A Hat Full Of Sky

longed for , the hiss of wind in the turf and the feel of centuries under her feet. She wanted that sense, which had never left her before, of being where Achings had lived for thousands of years. She needed blue butterflies and the sounds of sheep and the big empty skies.
    Back home, when she’d felt upset, she’d gone up to the remains of the old shepherding hut and sat there for a while. That had always worked.
    It was a long way away now. Too far. Now she was full of a horrible, heavy, dead feeling, and there was nowhere to leave it. And it wasn’t how things were supposed to go.
    Where was the magic ? Oh, she understood that you had to learn about the basic, everyday craft , but when did the “witch” part turn up? She’d been trying to learn, she really had, and she was turning into…well, a good worker, a handy girl with potions and a reliable person. Dependable, like Miss Level.
    She’d expected—well, what? Well…to be doing serious witch stuff, you know, broomsticks, magic, guarding the world against evil forces in a noble yet modest way, and then also doing good for poor people because she was a really nice person. And the people she’d seen in the picture had had rather less messy ailments and their children didn’t have such runny noses. Mr. Weavall’s flying toenails weren’t in it anywhere . Some of them boomeranged .
    She got sick on broomsticks. Every time. She couldn’t even make a shamble. She was going to spend her days running around after people who, to be honest, could sometimes be doing a bit more for themselves. No magic, no flying, no secrets…just toenails and bogeys.
    She belonged to the Chalk. Every day she’d told the hills what they were. Every day they’d told her who she was. But now she couldn’t hear them.
    Outside, it began to rain, quite hard, and in the distance Tiffany heard the mutter of thunder.
    What would Granny Aching have done? But even folded in the wings of despair she knew the answer to that.
    Granny Aching never gave up. She’d search all night for a lost lamb….
    She lay looking at nothing for a while, and then lit the candle by the bed and swiveled her legs onto the floor. This couldn’t wait until morning.
    Tiffany had a little trick for seeing the hat. If you moved your hand behind it quickly, there was a slight, brief blurriness to what you saw, as though the light coming through the invisible hat took a little more time.
    It had to be there.
    Well, the candle should give enough light to be sure. If the hat was there, everything would be fine, and it wouldn’t matter what other people thought.
    She stood in the middle of the carpet, while lightning danced across the mountains outside, and closed her eyes.
    Down in the garden the apple-tree branches flayed in the wind, the dream catchers and curse nets clashing and jangling….
    “See me,” she said.
    The world went quiet, totally silent. It hadn’t done that before. But Tiffany tiptoed around until she knew she was opposite herself, and opened her eyes again…
    And there she was, and so was the hat, as clear as it had ever been.
    And the image of Tiffany below, a young girl in a green dress, opened its eyes and smiled at her and said:
    “We see you. Now we are you.”
    Tiffany tried to shout, “See me not!” But there was no mouth to shout….
    Lightning struck somewhere nearby. The window blew in. The candle flame flew out in a streamer of fire and died.
    And then there was only darkness, and the hiss of the rain.

CHAPTER 6
    The Hiver
    T hunder rolled across the Chalk.
    Jeannie carefully opened the package that her mother had given her on the day she’d left the Long Lake mound. It was a traditional gift, one that every young kelda got when she went away, never to return. Keldas could never go home. Keldas were home.
    The gift was this: memory.
    Inside the bag were a triangle of tanned sheepskin, three wooden stakes, a length of string twisted out of nettle fibers, a tiny leather bottle, and a hammer.
    She knew what to do, because she’d see her mother do it many times. The hammer was used to bang in the stakes around the smoldering fire. The string was used to tie the three corners of the leather triangle to the stakes so that it sagged in the center, just enough to hold a small bucketful of water, which Jeannie had drawn herself from the deep well.
    She knelt down and waited until the water very slowly began to seep though the leather, then built up the fire.
    She was aware of