A Hat Full Of Sky

also been engaged to be married to Rob Anybody, even if that had only been a sort of political trick. Jeannie knew all that. And the look had said: He is mine. This place is mine. I do not want you here! Keep out!

A pool of silence followed Tiffany and Miss Tick down the lane, since the usual things that rustle in hedges tended to keep very quiet when the Nac Mac Feegle were around.

They reached the little village green and sat down to wait for the carrier’s cart that went just a bit faster than walking pace and would take five hours to get to the village of Twoshirts, where—Tiffany’s parents thought— they’d get the big coach that ran all the way to the distant mountains and beyond.

Tiffany could actually see it coming up the road when she heard the hoofbeats across the green. She turned, and her heart seemed to leap and sink at the same time.

It was Roland, the Baron’s son, on a fine black horse. He leaped down before the horse had stopped, and then stood there looking embarrassed.

‘Ah, I see a very fine and interesting example of a… a… a big stone over there,’ said Miss Tick in a sticky- sweet voice. ‘I’ll just go and have a look at it, shall I?’

Tiffany could have pinched her for that.

‘Er, you’re going, then,’ said Roland as Miss Tick hurried away.

‘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 backwards and forwards 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?’ said 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 got a sword.

Tiffany hadn’t minded that. It stopped people 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 of 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 right back in the old days, people said, by the folk who’d built the stone circles and buried their kin in big earth mounds. And they’d cut out the Horse at one end of this little green valley, ten times bigger than a real horse and, if you didn’t look at it with your mind right, the wrong shape, too. Yet they must have known horses, owned horses, seen them every day, and they weren’t stupid people just because they lived a long time ago.

Tiffany had once asked her father about the look of the Horse, when they’d come all the way over here for a sheep fair, and he told her what Granny Aching had told him when he was a little boy. He passed on what she said word for word, and Tiffany did the same now.

‘’Taint what a horse looks like,’ said Tiffany. ‘It’s what a horse be.’

‘Oh,’ said Miss Tick. But because she was a teacher as well as a witch, and probably couldn’t help herself, she added, ‘The funny thing is, of course, that officially there is no such thing as a white horse. They’re called grey.’1

‘Yes, I know,’ said Tiffany. ‘This one’s white,’ she added, flatly.

That quietened Miss Tick down for a while, but she seemed to have something on her mind.

‘I expect you’re upset about leaving the Chalk, aren’t you?’ she said as the cart rattled on.

‘No,’ said Tiffany.

‘It’s OK to be,’ said Miss Tick.

‘Thank you, but I’m not really,’ said Tiffany.

‘If you want to have a bit of a cry, you don’t have to pretend you’ve got some grit in your eye or anything —’

‘I’m all right, actually,’ said Tiffany. ‘Honestly.’

‘You see, if you bottle that sort of thing up it can cause terrible damage later on.’

‘I’m not bottling, Miss Tick.’