirled around the ash trees as they rattled their branches to rowth

She had alondered why the trees grew there Granny Aching had told her there were old tracks up here, made in the days when the valley below had been a swamp Granny said that hy the ancient people had h up – away from the swamp, and away from other people ould like to raid their livestock

Perhaps they had found a sense of refuge near the old circles of stones they found there Perhaps they had been the ones who built them? No one knew for certain where they had coh they didn’t really believe it, everyone knew that they were the kind of thing it was probably better to leave alone Just in case After all, even if a circle did hide some old secrets or treasure, well, what use was that when it cah many of the stones had fallen dohat if the person buried underneath didn’t want to be dug up? Being dead didn’t ry, oh no

But Tiffany herself had once used one particular set of stones to pass through an arch to Fairyland – a Fairyland most decidedly not like the one she had read about in The Goode Childe’s Booke of Faerie Tales – and she knew the dangers were real