A Hat Full Of Sky - Terry Pratchett [43]
…How dare you invade my world, my land, my life…
But what had the virtual hat done for her? Perhaps the old woman had tricked her, had just made her think there was a hat there. Perhaps she was a bit cracked, like Annagramma had said, and had just got things wrong. Perhaps Tiffany should go home and make Soft Nellies for the rest of her life.
Tiffany turned around and crawled down the bed and opened her suitcase. She pulled out the rough box, opened it in the dark, and closed a hand around the lucky stone.
She’d hoped that there’d be some kind of spark, some kind of friendliness in it. There was none. There was just the roughness of the outside of the stone, the smoothness on the face where it had split, and the sharpness between the two. And the piece of sheep’s wool did nothing but make her fingers smell of sheep, and this made her long for home and feel even more upset. The silver Horse was cold.
Only someone quite close would have heard the sob. It was quite faint, but it was carried on the dark red wings of misery. She wanted, longed for, the hiss of wind in the turf and the feel of centuries under her feet. She wanted that sense, which had never left her before, of being where Achings had lived for thousands of years. She needed blue butterflies and the sounds of sheep and the big empty skies.
Back home, when she’d felt upset, she’d gone up to the remains of the old shepherding hut and sat there for a while. That had always worked.
It was a long way away now. Too far. Now she was full of a horrible, heavy, dead feeling, and there was nowhere to leave it. And it wasn’t how things were supposed to go.
Where was the magic? Oh, she understood that you had to learn about the basic, everyday craft, but when did the “witch” part turn up? She’d been trying to learn, she really had, and she was turning into…well, a good worker, a handy girl with potions and a reliable person. Dependable, like Miss Level.
She’d expected—well, what? Well…to be doing serious witch stuff, you know, broomsticks, magic, guarding the world against evil forces in a noble yet modest way, and then also doing good for poor people because she was a really nice person. And the people she’d seen in the picture had had rather less messy ailments and their children didn’t have such runny noses. Mr. Weavall’s flying toenails weren’t in it anywhere. Some of them boomeranged.
She got sick on broomsticks. Every time. She couldn’t even make a shamble. She was going to spend her days running around after people who, to be honest, could sometimes be doing a bit more for themselves. No magic, no flying, no secrets…just toenails and bogeys.
She belonged to the Chalk. Every day she’d told the hills what they were. Every day they’d told her who she was. But now she couldn’t hear them.
Outside, it began to rain, quite hard, and in the distance Tiffany heard the mutter of thunder.
What would Granny Aching have done? But even folded in the wings of despair she knew the answer to that.
Granny Aching never gave up. She’d search all night for a lost lamb….
She lay looking at nothing for a while, and then lit the candle by the bed and swiveled her legs onto the floor. This couldn’t wait until morning.
Tiffany had a little trick for seeing the hat. If you moved your hand behind it quickly, there was a slight, brief blurriness to what you saw, as though the light coming through the invisible hat took a little more time.
It had to be there.
Well, the candle should give enough light to be sure. If the hat was there, everything would be fine, and it wouldn’t matter what other people thought.
She stood in the middle of the carpet, while lightning danced across the mountains outside, and closed her eyes.
Down in the garden the apple-tree branches flayed in the wind, the dream catchers and curse nets clashing and jangling….
“See me,” she said.
The world went quiet, totally silent. It hadn’t done