A Hat Full of Sky

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'Granny?' said Tiffany, as the light began to grow brighter. It brought back tiredness with it, too. 'Yes?'
'What exactly happened just then?'
'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's 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. 'Urn, 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. 'Urn, the First Aid and Lost Children's Tent,' said Petulia. 'Urn . . . you fainted when Mistress Weather-wax 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!' Lucy Warbeck said, 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 back holding a pointy hat. It was almost grey with age and quite battered. Zakzak wouldn't have dared try to sell something like this, but the other girls stared it like starving dogs watching a butcher's hand. 'Urn, 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. 'Urn, 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 hatV 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 yakking 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 teal' 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 and have bunsY 'Um, the ones I saw had icing on,' Petulia ventured, nervously. 'They weren't just homemade-'
'Look,' said Lucy Warbeck, 'we didn't really, you know, see anything? You were just standing there with this, like, glow around you and we couldn't get in and then Gran- Mistress Weatherwax walked up and stepped right in and you both, you know, stood there? And then the glow went zip and vanished and you, like, fell over.'
'What Lucy's failing to say very accurately,' said Annagramma, 'is that we didn't actually see you go anywhere. I'm telling you this as a friend, of course. There was just this glow, which could have been anything.' Annagramma was going to be a good witch, Tiffany considered. She could tell
herself stories that she literally believed. And she could bounce back like a ball. 'Don't forget, I saw the horse,' said Harrieta Bilk. Annagramma rolled her eyes. 'Oh yes, Harrieta thinks she saw some kind of horse in the sky. Except it didn't look like a horse, she says. She says it looked like a horse would look if you took the actual horse away and just left the horsiness, right, Harrieta?'
'I didn't say that!' snapped Harrieta. 'Well, pardon me. That's what it sounded like.'
'Urn, and some people said they saw a white horse grazing in the next field, too, said Petulia. 'And a lot of the older witches said they felt a tremendous amount of-'
'Yes, some people thought they saw a horse in a field but it isn't there any more,' said Annagramma in the singsong voice she used when she thought it was all stupid. 'That must be very rare in the country, seeing horses in fields. Anyway, if there really was a white horse, it was grey.' Tiffany sat on the edge of the table, staring at her knees. Anger at Annagramma had jolted her to life, but now the tiredness was creeping back. 'I suppose none of you saw a little blue man, about six inches high, with red hair?' she said quietly. 'Anyone?' said Annagramma, with malicious cheerfulness. There was a general mumbling of 'no'. 'Sorry, Tiffany,' said Lucy. 'Don't worry,' said Annagramma. 'He probably just rode away on his white horse!' This is going to be like Fairyland all over again, thought Tiffany. Even I can't remember if it was real. Why should anyone believe me? But she had to try. 'There was a dark doorway,' she said slowly, 'and beyond it was a desert of black sand and it was quite light although there were stars in the sky, and Death was there. I spoke to him 'You spoke to him, did you?' said Annagramma. 'And what did he say, pray?'
'He didn't say “pray”,' said Tiffany. 'We didn't talk about much. But he didn't know what an egress was.'
'It's a small type of heron, isn't it?' said Harrieta. There was silence, except for the noise of the Trials outside. 'It's not your fault,' said Annagramma in what was, for her, almost a friendly voice. 'It's like I said: Mistress Weatherwax messes with people's heads.'
'What about the glow?' said Lucy. 'That was probably ball lightning,' said Annagramma. 'That's very strange stuff.'
'But people were, like, hammering on it! It was as hard as ice!'
'Ah, well, it probably felt like that,' said Annagramma, 'but it was . . . probably affecting people's muscles, maybe. I'm only trying to be helpful here,' she added. 'You've got to be sensible. She just stood there. You saw her. There weren't any doors or deserts. There was just her.' Tiffany sighed. She just felt tired. She just wanted to crawl off somewhere. She just wanted to go home. She'd walk there now if her boots weren't suddenly so uncomfortable.
While the girls argued, she undid the laces and tugged one off. Silver-black dust poured out. When it hit the ground it bounced, slowly, curving up into the air again like mist. The girls turned, watching in silence. Then Petulia reached down and caught some of the dust. When she lifted her hand, the fine stuff flowed between her fingers. It fell as slowly as feathers. 'Sometimes things go wrong,' she said, in a faraway voice. 'Mistress Blackcap told me. Haven't any of you been there when old folk are dying?' There were one or two nods, but everyone was watching the dust. 'Sometimes things go wrong,' said Petulia again. 'Sometimes they're dying but they can't leave because they don't know the Way. She said that's when they need you to be there, close to them, to help them find the door so they don't get lost in the dark.'
'Petulia, we're not supposed to talk about this,' said Harrieta, gently. 'No!' said Petulia, her face red. 'It is a time to talk about it, just here, just us! Because she said it's the last thing you can do for someone. She said there's a dark desert they have to cross, where the sand-'
'Hah! Mrs Earwig says that sort of thing is black magic,' said Annagramma, her voice as sharp and sudden as a knife. 'Does she?' said Petulia dreamily as the sand poured down. 'Well, Mistress Blackcap said that sometimes the moon is light and sometimes it's in shadow but you should always remember it's the same moon. And . . . Annagramma?'
'Yes?' Petulia took a deep breath. 'Don't you ever dare interrupt me again as long as you live. Don't you dare. Don't you darel I mean it.' Chapter 13 ri7G Witclj And then . . . there were the Trials themselves. That was the point of the day, wasn't it? But Tiffany, stepping out with the girls around her, sensed the buzz in the air. It said: Was there any point now? After what had happened? Still, people had put up the rope square again, and a lot of the older witches dragged their chairs to the edge of it, and it seemed that it was going to happen after all. Tiffany wandered up to the rope, found a space and sat down on the grass with Granny
Weatherwax's hat in front of her. She was aware of the other girls behind her, and also a buzz or susurration of whispering spreading out into the crowd. '. . . She really did do it, too . . . no, really .. . all the way to the desert... saw the dust... her boots were full, they say . . .' Gossip spreads faster among witches than a bad cold. Witches gossip like starlings. There were no judges, and no prizes. The Trials weren't like that, as Petulia had said. The point was to show what you could do, to show what you'd become, so that people would go away thinking things like That Caramella Bottlethwaite, she's coming along nicely.' It wasn't a competition, honestly. No one won. And if you believed that you'd believe that the moon is pushed around the sky by a goblin called Wilberforce. What was true was that one of the older witches generally opened the thing with some competent but not surprising trick which everyone had seen before but still appreciated. That broke the ice. This year it was old Goodie Trample and her collection of singing mice. But Tiffany wasn't paying attention. On the other side of the roped-off square, sitting on a chair and surrounded by older witches like a queen on her throne, was Granny Weatherwax. The whispering went on. Maybe opening her eyes had opened her ears, too, because Tiffany felt she could hear the whispers all around the square. '.. .Di'n't have no trainin', just did it... did you see that horse?.. .1 never saw no horse!.. .Di 'n 'tjust open the door, she stepped right in!... Yeah, but who was it fetched her back?Esme Weatherwax, that's who!... Yes, that's what I'm sayin', any little fool could've opened the door by luck, but it takes a real witch to bring her back, that's a winner, that is... fought the thing, left it there!... 7 didn 't see you doing anything, Violet Pulsimone! That child... Was there a horse or not? ... Was going to do my dancing broom trick, but that'd be wasted now, of course ... Why did Mistress Weatherwax give the girl her hat, eh? What's she want us to think? She never takes off her hat to no one!' You could feel the tension, crackling from pointy hat to pointy hat like summer lightning. The mice did their best with I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles but it was easy to see that their minds weren't on it. Mice are highly strung and very temperamental. Now people were leaning down beside Granny Weatherwax. Tiffany could see some animated conversations going on. 'You know, Tiffany,' said Lucy Warbeck, behind her, 'all you've got to do is, like, stand up and admit it. Everyone knows you did it. I mean, no one's ever, like, done something like that at the Trials!'