I Shall Wear Midnight

of action. Your mind picks it up and doesn’t know what to do with it, so it files it under “stink”. All the magically inclined can smell it; but when people encounter it, it changes them, makes them a little bit like him. And so trouble follows wherever he goes.’

And Tiffany knew exactly what kind of trouble she meant, even though her memories shot her back in time to before the Cunning Man had woken again.

In her mind’s eye she could see the black-edged pieces blowing back and forth in the late-autumn wind, which sighed with despair in her mind’s ear, and worst of all, oh yes, worst of all, her mind’s nose snuffed up the sharp acrid stink of ancient, half-burned paper. In her memory some of the pieces fluttered in the pitiless wind like moths that had been swatted and broken, but were still hopelessly trying to fly.

And there were stars on them.

People had marched to the rough music and roughly dragged out the cracked old woman whose only crime, as far as Tiffany could see, was that she had no teeth left and smelled of wee. They had thrown stones, they had smashed windows, they had killed the cat, and all this had been done by good people, nice people, people that she knew and met every day, and they had done all these things which, even now, they never talked about. It was a day that somehow had vanished from the calendar. And on that day, with a pocketful of charred stars, not knowing what it was she was doing, but determined to do it, she had become a witch.

‘You said that others have fought him?’ she said now to Miss Smith. ‘How did they manage it?’

‘That last cupcake was still in the bag with the baker’s name on it, I’m sure of it. You’re not sitting on it, are you?’ Miss Smith cleared her throat and said, ‘By being very powerful witches, by understanding what it means to be a powerful witch, and by taking every chance, using every trick and, I suspect, understanding the Cunning Man’s mind before he understands theirs. I have trudged through a long time to learn about the Cunning Man,’ she added, ‘and the one thing I can tell you for certain is that the way to kill the Cunning Man is with cunning. You will need to be more cunning than he is.’

‘He can’t be that cunning if he’s taken all this time to find me,’ said Tiffany.

‘Yes, that puzzles me,’ said Miss Smith. ‘And it should puzzle you. I would have expected it to have taken him a very long time. More than two years, anyway. He’s either been very clever — and frankly he has nothing to be clever with — or somehow something else has drawn you to his attention. Someone magical, I would guess. Do you know any witches who aren’t your friend?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Tiffany. ‘Are any of the witches who have defeated him still alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was wondering, if I found one — perhaps they could tell me how they did it?’

‘I’ve told you. He’s the Cunning Man. Why should he fall for the same trick twice? You have to find your own way. Those who have trained you would expect nothing less.’

‘This isn’t some kind of test, is it?’ said Tiffany, and then felt embarrassed at how lame that sounded.

‘Don’t you remember what Granny Weatherwax always says?’ said Miss Smith.

‘Everything is a test.’ They said it together with one voice, looked at one another and laughed.

At which point, there was a squawk. Miss Smith opened the door and a small white chicken walked in, looked around curiously and exploded. Where it had been was an onion, fully rigged with mast and sails.

‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ said Miss Smith. She sighed. ‘Happens all the time, I’m afraid. The Unreal Estate is never static, you see. All the magic, banging together, bits of spells winding themselves around other spells, whole new spells being created that nobody has ever thought of before … it’s a mess. It generates things quite randomly. Yesterday I found a book on growing chrysanthemums, printed in copper on water. You would think it would tend to slosh about a bit, but it all seemed to hang together until the magic ran out.’

‘That was bad luck for the chicken,’ said Tiffany nervously.

‘Well, I can guarantee that it wasn’t a chicken two minutes ago,’ said Miss Smith, ‘and now it’s probably enjoying being a seagoing vegetable. Now perhaps you can see why I don’t spend too much time down here. I had an incident with a toothbrush once that I will not forget in a hurry.’ She pushed open the door still further, and Tiffany saw the shambles.

There was no mistaking a shambles.²¹ Well, there was at first and she mistook it for a heap of rubbish.

‘It’s amazing what you can find in your pockets if you’re in a magical junk yard,’ said Miss Smith calmly.

Tiffany stared at the giant shambles again. ‘Isn’t that a horse’s skull?²² And isn’t that a bucket of tadpoles?’

‘Yes. Something alive always helps, don’t you find?’

Tiffany’s eyes narrowed. ‘But that is a wizard’s staff, isn’t it? I thought they stopped working if a woman touched one!’

Miss Smith smiled. ‘Well, I’ve had mine ever since I was in my cradle. If you know where to look, you can see the marks I made when I was teething. It’s my staff and it works, although I have to say it started to work better when I took the knob off the end. It didn’t do anything practical and it upsets the balance. Now, will you stop standing there with your mouth open?’

Tiffany’s mouth clamped shut, and then sprang open again. A penny had dropped and it felt as if it had dropped from the moon.

‘You’re her, aren’t you? You must be, you’re her! Eskarina Smith, right? The only woman who ever became a wizard!’

‘Somewhere inside, I suppose so, yes, but it seems such a long time ago, and you know, I never really felt like a wizard, so I never really worried about what anyone said. And anyway, I had the staff, and no one could take that away from me.’ Eskarina hesitated for a moment, and then went on, ‘That’s what I learned at university: to be me, just what I am, and not worry about it. That knowledge is an invisible magical staff, all by itself. Look, I don’t really want to talk about this. It brings back bad memories.’

‘Please forgive me,’ said Tiffany. ‘I just couldn’t stop myself. I’m very sorry if I have dredged up any scary recollections.’

Eskarina smiled. ‘Oh, the scary ones are never a problem. It’s good ones that can be difficult to deal with.’ There was a click from the shambles. Eskarina stood up and walked over to it. ‘Oh dear, of course, only the witch that makes it can read her own shambles, but trust me when I say that the way the skull has turned and the position of the pincushion along the axis of the spinning wheel mean that he is very close. Almost right on top of us, in fact. Or the random magic in this place may be confusing him, and you seem to be everywhere and nowhere, so he’ll go away soon and try to pick up the trail somewhere else. And, as I mentioned, somewhere on the trail he will eat. He’ll get into some fool’s head, and some old lady or some girl who is wearing quite dangerous cult symbols without an inkling of what they really mean will suddenly find herself hounded. Let us hope she can run.’

Tiffany looked around, bewildered. ‘And what happens will be my fault?’

‘Is that the sarcastic whine of a little girl or the rhetorical question of a witch with her own steading?’

Tiffany began to reply, and then stopped. ‘You can travel in time, can’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Then you know what I’m going to answer?’

‘Well, it’s not quite as simple as that,’ said Eskarina, and looked slightly uncomfortable for a moment, much to Tiffany’s surprise and, it has be said, delight. ‘I know, let me see, there are fifteen different replies you might make, but I don’t know which one it will be until you make it, because of the elasticated string theory.’

‘Then all I will say,’ said Tiffany, ‘is thank you very much. I am sorry to have taken up your time. But I need to be getting on; I have so many things to do. Do you know what the time is?’

‘Yes,’ said Eskarina. ‘It is a way of describing one of the notional dimensions of four-dimensional space. But for your purposes, it’s about ten forty-five.’

That seemed to Tiffany to be a bafflingly complicated way of answering the question, but as she opened her mouth to say so, the shambles collapsed and the door opened to let in a stampede of chickens — which did not, however, explode.

Eskarina grabbed Tiffany’s hand, shouting, ‘He has found you! I don’t know how!’

A chicken half jumped, half flapped and half tumbled onto the wreck of the shambles and crowed! Cock-a-doodle-crivens!