A Hat Full Of Sky

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, farther 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 toward 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 wooly pants, dear?”
    Tiffany, still shocked, mumbled something that 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 hedgehop.”
    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 “Ups-a-daisy!” 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