This is Tiffany Aching, riding a broomstick through the mountain forests a hundred miles away. It’s a very old broomstick, and she’s flying it just above the ground; it’s got two smaller broomsticks stuck on the back like training wheels, to stop it from tipping over. It belongs, appropriately, to a very old witch called Miss Treason, who’s even worse at flying than Tiffany and is 113 years old.

Tiffany is slightly more than one hundred years younger than that, taller than she was even a month ago, and not as certain of anything at all as she was a year ago.

She is training to be a witch. Witches usually wear black, but as far as she could tell, the only reason that witches wore black was that they’d always worn black. This did not seem a good enough reason, so she tended to wear blue or green. She didn’t laugh with scorn at finery because she’d never seen any.

You couldn’t escape the pointy hat, though. There was nothing magical about a pointy hat except that it said that the woman underneath it was a witch. People paid attention to a pointy hat.

Even so, it was hard to be a witch in the village where you’d grown up. It was hard to be a witch to people who knew you as “Joe Aching’s girl” and had seen you running around with only your undershirt on when you were two years old.

Going away had helped. Most people Tiffany knew hadn’t been more than ten miles away from the spot where they were born, so if you’d gone to mysterious foreign parts, that made you a bit mysterious, too. You came back slightly different. A witch needed to be different.

Witching was turning out to be mostly hard work and really short on magic of the zap!-glingle-glingle-glingle variety. There was no school and nothing that was exactly like a lesson. But it wasn’t wise to try to learn witching all by yourself, especially if you had a natural talent. If you got it wrong, you could go from ignorant to cackling in a week….

When you got right down to it, it was all about cackling. No one ever talked about this, though. Witches said things like “You can never be too old, too skinny, or too warty,” but they never mentioned the cackling. Not properly. They watched out for it, though, all the time.

It was all too easy to become a cackler. Most witches lived by themselves (cat optional) and might go for weeks without ever seeing another witch. In those times when people hated witches, they were often accused of talking to their cats. Of course they talked to their cats. After three weeks without an intelligent conversation that wasn’t about cows, you’d talk to the wall. And that was an early sign of cackling.

“Cackling,” to a witch, didn’t just mean nasty laughter. It meant your mind drifting away from its anchor. It meant you losing your grip. It meant loneliness and hard work and responsibility and other people’s problems driving you crazy a little bit at a time, each bit so small that you’d hardly notice it, until you thought that it was normal to stop washing and wear a kettle on your head. It meant you thinking that the fact you knew more than anyone else in your village made you better than them. It meant thinking that right and wrong were negotiable. And, in the end, it meant you “going to the dark,” as the witches said. That was a bad road. At the end of that road were poisoned spinning wheels and gingerbread cottages.

What stopped this was the habit of visiting. Witches visited other witches all the time, sometimes traveling quite a long way for a cup of tea and a bun. Partly this was for gossip, of course, because witches love gossip, especially if it’s more exciting than truthful. But mostly it was to keep an eye on one another.

Today Tiffany was visiting Granny Weatherwax, who was in the opinion of most witches (including Granny herself) the most powerful witch in the mountains. It was all very polite. No one said, “Not gone bats, then?” or “Certainly not! I’m as sharp as a spoon!” They didn’t need to. They understood what it was all about, so they talked of other things. But when she was in a mood, Granny Weatherwax could be hard work.

She sat silently in her rocking chair. Some people are good at talking, but Granny Weatherwax was good at silence. She could sit so quiet and still that she faded. You forgot she was there. The room became empty.

It upset people. It was probably meant to. But Tiffany had learned silence too, from Granny Aching, her real grandmother. Now she was learning that if you made yourself really quiet, you could become almost invisible.

Granny Weatherwax was an expert.

Tiffany thought of it as the I’m-not-here spell, if it was a spell. She reasoned that everyone had something inside them that told the world they were there. That was why you could often sense when someone was behind you, even if they were making no sound at all. You were receiving their I-am-here signal.

Some people had a very strong one. They were the people who got served first in shops. Granny Weatherwax had an I-am-here signal that bounced off the mountains when she wanted it to; when she walked into a forest, all the wolves and bears ran out the other side.

She could turn it off, too.

She was doing that now. Tiffany was having to concentrate to see her. Most of her mind was telling her that there was no one there at all.

Well, she thought, that’s about enough of that. She coughed. Suddenly Granny Weatherwax had always been there.

“Miss Treason is very well,” said Tiffany.

“A fine woman,” said Granny.

“Oh, yes.”

“She has her funny ways,” said Tiffany.

“We’re none of us perfect,” said Granny.

“She’s trying some new eyes,” said Tiffany.

“That’s good.”

“They’re a couple of ravens….”

“It’s just as well,” said Granny.

“Better than the mouse she usually uses,” said Tiffany.

“I expect they are.”

There was a bit more of this, until Tiffany began to get annoyed at doing all the work. There was such a thing as common politeness, after all. Oh well, she knew what to do about it now.

“Mrs. Earwig’s written another book,” she said.

“I heard,” said Granny. The shadows in the room maybe grew a little darker.

Well, that explained the sulk. Even thinking about Mrs. Earwig made Granny Weatherwax angry. Mrs. Earwig was all wrong to Granny Weatherwax. She wasn’t born locally, which was almost a crime to begin with. She wrote books, and Granny Weatherwax didn’t trust books. And Mrs. Earwig (pronounced “Ah-wij,” at least by Mrs. Earwig) believed in shiny wands and magical amulets and mystic runes and the power of the stars, while Granny Weatherwax believed in cups of tea, dry biscuits, washing every morning in cold water, and, well, she believed mostly in Granny Weatherwax.

Mrs. Earwig was popular among the younger witches, because if you did witchcraft her way, you could wear so much jewelry that you could barely walk. Granny Weatherwax wasn’t popular with anyone much—

—except when they needed her. When Death was standing by the cradle or the axe slipped in the woods and blood was soaking into the moss, you sent someone hurrying to the cold, gnarly little cottage in the clearing. When all hope was gone, you called for Granny Weatherwax, because she was the best.

And she always came. Always. But popular? No. Need is not the same as like. Granny Weatherwax was for when things were serious.

Tiffany did like her, though, in an odd kind of way. She thought Granny Weatherwax liked her, too. She let Tiffany call her Granny to her face, when all the other young witches had to call her Mistress Weatherwax. Sometimes Tiffany thought that if you were friendly to Granny Weatherwax, she tested you to see how friendly you would stay. Everything about Granny Weatherwax was a test.

“The new book is called First Flights in Witchcraft,” she went on, watching the old witch carefully.

Granny Weatherwax smiled. That is, her mouth went up at the corners.

“Hah!” she said. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You can’t learn witchin’ from books. Letice Earwig thinks you can become a witch by goin’ shoppin’.” She gave Tiffany a piercing look, as if she were making up her mind about something. Then she said: “An’ I’ll wager she don’t know how to do this.”

She picked up her cup of hot tea, curling her hand around it. Then she reached out with her other hand and took Tiffany’s hand.

“Ready?” said Granny.

“For wha—” Tiffany began, and then she felt her hand get hot. The heat spread up her arm, warming it to the bone.

“Feelin’ it?”

“Yes!”

The warmth died away. And Granny Weatherwax, still watching Tiffany’s face, turned the teacup upside down.

The tea dropped out in one lump. It was frozen solid.

Tiffany was old enough not to say, “How did you do that?” Granny Weatherwax didn’t answer silly questions or, for that matter, many questions at all.

“You moved the heat,” Tiffany said. “You took the heat out of the tea and moved it through you to me, yes?”

“Yes, but it never touched me,” said Granny triumphantly. “It’s all about balance, do you see? Balance is the trick. Keep the balance and—” She stopped. “You’ve ridden on a seesaw? One end goes up, one end goes down. But the bit in the middle, right in the middle, that stays where it is. Upness and downness go right through it. Don’t matter how high or low the ends go, it keeps the balance.” She sniffed. “Magic is mostly movin’ stuff around.”

“Can I learn that?”

“I daresay. It’s not hard, if you get your mind right.”

“Can you teach me?”

“I just have. I showed you.”

“No, Granny, you just showed me how to do it, not…how to do it!”

“Can’t tell you that. I know how I do it. How you do it’ll be different. You’ve just got to get your mind right.”

“How do I do that?”

“How should I know? It’s your mind,” snapped Granny. “Put the kettle on again, will you? My tea’s gone cold.”

There was something almost spiteful about all this, but that was Granny. She took the view that if you were capable of learning, you’d work it out. There was no point in making it easy for people. Life wasn’t easy, she said.

“An’ I see you’re still wearing that trinket,” said Granny. She didn’t like trinkets, a word she used to mean anything metal a witch wore that wasn’t there to hold up, shut, or fasten. That was “shoppin’.”

Tiffany touched the little silver horse she wore around her neck. It was small and simple, and it meant a lot to her.

“Yes,” she said calmly. “I still am.”

“What have you got in that basket?” Granny said now, which was unusually rude. Tiffany’s basket was on the table. It had a present in it, of course. Everyone knew you took a small present along when you went visiting, but the person you were visiting was supposed to be surprised when you gave it to her, and say things like “Oooh, you shouldn’t have.”

“I brought you something,” said Tiffany, swinging the big black kettle onto the fire.

“You’ve got no call to be bringing me presents, I’m sure,” said Granny sternly.

“Yes, well,” said Tiffany, and left it at that.

She heard Granny lift the lid of the basket. There was a kitten in it.

“Her mother is Pinky, the Widow Cable’s cat,” said Tiffany, to fill the silence.

“You shouldn’t have,” growled the voice of Granny Weatherwax.

“It was no trouble.” Tiffany smiled at the fire.

“I can’t be havin’ with cats.”

“She’ll keep the mice down,” said Tiffany, still not turning around.

“Don’t have mice.”

Nothing for them to eat, thought Tiffany. Aloud, she said, “Mrs. Earwig’s got six big black cats.” In the basket, the white kitten would be staring up at Granny Weatherwax with the sad, shocked expression of all kittens. You test me, I test you, Tiffany thought.

“I don’t know what I shall do with it, I’m sure. It’ll have to sleep in the goat shed,” said Granny Weatherwax. Most witches had goats.

The kitten rubbed against Granny’s hand and went meep.

When Tiffany left, later on, Granny Weatherwax said good-bye at the door and very carefully shut the kitten outside.

Tiffany went across the clearing to where she’d tied up Miss Treason’s broomstick.

But she didn’t get on, not yet. She stepped back up against a holly bush, and went quiet until she wasn’t there anymore, until everything about her said: I’m not here.

Everyone could see pictures in the fire and in clouds. You just turned that the other way around. You turned off that bit of yourself that said you were there. You dissolved. Anyone looking at you would find you very hard to see. Your face became a bit of leaf and shadow, your body a piece of tree and bush. The other person’s mind would fill in the gaps.

Looking like just another piece of holly bush, she watched the door. The wind had got up, warm but worrisome, shaking the yellow and red leaves off the sycamore trees and whirring them around the clearing. The kitten tried to bat a few of them out of the air and then sat there, making sad little mewling noises. Any minute now, Granny Weatherwax would think Tiffany had gone and would open the door and—

“Forgot something?” said Granny by her ear.

She was the bush.

“Er…it’s very sweet. I just thought you might, you know, grow to like it,” said Tiffany, but she was thinking: Well, she could have got here if she ran, but why didn’t I see her? Can you run and hide at the same time?

“Never you mind about me, my girl,” said the witch. “You run along back to Miss Treason and give her my best wishes, right now. But”—and her voice softened a little—“that was good hiding you did just then. There’s many as would not have seen you. Why, I hardly heard your hair growin’!”

When Tiffany’s stick had left the clearing, and Granny Weatherwax had satisfied herself in other little ways that she had really gone, she went back inside, carefully ignoring the kitten again.

After a few minutes, the door creaked open a little. It may have been just a draft. The kitten trotted inside….

 

All witches were a bit odd. Tiffany had got used to odd, so that odd seemed quite normal. There was Miss Level, for example, who had two bodies, although one of them was imaginary. Mistress Pullunder, who bred pedigreed earthworms and gave them all names…well, she was hardly odd at all, just a bit peculiar, and anyway earthworms were quite interesting in a basically uninteresting kind of way. And there had been Old Mother Dismass, who suffered from bouts of temporal confusion, which can be quite strange when it happens to a witch; her mouth never moved in time with her words, and sometimes her footsteps came down the stairs ten minutes before she did.

But when it came to odd, Miss Treason didn’t just take the cake, but a packet of biscuits too, with sprinkles on the top, and also a candle.

Where to start, when things were wall-to-wall odd….

Miss Eumenides Treason had gone blind when she was sixty years old. To most people that would have been a misfortune, but Miss Treason was skilled at Borrowing, a particular witch talent.

She could use the eyes of animals, reading what they saw right out of their minds.

She’d gone deaf when she was seventy-five, but she’d got the hang of it by now and used any ears she could find running around.

When Tiffany had first gone to stay with her, Miss Treason had used a mouse for seeing and hearing, because her old jackdaw had died. It was a bit worrying to see an old woman striding around the cottage with a mouse in her outstretched hand, and very worrying if you said something and the mouse was swung around to face you. It was amazing how creepy a little pink wriggly nose could be.

The new ravens were a lot better. Somebody in one of the local villages had made the old woman a perch that fitted across her shoulders, one bird on either side, and with her long white hair the effect was very, well, witchy, although a bit messy down the back of her cloak by the end of the day.

Then there was her clock. It was heavy and made of rusty iron by someone who was more blacksmith than watchmaker, which was why it went clonk-clank instead of tick-tock. She wore it on her belt and could tell the time by feeling the stubby little hands.

There was a story in the villages that the clock was Miss Treason’s heart, which she’d used ever since her first heart died. But there were lots of stories about Miss Treason.

You had to have a high threshold for odd to put up with her. It was traditional that young witches traveled around and stayed with older witches to learn from a lot of experts in exchange for what Miss Tick the witch finder called “some help with the chores,” which meant “doing all the chores.” Mostly, they left Miss Treason’s after one night. Tiffany had stuck it out for three months so far.

Oh, and sometimes, when she was looking for a pair of eyes to look through, Miss Treason would creep into yours. It was a strange prickly sensation, like having someone invisible looking over your shoulder.

Yes…perhaps Miss Treason didn’t just take the cake, a packet of biscuits with sprinkles on the top, and a candle, but also the trifle, the sandwiches, and a man who made amusing balloon animals afterward.

She was weaving at her loom when Tiffany came in. Two beaks turned to face her.

“Ah, child,” said Miss Treason in a thin, cracked voice. “You have had a good day.”

“Yes, Miss Treason,” said Tiffany obediently.

“You have seen the girl Weatherwax and she is well.” Click-clack went the loom. Clonk-clank went the clock.

“Quite well,” said Tiffany. Miss Treason didn’t ask questions. She just told you the answers. “The girl Weatherwax,” Tiffany thought, as she started to get their supper. But Miss Treason was very old.

And very scary. It was a fact. You couldn’t deny it. She didn’t have a hooked nose and she did have all her teeth, even if they were yellow, but after that she was a picture-book wicked witch. And her knees clicked when she walked. And she walked very fast, with the help of two sticks, scuttling around like a big spider. That was another strange thing: The cottage was full of cobwebs, which Miss Treason ordered Tiffany never to touch, but you never saw a spider.

There was the thing about black, too. Most witches liked black, but Miss Treason even had black goats and black chickens. The walls were black. The floor was black. If you dropped a stick of licorice, you’d never find it again. And, to Tiffany’s dismay, she had to make her cheeses black, which meant painting the cheeses with shiny black wax. Tiffany was an excellent cheesemaker and it did keep them moist, but Tiffany distrusted black cheeses. They always looked as though they were plotting something.

And Miss Treason didn’t seem to need sleep. She hadn’t got much use for night and day now. When the ravens went to bed, she’d summon up an owl and weave by owl sight. An owl was particularly good, she said, because it’d keep turning its head to watch the shuttle of the loom. Click-clack went the loom, and clonk-clank went the clock, right back at it.

Miss Treason, with her billowing black cloak and bandaged eyes and wild white hair…

Miss Treason with her two sticks, wandering the cottage and garden in the dark and frosty night, smelling the memory of flowers….

All witches had some particular skill, and Miss Treason delivered Justice.

People would come from miles around to bring her their problems:

I know it’s my cow but he says it’s his!

She says it’s her land but my father left it to me!…and Miss Treason would sit at the click-clacking loom with her back to the room full of anxious people. The loom worried them. They watched it as though they were afraid of it, and the ravens watched them.

They would stutter out their cases, um-ing and ah-ing, while the loom rattled away in the flickering candlelight. Oh, yes…the candlelight…

The candleholders were two skulls. One had the word ENOCHI carved on it; the other had the word ATHOOTITA.

(The words meant “GUILT” and “INNOCENCE.” Tiffany wished she didn’t know that. There was no way that a girl brought up on the Chalk should know that, because the words were in a foreign language, and an ancient one, too. She knew them because of Dr. Sensibility Bustle, D. M. Phil., B. El L., Patricius Professor of Magic at Unseen University, who was in her head.

(Well, a tiny part of him, at least.

(A couple of summers ago she had been taken over by a hiver, a…thing that had been collecting minds for millions of years. Tiffany managed to get it out of her head, but a few fragments had stayed tangled up in her brain. One of these was a tiny lump of ego and a mix of memories that were what remained of the late Dr. Bustle. He wasn’t much trouble, but if she looked at anything in a foreign language, she could read it—or, rather, hear Dr. Bustle’s reedy voice translating it for her. That seemed to be about all that was left of him, but she tried to avoid getting undressed in front of a mirror.)

The candles had dripped wax all over the skulls, and people would keep glancing at them the whole time they were in the room.

And then, when all the words had been said, the loom would stop with a shock of sudden silence, and Miss Treason would turn around in her big heavy chair, which had wheels on it, and remove the black blindfold from her pearly gray eyes and say:

“I have heard. Now I shall see. I shall see what is true.”

Some people would actually run away at this point, when she stared at them in the light from the skulls. Those eyes that could not see your face could somehow see your mind. When Miss Treason was looking right through you, you could only be truthful or very, very stupid.

So no one ever argued with Miss Treason.

Witches were not allowed to be paid for using their talents, but everyone who came to have a dispute settled by Miss Treason brought her a present, usually food but sometimes clean used clothing, if it was black, or a pair of old boots if they were her size. If Miss Treason gave judgment against you, it was really not a good idea (everyone said) to ask for your present back, as being turned into something small and sticky often offends.

They said if you lied to Miss Treason, you would die horribly within a week. They said that kings and princes came to see Miss Treason at night, asking questions about great affairs of state. They said that in her cellar was a heap of gold, guarded by a demon with skin like fire and three heads that would attack anyone it saw and eat their noses.

Tiffany suspected that at least two of these beliefs were wrong. She knew the third one wasn’t true, because one day she’d gone down into the cellar (with a bucket of water and a poker, just in case), and there was nothing there but piles of potatoes and carrots. And a mouse, watching her carefully.

Tiffany wasn’t scared, much. For one thing, unless the demon was good at disguising itself as a potato, it probably didn’t exist. And another thing was that although Miss Treason looked bad and sounded bad and smelled like old locked wardrobes, she didn’t feel bad.

First Sight and Second Thoughts, that’s what a witch had to rely on: First Sight to see what’s really there, and Second Thoughts to watch the First Thoughts to check that they were thinking right. Then there were the Third Thoughts, which Tiffany had never heard discussed and therefore kept quiet about; they were odd, seemed to think for themselves, and didn’t turn up very often. And they were telling her that there was more to Miss Treason than met the eye.

And then one day, when she was dusting, Tiffany knocked over the skull called Enochi.

…and suddenly Tiffany knew a lot more about Miss Treason than Miss Treason probably wanted anyone to know.

Tonight, as they were eating their stew (with black beans), Miss Treason said, “The wind is rising. We must go soon. I would not trust the stick above the trees on a night like this. There may be strange creatures about.”

“Go? We’re going out?” Tiffany asked. They never went out in the evenings, which was why the evenings always felt a hundred years long.

“Indeed we are. They will be dancing tonight.”

“Who will?”

“The ravens will not be able to see and the owl will get confused,” Miss Treason went on. “I will need to use your eyes.”

“Who will be dancing, Miss Treason?” said Tiffany. She liked dancing, but no one seemed to dance up here.

“It is not far, but there will be a storm.”

So that was that; Miss Treason wasn’t going to tell. But it sounded interesting. Besides, it would probably be an education to see anyone Miss Treason thought was strange.

Of course, it did mean Miss Treason would put her pointy hat on. Tiffany hated this bit. She’d have to stand in front of Miss Treason and stare at her, and feel the little tingle in her eyes as the ancient witch used her as a kind of mirror.

The wind was roaring in the woods like a big dark animal by the time they’d finished supper. It barged the door out of Tiffany’s hands when she opened it and blew around the room, making the cords hum on the loom.

“Are you sure about this, Miss Treason?” she said, trying to push the door shut.

“Don’t you say that to me! You will not say that to me! The dance must be witnessed! I have never missed the dance!” Miss Treason looked nervous and edgy. “We must go! And you must wear black.”

“Miss Treason, you know I don’t wear black,” said Tiffany.

“Tonight is a night for black. You will wear my second-best cloak.”

She said it with a witch’s firmness, as if the idea of anyone disobeying had never crossed her mind. She was 113 years old. She’d had a lot of practice. Tiffany didn’t argue.

It isn’t that I have anything against black, Tiffany thought as she fetched the second-best cloak, but it’s just not me. When people say witches wear black, they actually mean that old ladies wear black. Anyway, it’s not as if I’m wearing pink or something….

After that she had to wrap Miss Treason’s clock in pieces of blanket, so that the clonk-clank became clonk-clank. There was no question of leaving it behind. Miss Treason always kept the clock close to her.

While Tiffany got herself ready, the old woman wound the clock up with a horrible graunching noise. She was always winding it up; sometimes she stopped to do it in the middle of a judgment, with a room full of horrified people.

There was no rain yet, but when they set out the air was full of twigs and flying leaves. Miss Treason sat sidesaddle on the broom, hanging on for dear life, while Tiffany walked along towing it by means of a piece of clothesline.

The sunset sky was still red, and a gibbous moon was high, but the clouds were being whipped across it, filling the woods with moving shadows. Branches knocked together, and Tiffany heard the creak and crash as, somewhere in the dark, one fell to the ground.

“Are we going to the villages?” Tiffany yelled above the din.

“No! Take the path through the forest!” shouted Miss Treason.

Ah, thought Tiffany, is this the famous “dancing around without your drawers on” that I’ve heard so much about? Actually, not very much about, because as soon as anyone mentions it, someone else tells them to shut up, so I really haven’t heard much about it at all, but haven’t heard in a very meaningful way.

It was something people thought witches did, but witches didn’t think they did it. Tiffany had to admit she could see why. Even hot summer nights weren’t all that warm, and there were always hedgehogs and thistles to worry about. Besides, you just couldn’t imagine someone like Granny Weatherwax dancing around without—Well, you just couldn’t imagine it, because if you did, it would make your head explode.

The wind died down as she took the forest track, still towing the floating Miss Treason. But the wind had brought cold air with it and then left it behind. Tiffany was glad of the cloak, even if it was black.

She trudged on, taking different tracks when Miss Treason told her to, until she saw firelight through the trees, in a little dip in the land.

“Stop here and help me down, girl,” said the old witch. “And listen carefully. There are rules. One, you will not talk; two, you will look only at the dancers; three, you will not move until the dance is finished. I will not tell you twice!”

“Yes, Miss Treason. It’s very cold up here.”

“And will get colder.”

They headed for the distant light. What good is a dance you can only watch? Tiffany wondered. It didn’t sound like much fun.

“It isn’t meant to be fun,” said Miss Treason.

Shadows moved across the firelight, and Tiffany heard the sound of men’s voices. Then, as they reached the edge of the sunken ground, someone threw water over the fire.

There was a hiss, and a cloud of smoke and steam rose among the trees. It happened in a moment and left a shock behind. The only thing that had seemed alive here had died.

Dry fallen leaves crunched under her feet. The moon, in a sky swept clean now of clouds, made little silver shapes on the forest floor.

It was some time before Tiffany realized that there were six men standing in the middle of the clearing. They must have been wearing black; against the moonlight they looked like man-shaped holes into nothing. They were in two lines of three, facing each other, but were so still that after a while Tiffany wondered if she was imagining them.

There was the thud of a drumbeat: bom…bom…bom.

It went on for half a minute or so, and then stopped. But in the silence of the cold woods the beat went on inside Tiffany’s head, and perhaps that wasn’t the only head it thundered in, because the men were gently nodding their heads, to keep the beat.

They began to dance.

The only noise was of their boots hitting the ground as the shadow men wove in and out. But then Tiffany, her head full of the silent drum, heard another sound. Her foot was tapping, all by itself.

She’d heard this beat before; she’d seen men dancing like this. But it had been on warm days in bright sunshine. They’d worn little bells on their clothes.

“This is a Morris dance!” she said, not quite under her breath.

“Shush!” hissed Miss Treason.

“But this isn’t the right—”

“Be silent!”

Blushing and angry in the dark, Tiffany took her eyes off the dancers and defiantly looked around the clearing. There were other shadows crowding in, human or at least human shaped, but she couldn’t see them clearly and maybe that was just as well.

It was getting colder, she was sure. White frost was crackling across the leaves.

The beat went on. But it seemed to Tiffany that it wasn’t alone now, but had picked up other beats, and echoes from inside her head.

Miss Treason could shush all she liked. It was a Morris dance. But it was out of time!

The Morris men came to the village sometime in May. You could never be sure when, because they had to call at lots of villages along the Chalk, and every village had a pub, which slowed them down.

They carried sticks and wore white clothes with bells on them, to stop them from creeping up on people. No one likes an unexpected Morris dancer. Tiffany would wait outside the village with the other children and dance behind them all the way in.

And then they used to dance on the village green to the beat of a drum, banging their sticks together in the air, and then everyone would go to the pub and summer would come.

Tiffany hadn’t been able to work out how that last bit happened. The dancers danced, and then summer came—that was all anybody seemed to know. Her father said that there had once been a year when the dancers hadn’t turned up, and a cold wet spring had turned into a chilly autumn, with the months between being filled with mists and rain and frosts in August.

The sound of the drums filled her head now, making her feel dizzy. They were wrong; there was something wrong—

And then she remembered the seventh dancer, the one they called the Fool. He was generally a small man, wearing a battered top hat and bright rags sewn all over his clothes. Mostly he wandered around holding out the hat and grinning at people until they gave him money for beer. But sometimes he’d put the hat down and whirl off into the dancers. You’d expect there to be a massive collision of arms and legs, but it never happened. Jumping and twirling among the sweating men, he always managed to be where the other dancers weren’t.

The world was moving around her. She blinked. The drums in her head were like thunder now, and there was one beat as deep as oceans. Miss Treason was forgotten. So was the strange, mysterious crowd. Now there was only the dance itself.

It twisted in the air like a living thing. But there was a space in it, moving around. It was where she should be, she knew it. Miss Treason had said no, but that had been a long time ago and how could Miss Treason understand? What could she know? When did she last dance? The dance was in Tiffany’s bones now, calling to her. Six dancers were not enough!

She ran forward and jumped into the dance.

The eyes of the dancing men glared at her as she skipped and danced between them, always being where they weren’t. The drums had her feet, and they went where the beat sent them.

And then……there was someone else there.

It was like the feeling of someone behind her—but it was also the feeling of someone in front of her, and beside her, and above her, and below her, all at once.

The dancers froze, but the world spun. The men were just black shadows, darker outlines in the darkness. The drumbeats stopped, and there was one long moment as Tiffany turned gently and silently, arms out, feet not touching the ground, her face turned toward stars that were as cold as ice and sharp as needles. It felt…wonderful.

A voice said: “Who Are You?” It had an echo, or perhaps two people had said it at almost the same time.

The beat came back, suddenly, and six men crashed into her.

 

A few hours later, in the small town of Dogbend, down on the plains, the citizens threw a witch into the river with her arms and legs tied together.

This sort of thing never happened in the mountains, where witches had respect, but down on the wide plains there were still people dumb enough to believe the nastier stories. Besides, there wasn’t much to do in the evenings.

However, it probably wasn’t often that the witch was given a cup of tea and some biscuits before her ducking.

It had happened here because the people of Dogbend Did It By The Book.

The book was called: Magavenatio Obtusis.*

The townspeople didn’t know how the book had arrived. It had just turned up one day, on a shelf in one of the shops.

They knew how to read, of course. You had to have a certain amount of reading and writing to get on in the world, even in Dogbend. But they didn’t trust books much, or the kind of people who read them.

This one, though, was a book on how to deal with witches. It looked pretty authoritative, too, without too many long (and therefore untrustworthy) words, like “marmalade.” At last, they told one another, this is what we need. This is a sensible book. Okay, it isn’t what you’d expect, but remember that witch last year? We ducked her in the river and then tried to burn her alive? Only she was too soggy, and got away? Let’s not go through that again!

They paid particular attention to this bit:

Of course, this time some people did. And what they saw was the witch sinking and not coming up again, while her wicked pointy hat floated away. Then they went home for breakfast.

In this particular river, nothing much happened for several minutes more. Then the pointy hat started to move toward a thick patch of reeds. It stopped there, and rose very slowly. A pair of eyes peered out from underneath the brim….

When she was sure that there was no one about, Miss Perspicacia Tick, teacher and witch finder, crawled up the bank on her stomach and then legged it away at high speed into the woods just as the sun came up. She’d left a bag with a clean dress and some fresh underwear stuck in a badger’s sett, along with a box of matches (she never carried matches in her pocket if there was a danger of being caught, in case it gave people ideas).

Well, she thought, as she dried out in front of a fire, things could have been worse. Thank goodness the village still had someone left who could read, or else she would have been in a pretty pickle. Maybe it was a good idea that she’d had the book printed in big letters.

It was in fact Miss Tick who had written Witch Hunting for Dumb People, and she made sure that copies of it found their way into those areas where people still believed that witches should be burned or drowned.

Since the only witch ever likely to pass through these days was Miss Tick herself, it meant that if things did go wrong, she’d get a good night’s sleep and a decent meal before being thrown into the water. The water was no problem at all to Miss Tick, who had been to the Quirm College for Young Ladies, where you had to have an icy dip every morning to build Moral Fiber. And a No. 1 Bosun’s knot was very easy to undo with your teeth, even underwater.

Oh, yes, she thought, as she emptied her boots, and she’d got two silver sixpences, too. Really, the people of the village of Dogbend were getting very stupid indeed. Of course, that’s what happened when you got rid of your witches. A witch was just someone who knew a bit more than you did. That’s what the name meant. And some people didn’t like anyone who knew more than they did, so these days the wandering teachers and the traveling librarians steered clear of the place. The way things were going, if the people of Dogbend wanted to throw stones at anyone who knew more than them, they’d soon have to throw them at the pigs.

The place was a mess. Unfortunately there was a girl aged eight there who was definitely showing promise, and Miss Tick dropped in sometimes to keep an eye on her. Not as a witch, obviously, because although she liked a cold dip in the morning, you could have too much of a good thing. She disguised herself as a humble apple seller, or a fortune-teller. (Witches don’t usually do fortune-telling, because if they did, they’d be too good at it. People don’t want to know what’s really going to happen, only that it’s going to be nice. But witches don’t add sugar.)

Unfortunately the spring on Miss Tick’s stealth hat had gone wrong while she was walking down the main street and the point had popped up. Even Miss Tick hadn’t been able to talk her way out of that one. Oh well, she’d have to make other arrangements now. Witch finding was always dangerous. You had to do it, though. A witch growing up all alone was a sad and dangerous child….

She stopped, and stared at the fire. Why had she just thought about Tiffany Aching? Why now?

Working quickly, she emptied her pockets and started a shamble.

Shambles worked. That was about all you could say about them for certain. You made them out of some string and a couple of sticks and anything you had in your pocket at the time. They were a witch’s equivalent of those knives with fifteen blades and three screwdrivers and a tiny magnifying glass and a thing for extracting earwax from chickens.

You couldn’t even say precisely what they did, although Miss Tick thought they were a way of finding out what things the hidden bits of your own mind somehow knew. You had to make a shamble from scratch every time, and only from things in your pockets. There was no harm in having interesting things in your pockets, though, just in case.

After less than a minute Miss Tick had crafted a shamble out of:

It looked like a cat’s cradle, or maybe the tangled strings of a very strange puppet.

Miss Tick stared at it, waiting for it to read her. Then the ruler swung around, the throat sweets exploded in a little cloud of red dust, the pencil shot away and stuck in Miss Tick’s hat, and the ruler was covered in frost.

That was not supposed to happen.

 

Miss Treason sat downstairs in her cottage and watched Tiffany sleeping in the low bedroom above her. She did this through a mouse, which was sitting on the tarnished brass bedstead. Beyond the gray windows (Miss Treason hadn’t bothered to clean them for fifty-three years, and Tiffany hadn’t been able to shift all the dirt), the wind howled among the trees, even though it was mid-afternoon.

He’s looking for her, she thought as she fed a piece of ancient cheese to another mouse on her lap. But he won’t find her. She is safe here.

Then the mouse looked up from the cheese. It had heard something.

“I told yez! She’s here somewhere, fellas!”

“I dinna see why we canna just talk tae the ol’ hag. We get along fine wi’ hags.”

“Mebbe, but this one is a terrrrrible piece o’ work. They say she’s got a fearsome demon in her tattie cellar.”

Miss Treason looked puzzled. “Them?” she whispered to herself. The voices were coming from beneath the floor. She sent the mouse scurrying across the boards and into a hole.

“I dinna want to disappoint ye, but we’s in a cellar right here, and it’s full o’ tatties.”

After a while a voice said: “So where izzit?”

“Mebbe it’s got the day off?”

“What’s a demon need a day off for?”

“Tae gae an’ see its ol’ mam an’ dad, mebbe?”

“Oh, aye? Demons have mams, do they?”

“Crivens! Will ye lot stop arguin’! She might hear us!”

“Nae, she’s blind as a bat and deaf as a post, they say.”

Mice have very good hearing. Miss Treason smiled as the hurrying mouse came out in the rough old stone wall of the cellar, near the floor.

She looked through its eyes. It could see quite well in the gloom, too.

A small group of little men was creeping across the floor. Their skins were blue and covered with tattoos and dirt. They all wore very grubby kilts, and each one had a sword, as big as he was, strapped to his back. And they all had red hair, a real orange-red, with scruffy pigtails. One of them wore a rabbit skull as a helmet. It would have been more scary if it hadn’t kept sliding over his eyes.

In the room above, Miss Treason smiled again. So they’d heard of Miss Treason? But they hadn’t heard enough.

As the four little men squirmed through an old rat hole to get out of the cellar, they were watched by two more mice, three different beetles, and a moth. They tiptoed carefully across the floor, past an old witch who was clearly asleep—right up until she banged on the arms of her chair and bellowed:

“Jings! I see you there, ye wee schemies!”

The Feegles reacted in instant panic, colliding with one another in shock and awe.

“I dinna remember tellin’ ye tae move!” shouted Miss Treason, grinning horribly.

“Oh, waily, waily, waily! She’s got the knowin’ o’ the speakin’!” someone sobbed.

“Ye’re Nac Mac Feegles, right? But I dinna ken the clan markin’s. Calm doon, I ain’t gonna deep-fry ye. You! What’s your name?”

“Ah’m Rob Anybody, Big Man o’ the Chalk Hill clan,” said the one with the rabbit-skull helmet. “And—”

“Aye? Big Man, are ye? Then ye’ll do me the courtesy an’ tak’ off yon bony bonnet ere ye speak tae me!” said Miss Treason, enjoying herself no end. “An’ stannit up straight! I will have nae slouchin’ in this hoose!”

Instantly all four Feegles stood to rigid attention.

“Right!” said Miss Treason. “An’ who are the rest o’ yez?”

“This is my brother Daft Wullie, miss,” said Rob Anybody, shaking the shoulder of the Feegle who was an instant wailer. He was staring in horror at Enochi and Athootita.

“An’ the other two of you…I mean, twa’ o’ ye?” said Miss Treason. “You, there. I mean ye. Ye have the mousepipes. Are ye a gonnagle?”

“Aye, mistress,” said a Feegle who looked neater and cleaner than the others, although it had to be said that there were things living under old logs that were cleaner and neater than Daft Wullie.

“And your name is…?”

“Awf’ly Wee Billy Bigchin, mistress.”

“You’re staring hard at me, Awf’ly Wee Billy Bigchin,” said Miss Treason. “Are ye afraid?”

“No, mistress. I wuz admirin’ ye. It does my heart good tae see a witch so…witchy.”

“It does, does it?” said Miss Treason suspiciously. “Are ye sure ye’re no’ afraid o’ me, Mr. Billy Bigchin?”

“No, mistress. But I will be if it makes ye happy,” said Billy carefully.

“Hah!” said Miss Treason. “Well, I see we have—hae a clever one here. Who is your big friend, Mr. Billy?”

Billy elbowed Big Yan in the ribs. Despite his size, which for a Feegle was huge, he was looking very nervous. Like a lot of people with big muscles, he got edgy about people who were strong in other ways.

“He’s Big Yan, mistress,” Billy Bigchin supplied, while Big Yan stared at his feet.

“I see he’s got a necklace o’ big teeth,” said Miss Treason. “Human teeth?”

“Aye, mistress. Four, mistress. One for every man he’s knocked out.”

“Are you talking about human men?” asked Miss Treason in astonishment.

“Aye, mistress,” said Billy. “Mostly he drops on ’em heidfirst oot o’ a tree. He has a verra tough heid,” he added, in case this wasn’t clear.

Miss Treason sat back. “And now you will kindly explain why ye were creepin’ aboot here in my hoose,” she said. “Come along, now!”

There was a tiny, tiny pause before Rob Anybody said happily, “Oh, weel, that’s easy. We wuz huntin’ the haggis.”

“No, you weren’t,” said Miss Treason sharply, “because a haggis is a pudding of sheep’s offal and meat, well spiced and cooked in a sheep’s stomach.”

“Ah, that is only when ye canna find the real thing, mistress,” said Rob Anybody carefully. “’Tis no’ a patch on the real thing. Oh, a canny beast is the haggis, which makes its burrows in tattie cellars….”

“And that’s the truth? You were hunting the haggis? Is it, Daft Wullie?” said Miss Treason, her voice suddenly sharp. All eyes, including a pair belonging to an earwig, turned to the luckless Wullie.

“Er…aye…oooh…aarg…waily, waily, waily!” moaned Daft Wullie, and dropped to his knees. “Please dinna do somethin’ horrible tae me, mistress!” he begged. “Yon earwiggy is givin’ me a dreadful look!”

“Very well, we shall start again,” said Miss Treason. She reached up and tore off her blindfold. The Feegles stepped back as she touched the skulls on either side of her.

“I do not need eyes to smell a lie when it comes calling,” she said. “Tell me why you are here. Tell me…again.”

Rob Anybody hesitated for a moment. This was, in the circumstances, very brave of him. Then he said: “’Tis aboot the big wee hag, mistress, we came.”

“The big wee—Oh, you mean Tiffany?”

“Aye!”

“We is under one o’ them big birds,” said Daft Wullie, keeping his eyes averted from the witch’s blind stare.

“He means a geas, mistress,” said Rob Anybody, glaring at his brother. “It’s like a—”

“—a tremendous obligation that you cannot disobey,” said Miss Treason. “I ken what a geas is. But why?”

Miss Treason had heard a lot of things in 113 years, but now she listened in astonishment to a story about a human girl who had, for a few days at least, been the kelda of a clan of Nac Mac Feegles. And if you were their kelda, even for a few days, they’d watch over you…forever.

“An’ she’s the hag o’ our hills,” said Billy Bigchin. “She cares for them, keeps them safe. But…”

He hesitated, and Rob Anybody continued: “Our kelda is havin’ dreams. Dreams o’ the future. Dreams o’ the hills all froze an’ everyone deid an’ the big wee hag wearin’ a crown o’ ice!”

“My goodness!”

“Aye, an’ there wuz more!” said Billy, throwing out his arms. “She saw a green tree growin’ in a land o’ ice! She saw a ring o’ iron! She saw a man with a nail in his heart! She saw a plague o’ chickens an’ a cheese that walks like a man!”

There was silence, and then Miss Treason said: “The first two, the tree and the ring, no problem there, good occult symbolism. The nail, too, very metaphorical. I’m a bit doubtful about the cheese—could she mean Horace?—and the chickens…I’m not sure you can have a plague of chickens, can you?”

“Jeannie wuz verra firm about them,” said Rob Anybody. “She’s dreamed many strange and worryin’ things, so we thought we might just see how the big wee hag wuz gettin’ along.”

Miss Treason’s various eyes stared at him. Rob Anybody stared back with an expression of ferocious honesty, and did not flinch.

“This seems an honorable enterprise,” she said. “Why start by lying?”

“Oh, the lie wuz goin’ tae be a lot more interestin’,” said Rob Anybody.

“The truth of the matter seems quite interesting to me,” said Miss Treason.

“Mebbe, but I wuz plannin’ on puttin’ in giants an’ pirates an’ magic weasels,” Rob declared. “Real value for the money!”

“Oh well,” said Miss Treason. “When Miss Tick brought Tiffany to me, she did say she was guarded by strange powers.”

“Aye,” said Rob Anybody proudly. “That’d be us, right enough.”

“But Miss Tick is a rather bossy woman,” said Miss Treason. “I am sorry to say I didn’t listen much to what she said. She is always telling me that these girls are really keen to learn, but mostly they are just flibbertigibbets who want to be a witch to impress the young men, and they run away after a few days. This one doesn’t, oh no! She runs toward things! Did you know she tried to dance with the Wintersmith?!”

“Aye. We ken. We were there,” said Rob Anybody.

“You were?”

“Aye. We followed yez.”

“No one saw you there. I would have known if they did,” Miss Treason said.

“Aye? Weel, we’re good at no one seein’ us,” said Rob Anybody, smiling. “It’s amazin’, the people who dinna see us.”

“She actually tried to dance with the Wintersmith,” Miss Treason repeated. “I told her not to.”

“Ach, people’re always tellin’ us not tae do things,” said Rob Anybody. “That’s how we ken what’s the most interestin’ things tae do!”

Miss Treason stared at him with the eyes of one mouse, two ravens, several moths, and an earwig.

“Indeed,” she said, and sighed. “Yes. The trouble with being this old, you know, is that being young is so far away from me now that it seems sometimes that it happened to someone else. A long life is not what it’s cracked up to be, that is a fact. It—”

“The Wintersmith is seekin’ for the big wee hag, mistress,” said Rob Anybody. “We saw her dancin’ wi’ the Wintersmith. Now he is seekin’ her. We can hear him in the howl o’ the wind.”

“I know,” said Miss Treason. She stopped, and listened for a moment. “The wind has dropped,” she stated. “He’s found her.”

She snatched up her walking sticks and scuttled toward the stairs, going up them with amazing speed. Feegles swarmed past her into the bedroom, where Tiffany lay on a narrow bed.

A candle burned in a saucer at each corner of the room.

“But how has he found her?” Miss Treason demanded. “I had her hidden! You, blue men, fetch wood now!” She glared at them. “I said fetch—”

She heard a couple of thumps. Dust was settling. The Feegles were watching Miss Treason expectantly. And sticks, a lot of sticks, were piled in the tiny bedroom fireplace.

“Ye did well,” she said. “An’ not tae soon!”

Snowflakes were drifting down the chimney.

Miss Treason crossed her walking sticks in front of her and stamped her foot hard.

“Wood burn, fire blaze!” she shouted. The wood in the grate burst into flame. But now frost was forming on the window, ferny white tendrils snapping across the glass with a crackling sound.

“I am not putting up with this at my age!” said the witch.

Tiffany opened her eyes, and said: “What’s happening?”