Chapter 1
Leaving
It came crackling over the hills, like an invisible fog. Movement without a body tired it, and it drifted very slowly. It wasn ‘t thinking now. It had been months since it had last thought, because the brain that was doing the thinking for it had died. They always died. So now it was naked
again, and frightened.
It could hide in one of the blobby white creatures that baa ‘d nervously as it crawled over the turf. But they had useless brains, capable of thinking only about grass and making other things
that went baa. No. They would not do. It needed, needed something better, a strong mind, a mind with power, a mind that could keep it safe.
It searched . . .
The new boots were all wrong. They were stiff and shiny. Shiny boots! That was
disgraceful. Clean boots, that was different. There was nothing wrong with putting a
bit of a polish on boots to keep the wet out. But boots had to work for a living. They
shouldn’t shine.
Tiffany Aching, standing on the rug in her bedroom, shook her head. She’d have to
scuff the things as soon as possible.
Then there was the new straw hat, with a ribbon on it. She had some doubts about
that, too.
She tried to look at herself in the mirror, which wasn’t easy because the mirror was
not much bigger than her hand, and cracked and blotchy. She had to move it around to
try and see as much of herself as possible and remember how the bits fitted together.
But today . . . well, she didn’t usually do this sort of thing in the house, but it was
important to look smart today, and since no one was around . . .
She put the mirror down on the rickety table by the bed, stood in the middle of the
threadbare rug, shut her eyes and said:
‘See me.’
And away on the hills something, a thing with no body and no mind but a terrible hunger and a
bottomless fear, felt the power.
It would have sniffed the air, if it had a nose.
It searched.
It found.
Such a strange mind, like a lot of minds inside one another, getting smaller and smaller! So
strong! So close!
It changed direction slightly, and went a little faster. As it moved, it made a noise like a swarm of flies. The sheep, nervous for a moment about something they couldn ‘t see, hear or smell, baa
‘d… … and went back to chewing grass.
Tiffany opened her eyes. There she was, a few feet away from herself. She could see the
back of her own head.
Carefully, she moved around the room, not looking down at the ‘her’ that was
moving, because she found that if she did that then the trick was over.
It was quite difficult, moving like that, but at last she was in front of herself and
looking herself up and down.
Brown hair to match brown eyes . . . there was nothing she could do about that. At
least her hair was clean and she’d washed her face.
She had a new dress on, which improved things a bit. It was so unusual to buy new
clothes in the Aching family that, of course, it was bought big so that she’d ‘grow into
it’. But at least it was pale green, and it didn’t actually touch the floor. With the shiny
new boots and the straw hat she looked . . . like a farmer’s daughter, quite respectable,
going off to her first job. It’d have to do.
From here she could see the pointy hat on her head, but she had to look hard for it.
It was like a glint in the air, gone as soon as you saw it. That’s why she’d been
worried about the new straw hat, but it had simply gone through it as if the new
hat wasn’t there.
This was because, in a way, it wasn’t. It was invisible, except in the rain. Sun and
wind went straight through, but rain and snow somehow saw it, and treated it as if it
were real.
She’d been given it by the greatest witch in the world, a real witch with a black dress
and a black hat and eyes that could go through you like turpentine goes through a sick
sheep. It had been a kind of reward. Tiffany had done magic, serious magic. Before
she had done it she hadn’t known that she could; when she had been doing it she hadn’t
known that she was; and after she had done it she hadn’t known how she had. Now
she had to learn how.
‘See me not,’ she said. The vision of her . . . or whatever it was, because she was not
exactly sure about this trick . . . vanished.
It had been a shock, the first time she’d done this. But she’d always found it easy to
see herself, at least in her head. All her memories were like little pictures of herself doing
things or watching things, rather than the view from the two holes in the front of her
head. There was a part of her that was always watching her.
Miss Tick – another witch, but one who was easier to talk to than the witch who’d
given Tiffany the hat – had said that a witch had to know how to ‘stand apart’, and that
she’d find out more when her talent grew, so Tiffany supposed the ‘see me’ was part of
this.
Sometimes Tiffany thought she ought to talk to
Miss Tick about ‘see me’. It felt as if she was stepping out of her body, but still had a sort of
ghost body that could walk around. It all worked as long as her ghost eyes didn’t look
down and see that she was just a ghost body. If that happened, some part of her
panicked and she found herself back in her solid body immediately. Tiffany had, in the
end, decided to keep this to herself. You didn’t have to tell a teacher everything. Anyway,
it was a good trick for when you didn’t have a mirror.
Miss Tick was a sort of witch-finder. That seemed to be how witchcraft worked. Some
witches kept a magical lookout for girls who showed promise, and found them an older
witch to help them along. They didn’t teach you how to do it. They taught you how to
know what you were doing.
Witches were a bit like cats. They didn’t much like one another’s company, but they
did like to know where all the other witches were, just in case they needed them. And what you might need them for was to tell you, as a friend, that you were beginning to
cackle.
Witches didn’t fear much, Miss Tick had said, but what the powerful ones were afraid
of, even if they didn’t talk about it, was what they called ‘going to the bad’. It was too easy to slip into careless little cruelties because you had power and other people hadn’t, too
easy to think other people didn’t matter much, too easy to think that ideas like
right and wrong didn’t apply to you. At the end of that road was you
dribbling and cackling to yourself all alone in a gingerbread house, growing warts on
your nose.
Witches needed to know other witches were watching them.
And that, Tiffany thought, was why the hat was there. She could touch it any time,
provided she shut her eyes. It was a kind of reminder . . .
Tiffany!’ her mother shouted up the stairs. ‘Miss Tick’s here!’
Yesterday, Tiffany had said goodbye to Granny Aching . . .
The iron wheels of the old shepherding hut were half buried in the turf, high up on
the hills. The potbellied stove, which still stood lopsided in the grass, was red with rust.
The chalk hills were taking them, just like they’d taken the bones of Granny Aching.
The rest of the hut had been burned on the day she’d been buried. No shepherd
would have dared to use it, let alone spend the night there. Granny Aching had been
too big in people’s minds, too hard to replace. Night and day, in all seasons, she was the
Chalk country: its best shepherd, its wisest woman, and its memory. It was as if the
green downland had a soul that walked about in old boots and a sacking apron and
smoked a foul old pipe and dosed sheep with turpentine.
The shepherds said that Granny Aching had cussed the sky blue. They called the
fluffy little white clouds of summer ‘Granny Aching’s little lambs’. And although
they laughed when they
said these things, part of them was not joking.
No shepherd would have dared presume to live in that hut, no shepherd at all.