Wintersmith (7 page)

“Oh, you’re after butter now, are you, Horace?” said Tiffany, picking up the dairy broom. “That’s practically cannibalism, you know.”

Still, it was better than mice, she had to admit. Finding little piles of mouse bones on the floor was a bit distressing. Even Miss Treason had not been able to work that one out. A mouse she happened to be looking through would be trying to get at the cheeses and then it would all go dark.

That was because Horace was a cheese.

Tiffany knew that Lancre Blue cheeses were always a bit on the lively side, and sometimes had to be nailed down, but…well, she was highly skilled at cheese making, even though she said it herself, and Horace was definitely a champion. The famous blue streaks that gave the variety its wonderful color were really pretty, although Tiffany wasn’t sure they should glow in the dark.

She prodded the shadows with the end of the broom. There was a crack, and when she pulled the stick out again, two inches were missing from the end. Then there was a
ptooi!
noise and the missing piece of handle bounced off the wall on the other side of the room.

“No more milk for you, then,” said Tiffany, straightening up, and she thought:

He came to give me the horse back. The Wintersmith did that.

Um…

That is quite…impressive, when you think about it.

I mean, he’s got to organize avalanches and gales and come up with new shapes for snowflakes and everything, but he spared a bit of time just to come and give me my necklace back. Um…

And he just stood there.

And then he just vanished—I mean vanished even more.

Um…

She left Horace muttering under the sink and made tea for Miss Treason, who was back at her weaving. Then she quietly went up to her room.

Tiffany’s diary was three inches thick. Annagramma, another local trainee witch and one of her friends (more or less), said that she should really call it her Book of Shadows and write it on vellum using one of the special magical inks sold at Zakzak Stronginthearm’s Magical Emporium at Popular Prices—at least, prices that were popular with Zakzak.

Tiffany couldn’t afford one. You could only trade witchcraft—you weren’t supposed to sell it. Miss Treason didn’t mind her selling cheeses, but even so paper was expensive up here, and the wandering peddlers never had very much to sell. They usually had an ounce or two of green copperas, though, which could make a
decent ink if you mixed it with crushed oak galls or green walnut shells.

The diary was now as thick as a brick with extra pages Tiffany had glued in. She’d worked out that she could make it last two more years if she wrote small.

On the leather cover she had, with a hot skewer, drawn the words “Feegles Keep Out!!” It had never worked. They looked upon that sort of thing as an invitation. She wrote parts of the diary in code these days. Reading didn’t come naturally to the Chalk Hill Feegles, so surely they’d never get the hang of a code.

She looked around carefully, in any case, and unlocked the huge padlock that secured a chain around the book. She turned to today’s date, dipped her pen in the ink, and wrote: “
Met t*
.”

Yes, a snowflake would be a good code for the Wintersmith.

He just stood there, she thought.

And he ran away because I screamed.

Which was a good thing, obviously.

Um…

But…I wish I hadn’t screamed.

She opened her hand. The image of the horse was still there, as white as chalk, but there was no pain at all.

Tiffany gave a little shiver and pulled herself together. So? She had met the spirit of Winter. She was a witch. It was the sort of thing that sometimes happened. He’d politely given her back what was hers, and then he’d gone. There was no call to get soppy about it. There were things to do.

Then she wrote: “Ltr frm R.”

She very carefully opened the letter from Roland, which was easy because slug slime isn’t much of a glue. With any luck she could even reuse the envelope. She hunched over the letter so that
no one could read it over her shoulder. Finally she said: “Miss Treason, will you get out of my face, please? I need to use my eyeballs privately.”

There was a pause and then a mutter from downstairs, and the tickling behind her eyes went away.

It was always…good to get a letter from Roland. Yes, they were often about the sheep, and other things of the Chalk, and sometimes there’d be a dried flower inside, a harebell or a cowslip. Granny Aching wouldn’t have approved of that; she always said that if the hills had wanted people to pick the flowers, they would have grown more of them.

The letters always made her homesick.

One day Miss Treason had said, “This young man who writes to you…is he your beau?” and Tiffany had changed the subject until she had time to look up the word in the dictionary and then more time to stop blushing.

Roland was…well, the thing about Roland was…the main thing about…well, the point was…he was there.

Okay, when she’d first really met him, he had been a rather useless, rather stupid lump, but what could you expect? He’d been the prisoner of the Queen of the Elves for a year, to start with, fat as butter and half crazy on sugar and despair. Besides, he’d been brought up by a couple of haughty aunts, his father—the Baron—being mostly more interested in horses and dogs.

He’d more and less changed since then: more thoughtful, less rowdy, more serious, less stupid. He’d also had to wear glasses, the first ever seen on the Chalk.

And he had a library! More than a hundred books! Actually, it belonged to the castle, but no one else seemed interested in it.

Some of the books were huge and ancient, with wooden covers
and huge black letters and colored pictures of strange animals and far-off places. There was Waspmire’s
Book of Unusual Days
, Crumberry’s
Why Things Are Not Otherwise
, and all but one volume of the
Ominous Encyclopaedia
. Roland had been astonished to find that she could read foreign words, and she’d been careful not to tell him it was all done with the help of what remained of Dr. Bustle.

The thing was…the fact was…well, who else had they got? Roland couldn’t, just
couldn’t
have friends among the village kids, what with him being the son of the Baron and everything. But Tiffany had the pointy hat now, and that counted for something. The people of the Chalk didn’t like witches much, but she was Granny Aching’s granddaughter, right? No tellin’ what she’d learned from the ol’ girl, up at the shepherding hut. And they do say she showed those witches up in the mountains what witchin’s all about, eh? Remember the lambing last year? She prit near brought dead lambs back to life just by lookin’ at ’em! And she’s an Aching, and they’ve got these hills in their bones. She’s all right. She’s ours, see?

And that was fine, except that she didn’t have any old friends anymore. Kids back home who’d been friendly were now…respectful, because of the hat. There was a kind of wall, as if she’d grown up and they hadn’t. What could they talk about? She’d been to places they couldn’t even imagine. Most of them hadn’t even been to Twoshirts, which was only half a day away. And this didn’t worry them at all. They were going to do the jobs their fathers did, or raise children like their mothers did. And that was fine, Tiffany added hurriedly to herself. But they hadn’t decided. It was just happening to them, and they didn’t notice.

It was the same up in the mountains. The only people of her own age she could actually talk to were other witches-in-training like Annagramma and the rest of the girls. It was useless trying to
have a real conversation with people in the villages, especially the boys. They just looked down and mumbled and shuffled their feet, like people at home when they had to talk to the Baron.

Actually, Roland did that too, and he went red every time she looked at him. Whenever she visited the castle, or walked on the hills with him, the air was full of complicated silences…just like it had been with the Wintersmith.

She read the letter carefully, trying to ignore the grubby Feegle fingerprints all over it. He’d been kind enough to include several spare sheets of paper.

She smoothed one out, very carefully, stared at the wall for a while, and then began to write.

Down in the scullery,
*
Horace the cheese had come out from behind the slop bucket. Now he was in front of the back door. If a cheese ever looked thoughtful, Horace looked thoughtful now.

In the tiny village of Twoshirts, the driver of the mail coach was having a bit of a problem. A lot of mail from the countryside around Twoshirts ended up at the souvenir shop there, which also acted as the post office.

Usually the driver just picked up the mailbag, but today there was a difficulty. He frantically turned over the pages of the book of Post Office Regulations.

Miss Tick tapped her foot. This was getting on his nerves.

“Ah, ah, ah,” said the coachman triumphantly. “Says here no animals, birds, dragons, or fish!”

“And which one of them do you think I am?” asked Miss Tick icily.

“Ah, well, right, well, human is kind of like animal, right? I mean, look at monkeys, right?”

“I have no wish to look at monkeys,” said Miss Tick. “I have seen the sort of things they do.”

The coachman clearly spotted that this was a road not to go down, and turned the pages furiously. Then he beamed.

“Ah, ah, ah!” he said. “How much do you weigh, miss?”

“Two ounces,” said Miss Tick. “Which by chance is the maximum weight of a letter that can be sent to the Lancre and Near Hinterland area for ten pence.” She pointed to the two stamps gummed to her lapel. “I have already purchased my stamps.”

“You never weigh two ounces!” said the coachman. “You’re a hundred and twenty pounds at least!”

Miss Tick sighed. She’d wanted to avoid this, but Twoshirts wasn’t Dogbend, after all. It lived on the highway, it watched the world go past. She reached up and pressed the button that worked her hat.

“Would you like me to forget you just said that?” she asked.

“Why?” said the coachman.

There was a pause while Miss Tick stared blankly at him. Then she turned her eyes upward.

“Excuse me,” she said. “This is always happening, I’m afraid. It’s the duckings, you know. The spring rusts.”

She reached up and banged the side of the hat. The hidden pointy bit shot up, scattering paper flowers.

The coachman’s eyes followed it. “Oh,” he said.

And the thing about pointy hats was this: The person under one was definitely a witch or a wizard. Oh, someone who wasn’t could probably get a pointy hat and go out wearing it, and they’d be fine right up until the moment when they met a real pointy-hat
owner. Wizards and witches don’t like impostors. They also don’t like being kept waiting.

“How much do I weigh now, pray?” she asked.

“Two ounces!” said the coachman quickly.

Miss Tick smiled. “Yes. And not one scruple more! A scruple being, of course, a weight of twenty grains, or one twenty-fourth of an ounce. I am in fact…unscrupulous!”

She waited to see if this extremely teachery joke was going to get a smile but didn’t mind when it didn’t. Miss Tick rather liked being smarter than other people.

She got on the coach.

As the coach climbed up into the mountains, snow started to fall. Miss Tick, who knew that no two snowflakes are alike, didn’t pay them any attention. If she had done so, she’d have felt slightly less smart.

Tiffany slept. A fire glowed in the bedroom grate. Downstairs, Miss Treason’s loom wove its way through the night….

Small blue figures crept across the bedroom floor and, by forming a Feegle pyramid, reached the top of the little table Tiffany used as a desk.

Tiffany turned over in bed and made a little
snfgl
noise. The Feegles froze, just for a moment, and then the bedroom door swung gently shut behind them.

A blue blur raised a trail of dust on the narrow stairs, across the loom-room floor, out into the scullery, and through a strange cheese-shaped hole in the outside door. From then on it was a trail of disturbed leaves leading deep into the woods, where a small fire burned. It lit the faces of a horde of Feegles, although it may not have wanted to.

The blur stopped and became about six Feegles, two of them carrying Tiffany’s diary.

They laid it down carefully.

“We’re well oot o’ that hoose,” said Big Yan. “Dija see dem bigjob skulls? There’s a hag ye wouldna want tae cross in a hurry!”

“Ach, I see she’s got one o’ they paddly locks again,” said Daft Wullie, walking around the diary.

“Rob, I canna help thinkin’ that it’s no’ right tae read this,” said Billy Bigchin, as Rob put his arm into the keyhole. “It’s pers’nal!”

“She’s oor hag. What’s pers’nal tae her is pers’nal tae us,” said Rob matter-of-factly, fishing around inside the lock. “Besides, she must want someone tae read it, ’cuz she wrote things doon. Nae point in writin’ stuff doon if ye dinna want it read! It’s a sheer waste o’ pencil!”

“Mebbe she wanted tae read it hersel’,” said Billy doubtfully.

“Oh, aye? Why’d she want tae do that?” said Rob scornfully. “She already kens what’s in it. An’ Jeannie wants tae know what she’s thinkin’ aboot the Baron’s lad.”

There was a click, and the padlock opened. The assembled Feeglehood watched carefully.

Rob turned the rustling pages and grinned.

“Ach, she’s writ here:
Oh, the dear Feegles ha’ turned up again,
” he said. This met with general applause.

“Ach, what a kind girl she is tae write that,” said Billy Bigchin. “Can I see?”

He read:
Oh dear, the Feegles have turned up again.

“
Ah,” he said. Billy Bigchin had come with Jeannie all the way from the Long Lake clan. The clan there was more at home with the reading and writing, and since he was the gonnagle, he was expected to be good at both.