A Hat Full Of Sky - Terry Pratchett [94]
“What do you think happened?”
Light burst in upon them.
Someone was wiping Tiffany’s forehead with a damp cloth.
She lay, feeling the beautiful coolness. There were voices around her, and she recognized the chronic-complainer tones of Annagramma:
“…And she was really making a fuss in Zakzak’s. Honestly, I don’t think she’s quite right in the head! I think she’s literally gone cuckoo! She was shouting things and using some kind of, oh, I don’t know, some peasant trick to make us think she’d turned that fool Brian into a frog. Well, of course, she didn’t fool me for one minute—”
Tiffany opened her eyes and saw the round pink face of Petulia, screwed up with concern.
“Um, she’s awake!” said the girl.
The space between Tiffany and the ceiling filled up with pointy hats. They drew back, reluctantly, as she sat up. From above, it must have looked like a dark daisy, closing and opening.
“Where is this?” she said.
“Um, the First Aid and Lost Children’s Tent,” said Petulia. “Um…you fainted when Mistress Weatherwax brought you back from…from wherever you’d gone. Everyone’s been in to see you!”
“She said you’d, like, dragged the monster into, like, the Next World!” said Lucy Warbeck, her eyes gleaming. “Mistress Weatherwax told everyone all about it!”
“Well, it wasn’t quite—” Tiffany began. She felt something prod her in the back. She reached behind her, and her hand came out holding a pointy hat. It was almost gray with age and quite battered. Zakzak wouldn’t have dared try to sell something like this, but the other girls stared at it like starving dogs watching a butcher’s hand.
“Um, Mistress Weatherwax gave you her hat,” breathed Petulia. “Her actual hat.”
“She said you were a born witch and no witch should be without a hat!” said Dimity Hubbub, watching.
“That’s nice,” said Tiffany. She was used to secondhand clothes.
“It’s only an old hat,” said Annagramma.
Tiffany looked up at the tall girl and let herself smile slowly.
“Annagramma?” she said, raising a hand with the fingers open.
Annagramma backed away. “Oh no,” she said. “Don’t you do that! Don’t you do that! Someone stop her doing that!”
“Do you want a balloon, Annagramma?” said Tiffany, sliding off the table.
“No! Please!” Annagramma took another step back, holding her arms in front of her face, and fell over a bench. Tiffany picked her up and patted her cheerfully on a cheek.
“Then I shan’t buy you one,” she said. “But please learn what literally really means, will you?”
Annagramma smiled in a frozen kind of way. “Er, yes,” she managed.
“Good. And then we will be friends.”
She left the girl standing there and went back to pick up the hat.
“Um, you’re probably still a bit woozy,” said Petulia. “You probably don’t understand.”
“Ha, I wasn’t actually frightened, you know,” said Annagramma. “It was all for fun, of course.” No one paid any attention.
“Understand what?” said Tiffany.
“It’s her actual hat!” the girls chorused.
“It’s like, if that hat could talk, what stories it would have to, you know, tell,” said Lucy Warbeck.
“It was just a joke,” said Annagramma to anyone who was listening.
Tiffany looked at the hat. It was very battered, and not extremely clean. If that hat could talk, it would probably mutter.
“Where’s Granny Weatherwax now?” she said.
There was a gasp from the girls. This was nearly as impressive as the hat.
“Um…she doesn’t mind you calling her that?” said Petulia.
“She invited me to,” said Tiffany.
“Only we heard you had to have known her for, like, a hundred years before she let you call her that…” said Lucy Warbeck.
Tiffany shrugged. “Well, anyway,” she said, “do you know where she is?”
“Oh, having tea with the other old witches and yacking on about chutney and how witches today aren’t what they were when she was a girl,” said Lulu Darling.
“What?” said Tiffany. “Just having tea?”
The young witches looked at one another in puzzlement.
“Um, there’s buns too,” said Petulia. “If that’s important.”
“But she opened the door for me. The door into—out of the…the desert! You can’t just sit down after that