Wintersmith

"No! It was me! I mean, my voice! But it didn't sound like him. I mean, like I think he'd sound! It was a bit snide, like Annagramma when she's in a mood! But it was my voice!"

"How do you think he'd sound?" said Petulia.

The wind gusted across the clearing, making the pine trees shake and roar.

"…Tiffany…be mine…"

After a little while Petulia coughed and said: "Um, was it just me, or did that sound like—?"

"Not just you," whispered Tiffany, standing very still.

"Ah," said Petulia, in a voice as bright and brittle as a rose of ice. "Well, I think we should get indoors now, yes? Um, and get all the fires lit and some tea made, yes? And then start getting things ready, because quite soon a lot of people will be turning up."

A minute later they were in the cottage, with the doors bolted and every candle spluttering into life.

They didn't talk about the wind or the roses. What would be the point? Besides, there was a job to be done. Work, that's what helps. Work, and think and talk later, don't gabble now like frightened ducks. They even managed to get another layer of grime off the windows.

All through the morning people arrived from the village with the things Miss Treason had ordered. People were walking across the clearing. The sun was out, even if it was as pale as a poached egg. The world was belonging to…normality. Tiffany caught herself wondering if she was wrong about things. Were there roses? There were none now; the fragile petals had not survived even the dawn's weak light. Had the wind spoken? Then she met Petulia's gaze. Yes, it had happened. But for now there was a funeral to feed.

The girls had already got to work on the ham rolls, with three sorts of mustard, but however far wrong you couldn't go with a ham roll, if that was all you were giving seventy or eighty hungry witches, you were going all the way past Wrong and were heading into Absolute Party Disaster. So barrows were arriving with loaves and roasts of beef, and jars of pickled cucumbers so big that they looked like drowned whales. Witches are very keen on pickles, as a rule, but the food they like best is free food. Yes, that's the diet for your working witch: lots of food that someone else is paying for, and so much of it that there is enough to shove in your pockets for later.

As it turned out, Miss Treason wasn't paying for it either. No one would take any money. They wouldn't leave, either, but hung about by the back door looking worried until they could have a word with Tiffany. The conversation, when she could spare the time from slicing and spreading, would go something like this:

"She's not really dying, is she?"

"Yes. At around half past six tomorrow morning."

"But she's very old!"

"Yes. I think that's sort of why, you see."

"But what will we do without her?"

"I don't know. What did you do before she was here?"

"She was always here! She knew everything! Who's going to tell us what to do now?"

And then they'd say: "It's not going to be you, is it?" and give her a Look that said: We hope not. You don't even wear a black dress.

After a while Tiffany got fed up with this and in a very sharp voice asked the next person, a woman delivering six cooked chickens: "What about all those stories about her slitting open bad people's bellies with her thumbnail, then?"

"Er, well, yes, but it was never anyone we knew," said the woman virtuously.

"And the demon in the cellar?"

"So they say. O' course, I never saw it pers'nally." The woman gave Tiffany a worried look. "It is down there, isn't it?"

You want it to be, Tiffany thought. You actually want there to be a monster in the cellar!

But as far as Tiffany knew, what was in the cellar this morning was a lot of snoring Feegles who had been boozin'. If you put a lot of Feegles in a desert, within twenty minutes they'd find a bottle of something dreadful to drink.

"Believe me, madam, you wouldn't want to wake what's down there now," she said, giving the woman a worried smile.

The woman seemed satisfied with that but suddenly looked concerned again.

"And the spiders? She really eats spiders?" she asked.

"Well, there's lots of webs," said Tiffany, "but you never see a spider!"

"Ah, right," said the woman, as if she'd been let into a big secret. "Say what you like, Miss Treason's been a real witch. With skulls! I expect you have to polish 'em, eh? Ha! She could spit your eye out as soon as look at you!"

"She never did, though," said a man delivering a huge tray of sausages. "Not to anyone local, anyway."

"That's true," the woman admitted reluctantly. "She was very gracious in that respect."

"Ah, she was a proper old-time witch, Miss Treason," said the sausage man. "Many a man has widdled in his boots when she's turned the sharp side of her tongue on him. You know that weaving she's always doing? She weaves your name into the loom, that's what she does! And if you tell her a lie, your thread breaks and you drop down dead on the spot!"