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It was hard to be a witch when people thought you were still only ten. Admittedly, Tiffany was indeed still only ten, but she didn't see that that was any cause for people to go round thinking it.
People on the Chalk had a fairly fixed idea of witches. Tiffany blamed The Goode Childe's Booke of Faerie Tales. It was the sort of book that filled people's heads with the stories 'everyone knew' - that princes were handsome and noble, that beautiful stepmothers were not to be trusted, and that witches were ugly, wicked old hags who did awful things.
While Tiffany was personally of the opinion that ten was quite grown-up, even she was forced to admit that you couldn't really call it old. And her brown hair and brown eyes and plain face weren't nearly memorable enough to be ugly. Sometimes she thought it would be nice to be little bit funny-looking - not hideous, but maybe have a big nose or eyes that didn't match - so she could be 'Tiffany, you know, the one with the nose' instead of just 'Tiffany, Joe Aching's youngest girl'.
She didn't really do any awful things, either, apart from the kind that stayed inside your head and nobody else ever knew but you still sometimes lay awake in the middle of the night remembering that you'd thought them.
Remembering that you'd thought things was part of being a witch. Most people lived their lives telling themselves stories like the ones in The Goode Childe's Booke of Faerie Tales. When something didn't fit the way they thought things ought to be, they just sort of... edited it out.
But witches had to have First Sight and Second Thoughts. They saw what was really there and thought about what they were thinking. Tiffany had used both to fight the Queen of the Fairies last year, and while she didn't need any recognition for that, it would have been nice to have been offered some recognition so she could explain to people that she didn't need it.
The events of that night were a bit hazy now. She'd done something that involved seeing even clearer than First Sight, the sort of seeing that you couldn't keep up for long and still be a person. The memory of it wouldn't fit properly inside her human head.
Tiffany had never seen a map big enough to need folding, people on the Chalk generally being of the opinion that it was enough to know where you were going, but if she had, she would have compared it to trying to fold one up and shove it back into a small pocket. You couldn't really figure out how to pack it back into the same space that it had come out of, and once it was crammed in, you knew you'd never get it out again without risking tearing something important.
But it had definitely all happened. Mistress Weatherwax had given her a pointy hat afterwards, although it didn't, if you wanted to get technical about it, strictly exist. It was more a sensation on the top of her head that she knew was there but no one else did. Sometimes she even thought that she could almost see it when she set it down on the table beside her bed, but the little mirror that she had in her bedroom was barely good enough for seeing how she looked in actual hats, let alone ones that weren't there.
Still, of course, there were always the Feegles. There was nothing quite as real as a Nac Mac Feegle. You looked at them and you just knew that your imagination couldn't possibly deserve the blame.
She'd been their kelda briefly before Jeannie had arrived from the Long Lake clan, and ever since they'd taken to following her around as an escort. It was kind of them, Tiffany supposed, but also faintly worrying if you were, after all, now a quite grown-up girl of ten. She was fairly sure they'd grasped that privacy was something "Ye need in the privy, see?" but their position on bedrooms and diaries was a bit less clear.
And they were definitely following her now, as she walked the endless green of the downs above the farm. They were being quiet about it, but so was everything else. She'd grown to recognise the hush that fell in their presence. Animals tended to keep their heads down when pictsies were about; the Nac Mac Feegles could pick a fight with anything, even plants. Even air.
Tiffany stopped near the foot of the burial mound that housed the Old Man's Forge, and glared towards a scrubby thorn tree on the lower slopes. "All right, who's there?" she demanded.
It was a guess, but sometimes seeing what was really there meant knowing that just because you couldn't see it didn't mean it wasn't there.
There was a flurry of panicked scrabbling from the underbrush, and she glimpsed a nervous blue face peering out at her from between the thorns. Feegles, she'd discovered, were a bit like squirrels. They could be perfectly stealthy right up until they realised that you might have spotted them, and then they tended to have a frantic little attention-grabbing spasm before freezing where they were despite still being in full view.
Also, they got into everything, no matter how much time you spent building ever more elaborate contraptions to keep them out.
There was now some not-very-quiet whispering going on underneath the thorn tree.
"Ach, crivens! We're for it noo!"
"Has the big wee hag spotted ye, No'-As-Big-As-Big-Angus-Angus?
"The Big Man said we wasnae to be seen, ye daft puddin'!"
Eventually, after a little more shoving, a Feegle that she recognised as Daft Wullie was ejected from the thicket. He tugged his bonnet off and held it in front of him, staring up at her knock-kneed - and given that the Feegles all wore kilts, it was regrettably easy to see their knees. He appeared to have been struck mute by the pressure of explaining himself, something Feegles didn't like to do just in case there might be lawyers taking notes.
"Were you following me again?" Tiffany said. It was the sort of question that you asked despite knowing the answer, just to see if the other person knew the answer too.
"Us? Followin' ye?" He looked over one shoulder and then the other, contriving to appear as if he'd never seen the other Feegles in his life, and was quite surprised to find himself on this hill while he was at it. "Nae, we wuz just... oot for an itty-bitty stroll, d'ye ken?"
"That just happened to go in the same direction that I was going too?" Tiffany said, with what she hoped was withering sarcasm. She didn't have many people to practice it on.
He nodded, grinning happily. It was hard to win a battle of wits against Daft Wullie, since first you had to explain to him that you'd won, and how.
She gave up. "Well, I don't need you to come with me any further," she said. "I'm just going to the Old Man's Forge." He nodded agreeably, but she wasn't convinced that very much of it was going in. "It's witch business," she tried.
"Oh, aye. Ye'd be the one wi' the knowin' of the hagglin', right enough," he said. "We wouldnae want tae be interferin' wi' such things, would we, lads?"
There was a chorus of agreement from the lads, who'd forgotten they were pretending not to be there.
"So don't keep following me," Tiffany added, just to make it extra clear. Feegles responded best to very direct instructions, as far as they responded to anything at all.
She moved on up the hill. As she walked, there was a faint susurrus from the thorn trees beside her. Not the eldritch susurrus of the Faerie Queen's servants - Tiffany, who had read the dictionary, had once been refunded half an egg after explaining to one of the wandering teachers that 'eldritch' didn't mean 'oblong' - but the slightly more down-to-earth susurrus of a group of little men making their way quickly through the leaves. She stopped.
"Was that you, Daft Wullie?" she demanded, in her most commanding voice. She liked to think it sounded a bit like Mistress Weatherwax and Granny Aching, though she suspected, in her heart of hearts, that it might sound a bit more like her sister Fastidia when she was in a strop.
There was a brief interlude of hurried whispers from the nearby thicket.
"Nae, it wasnae me," called Daft Wullie's voice, after a moment.
"Stop following me!" she said.
"I told ye that wasnae the right answer!" somebody hissed.
Tiffany marched on a little bit faster, for all that trying to leave the Feegles behind was an exercise in futility.
The top of the mound was thick with thorn trees, but the far side was just grass. Most of the grass on the downs had been cropped by the sheep until it was no longer than carpet. Here, though, it had been left to grow long and wild enough to hide a crouching Feegle.
This was the site of the Old Man's Forge.
The Forge was hardly the most impressive relic of the olden days to be found here on the downs. The Chalk was littered with stone circles and tall trilithons, and vast ancient carvings like the White Horse. By comparison, the Forge was easy to overlook. The four big flat rocks were set into the side of the mound, forming a simple shelter that was barely three feet deep.
But someone had dragged these rocks many miles to this place that had no stones of its own, only flint. And there was something wrong with the way that the echoes worked. If you stuck your head between the stones and shouted, it took several seconds for your voice to come back.
The downs were dotted with strange places like this, where things didn't fit together quite right. Since she'd officially become the local witch, Tiffany had been round visiting them all.
Or, as she thought of it, Looking For Trouble.
The old kelda had told her that doors to other worlds were everywhere. While one visit to Fairyland felt like quite enough, it seemed to her that she should keep an eye on things just in case it decided to visit her.
And besides, she couldn't help but feel that being a witch should really have involved a few more adventures by now. Even if there wasn't a magical school with unicorns, there ought to be... something. If being a witch meant doing whatever needed to be done, then what did it mean when there was nothing that needed doing? Or at least nothing that anyone would let Tiffany do that other people couldn't do better. Mistress Weatherwax had mentioned studying midwifery, but she couldn't say that she was very keen. Babies were more than sticky enough after they'd been born.
She stood before the forge, looking into the shallow space between the stones. Local children dared each other to shout their names into it, but that seemed a very childish thing to do when you were ten years old and a witch and had Feegles watching you. She was conscious of a dreadful hush from behind her; the kind of hush that fell when you stood up on stage, or someone said, "Tell us a bit about yourself." A waiting sort of silence that expected you to do something which had better be good.
Last time that she'd needed magic words, she'd read from Diseases of the Sheep. Sheep got all kinds of bizarre, obscure ailments that sounded terribly mysterious. Well, apart from Licky End. She was fairly sure that nobody would get very far performing magic rituals with the words Licky End.
She didn't have it with her now, but still, she knew plenty of words - strange words, interesting words that she'd read in the dictionary and rolled around her head, knowing she would probably never get the chance to use them in real life.
"Scrimshaw!" she shouted into the gap. "Caldera! Frisket! Orlop!"
There was a satisfied sigh from the Feegles behind her, who knew good verbiage when they heard it, and certainly didn't care about trifling little things like what it meant.
There was a pause, and then, as if coming from deep down and far off, the traces of the words came back to her.
Shaw. Ra. Ket. Op.
And that was that. There was no susurrus, no doorway to the world of the fairies. She didn't need to reach for the old iron key she'd tucked in her pocket - a compromise substitute for carrying the frying pan, which was the sort of thing that raised a few questions if you did it too often. There was nothing at all apart from the strange echo.
By now she was starting to feel a bit silly about the whole thing - and there was nothing that Tiffany hated more than feeling like she was being silly.
"And don't you forget it," she said into the Forge sternly, just to make it seem as if she'd done what she came here to do. A good chunk of witchcraft, she'd already realised, was acting as if you always knew what you were doing, whether you did or not.
As she turned away, the whisper of the Forge came back to her - but it didn't repeat her words.
It said: Tiffany.
At this point, most people would have just told themselves that they'd imagined it. They would think about how this was quite a spooky place, and that they'd been wanting something to happen. They would laugh a little bit, just to show how scared they weren't, and hurry home just a fraction too fast. By tomorrow, they would have fully convinced themselves that it had been the echo after all.
But Tiffany was a witch. She believed her ears, and not the sensible part of her brain that just got in the way.
And "don't you forget it" didn't sound the slightest bit like "Tiffany".
She spun back round to stare into the Forge. "Hello?" she said, which she couldn't help but feel, a few moments later, was almost as embarrassing as saying something like, "That wasn't real." At which point her Third Thoughts butted in and pointed out that really, wasn't it twice as silly to be worried about saying something embarrassing at a time like this?
Then, just for a change, her First Thoughts took the reins once more, and suggested that maybe they should pay some attention to what they were doing instead of what they were thinking.
But the Old Man's Forge had gone silent. Far more time had passed than it usually took for the echoes to bounce back. Even so, she stood still and counted up to thirty in her head just to be sure. She was that kind of girl.
No voice came back to her. At last, she turned away.
Tiffany, the Old Man's Forge said behind her.
She started to swing round, but her Second Thoughts said: That didn't work last time, remember? She made herself stand still, though her muscles almost locked up from the effort of not turning the rest of the way. There was a cold, itchy feeling on the back of her neck, like someone standing too close behind her.
It's only there when I don't look at it...
That made a sort of sense, she supposed. After all, it was an echo, and echoes always came back from the wrong direction.
Whatever it was, it knew her name. Worse, she'd given it her name, all those years ago, up here playing dares with her sisters. The pictsies were great believers in the terrible power of giving out your name, Tiffany knew. It gave the lawyers a way to find you.
Lawyers, and maybe other things as well.
She thought about asking Daft Wullie and the others if they could see something behind her, but she couldn't decide if it would be worse if they said they could or if they couldn't.
Of course, there was also a third, even worse option. They could have listened to her and already gone away. That thought was so terrible that she didn't dare ask at all.
She needed to see what was behind her. But how could she see behind her without turning round? She didn't have a mirror with her now, and even the little one she had at the farmhouse was so scratched and blotchy she could hardly see anything. On the other hand, she rarely needed it, because she'd always been good at seeing herself from outside. There was a part of her that was always watching what she was doing from a distance, thinking Second and Third Thoughts.
And she remembered facing the Queen of the Fairies, the way it had felt as if she'd woken up and for a few moments seen everything. She didn't think she would be able to do that again, but she still remembered the shape of it, the way that it had felt to be watching things from outside.
She didn't need to see everything this time. She just needed to...
"See me," Tiffany said, and stepped forward.
But only part of her had stepped forward. The rest of her was left behind. She turned around, and there she was, behind herself. Her body was just standing there, with its eyes shut. She'd never been able to see what she looked like with her eyes shut before.
Behind the other her she saw the entrance to the Old Man's Forge. Except it wasn't shallow at all, looked at from outside like this. It was a deep dark hole filled with an endless black... and somewhere far down in there she saw the gleam of eyes.
Tiffany found herself suddenly gripped by panic. If that was her body back there, then who was here, doing the looking? She looked down at her ghostly self, but there was nothing there - and just like that, she was snapped back inside of her body.
As her knees bucked with surprise, there was a sickening lurching sensation. It took her a moment to realise that this wasn't just the dizziness of returning to her body, but of being carried away from the hill by Feegles, at speed. She found herself deposited near the road to the village, and was promptly sick behind a hedge.
Worried Feegle eyes peered down at her where she lay on the ground. While there was no such thing as a good angle to view a Feegle from, this was definitely one of the worse ones. She made an effort to sit up.
Daft Wullie was wringing his bonnet again. "Oh, waily, waily, we're in trouble noo!" he said.
"Is the big wee hag deid?" said one of the others.
"Dinnae be daft, she's still movin'," hissed another.
"Aye, but we're all deid and so are we!"
Tiffany clutched her head. "You didn't need to carry me all the way down here," she said. It was easier to be sure that they hadn't needed to now that she was already safely down.
"Ach, weel, ye'll have the knowin' of the hiddlins better than us," Daft Wullie said, relaxing a little now that she was up and talking. "But the Big Man said we wuz tae protect ye, d'ye ken? And we tak' oour duty verra seriously!"
"Well, thank you, but you can tell him I don't need you to," she said as she stood up unsteadily. It was slightly reassuring, she thought but would never admit, to know that they would just ignore it anyway. "Who's the hag around here, after all?"
Wullie looked suspiciously blank when faced by something as treacherous as a rhetorical question.
"I am," she clarified, trying not to sigh.
"Oh, aye!" he said, brightening. "Ye'd be the hag, right enough."
"So you can all leave now. I can make my own way home."
An instant later, the Feegles had disappeared, leaving no more than a faint impression of blurred red and blue. She knew they wouldn't really have gone far, but it was good enough for now.
Tiffany reached up and adjusted her hat as she started along the worn chalk track. She could swear, when she'd looked at herself from the outside, that she'd glimpsed it there on her head, just for a moment.
Yes, she was the witch around here. She'd faced the thing in the Forge and she'd survived, hadn't she? It hadn't really even actually tried anything before the Feegles rescued her. If it did, then she would be ready.
And in the meantime, that little 'see me' trick seemed as though it might come in handy...