Wintersmith

It was always…good to get a letter from Roland. Yes, they were often about the sheep, and other things of the Chalk, and sometimes there'd be a dried flower inside, a harebell or a cowslip. Granny Aching wouldn't have approved of that; she always said that if the hills had wanted people to pick the flowers, they would have grown more of them.

The letters always made her homesick.

One day Miss Treason had said, "This young man who writes to you…is he your beau?" and Tiffany had changed the subject until she had time to look up the word in the dictionary and then more time to stop blushing.

Roland was…well, the thing about Roland was…the main thing about…well, the point was…he was there.

Okay, when she'd first really met him, he had been a rather useless, rather stupid lump, but what could you expect? He'd been the prisoner of the Queen of the Elves for a year, to start with, fat as butter and half crazy on sugar and despair. Besides, he'd been brought up by a couple of haughty aunts, his father—the Baron—being mostly more interested in horses and dogs.

He'd more and less changed since then: more thoughtful, less rowdy, more serious, less stupid. He'd also had to wear glasses, the first ever seen on the Chalk.

And he had a library! More than a hundred books! Actually, it belonged to the castle, but no one else seemed interested in it.

Some of the books were huge and ancient, with wooden covers and huge black letters and colored pictures of strange animals and far-off places. There was Waspmire's Book of Unusual Days, Crumberry's Why Things Are Not Otherwise, and all but one volume of the Ominous Encyclopaedia. Roland had been astonished to find that she could read foreign words, and she'd been careful not to tell him it was all done with the help of what remained of Dr. Bustle.

The thing was…the fact was…well, who else had they got? Roland couldn't, just couldn't have friends among the village kids, what with him being the son of the Baron and everything. But Tiffany had the pointy hat now, and that counted for something. The people of the Chalk didn't like witches much, but she was Granny Aching's granddaughter, right? No tellin' what she'd learned from the ol' girl, up at the shepherding hut. And they do say she showed those witches up in the mountains what witchin's all about, eh? Remember the lambing last year? She prit near brought dead lambs back to life just by lookin' at 'em! And she's an Aching, and they've got these hills in their bones. She's all right. She's ours, see?

And that was fine, except that she didn't have any old friends anymore. Kids back home who'd been friendly were now…respectful, because of the hat. There was a kind of wall, as if she'd grown up and they hadn't. What could they talk about? She'd been to places they couldn't even imagine. Most of them hadn't even been to Twoshirts, which was only half a day away. And this didn't worry them at all. They were going to do the jobs their fathers did, or raise children like their mothers did. And that was fine, Tiffany added hurriedly to herself. But they hadn't decided. It was just happening to them, and they didn't notice.

It was the same up in the mountains. The only people of her own age she could actually talk to were other witches-in-training like Annagramma and the rest of the girls. It was useless trying to have a real conversation with people in the villages, especially the boys. They just looked down and mumbled and shuffled their feet, like people at home when they had to talk to the Baron.

Actually, Roland did that too, and he went red every time she looked at him. Whenever she visited the castle, or walked on the hills with him, the air was full of complicated silences…just like it had been with the Wintersmith.

She read the letter carefully, trying to ignore the grubby Feegle fingerprints all over it. He'd been kind enough to include several spare sheets of paper.

She smoothed one out, very carefully, stared at the wall for a while, and then began to write.

Down in the scullery,

They say that there can never be two snowflakes that are exactly alike, but has anyone checked lately?

Snow fell gently in the darkness. It piled up on rooftops, it kissed its way between the branches of trees, it settled on the forest floor with a gentle sizzle and smelled sharply of tin.

Granny Weatherwax always checked the snow. She stood at her doorway, with the candlelight streaming out around her, and caught flakes on the back of a shovel.

The white kitten watched the snowflakes. That's all it did. It didn't bat them with a paw, it just watched, very intently, each flake spiral down until it landed. Then the kitten would watch it some more, until it was sure the entertainment was over, before it looked up and selected another flake.

It was called You, as in "You! Stop that!" and "You! Get off there!" When it came to names, Granny Weatherwax didn't do fancy.

Granny looked at the snowflakes and smiled in her not-exactly-nice way.