A Hat Full Of Sky - Terry Pratchett [7]
“Yes,” said Tiffany.
Roland looked as though he was going to explode with nervousness.
“I got this for you,” he said. “I had it made by a man, er, over in Yelp.” He held out a package wrapped in soft paper.
Tiffany took it and put it carefully in her pocket.
“Thank you,” she said, and dropped a small curtsy. Strictly speaking, that’s what you had to do when you met a nobleman, but it just made Roland blush and stutter.
“O-open it later on,” said Roland. “Er, I hope you’ll like it.”
“Thank you,” said Tiffany sweetly.
“Here’s the cart. Er…you don’t want to miss it.”
“Thank you,” said Tiffany, and curtsied again, because of the effect it had. It was a little bit cruel, but sometimes you had to be.
Anyway, it would be very hard to miss the cart. If you ran fast, you could easily overtake it. It was so slow that “stop” never came as a surprise.
There were no seats. The carrier went around the villages every other day, picking up packages and, sometimes, people. You just found a place where you could get comfortable among the boxes of fruit and rolls of cloth.
Tiffany sat on the back of the cart, her old boots dangling over the edge, swaying backward and forward as the cart lurched away on the rough road.
Miss Tick sat beside her, her black dress soon covered in chalk dust to the knees.
Tiffany noticed that Roland didn’t get back on his horse until the cart was nearly out of sight.
And she knew Miss Tick. By now she would be just bursting to ask a question, because witches hate not knowing things. And sure enough, when the village was left behind, Miss Tick said, after a lot of shifting and clearing her throat:
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“Open what?” asked Tiffany, not looking at her.
“He gave you a present,” said Miss Tick.
“I thought you were examining an interesting stone, Miss Tick,” said Tiffany accusingly.
“Well, it was only fairly interesting,” said Miss Tick, completely unembarrassed. “So…are you?”
“I’ll wait until later,” said Tiffany. She didn’t want a discussion about Roland at this point or, really, at all.
She didn’t actually dislike him. She’d found him in the land of the Queen of the Fairies and had sort of rescued him, although he had been unconscious most of the time. A sudden meeting with the Nac Mac Feegle when they’re feeling edgy can do that to a person. Of course, without anyone actually lying, everyone at home had come to believe that he had rescued her. A nine-year-old girl armed with a frying pan couldn’t possibly have rescued a thirteen-year-old boy who’d had a sword.
Tiffany hadn’t minded that. It stopped people from asking too many questions she didn’t want to answer or even know how to. But he’d taken to…hanging around. She kept accidentally running into him on walks more often than was really possible, and he always seemed to be at the same village events she went to. He was always polite, but she couldn’t stand the way he kept looking like a spaniel that had been kicked.
Admittedly—and it took some admitting—he was a lot less of a twit than he had been. On the other hand, there had been such a lot of twit to begin with.
And then she thought, Horse, and wondered why until she realized that her eyes had been watching the landscape while her brain stared at the past.
“I’ve never seen that before,” said Miss Tick.
Tiffany welcomed it as an old friend. The Chalk rose out of the plains quite suddenly on this side of the hills. There was a little valley cupped into the fall of the down, and there was a carving in the curve it made. Turf had been cut away in long flowing lines, so that the bare chalk made the shape of an animal.
“It’s the White Horse,” said Tiffany.
“Why do they call it that?” said Miss Tick.
Tiffany looked at her.
“Because the chalk is white?” she said, trying not to suggest that Miss Tick was being a bit dense.
“No, I meant why do they call it a horse? It doesn’t look like a horse. It’s just…flowing lines….”
…that look as if they’re moving, Tiffany thought.
It had been cut out of the turf way back in the old days, people said, by the folk who