A Hat Full Of Sky

trick, Annagramma,” said Petulia meekly.
    “Good. You’re nearly good at that,” said Annagramma, and pointed around the circle, from one girl to another, nodding at their answers, until she came to Tiffany.
    “Soft Nellies?” she said, to sniggering amusement.
    “What are Witch Trials?” said Tiffany. “Miss Level mentioned them, but I don’t know what they are.”
    Annagramma gave one of her noisy sighs.
    “You tell her, Petulia,” she said. “ You brought her, after all.”
    Hesitantly, with lots of “um”s and glances at Annagramma, Petulia explained about the Witch Trials. Um, it was a time when witches from all over the mountains could meet up and um see old friends and um pick up the latest news and gossip. Ordinary people could come along too, and there was a fair and um sideshows.
    It was quite an um big event. And in the afternoon all the witches that um wanted to could show off a spell or um something they’d been working on, which was very um popular.
    To Tiffany they sounded like sheepdog trials, without the dogs or the sheep. They were in Sheercliff this year, which was quite close.
    “And is there a prize?” she asked.
    “Um, oh no,” said Petulia. “It’s all done in the spirit of fun and good fellow—um, good sistership.”
    “Hah!” said Annagramma. “Not even she will believe that! It’s all a fix, anyway. They’ll all applaud Mistress Weatherwax. She always wins, whatever she does. She just messes up people’s minds. She just fools them into thinking she’s good. She wouldn’t last five minutes against a wizard. They do real magic. And she dresses like a scarecrow, too! It’s ignorant old women like her who keep witchcraft rooted in the past, as Mrs. Earwig points out in Chapter One!”
    One or two girls looked uncertain. Petulia even looked over her shoulder.
    “Um, people do say she’s done amazing things, Annagramma,” she said. “And, um, they say she can spy on people miles away—”
    “Yes, they say that,” said Annagramma. “That’s because they’re all frightened of her! She’s such a bully! That’s all she does, bully people and mess up their heads! That’s old witchcraft, that is. Just one step away from cackling, in my opinion. She’s half cracked now, they say.”
    “She didn’t seem cracked to me.”
    “Who said that?” snapped Annagramma.
    Everyone looked at Tiffany, who wished she hadn’t spoken. But now there was nothing for it but to go on.
    “She was just a bit old and stern,” she said. “But she was quite…polite. She didn’t cackle.”
    “You’ve met her?”
    “Yes.”
    “ She spoke to you , did she?” snarled Annagramma. “Was that before or after you kicked out the Fairy Queen?”
    “Just after,” said Tiffany, who was not used to this sort of thing. “She turned up on a broomstick,” she added. “I am telling the truth.”
    “Of course you are,” said Annagramma, smiling grimly. “And she congratulated you, I expect.”
    “Not really,” said Tiffany. “She seemed pleased, but it was hard to tell.”
    And then Tiffany said something really, really stupid. Long afterward, and long after all sorts of things had happened, she’d go “la la la!” to blot out the memory whenever something reminded her of that evening.
    She said: “She did give me this hat.”
    And they said, all of them, with one voice: “What hat?”

    Petulia took her back to the cottage. She did her best, and assured Tiffany that she believed her, but Tiffany knew she was just being nice. Miss Level tried to talk to her as she ran upstairs, but she bolted her door, kicked off her boots, and lay down on the bed with the pillow over her head to drown out the laughter echoing inside.
    Downstairs there was some muffled conversation between Petulia and Miss Level and then the sound of the door closing as Petulia left.
    After a while there was a scraping noise as Tiffany’s boots were dragged across the floor and arranged neatly under the bed. Oswald was never off duty.
    After another while the laughter died down, although she was sure it’d never go completely.
    Tiffany could feel the hat. At least, she had been able to feel it. The virtual hat, on her real head. But no one could see it, and Petulia had even waved a hand back and forth over Tiffany’s head and encountered a complete absence of hat.
    The worst part—and it was hard to find the worst part, so humiliatingly bad had it been—was hearing Annagramma say, “No, don’t