The Wee Free Men

“But can’t you use a keeping-warm spell?” said Tiffany.



“I could. But a witch doesn’t do that sort of thing. Once you use magic to keep yourself warm, then you’ll start using it for other things.”



“But isn’t that what a witch is supposed to—” Tiffany began.



“Once you learn about magic, I mean really learn about magic, learn everything you can learn about magic, then you’ve got the most important lesson still to learn,” said Miss Tick.



“What’s that?”



“Not to use it. Witches don’t use magic unless they really have to. It’s hard work and difficult to control. We do other things. A witch pays attention to everything that’s going on. A witch uses her head. A witch is sure of herself. A witch always has a piece of string—”



“I always do have a piece of string!” said Tiffany. “It’s always handy!”



“Good. Although there’s more to witchcraft than string. A witch delights in small details. A witch sees through things and around things. A witch sees farther than most. A witch sees things from the other side. A witch knows where she is, who she is, and when she is. A witch would see Jenny Green-Teeth,” she added. “What happened?”



“How did you know I saw Jenny Green-Teeth?”



“I’m a witch. Guess,” said Miss Tick.



Tiffany looked around the tent. There wasn’t much to see, even now that her eyes were getting accustomed to the gloom. The sounds of the outside world filtered through the heavy material.



“I think—”



“Yes?” said the witch.



“I think you heard me telling the teacher.”



“Correct. I just used my ears,” said Miss Tick, saying nothing at all about saucers of ink. “Tell me about this monster with eyes the size of the kind of soup plates that are eight inches across. Where do soup plates come into it?”



“The monster is mentioned in a book of stories I’ve got,” explained Tiffany. “It said Jenny Green-Teeth has eyes the size of soup plates. There’s a picture, but it’s not a good one. So I measured a soup plate, so I could be exact.”



Miss Tick put her chin on her hand and gave Tiffany an odd sort of smile.



“That was all right, wasn’t it?” said Tiffany.



“What? Oh, yes. Yes. Um…yes. Very…exact. Go on.”



Tiffany told her about the fight with Jenny, although she didn’t mention Wentworth in case Miss Tick got funny about it. Miss Tick listened carefully.



“Why the frying pan?” she said. “You could’ve found a stick.”



“A frying pan just seemed a better idea,” said Tiffany.



“Hah! It was. Jenny would’ve eaten you up if you’d used a stick. A frying pan is made of iron. Creatures of that kidney can’t stand iron.”



“But it’s a monster out of a storybook!” said Tiffany. “What’s it doing turning up in our little river?”



Miss Tick stared at Tiffany for a while and then said: “Why do you want to be a witch, Tiffany?”



It had started with The Goode Childe’s Booke of Faerie Tales. Actually, it had probably started with a lot of things, but the stories most of all.



Her mother had read them to her when she was little, and then she’d read them to herself. And all the stories had, somewhere, the witch. The wicked old witch.



And Tiffany had thought, Where’s the evidence?



The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you had no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch.



If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about “a handsome prince”…was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called him handsome? As for “a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long”…well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories didn’t want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told….



And you were told that the old witch lived all by herself in a strange cottage that was made of gingerbread or ran around on giant hen’s feet, and talked to animals, and could do magic.



Tiffany only ever knew one old woman who lived all alone in a strange cottage….



Well, no. That wasn’t quite true. But she had only ever known one old woman who lived in a strange house that moved about, and that was Granny Aching. And she could do magic, sheep magic, and she talked to animals and there was nothing wicked about her. That proved you couldn’t believe the stories.



And there had been the other old woman, the one who everyone said was a witch. And what had happened to her had made Tiffany very…thoughtful.



Anyway, she preferred the witches to the smug handsome princes and especially to the stupid smirking princesses, who didn’t have the sense of a beetle. They had lovely golden hair, too, and Tiffany didn’t. Her hair was brown, plain brown. Her mother called it chestnut, or sometimes auburn, but Tiffany knew it was brown, brown, brown, just like her eyes. Brown as earth. And did the book have any adventures for people who had brown eyes and brown hair? No, no, no…it was the blond people with blue eyes and the redheads with green eyes who got the stories. If you had brown hair you were probably just a servant or a woodcutter or something. Or a dairymaid. Well, that was not going to happen, even if she was good at cheese. She couldn’t be the prince, and she’d never be a princess, and she didn’t want to be a woodcutter, so she’d be the witch and know things, just like Granny Aching—



“Who was Granny Aching?” said a voice.



Who was Granny Aching? People would start asking that now. And the answer was: What Granny Aching was, was there. She was always there. It seemed that the lives of all the Achings revolved around Granny Aching. Down in the village decisions were made, things were done, life went on in the knowledge that in her old wheeled shepherding hut on the hills Granny Aching was there, watching.



And she was the silence of the hills. Perhaps that’s why she liked Tiffany, in her awkward, hesitant way. Her older sisters chattered, and Granny didn’t like noise. Tiffany didn’t make noise when she was up at the hut. She just loved being there. She’d watch the buzzards and listen to the noise of the silence.



It did have a noise, up there. Sounds, voices, animal noises floating up onto the downs somehow made the silence deep and complex. And Granny Aching wrapped this silence around herself and made room inside it for Tiffany. It was always too busy on the farm. There were a lot of people with a lot to do. There wasn’t enough time for silence. There wasn’t time for listening. But Granny Aching was silent and listened all the time.



“What?” said Tiffany, blinking.



“You just said, ‘Granny Aching listened to me all the time,’” said Miss Tick.



Tiffany swallowed. “I think my grandmother was slightly a witch,” she said, with a touch of pride.



“Really? How do you know.”



“Well, witches can curse people, right?” said Tiffany.



“So it is said,” said Miss Tick diplomatically.



“Well, my father said Granny Aching cussed the sky blue,” said Tiffany.



Miss Tick coughed. “Well, cussing, now, cussing isn’t like genuine cursing. Cussing’s more like dang and botheration and darned and drat, you know? Cursing is more on the lines of ‘I hope your nose explodes and your ears go flying away.’”



“I think Granny’s cussing was a bit more than that,” said Tiffany, in a very definite voice. “And she talked to her dogs.”



“And what kind of things did she say to them?” said Miss Tick.



“Oh, things like ‘come by’ and ‘away to me’ and ‘that’ll do,’” said Tiffany. “They always did what she told them.”



“But those are just sheepdog commands,” said Miss Tick dismissively. “That’s not exactly witchcraft.”



“Well, that still makes them familiars, doesn’t it?” Tiffany retorted, feeling annoyed. “Witches have animals they can talk to, called familiars. Like your toad there.”



“I’m not familiar,” said a voice from among the paper flowers. “I’m just slightly presumptuous.”



“And she knew about all kinds of herbs,” Tiffany persisted. Granny Aching was going to be a witch even if Tiffany had to argue all day. “She could cure anything. My father said she could make a shepherd’s pie stand up and baa.” Tiffany lowered her voice. “She could bring lambs back to life….”



You hardly ever saw Granny Aching indoors in the spring and summer. She spent most of the year sleeping in the old wheeled hut, which could be dragged across the downs after the flocks. But the first time Tiffany could remember seeing the old woman in the farmhouse, she was kneeling in front of the fire, putting a dead lamb in the big black oven.



Tiffany had screamed and screamed. And Granny had gently picked her up, a little awkwardly, and sat her on her lap and shushed her and called her “my little jiggit,” while on the floor her sheepdogs, Thunder and Lightning, watched her in doggish amazement. Granny wasn’t particularly at home around children, because they didn’t baa.



When Tiffany had stopped crying out of sheer lack of breath, Granny had put her down on the rug and opened the oven, and Tiffany had watched the lamb come alive again.



When Tiffany got a little older, she found out that jiggit meant “twenty” in the Yan Tan Tethera, the ancient counting language of the shepherds. The older people still used it when they were counting things they thought of as special. She was Granny Aching’s twentieth grandchild.



And when she was older still, she also understood all about the warming oven, which never got more than, well, warm. Her mother would let the bread dough rise in it, and Ratbag the cat would sleep in it, sometimes on the dough. It was just the place to revive a weak lamb that had been born on a snowy night and was near death from the cold. That was how it worked. No magic at all. But that time it had been magic. And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.



“Good, but still not exactly witchcraft,” said Miss Tick, breaking the spell again. “Anyway, you don’t have to have a witch ancestor to be a witch. It helps, of course, because of heredity.”



“You mean like having talents?” said Tiffany, wrinkling her brow.



“Partly, I suppose,” said Miss Tick. “But I was thinking of pointy hats, for example. If you have a grandmother who can pass on her pointy hat to you, that saves a great deal of expense. They are incredibly hard to come by, especially ones strong enough to withstand falling farmhouses. Did Mrs. Aching have anything like that?”



“I don’t think so,” said Tiffany. “She hardly ever wore a hat except in the very cold weather. She wore an old grain sack as a sort of hood. Um…does that count?”



For the first time, Miss Tick looked a little less flinty. “Possibly, possibly,” she said. “Do you have any brothers and sisters, Tiffany?”