Wintersmith (13 page)

As she dried her face, she thought she heard a muffled sound outside and went over to the window. There was frost on—

Oh, no…oh…no…no! He was at it again!

The frost ferns spelled the word “Tiffany.” Over and over.

She grabbed a rag and wiped them off, but the ice only formed again, thicker.

She hurried downstairs. The ferns were all over the windows, and when she tried to wipe them off, the rag froze to the glass. It creaked when she pulled at it.

Her name, all over the window. Over all the windows. Maybe over all the windows in all the mountains. Everywhere.

He’d come back. That was dreadful!

But also, just a bit…cool….

She didn’t think the word, because as far as Tiffany knew the word meant “slightly cold.” But she thought the thought, even so. It was a hot little thought.

“In my day young men would just carve the girl’s initials on a tree,” said Miss Treason, coming down the stairs one careful step at a time. Too late, Tiffany felt the tickle behind her eyes.

“It’s not funny, Miss Treason! What shall I do?”

“I don’t know. If possible, be yourself.”

Miss Treason bent down creakily and opened her hand. The seeing-eye mouse hopped down onto the floor, turned, and stared at her with tiny black eyes for a moment. She prodded it with a finger. “Go on, off you go. Thank you,” she said, and then it scuttled off to a hole.

Tiffany helped her upright, and the old witch said: “You’re starting to snivel, aren’t you.”

“Well, it’s all a bit—” Tiffany began. The little mouse had looked so lost and forlorn.

“Don’t cry,” said Miss Treason. “Living this long’s not as wonderful as people think. I mean, you get the same amount of youth as everyone else, but a great big extra helping of being very old and deaf and creaky. Now, blow your nose and help me on with the ravens’ perch.”

“He might still be out there…” Tiffany mumbled, as she eased the perch onto the thin shoulders.

Then she rubbed at the window again and saw shapes and movement.

“Oh…they came…” she said.

“What?” said Miss Treason. She stopped. “There’s lots of people out there!”

“Er…yes,” said Tiffany.

“What do you know about this, my girl?”

“Well, you see, they kept asking when—”

“Fetch my skulls! They mustn’t see me without my skulls! How does my hair look?” said Miss Treason, frantically winding up her clock.

“It looks nice—”

“Nice?
Nice?
Are you mad? Mess it up this minute!” Miss Treason demanded. “And fetch my most raggedy cloak! This one’s far too clean! Move yourself, child!”

It took several minutes to get Miss Treason ready, and a lot of the time was spent convincing her that taking the skulls out in daylight might be dangerous, in case they got dropped and someone saw the labels. Then Tiffany opened the door.

A murmur of conversation crashed into silence.

There were people in a crowd all around the door. As Miss Treason stepped forward, it parted to leave a clear path.

To her horror, Tiffany saw a dug grave on the other side of the clearing. She hadn’t expected that. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but a dug grave wasn’t it.

“Who dug—?”

“Our blue friends,” said Miss Treason. “I asked them to.”

And then the crowd started to cheer. Women hurried forward with big bunches of yew, holly, and mistletoe, the only green things growing. People were laughing. People were crying. They clustered around the witch, forcing Tiffany out to the edge of the crowd. She went quiet and listened.

“We don’t know what we’ll do without you, Miss Treason.”—“I don’t think we’ll get another witch as good as you, Miss Treason!”—“We never thought you’d go, Miss Treason. You
brought my ol’ granddad into the world.”—

Walking into the grave, Tiffany thought. Well, that’s style. That is…solid gold Boffo. They’ll remember that for the rest of their lives—

“In that case you shall keep all the puppies but one—” Miss Treason had stopped to organize the crowd. “The custom is to give that one to the owner of the dog. You should have kept the bitch in, after all, and minded your fences. And your question, Mister Blinkhorn?”

Tiffany stood up straight. They were bothering her! Even this morning! But she…wanted to be bothered. Being bothered was her life.

“Miss Treason!” she snapped, pushing her way through the mob. “Remember you have an appointment!”

It wasn’t the best thing to say, but a lot better than: “You said you were going to die in about five minutes’ time!”

Miss Treason turned and looked uncertain for a moment.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, indeed. We had better get on.” Then, still talking to Mr. Blinkhorn about some complex problem concerning a fallen tree and someone’s shed, and with the rest of the crowd trailing after her, she let Tiffany walk her gently to the graveside.

“Well, at least you’ve got a happy ending, Miss Treason,” Tiffany whispered. It was a silly thing to say and deserved what it got.

“We make happy endings, child, day to day. But you see, for the witch there are no happy endings. There are just endings. And here we are….”

Best not to think, thought Tiffany. Best not to think you’re climbing down an actual ladder into an actual grave. Try not to think about helping Miss Treason down the ladder onto the leaves
that are piled up at one end. Do not let yourself know you’re standing in a grave.

Down here, the horrible clock seemed to clank even louder:
clonk-clank, clonk-clank
….

Miss Treason trod the leaves down a bit and said cheerfully, “Yes, I can see myself being quite comfortable here. Listen, child, I told you about the books, did I not? And there is a small gift for you under my chair. Yes, this seems adequate. Oh, I forgot…”

Clonk-clank, clonk-clank
…went the clock, sounding much louder down there.

Miss Treason stood on tiptoe and poked her head over the edge of the hole. “Mr. Easy! You owe two months’ rent to the Widow Langley! Understand? Mr. Plenty, the pig belongs to Mrs. Frumment, and if you don’t give it back to her, I shall come back and groan under your window! Mistress Fullsome, the Dogelley family have had Right of Passage over the Turnwise pasture since even I cannot remember, and you must…you must…”

Clon…k.

There was a moment, one long moment, when the sudden silence of the clock not ticking anymore filled the clearing like thunder.

Slowly Miss Treason sagged down onto the leaves.

It took a few dreadful seconds for her brain to start working, and then Tiffany screamed at the people clustered above: “Go back, all of you! Give her some air!”

She knelt down as they backed hurriedly away.

The smell of the raw soil was sharp in the air. At least Miss Treason seemed to have died with her eyes shut. Not everyone did. Tiffany hated having to shut them for people; it was like killing them all over again.

“Miss Treason?” she whispered. That was the first test. There were a lot of them, and you had to do them all: speak to them, raise an arm, check the pulses including the one behind the ear, check for breath with a mirror…and she’d always been so nervous about getting them wrong that the first time she’d had to go out to deal with someone who looked dead—a young man who’d been in a horrible sawmill accident—she’d done every single test, even though she’d had to go and find his head.

There were no mirrors in Miss Treason’s cottage.

In that case she—

—should think! This is Miss Treason here! And I heard her wind her clock up only a few minutes ago!

She smiled.

“Miss Treason!” she said, very close to the woman’s ear. “I know you’re in there!”

And that’s when the morning, which had been sad, weird, odd, and horrible, became…Boffo all the way.

Miss Treason smiled.

“Have they gone?” she inquired.

“Miss Treason!” said Tiffany sternly. “That was a terrible thing to do!”

“I stopped my clock with my thumbnail,” said Miss Treason proudly. “Couldn’t disappoint them, eh? Had to give ’em a show!”

“Miss Treason,” said Tiffany severely, “did you make up the story about your clock?”

“Of course I did! And it’s a wonderful bit of folklore, a real corker. Miss Treason and her clockwork heart! Might even become a myth, if I’m lucky. They’ll remember Miss Treason for thousands of years!”

Miss Treason closed her eyes again.

“I’ll certainly remember you, Miss Treason,” said Tiffany. “I will really, because—”

The world had gone gray, and was getting grayer. And Miss Treason had gone very still.

“Miss Treason?” said Tiffany, nudging her. “Miss Treason?”

M
ISS
E
UMENIDES
T
REASON
,
AGED ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN
?

Tiffany heard the voice inside her head. It didn’t seem to have come through her ears. And she’d heard it before, making her quite unusual. Most people hear the voice of Death only once.

Miss Treason stood up, without the creak of even one bone. And she looked just like Miss Treason, solid and smiling. What now lay on the dead leaves was, in this strange light, just a shadow.

But a very tall dark figure was standing beside her. It was Death himself. Tiffany had seen him before, in his own land beyond the Dark Door, but you didn’t need to have met him before to know who he was. The scythe, the long hooded robe, and of course the bundle of hourglasses were all clues.

“Where are your manners, child?” said Miss Treason.

Tiffany looked up and said: “Good morning.”

G
OOD
M
ORNING
, T
IFFANY
A
CHING
,
AGED THIRTEEN
, said Death in his no-voice. I
SEE YOU ARE IN GOOD HEALTH
.

“A little curtsy would be in order too,” said Miss Treason.

To Death? thought Tiffany. Granny Aching wouldn’t have liked that. Never bend the knee to tyrants, she would say.

A
T LAST
, M
ISS
E
UMENIDES
T
REASON
,
WE MUST WALK TOGETHER
. Death took her gently by the arm.

“Hey, wait a minute!” said Tiffany. “Miss Treason is one hundred and thirteen!”

“Er…I adjusted it slightly for professional reasons,” said Miss Treason. “One hundred and eleven sounds so…adolescent.” As if
to hide her ghostly embarrassment, she plunged her hand into her pocket and pulled out the spirit of the ham sandwich.

“Ah, it worked,” she said. “I know I—where has the mustard gone?”

M
USTARD IS ALWAYS TRICKY
, said Death as they began to fade.

“No mustard? What about pickled onions?”

P
ICKLES OF ALL SORTS DON
’
T SEEM TO MAKE IT
. I’
M SORRY
. Behind them, the outline of a door appeared.

“No relishes in the next world? That’s dreadful! What about chutneys?” said the vanishing Miss Treason.

T
HERE
’
S JAM
. J
AM WORKS
.

“Jam? Jam! With ham?”

And they were gone. The light went back to normal. Sound came back. Time came back.

Once again the thing to do was not to think too deeply, just keep her thoughts nice and level and focused on what she had to do.

Watched by the people still hovering around the clearing, Tiffany went and got some blankets, bundling them up so that when she carried them back to the grave, no one would notice that the two Boffo skulls and the spiderweb-making machine were tucked inside. Then with Miss Treason and the secret of Boffo safely tucked away, she filled in the grave, and at this point a couple of men ran and helped her—right until there came, from under the soil:

Clonk-clank. Clonk.

The men froze. So did Tiffany, but her Third Thoughts cut in with: Don’t worry! Remember, she stopped it! A falling stone or something must have started it going again!

She relaxed and said sweetly: “That was probably just her saying good-bye.”

The rest of the soil got shoveled in really quickly.

And now I’m part of the Boffo, Tiffany thought, as the people hurried back to their villages. But Miss Treason worked very hard for them. She deserves to be a myth, if that’s what she wants. And I’ll bet, I’ll bet that on dark nights they’ll hear her….

But now there was nothing but the wind in the trees.

She stared at the grave.

Someone should say something. Well? She was the witch, after all.

There wasn’t much religion on the Chalk or in the mountains. The Omnians came and had a prayer meeting about once a year, and sometimes a priest from the Nine Day Wonderers or the See of Little Faith or the Church of Small Gods would come by on a donkey. People went to listen, if a priest sounded interesting or went red and shouted, and they sang the songs if they had a good tune. And then they went home again.

“We are small people,” her father had said. “It ain’t wise to come to the attention of the gods.”

Tiffany remembered the words he had said over the grave of Granny Aching, what seemed like a lifetime ago. On the summer turf of the downlands, with the buzzards screaming in the sky, they had seemed to be all there was to say. So she said them now:

She saw a movement, and then Billy Bigchin, the gonnagle, scrambled onto the turned earth of the grave. He gave Tiffany a solemn look, then unslung his mousepipes and began to play.

Humans could not hear the mousepipes very well because the
notes were too high, but Tiffany could feel them in her head. A gonnagle could put many things into his music, and she felt sunsets, and autumns, and the mist on hills and the smell of roses so red they were nearly black….