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'No!' Miss Level burst out, raising her hands. The shout seemed to have shocked her, because she was shaking when she lowered them. 'No -1 -1 wouldn't dream of it,' she said in a more normal voice, trying to smile. 'You've had a long day. I'll show you to your room and where things are, and I'll bring you up some stew, and you can be an apprentice tomorrow. No rush.' Tiffany looked at the bubbling pot on the iron stove, and the loaf on the table. It was fresh baked bread, she could smell that. The trouble with Tiffany was her Third Thoughts.[First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They're rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.] They thought: She lives by herself. Who lit the fire? A bubbling pot needs stirring from time to time. Who stirred it? And someone lit the candles. Who? 'Is there anyone else staying here, Miss Level?' she said. Miss Level looked desperately at the pot and the loaf and back to Tiffany. 'No, there's only me,' she said, and somehow Tiffany knew she was telling the truth. Or a truth, anyway. 'In the morning?' said Miss Level, almost pleading. She looked so forlorn that Tiffany actually felt sorry for her. She smiled. 'Of course, Miss Level,' she said. There was a brief tour by candlelight. There was a privy not far from the cottage; it
was a two-holer, which Tiffany thought was a bit odd but, of course, maybe other people had lived here once. There was also a room just for a bath, a terrible waste of space by the standards of Home Farm. It had its own pump and a big boiler for heating the water. This was definitely posh. Her bedroom was a ... nice room. Nice was a very good word. Everything had frills. Anything that could have a cover on it was covered. Some attempt had been made to make the room. . . jolly, as if being a bedroom was a jolly wonderful thing to be. Tiffany's room back on the farm had a rag rug on the floor, a water jug and basin on a stand, a big wooden box for clothes, an ancient dolls' house and some old calico curtains and that was pretty much it. On the farm, bedrooms were for shutting your eyes in. This room had a chest of drawers. The contents of Tiffany's suitcase filled one drawer easily. The bed made no sound when Tiffany sat on it. Her old bed had a mattress so old that it had a comfy hollow in it, and the springs all made different noises; if she couldn't sleep she could move various parts of her body and play The Bells of St Ungulants on the springs - cling twing glong, gling ping bloyinnng, dlink plang dyonnng, ding ploink. This room smelled different, too. It smelled of spare rooms, and other people's soap. At the bottom of her suitcase was a small box that Mr Block the farm's carpenter had made for her. He did not go in for delicate work, and it was quite heavy. In it, she kept.. . keepsakes. There was a piece of chalk with a fossil in it, which was quite rare, and her personal butter stamp (which showed a witch on a broomstick) in case she got a chance to make butter here, and a dobby stone, which was supposed to be lucky because it had a hole in it. (She'd been told that when she was seven, and had picked it up. She couldn't quite see how the hole made it lucky, but since it had spent a lot of time in her pocket, and then safe and sound in the box, it probably was more fortunate than most stones, which got kicked around and run over by carts and so on.) There was also a blue-and-yellow wrapper from an old packet of Jolly Sailor tobacco, and a buzzard feather, and an ancient flint arrowhead wrapped up carefully in a piece of sheep's wool. There were plenty of these on the Chalk. The Nac Mac Feegle used them for spear points. She lined these up neatly on the top of the chest of drawers, alongside her diary, but they didn't make the place look more homely. They just looked lonely. Tiffany picked up the old wrapper and the sheep's wool and sniffed them. They weren't quite the smell of the shepherding hut, but they were close enough to it to bring tears to her eyes. She had never spent a night away from the Chalk before. She knew the word 'homesickness' and wondered whether this cold, thin feeling growing inside her was what it felt like- Someone knocked at the door. 'It's me,' said a muffled voice. Tiffany jumped off the bed and opened the door.
... if it's the one on top of your neck,' said Tiffany cautiously, still thinking about the other nose, 'you've still got it.' The old suitcase was roped to the bristle end of the broomstick, which now floated calmly a few feet above the ground. 'There, that'll make a nice comfy seat,' said Miss Level, now the bag of nerves that most people turned into when they felt Tiffany staring at them. 'If you'd just hang on behind me. Er. That's what I normally do.'
'You normally hang on behind you?' said Tiffany. 'How can-?' "Tiffany, I've always encouraged your forthright way of asking questions,' said Miss Tick loudly. 'And now, please, I would love to congratulate you on your mastery of silence! Do climb on behind Miss Level, I'm sure she'll want to leave while you've still got some daylight.' The stick bobbed a little as Miss Level climbed onto it. She patted it, invitingly. 'You're not frightened of heights, are you, dear?' she said as Tiffany climbed on. 'No,' said Tiffany. 'I shall drop in when I come up for the Witch Trials,' said Miss Tick as Tiffany felt the stick rise gently under her. 'Take care!' It turned out that when Miss Level had asked Tiffany if she was scared of heights, it had been the wrong question. Tiffany was not afraid of heights at all. She could walk past tall trees without batting an eyelid. Looking up at huge towering mountains didn't bother her a bit. What she was afraid of, although she hadn't realized it up until this point, was depths. She was afraid of dropping such a long way out of the sky that she'd have time to run out of breath screaming before hitting the rocks so hard that she'd turn to a sort of jelly and all her bones would break into dust. She was, in fact, afraid of the ground. Miss Level should have thought before asking the question. Tiffany clung to Miss Level's belt and stared at the cloth of her dress. 'Have you ever flown before, Tiffany?' asked the witch as they rose.
'Gnf!' squeaked Tiffany. 'If you like, I could take us round in a little circle,' said Miss Level. 'We should have a fine view of your country from up here.' The air was rushing past Tiffany now. It was a lot colder. She kept her eyes fixed firmly on the cloth. 'Would you like that?' said Miss Level, raising her voice as the wind grew louder. 'It won't take a moment!' Tiffany didn't have time to say no, and in any case was sure she'd be sick if she opened her mouth. The stick lurched under her and the world went sideways. She didn't want to look, but remembered that a witch is always inquisitive to the point of nosiness. To stay a witch, she had to look. She risked a glance and saw the world under her. The red-gold light of sunset was flowing across the land, and down there were the long shadows of Twoshirts and, further away, the woods and villages all the way back to the long curved hill of the Chalk - - which glowed red, and the white carving of the chalk Horse burned gold like some giant's pendant. Tiffany stared at it; in the fading light of the afternoon, with the shadows racing away from the sliding sun, it looked alive. At that moment she wanted to jump off, fly back, get there by closing her eyes and clicking her heels together, do anything- No! She 'd bundled those thoughts away, hadn 't she? She had to learn, and there was no one on the hills to teach her! But the Chalk was her world. She walked on it every day. She could feel its ancient life under her feet. The land was in her bones, just as Granny Aching had said. It was in her name, too; in the old language of the Nac Mac Feegle her name sounded like 'Land Under Wave', and in the eye of her mind she 'd walked in those deep prehistoric seas when the Chalk had been formed, in a million-year rain made of the shells of tiny creatures. She trod a land made of life, and breathed it in, and listened to it, and thought its thoughts for it. To see it now, small, alone, in a landscape that stretched to the end of the world, was too much. She had to go back to it- For a moment the stick wobbled in the air. No! I know I must go! It jerked back, and there was a sickening feeling in her stomach as the stick curved away towards the mountains. 'A little bit of turbulence there, I think,' said Miss Level over her shoulder. 'By the way, did Miss Tick warn you about the thick woolly pants, dear?' Tiffany, still shocked, mumbled something which managed to sound like 'no'. Miss Tick had mentioned the pants, and how a sensible witch wore at least three pairs to stop ice forming, but she had forgotten about them. 'Oh dear,' said Miss Level. 'Then we'd better hedge-hop.' The stick dropped like a stone. Tiffany never forgot that ride, though she often tried to. They flew just above the ground, which was the blur just below her feet. Every time they came to a fence or a hedge Miss Level would jump it with a cry of 'Here we go!' or 'Upsadaisy!' which was probably meant to make Tiffany feel better. It didn't. She threw up twice. Miss Level flew with her head bent so far down as to be almost level with the stick,
thus getting the maximum aerodynamic advantage from the pointy hat. It was quite a stubby one, only about nine inches high, rather like a clown hat without the bobbles; Tiffany found out later that this was so that she didn't have to take it off when entering low-ceilinged cottages. After a while - an eternity from Tiffany's point of view - they left the farmlands behind and started to fly through foothills. Before long they'd left trees behind, too, and the stick was flying above the fast white waters of a wide river, studded with boulders. Spray splashed over their boots. She heard Miss Level yell above the roar of the river and the rush of the wind: 'Would you mind leaning back? This bit's a little tricky!' Tiffany risked peeking over the witch's shoulder, and gasped. There was not much water on the Chalk, except for the little streams that people called bournes, which flowed down the valleys in late winter and dried up completely in the summer. Big rivers flowed around it, of course, but they were slow and tame. The water ahead wasn't slow and tame. It was vertical. The river ran up into the dark blue sky, soared up to the early stars. The broom followed it. Tiffany leaned back and screamed, and went on screaming as the broomstick tilted in the air and climbed up the waterfall. She'd known the word, certainly, but the word hadn't been so big, so wet, and above all it hadn't been so loud. The mist of it drenched her. The noise pounded on her ears. She held onto Miss Level's belt as they climbed through spray and thunder and felt that she'd slip at any minute - - and then she was thrown forward, and the noise of the fall died away behind her as the stick, now once again going 'along' rather than 'up', sped across the surface of a river that, while still leaping and foaming, at least had the decency to do it on the ground. There was a bridge high above, and walls of cold rock hemmed in the river on either side, but the walls got lower and the river got slower and the air got warmer again until the broomstick skimmed across calm flat water that probably didn't know what was going to happen to it. Silver fish zigzagged away as they passed over the surface. After a while Miss Tick sent them curving up across new fields, smaller and greener than the ones at home. There were trees again, and little woods in deep valleys. But the last of the sunlight was draining away and, soon, all there was below was darkness. Tiffany must have dozed off, clinging onto Miss Level, because she felt herself jerk awake as the broomstick stopped in mid-air. The ground was some way below, but someone had set out a ring of what turned out to be candle ends, burning in old jars. Delicately, turning slowly, the stick settled down until it stopped just above the grass. At this point Tiffany's legs decided to untwist, and she fell off. 'Up we get!' said Miss Level cheerfully, picking her up. 'You did very well!'
'Sorry about screaming and being sick . . .' Tiffany mumbled, tripping over one of the jars and knocking the candle out. She tried to make out anything in the dark, but her head was spinning. 'Who lit candles, Miss Level?'
'I did. Let's get inside, it's getting chilly-' Miss Level began. 'Oh, by magic,' said Tiffany, still dizzy. 'Well, it can be done by magic, yes,' said Miss Level. 'But I prefer matches, which are of course a lot less effort and quite magical in themselves, when you come to think about it.' She untied the suitcase from the stick and said: 'Here we are, then! I do hope you'll like it here!' There was that cheerfulness again. Even when she felt sick and dizzy, and quite interested in knowing where the privy was as soon as possible, Tiffany still had ears that worked and a mind that, however much she tried, wouldn't stop thinking. And it thought: That cheerfulness has got cracks around the edges. Something isn't right here . . . Chapter 3 Latry There was a cottage, but Tiffany couldn't see much in the gloom. Apple trees crowded in around it. Something hanging from a branch brushed against her as, walking unsteadily, she followed Miss Level. It swung away with a tinkling sound. There was the sound of rushing water, too, some way away. Miss Level was opening a door. It led into a small, brightly lit and amazingly tidy kitchen. A fire was burning briskly in the iron stove. 'Urn . . . I'm supposed to be the apprentice,' said Tiffany, still groggy from the flight. 'I'll make something to drink if you show me where things are-'
'No!' Miss Level burst out, raising her hands. The shout seemed to have shocked her, because she was shaking when she lowered them. 'No -1 -1 wouldn't dream of it,' she said in a more normal voice, trying to smile. 'You've had a long day. I'll show you to your room and where things are, and I'll bring you up some stew, and you can be an apprentice tomorrow. No rush.' Tiffany looked at the bubbling pot on the iron stove, and the loaf on the table. It was fresh baked bread, she could smell that. The trouble with Tiffany was her Third Thoughts.[First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They're rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.] They thought: She lives by herself. Who lit the fire? A bubbling pot needs stirring from time to time. Who stirred it? And someone lit the candles. Who? 'Is there anyone else staying here, Miss Level?' she said. Miss Level looked desperately at the pot and the loaf and back to Tiffany. 'No, there's only me,' she said, and somehow Tiffany knew she was telling the truth. Or a truth, anyway. 'In the morning?' said Miss Level, almost pleading. She looked so forlorn that Tiffany actually felt sorry for her. She smiled. 'Of course, Miss Level,' she said. There was a brief tour by candlelight. There was a privy not far from the cottage; it
was a two-holer, which Tiffany thought was a bit odd but, of course, maybe other people had lived here once. There was also a room just for a bath, a terrible waste of space by the standards of Home Farm. It had its own pump and a big boiler for heating the water. This was definitely posh. Her bedroom was a ... nice room. Nice was a very good word. Everything had frills. Anything that could have a cover on it was covered. Some attempt had been made to make the room. . . jolly, as if being a bedroom was a jolly wonderful thing to be. Tiffany's room back on the farm had a rag rug on the floor, a water jug and basin on a stand, a big wooden box for clothes, an ancient dolls' house and some old calico curtains and that was pretty much it. On the farm, bedrooms were for shutting your eyes in. This room had a chest of drawers. The contents of Tiffany's suitcase filled one drawer easily. The bed made no sound when Tiffany sat on it. Her old bed had a mattress so old that it had a comfy hollow in it, and the springs all made different noises; if she couldn't sleep she could move various parts of her body and play The Bells of St Ungulants on the springs - cling twing glong, gling ping bloyinnng, dlink plang dyonnng, ding ploink. This room smelled different, too. It smelled of spare rooms, and other people's soap. At the bottom of her suitcase was a small box that Mr Block the farm's carpenter had made for her. He did not go in for delicate work, and it was quite heavy. In it, she kept.. . keepsakes. There was a piece of chalk with a fossil in it, which was quite rare, and her personal butter stamp (which showed a witch on a broomstick) in case she got a chance to make butter here, and a dobby stone, which was supposed to be lucky because it had a hole in it. (She'd been told that when she was seven, and had picked it up. She couldn't quite see how the hole made it lucky, but since it had spent a lot of time in her pocket, and then safe and sound in the box, it probably was more fortunate than most stones, which got kicked around and run over by carts and so on.) There was also a blue-and-yellow wrapper from an old packet of Jolly Sailor tobacco, and a buzzard feather, and an ancient flint arrowhead wrapped up carefully in a piece of sheep's wool. There were plenty of these on the Chalk. The Nac Mac Feegle used them for spear points. She lined these up neatly on the top of the chest of drawers, alongside her diary, but they didn't make the place look more homely. They just looked lonely. Tiffany picked up the old wrapper and the sheep's wool and sniffed them. They weren't quite the smell of the shepherding hut, but they were close enough to it to bring tears to her eyes. She had never spent a night away from the Chalk before. She knew the word 'homesickness' and wondered whether this cold, thin feeling growing inside her was what it felt like- Someone knocked at the door. 'It's me,' said a muffled voice. Tiffany jumped off the bed and opened the door.
Miss Level came in with a tray that held a bowl of beef stew and some bread. She put it down on the little table by the bed. 'If you put it outside the door when you're finished, I'll take it down later,' she said. 'Thank you very much,' said Tiffany. Miss Level paused at the door. 'It's going to be so nice having someone to talk to, apart from myself,' she said. 'I do hope you won't want to leave, Tiffany.' Tiffany gave her a happy little smile, then waited until the door had shut and she'd heard Miss Level's footsteps go downstairs before tiptoeing to the window and checking there were no bars in it. There had been something scary about Miss Level's expression. It was sort of hungry and hopeful and pleading and frightened, all at once. Tiffany also checked that she could bolt the bedroom door on the inside. The beef stew tasted, indeed, just like beef stew and not, just to take an example completely and totally at random, stew made out of the last poor girl who'd worked here. To be a witch, you have to have a very good imagination. Just now, Tiffany was wishing that hers wasn't quite so good. But Mistress Weatherwax and Miss Tick wouldn't have let her come here if it was dangerous, would they? Well, would they? They might. They just might. Witches didn't believe in making things too easy. They assumed you used your brains. If you didn't use your brains, you had no business being a witch. The world doesn't make things easy, they'd say. Learn how to learn fast. But . . . they'd give her a chance, wouldn't they? Of course they would. Probably. She'd nearly finished the not-made-of-people-at-all-honestly stew when something tried to take the bowl out of her hand. It was the gentlest of tugs, and when she automatically pulled it back, the tugging stopped immediately. O-K, she thought. Another strange thing. Well, this is a witch's cottage. Something pulled at the spoon but, again, stopped as soon as she tugged back. Tiffany put the empty bowl and spoon back on the tray. 'All right,' she said, hoping she sounded not scared at all. I've finished.' The tray rose into the air and drifted gently towards the door where it landed with a faint tinkle. Up on the door, the bolt slid back. The door opened. The tray rose up and sailed through the doorway. The door shut. The bolt slid across. Tiffany heard the rattle of the spoon as, somewhere on the dark landing, the tray moved on. It seemed to Tiffany that it was vitally important that she thought before doing anything. And so she thought: It would be stupid to run around screaming because your tray had been
taken away. After all, whatever had done it had even had the decency to bolt the door after itself, which meant that it respected her privacy, even while it ignored it. She cleaned her teeth at the washstand, got into her night-gown and slid into the bed. She blew out the candle. After a moment she got up, re-lit the candle and with some effort dragged the chest of drawers in front of the door. She wasn't quite certain why, but she felt better for doing it. She lay back in the dark again. Tiffany was used to sleeping while, outside on the downland, sheep baa'd and sheep bells occasionally went tonk. Up here, there were no sheep to baa and no bells to tonk and, every time one didn't, she woke up thinking, What was that? But she did get to sleep eventually, because she remembered waking up in the middle of the night to hear the chest of drawers very slowly slide back to its original position. Tiffany woke up, still alive and not chopped up, when the dawn was just turning grey. Unfamiliar birds were singing. There were no sounds in the cottage, and she thought: I'm the apprentice, aren't I? I'm the one who should be cleaning up and getting the fire lit. I know how this is supposed to go. She sat up and looked around the room. Her old clothes had been neatly folded on top of the chest of drawers. The fossil and the lucky stone and the other things had gone, and it was only after a frantic search that she found them back in the box in her suitcase. 'Now, look,' she said to the room in general. 'I am a hag, you know. If there are any Nac Mac Feegle here, step out this minute!' Nothing happened. She hadn't expected anything to happen. The Nac Mac Feegle weren't particularly interested in tidying things up, anyway. As an experiment she took the candlestick off the bedside table, put it on the chest of drawers and stood back. More nothing happened. She turned to look out of the window and, as she did so, there was a faint tint noise. When she spun round, the candlestick was back on the table. Well. . . today was going to be a day when she got answers. Tiffany enjoyed the slightly angry feeling. It stopped her thinking about how much she wanted to go home. She went to put her dress on and realized that there was something soft yet crackly in a pocket. Oh, how could she have forgotten? But it had been a busy day, a very busy day, and maybe she'd wanted to forget, anyway. She pulled out Roland's present and opened the white tissue paper carefully. It was a necklace. It was the Horse. Tiffany stared at it. Not what a horse looks like, but what a horse be ... It had been carved in the
turf back before history began, by people who had managed to convey in a few flowing lines everything a horse was: strength, grace, beauty and speed, straining to break free of the hill. And now someone - someone clever and, therefore, probably also someone expensive - had made it out of silver. It was flat, just like it was on the hillside and, just like the Horse on the hillside, some parts of it were not joined to the rest of the body. The crafts- man, though, had joined these carefully together with tiny silver chain, so that when Tiffany held it up in astonishment it was all there, moving-while-standing-still in the morning light. She had to put it on. And . . . there was no mirror, not even a tiny hand one. Oh, well. . . 'See me,' said Tiffany. And far away, down on the plains, something that had lost the trail awoke. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the mist on the fields parted as something invisible started to move, making a noise like a swarm of flies . . . Tiffany shut her eyes, took a couple of small steps sideways, a few steps forward, turned round and carefully opened her eyes again. There she stood, in front of her, as still as a picture. The Horse looked very well on the new dress, silver against green. She wondered how much it must have cost Roland. She wondered why. 'See me not,' she said. Slowly she took the necklace off, wrapped it up again in its tissue paper and put it in the box with the other things from home. Then she found one of the postcards from Twoshirts, and a pencil, and with care and attention, wrote Roland a short thank-you note. After a flash of guilt she carefully used the other postcard to tell her parents that she was completely still alive. Then, thoughtfully, she went downstairs. It had been dark last night, so she hadn't noticed the posters stuck up all down the stairs. They were from circuses, and were covered with clowns and animals and that old-fashioned poster lettering where no two lines of type are the same. They said things like: Thrills Galore! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Professor Monty Bladder's Three-Ring Circus Cabinet of Curiosities!! In His Actual Mouth!!! See the Horse With His Head Where His Tail Should Be! See the Egress!!!!! CLOWNS! CLOWNS! CLOWNS! The Flying Pastrami Brothers will defy Gravity, The
Greatest Force in the Universe •without a net!* aS!S5S>S>S!5>5>S>S>S>S>®S>SJS>S53S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>aS! See Clarence The Tap-Dancing l&ule! Wonder at isy a * The Astounding Mind Reading Act * Wonder at Topsy and Tipsy And so it went on, right down to tiny print. They were strange, bright things to find in a little cottage in the woods. She found her way into the kitchen. It was cold and quiet, except for the ticking of a clock on the wall. Both the hands had fallen off the clock face, and lay at the bottom of the glass cover, so while the clock was still measuring time it wasn't inclined to tell anyone about it. As kitchens went, it was very tidy. In the cupboard drawer beside the sink, forks, spoons and knives were all in neat sections, which was a bit worrying. Every kitchen drawer Tiffany had ever seen might have been meant to be neat but over the years had been crammed with things that didn't quite fit, like big ladles and bent bottle-openers, which meant that they always stuck unless you knew the trick of opening them. Experimentally she took a spoon out of the spoon section, dropped it amongst the forks and shut the drawer. Then she turned her back. There was a sliding noise and a tinkle exactly like the tinkle a spoon makes when it's put back amongst the other spoons, who have missed it and are anxious to hear its tales of life amongst the frighteningly pointy people. This time she put a knife in with the forks, shut the drawer - and leaned on it. Nothing happened for a while, and then she heard the cutlery rattling. The noise got louder. The drawer began to shake. The whole sink began to tremble- 'All right,' said Tiffany, jumping back. 'Have it your way!' The drawer burst open, the knife jumped from section to section like a fish and the drawer slammed back. Silence. 'Who are you?' said Tiffany. No one replied. But she didn't like the feeling in the air. Someone was upset with her now. It had been a silly trick, anyway. She went out into the garden, quickly. The rushing noise she had heard last night had been made by a waterfall not far from the cottage. A little water-wheel pumped water into a big stone cistern, and there was a pipe that led into the house. The garden was full of ornaments. They were rather sad, cheap ones - bunny rabbits with mad grins, pottery deer with big eyes, gnomes with pointy red hats and expressions that suggested they were on bad medication. Things hung from the apple trees or were tied to posts all around the place. There
were some dreamcatchers and curse-nets, which she sometimes saw hanging up outside cottages at home. Other things looked like big shambles, spinning and tinkling gently. Some . . . well, one looked like a bird made out of old brushes, but most looked like piles of junk. Odd junk, though. It seemed to Tiffany that some of it moved slightly as she went past. When she went back into the cottage, Miss Level was sitting at the kitchen table. So was Miss Level. There were, in fact, two of her. 'Sorry,' said the Miss Level on the right. 1 thought it was best to get it over with right now.' The two women were exactly alike. 'Oh, I see,' said Tiffany. 'You're twins.'
'No,' said the Miss Level on the left, I'm not. This might be a little difficult -'
'- for you to understand,' said the other Miss Level. 'Let me see, now. You know -'
'- how twins are sometimes said to be able to share thoughts and feelings?' said the first Miss Level. Tiffany nodded. 'Well,' said the second Miss Level, 'I'm a bit more complicated than that, I suppose, because -'
'- I'm one person with two bodies,' said the first Miss Level, and now they spoke like players in a tennis match, slamming the words back and forth. 'I wanted to break this to you -'
'- gently, because some people get upset by the -'
'- idea and find it creepy or -'
'- just plain -'
'- weird.' The two bodies stopped. 'Sorry about that last sentence,' said the Miss Level on the left. 1 only do that when I'm really nervous.'
'Er, do you mean that you both-' Tiffany began, but the Miss Level on the right said quickly, There is no both. There's just me, do you understand? I know it's hard. But I have a right right hand and a right left hand and a left right hand and a left left hand. It's all me. I can go shopping and stay home at the same time, Tiffany. If it helps, think of me as one -'
'- person with four arms and -'
'- four legs and -'
'- four eyes.' All four of those eyes now watched Tiffany nervously. 'And two noses,' said Tiffany. 'That's right. You've got it. My right body is slightly clumsier than my left body, but I have better eyesight in my right pair of eyes. I'm human, just like you, except that there's more of me.'
Level came in with a tray that held a bowl of beef stew and some bread. She put it down on the little table by the bed. 'If you put it outside the door when you're finished, I'll take it down later,' she said. 'Thank you very much,' said Tiffany. Miss Level paused at the door. 'It's going to be so nice having someone to talk to, apart from myself,' she said. 'I do hope you won't want to leave, Tiffany.' Tiffany gave her a happy little smile, then waited until the door had shut and she'd heard Miss Level's footsteps go downstairs before tiptoeing to the window and checking there were no bars in it. There had been something scary about Miss Level's expression. It was sort of hungry and hopeful and pleading and frightened, all at once. Tiffany also checked that she could bolt the bedroom door on the inside. The beef stew tasted, indeed, just like beef stew and not, just to take an example completely and totally at random, stew made out of the last poor girl who'd worked here. To be a witch, you have to have a very good imagination. Just now, Tiffany was wishing that hers wasn't quite so good. But Mistress Weatherwax and Miss Tick wouldn't have let her come here if it was dangerous, would they? Well, would they? They might. They just might. Witches didn't believe in making things too easy. They assumed you used your brains. If you didn't use your brains, you had no business being a witch. The world doesn't make things easy, they'd say. Learn how to learn fast. But . . . they'd give her a chance, wouldn't they? Of course they would. Probably. She'd nearly finished the not-made-of-people-at-all-honestly stew when something tried to take the bowl out of her hand. It was the gentlest of tugs, and when she automatically pulled it back, the tugging stopped immediately. O-K, she thought. Another strange thing. Well, this is a witch's cottage. Something pulled at the spoon but, again, stopped as soon as she tugged back. Tiffany put the empty bowl and spoon back on the tray. 'All right,' she said, hoping she sounded not scared at all. I've finished.' The tray rose into the air and drifted gently towards the door where it landed with a faint tinkle. Up on the door, the bolt slid back. The door opened. The tray rose up and sailed through the doorway. The door shut. The bolt slid across. Tiffany heard the rattle of the spoon as, somewhere on the dark landing, the tray moved on. It seemed to Tiffany that it was vitally important that she thought before doing anything. And so she thought: It would be stupid to run around screaming because your tray had been
taken away. After all, whatever had done it had even had the decency to bolt the door after itself, which meant that it respected her privacy, even while it ignored it. She cleaned her teeth at the washstand, got into her night-gown and slid into the bed. She blew out the candle. After a moment she got up, re-lit the candle and with some effort dragged the chest of drawers in front of the door. She wasn't quite certain why, but she felt better for doing it. She lay back in the dark again. Tiffany was used to sleeping while, outside on the downland, sheep baa'd and sheep bells occasionally went tonk. Up here, there were no sheep to baa and no bells to tonk and, every time one didn't, she woke up thinking, What was that? But she did get to sleep eventually, because she remembered waking up in the middle of the night to hear the chest of drawers very slowly slide back to its original position. Tiffany woke up, still alive and not chopped up, when the dawn was just turning grey. Unfamiliar birds were singing. There were no sounds in the cottage, and she thought: I'm the apprentice, aren't I? I'm the one who should be cleaning up and getting the fire lit. I know how this is supposed to go. She sat up and looked around the room. Her old clothes had been neatly folded on top of the chest of drawers. The fossil and the lucky stone and the other things had gone, and it was only after a frantic search that she found them back in the box in her suitcase. 'Now, look,' she said to the room in general. 'I am a hag, you know. If there are any Nac Mac Feegle here, step out this minute!' Nothing happened. She hadn't expected anything to happen. The Nac Mac Feegle weren't particularly interested in tidying things up, anyway. As an experiment she took the candlestick off the bedside table, put it on the chest of drawers and stood back. More nothing happened. She turned to look out of the window and, as she did so, there was a faint tint noise. When she spun round, the candlestick was back on the table. Well. . . today was going to be a day when she got answers. Tiffany enjoyed the slightly angry feeling. It stopped her thinking about how much she wanted to go home. She went to put her dress on and realized that there was something soft yet crackly in a pocket. Oh, how could she have forgotten? But it had been a busy day, a very busy day, and maybe she'd wanted to forget, anyway. She pulled out Roland's present and opened the white tissue paper carefully. It was a necklace. It was the Horse. Tiffany stared at it. Not what a horse looks like, but what a horse be ... It had been carved in the
turf back before history began, by people who had managed to convey in a few flowing lines everything a horse was: strength, grace, beauty and speed, straining to break free of the hill. And now someone - someone clever and, therefore, probably also someone expensive - had made it out of silver. It was flat, just like it was on the hillside and, just like the Horse on the hillside, some parts of it were not joined to the rest of the body. The crafts- man, though, had joined these carefully together with tiny silver chain, so that when Tiffany held it up in astonishment it was all there, moving-while-standing-still in the morning light. She had to put it on. And . . . there was no mirror, not even a tiny hand one. Oh, well. . . 'See me,' said Tiffany. And far away, down on the plains, something that had lost the trail awoke. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the mist on the fields parted as something invisible started to move, making a noise like a swarm of flies . . . Tiffany shut her eyes, took a couple of small steps sideways, a few steps forward, turned round and carefully opened her eyes again. There she stood, in front of her, as still as a picture. The Horse looked very well on the new dress, silver against green. She wondered how much it must have cost Roland. She wondered why. 'See me not,' she said. Slowly she took the necklace off, wrapped it up again in its tissue paper and put it in the box with the other things from home. Then she found one of the postcards from Twoshirts, and a pencil, and with care and attention, wrote Roland a short thank-you note. After a flash of guilt she carefully used the other postcard to tell her parents that she was completely still alive. Then, thoughtfully, she went downstairs. It had been dark last night, so she hadn't noticed the posters stuck up all down the stairs. They were from circuses, and were covered with clowns and animals and that old-fashioned poster lettering where no two lines of type are the same. They said things like: Thrills Galore! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Professor Monty Bladder's Three-Ring Circus Cabinet of Curiosities!! In His Actual Mouth!!! See the Horse With His Head Where His Tail Should Be! See the Egress!!!!! CLOWNS! CLOWNS! CLOWNS! The Flying Pastrami Brothers will defy Gravity, The
