A Hat Full Of Sky

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!’ 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.

‘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 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 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 and have buns!’

‘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.’

‘Um, 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