Wintersmith

Properly, or else I’ll get angry! Good. That feels better, doesn’t it? Let’s have no more of this silliness—”
    After ten minutes of listening to people being scolded, grumbled at, and generally prodded, Tiffany crept out again, cut through the woods, and walked into the clearing via the track. There was a woman hurrying toward her, but she stopped when Tiffany said: “Excuse me, is there a witch near here?”
    “Ooooh, yes,” said the woman, and gave Tiffany a hard stare. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
    “No,” said Tiffany, and thought: I lived here for months, Mrs. Carter, and I saw you most days. But I always wore the hat. People always talk to the hat. Without the hat, I’m in disguise.
    “Well, there’s Miss Hawkin,” said Mrs. Carter, as if reluctant to give away a secret. “Be careful, though.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “She turns into a terrible monster when she’s angry! I’ve seen her! She’s all right with us, of course,” she added. “Lots of young witches have been coming to learn things from her!”
    “Gosh, she must be good!”
    “She’s amazing,” Mrs. Carter went on. “She’d only been here five minutes and she seemed to know all about us!”
    “Amazing,” said Tiffany. You’d think that somebody wrote it all down. Twice. But that wouldn’t be interesting enough, would it? And who would believe that a real witch bought her face from Boffo?
    “And she’s got a cauldron that bubbles green,” Mrs. Carter said with great pride. “All down the sides. That’s proper witching, that is.”
    “It sounds like it,” said Tiffany. No witch she’d met had done anything with a cauldron apart from make stew, but somehow people believed in their hearts that a witch’s cauldron should bubble green. And that must be why Mr. Boffo sold Item #61 Bubbling Green Cauldron Kit, $14, extra sachets of Green, $1 each.
    Well, it worked. It probably shouldn’t, but people were people. She didn’t think Annagramma would be particularly interested in a visit right now, especially from someone who’d read all the way through the Boffo catalogue, so she retrieved her broom and headed on to Granny Weatherwax’s cottage.
    There was a chicken run out in the back garden now. It had been carefully woven out of pliable hazel, and contented werk s were coming from the other side.
    Granny Weatherwax was coming out of the back door. She looked at Tiffany as if the girl had just come back from a ten-minute stroll.
    “I’ve got business down in the town right now,” she said. “It wouldn’t worry me if you came, too.” That was, from Granny, as good as a brass band and an illuminated scroll of welcome. Tiffany fell in alongside her as she strode off along the track.
    “I hope I find you well, Mistress Weatherwax?” she said, hurrying to keep up.
    “I’m still here after another winter, that’s all I know,” said Granny. “You look well, girl.”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “We saw the steam from up here,” said Granny.
    Tiffany said nothing. That was it? Well, yes. From Granny, that would be it.
    After a while Granny said: “Come back to see your young friends, eh?”
    Tiffany took a deep breath. She’d been through this in her head dozens of times: what she would say, what Granny would say, what she would shout, what Granny would shout…
    “You planned it, didn’t you?” she said. “If you’d suggested one of the others, they’d probably have got the cottage, so you suggested me. And you knew, you just knew that I’d help her. And it’s all worked out, hasn’t it? I bet every witch in the mountains knows what happened by now. I bet Mrs. Earwig is seething. And the best bit is, no one got hurt. Annagramma’s picked up where Miss Treason left off, all the villagers are happy, and you’ve won! Oh, I expect you’ll say it was to keep me busy and teach me important things and keep my mind off the Wintersmith, but you still won!”
    Granny Weatherwax walked on calmly. Then she said: “I see you got your little trinket back.”
    It was like having a bolt of lightning and then not getting any thunder, or throwing a pebble into a pool and not getting a splash.
    “What? Oh. The horse. Yes! Look, I—”
    “What kind of fish?”
    “Er…pike,” said Tiffany.
    “Ah? Some likes ’em, but they are too muddy for my taste.”
    And that was it. Against Granny’s calm she had nowhere to go. She could nag, she could whine, and it wouldn’t make any