Wintersmith (8 page)

The Chalk Hill Feegles, on the other hand, were more at home with the drinkin’, stealin’, and fightin’, and Rob Anybody was good at all three. But he’d learned to read and write because Jeannie had asked him to. He did them with a lot more optimism than accuracy, Billy knew. When he was faced with a long sentence, he tended to work out a few words and then have a great big guess.

“The art o’ readin’ is all aboot understandin’ whut the wurds is
tryin’
tae say, right?” said Rob.

“Aye, mebbe,” said Big Yan, “but is there any wurd there tae tell us that the big wee hag is sweet on that heap o’ jobbies doon in the stone castle?”

“Ye ha’ a verra ro-mantic nature,” said Rob. “And the answer is: I canna tell. They writes some bits o’ their letters in them wee codies. That’s a terrible thing tae do to a reader. It’s hard enough readin’ the normal words, wi’oot somebody jumblin’ them all up.”

“It’ll be a baaaad look-oot fra’ us all if the big wee hag starts mindin’ boys instead o’ gettin’ the knowin’ o’ the hagglin’,” said Big Yan.

“Aye, but the boy willna be interested in marryin’,” said Slightly Mad Angus.

“He might be one day,” said Billy Bigchin, who’d made a hobby of watching humans. “Most bigjob men get married.”

“They do?” said a Feegle in astonishment.

“Oh, aye.”

“They want tae get married?”

“A lot o’ them do, aye,” said Billy.

“So there’s nae more drinkin’, stealin’, an’ fightin’?”

“Hey, ah’m still allowed some drinkin’ an’ stealin’ an’ fightin’!” said Rob Anybody.

“Aye, Rob, but we canna help noticin’ ye also have tae do the Explainin’, too,” said Daft Wullie.

There was a general nodding from the crowd. To Feegles, Explaining was a dark art. It was just so
hard
.

“Like, when we come back from drinkin’, stealin’, an’ fightin’, Jeannie gives ye the Pursin’ o’ the Lips,” Daft Wullie went on.

A moan went up from all the Feegles: “Ooooh, save us from the Pursin’ o’ the Lips!”

“An’ there’s the Foldin’ o’ the Arms,” said Wullie, because he was even scaring himself.

“Oooooh, waily, waily, waily, the Foldin’ o’ the Arms!” the Feegles cried, tearing at their hair.

“Not tae mention the Tappin’ o’ the Feets….” Wullie stopped, not wanting to mention the Tappin’ o’ the Feets.

“Aargh! Oooooh! No’ the Tappin’ o’ the Feets!” Some of the Feegles started to bang their heads on trees.

“Aye, aye, aye, BUT,” said Rob Anybody desperately, “what youse dinna ken is that this is part o’ the hiddlins o’ husbandry.”

Feegles looked at one another. There was silence except for the creak of a small tree as it fell over.

“We never heard o’ any sich thing, Rob,” said Big Yan.

“Well, an’ ah’m no’ surprised! Who’d tell ye? Ye ain’t married! Ye dinna get the po-et-ic symmi-tree o’ the whole thing. Gather roound ’til I tell ye….”

Rob looked around to see if anyone apart from about five hundred Feegles was watching him, and went on: “See…first ye get the drinkin’ an’ the fightin’ an’ the stealin’, okay. An’ when you get back tae the mound, it’s time for the Tappin’ o’ the Feets—”

“Ooooooo!”

“—an’ the Foldin’ o’ the Arms—”

“Aaaargh!”

“—an’, o’ course, the Pursin’ o’ the Lips
an’ will ye scunners knock it off wi’ the groanin’ before I starts bangin’ heids together! Right?
”

All the Feegles fell silent, except for one:

“Oh, waily, waily, waily! Ohhhhhhh! Aaarrgh! The Pursin’…o’…the…”

He stopped and looked around in embarrassment.

“Daft Wullie?” said Rob Anybody with icy patience.

“Aye, Rob?”

“Ye ken I told yez there wuz times ye should listen to whut I was sayin’?”

“Aye, Rob?”

“That wuz one o’ them times.”

Daft Wullie hung his head. “Sorry, Rob.”

“Aye! Now, where wuz I…Oh, aye…we get the lips an’ the arms an’ the feets, okay? An’ then—”

“It’s time for the Explainin’!” said Daft Wullie.

“Aye!” snapped Rob Anybody. “Any one o’ youse mudlins want to be the one who dares tae do the Explainin’?”

He looked around.

The Feegles shuffled backward.

“Wi’ the kelda a-pursin’ an’ a-foldin’ an’ a-tappin’,” Rob went on in a voice of Doom, “an’ that look in her bonny eye that says: ‘This Explanation had better be really guid’? Well? Do ye?”

By now Feegles were crying and chewing the edges of their kilts in terror.

“No, Rob,” they murmured.

“No, aye!” said Rob Anybody triumphantly. “Ye wouldna! That’s because you don’t have the knowin’ o’ the husbandry!”

“I heard Jeannie say ye come up with Explanations no other
Feegle in all the world would try,” said Daft Wullie admiringly.

“Aye, that’s quite likely,” said Rob, swelling with pride. “An’ Feegles has got a fine tradition o’ huge Explanations!”

“She said some of your Explainin’ is so long an’ twisty, by the time ye’ve got to the end, she canna recall how they started,” Daft Wullie went on.

“It’s a nat’ral gift—I wouldna wanta boast,” said Rob, waving his hand modestly.

“I can’t see bigjobs bein’ good at Explainin’,” said Big Yan. “They’re verra slow thinkers.”

“They still get wed, though,” said Billy Bigchin.

“Aye, and yon boy in the big castle is bein’ too friendly wi’ the big wee hag,” said Big Yan. “His da is gettin’ old an’ sick, and soon yon boy will own a big stone castle an’ the wee bittie papers that says that he owns the hills.”

“Jeannie’s afeared that if he’s got the wee bittie papers that says he owns the hills,” Billy Bigchin continued, “he might go daft and think they belong to him. An’ we know where that’ll lead, right?”

“Aye,” said Big Yan. “Plowin’.”

It was a dreaded word. The old Baron had once planned to plow a few of the flatter areas of the Chalk, because wheat was fetching high prices and there was no money in sheep, but Granny Aching had been alive then and had changed his mind for him.

But some pastures around the Chalk were being plowed up already. There
was
money in wheat. The Feegles took it for granted that Roland would take to the plow, too. Wasn’t he brought up by a couple of vain, scheming, and unpleasant aunts?

“I dinna trust him,” said Slightly Mad Angus. “He reads books an’ such. He disna care aboot the land.”

“Aye,” said Daft Wullie, “but if he wuz wed tae the big wee hag,
he’d no’ think o’ the plow, ’cuz the big wee hag would soon gi’e him the Pursin’ o’ the Arms—”

“It’s the Foldin’ o’ the Arms!” snapped Rob Anybody.

All the Feegles looked around fearfully.

“Ooooooh, not the Foldin’ o’ th—”

“Shut up!” Rob yelled. “Ah’m ashamed o’ yez! It’s up tae the big wee hag tae marry who she wants tae! Is that no’ so, gonnagle?”

“Hmm?” said Billy, looking upward. He caught a snowflake.

“I said the big wee hag can wed who she wants, right?”

Billy was staring at the snowflake.

“Billy?” said Rob.

“What?” he said, as if waking up. “Oh…yes. Do ye think she wants tae marry the Wintersmith?”

“The Wintersmith?” said Rob. “He canna marry anyone. He’s like a spirit—there’s nothin’ tae him!”

“She danced with him. We saw her,” said Billy, catching another flake and inspecting it.

“Just girlish high spirits! Anyway, why should the big wee hag think anything o’ the Wintersmith?”

“I have reason tae believe,” said the gonnagle slowly, as more flakes danced down, “that the Wintersmith is thinkin’ a lot aboot the big wee hag….”

T
hey say that there can never be two snowflakes that are exactly alike, but has anyone checked lately?

Snow fell gently in the darkness. It piled up on rooftops, it kissed its way between the branches of trees, it settled on the forest floor with a gentle sizzle and smelled sharply of tin.

Granny Weatherwax always checked the snow. She stood at her doorway, with the candlelight streaming out around her, and caught flakes on the back of a shovel.

The white kitten watched the snowflakes. That’s all it did. It didn’t bat them with a paw, it just watched, very intently, each flake spiral down until it landed. Then the kitten would watch it some more, until it was sure the entertainment was over, before it looked up and selected another flake.

It was called You, as in “You! Stop that!” and “You! Get off there!” When it came to names, Granny Weatherwax didn’t do fancy.

Granny looked at the snowflakes and smiled in her not-exactly-nice way.

“Come back in, You,” she said, and shut the door.

Miss Tick was shivering by the fire. It wasn’t very big—just big
enough. However, there was the smell of bacon and pease pudding coming from a small pot on the embers, and beside the small pot was a much larger one from which came the smell of chicken. Miss Tick didn’t often get chicken, so she lived in hope.

It had to be said that Granny Weatherwax and Miss Tick did not get on well with each other. Senior witches often don’t. You could tell that they didn’t by the way they were extremely polite all the time.

“The snow is early this year, Mistress Weatherwax,” said Miss Tick.

“Indeed it is, Miss Tick,” said Granny Weatherwax. “And so…interesting. Have you looked at it?”

“I’ve seen snow before, Mistress Weatherwax,” said Miss Tick. “It was snowing all the way up here. I had to help push the mail coach! I saw altogether too much snow! But what are we going to do about Tiffany Aching?”

“Nothing, Miss Tick. More tea?”

“She is rather our responsibility.”

“No. She’s hers, first and last. She’s a witch. She danced the Winter Dance. I saw her do it.”

“I’m sure she didn’t mean to,” said Miss Tick.

“How can you dance and not mean it?”

“She’s young. The excitement probably ran away with her feet. She didn’t know what was going on.”

“She should have found out,” said Granny Weatherwax. “She should have listened.”

“I’m sure you always did what you were told when you were almost thirteen, Mistress Weatherwax,” said Miss Tick with just a hint of sarcasm.

Granny Weatherwax stared at the wall for a moment. “No,” she said. “I made mistakes. But I didn’t make excuses.”

“I thought you wanted to help the child?”

“I’ll help her to help herself. That is my way. She’s danced into the oldest Story there is, and the only way out is through the other end. The only way, Miss Tick.”

Miss Tick sighed. Stories, she thought. Granny Weatherwax believes the world is all about stories. Oh well, we all have our funny little ways. Except me, obviously.

“Of course. It’s just that she’s so…normal,” Miss Tick said aloud. “When you consider what she’s done, I mean. And she thinks so much. And now that she’s come to the attention of the Wintersmith, well…”

“She fascinates him,” said Granny Weatherwax.

“That’s going to be a big problem.”

“Which she will have to solve.”

“And if she can’t?”

“Then she’s not Tiffany Aching,” said Granny Weatherwax firmly. “Ah, yes, she’s in the Story now, but she don’t know it! Look at the snow, Miss Tick. They say that no two snowflakes are alike. How could they know something like that? Oh, they thinks they’re so smart! I’ve always wanted to catch ’em out. An’ I have done! Go outside now, and look at the snow. Look at the snow, Miss Tick! Every flake the same!”

Tiffany heard the knocking and opened the tiny bedroom window with difficulty. Snow had built up on the sill, soft and fluffy.

“We didna want tae wake ye,” said Rob Anybody, “but Awf’ly Wee Billy said you ought tae see this.”

Tiffany yawned. “What am I looking for?” she muttered.

“Catch some o’ yon flakes,” said Rob. “No, not on yer hand—they’ll melt tae soon.”

In the gloom Tiffany felt around for her diary. It wasn’t there. She looked on the floor, in case she’d knocked it off. Then a match flared as Rob Anybody lit a candle, and there was the diary, looking as though it had always been there but, she noticed, also being suspiciously cold to the touch. Rob looked innocent, a sure sign of guilt.

Tiffany saved the questions for later and poked the diary out of the window. Flakes settled on it, and she lifted it closer to her eyes.

“They look just like any ordin—” she began, and then stopped, and then said, “Oh, no…this must be a trick!”

“Aye? Well, ye could call it that,” said Rob. “But it’s
his
trick, ye ken.”

Tiffany stared at falling flakes drifting in the light of the candle.

Every one of them was Tiffany Aching. A little, frozen, sparkling Tiffany Aching.

Downstairs, Miss Treason burst out laughing.

The doorknob on the door to the tower bedroom was rattled angrily. Roland de Chumsfanleigh (pronounced Chuffley; it wasn’t his fault) carefully paid it no attention.

“What are you doing in there, child?” said a muffled voice peevishly.

“Nothing, Aunt Danuta,” said Roland, without turning around from his desk. One of the advantages of living in a castle was that rooms were easy to lock; his door had three iron locks and two bolts that were as thick as his arm.

“Your father is calling out for you, you know!” said another voice, with even more peeve.

“He whispers, Aunt Araminta,” Roland said calmly, carefully writing an address on an envelope. “He only cries out when you set the doctors on him.”

“It’s for his own good!”

“He cries out,” Roland repeated, and then licked the flap on the envelope.

Aunt Araminta rattled the doorknob again.

“You are a very ungrateful child! You will starve, you know! We will get the guards to batter this door down!”

Roland sighed. The castle had been built by people who did not like to have their doors battered down, and anyone trying to do that here would have to carry the battering ram up a narrow spiral staircase with no room at the top to turn around, and then find a way to knock down a door four planks thick and made of oak timbers so ancient, it was like iron. One man could defend this room for months, if he had provisions. He heard some more grumbling outside and then the echo of the aunts’ shoes as they went down the tower. Then he heard them screaming at the guards again.

It wouldn’t do them much good. Sergeant Roberts and his guards
*
were edgy about taking orders from the aunts. Everyone knew, though, that if the Baron died before the boy was twenty-one, the aunts would legally run the estate until he
was
. And while the Baron was very ill, he was not dead. It was not a happy time to be a disobedient guard, but the sergeant and his men survived the anger of the aunts by being, when their orders justified it, deaf, stupid, forgetful, confused, ill, lost, or—in the case of Kevin—foreign.

For now, Roland kept his excursions for the small hours, when no one was around and he could pillage the kitchen. That’s when he went in to see his father. The doctors kept the old man dosed with something, but Roland held his hand for a while for the comfort that it gave. If he found jars of wasps or leeches, he threw them into the moat.

He stared at the envelope. Perhaps he ought to tell Tiffany about this, but he didn’t like to think about it. It would worry her and she might try to rescue him again, and that wouldn’t be right. This was something he had to face. Besides,
he
wasn’t locked in.
They
were locked out. While he held the tower, there was a place where they couldn’t poke and pry and steal. He’d got what was left of the silver candlesticks under his bed, along with what remained of the antique silver cutlery (“gone to be valued,” they’d said) and his mother’s jewel box. He’d been a bit late finding that; it was missing her wedding ring and the silver-and-garnet necklace his grandmother had left to her.

But tomorrow he’d get up early and ride over to Twoshirts with the letter. He liked writing them. They turned the world into a nicer place, because you didn’t have to include the bad bits.

Roland sighed. It would have been nice to tell Tiffany that in the library he’d found a book called
Sieges and Survival
by the famous general Callus Tacticus (who invented “tactics,” which was interesting). Who’d have thought such an ancient book could be so useful? The general had been very firm about having provisions, so Roland had plenty of small potatoes, large sausages, and heavy dwarf bread, which was handy to drop on people.

He glanced across the room, where there was a portrait of his mother that he had carried up from the cellar where
they
had left it (“waiting to be cleaned,” they said). Right beside it, if you knew what you were looking for, an area of wall about the size of a small door looked lighter than the rest of the stones. The candlestick next to it looked slightly lopsided, too.

There were lots of advantages to living in a castle.

Outside, it began to snow.

The Nac Mac Feegles peered out at the fluffy flakes from the thatch of Miss Treason’s cottage. By the light that managed to leak out from the grubby windows below, they watched the tiny Tiffanys whirl past.

“Say it wi’ snowflakes,” said Big Yan. “Hah!”

Daft Wullie snatched a spiraling flake. “Ye gotta admit he’s done the wee pointy hat really well,” he said. “He must like the big wee hag a lot.”

“It disna make any
sense
!” said Rob Anybody. “He’s the Winter! He’s all the snow an’ ice an’ storms an’ frosts. She’s just a wee big girl! Ye canna say that’s an ideal match! Whut do ye say, Billy? Billy?”

The gonnagle was chewing the end of his mousepipes while staring at the flakes with a faraway look in his eyes. But somehow Rob’s voice broke into his thoughts, because he said: “Whut does he ken aboot people? He’s no’ as alive as a wee insect, yet he’s as powerful as the sea. An’ he’s sweet on the big wee hag. Why? Whut can she be tae him? Whut will he do next? I tell ye this: Snowflakes is just the beginning. We must watch oot, Rob. This may become verra bad….”

Up in the mountains, 990,393,072,007 Tiffany Achings landed lightly on the old packed snow on a ridge and began an avalanche that carried away more than a hundred trees and a hunting lodge. This wasn’t Tiffany’s fault.

It wasn’t her fault that people slipped on packed layers of her, or couldn’t open the door because she was piled up outside it, or got hit by handfuls of her thrown by small children. Most of her had melted by breakfast time the next day, and besides, no one noticed anything strange except witches who don’t take people’s word for
things, and a lot of kids no one listened to.

Even so, Tiffany woke up feeling very embarrassed.

Miss Treason didn’t help at all.

“At least he likes you,” she said while she ferociously wound up her clock.

“I wouldn’t know about that, Miss Treason,” said Tiffany, really not wanting this conversation at all. She was washing the dishes at the sink, her back to the old woman, and she was glad that Miss Treason could not see her face—and, if it came to it, that she couldn’t see Miss Treason’s face, either.

“What will your young man say about it, I wonder?”

“What young man is that, Miss Treason?” said Tiffany, as stonily as she could manage.

“He writes you letters, girl!”

And I expect you read them with my eyes, Tiffany thought. “Roland? He’s just a friend…sort of,” she said.

“A
sort
of friend?”

I’m not going into this, Tiffany thought. I bet she’s grinning. It’s not her business, anyway.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s right, Miss Treason. A sort of friend.”

There was a long silence, which Tiffany used to scrub out the bottom of an iron saucepan.

“It is important to have friends,” said Miss Treason, in a voice that was somehow smaller than it had been. It sounded as though Tiffany had won. “When you have finished, dear, please be kind enough to fetch me my shamble bag.”

Tiffany did so, and hurried off into the dairy. It was always good to get in there. It reminded her of home, and she could think better. She—

There was a cheese-shaped hole in the bottom of the door, but
Horace was back in his broken cage, making a very faint
mnmnmnmn
noise that may have been cheese snores. She left him alone and dealt with the morning’s milk.

At least it wasn’t snowing. She felt herself blushing, and tried to stop herself from even thinking about it.

And there was going to be a coven meeting tonight. Would the other girls know? Hah! Of course they would. Witches paid attention to snow, especially if it was going to be embarrassing for somebody.

“Tiffany? I wish to speak with you,” Miss Treason called out.

Miss Treason had hardly ever called her Tiffany before. It was quite worrying to hear her say the name.

Miss Treason was holding up a shamble. Her seeing-eye mouse was dangling awkwardly among the bits of bone and ribbon.

“This is so inconvenient,” she said, and raised her voice. “Ach, ye mudlins! C’mon oot! I ken ye’re there! I can see ye lookin’ at me!”

Feegle heads appeared from behind very nearly everything.

“Good! Tiffany Aching, sit down!”

Tiffany sat down quickly.

“At a time like this, too,” said Miss Treason, laying down the shamble. “This is so inconvenient. But there is no doubt.” She paused for a moment and said: “I will die the day after tomorrow. On Friday, just before half past six in the morning.”

It was an impressive statement, and did not deserve this reply: “Oh, that’s a shame, tae be missin’ the weekend like that,” said Rob Anybody. “Are ye goin’ somewhere nice?”