A Hat Full Of Sky

frog?”
    “Well, er…” the wizard began.
    “Ha! That’s just a figure of speech!” snapped Zakzak. “I’d like to see you turn someone into a frog!”
    “Wish granted,” said Tiffany, and waved the wand.
    Brian started to say, “Look, when I said I’d been to Unseen University, I meant—”
    But he ended up saying, “Erk.”

    Take the eye away from Tiffany, up through the shop, high, high above the village until the landscape spreads out in a patchwork of fields, woods, and mountains.
    The magic spreads out like the ripples made when a stone is dropped in water. Within a few miles of the place it makes shambles spin and breaks the threads of curse nets. As the ripples widen, the magic gets fainter, although it never dies and still can be felt by things far more sensitive than any shamble….
    Let the eye move and fall now on this woods, this clearing, this cottage….
    There is nothing on the walls but whitewash, nothing on the floor but cold stone. The huge fireplace doesn’t even have a cooking stove. A black teakettle hangs on a black hook over what can hardly be called a fire at all; it’s just a few little sticks huddling together.
    This is the house of a life peeled to the core.
    Upstairs, an old woman, all in faded black, is lying on a narrow bed. But you wouldn’t think she was dead, because there is a big card on a string around her neck that reads:
    I ATE’NT DEAD
    …and you have to believe it when it’s written down like that.
    Her eyes are shut, her hands are crossed on her chest, her mouth is open.
    And bees crawl into her mouth, and over her ears, and all over her pillow. They fill the room, flying in and out of the open window, where someone has put a row of saucers filled with sugary water on the sill.
    None of the saucers match, of course. A witch never has matching crockery. But the bees work on, coming and going…busy as bees.
    When the ripple of magic passes through, the buzz rises to a roar. Bees pour in through the window urgently, as though driven by a gale. They land on the still old woman until her head and shoulders are a boiling mass of tiny brown bodies.
    And then, as one insect, they rise in a storm and pour away into the outside air, which is full of whirling seeds from the sycamore trees outside.
    Mistress Weatherwax sat bolt upright and said, “Bzzzt!” Then she stuck a finger into her mouth, rootled around a bit, and pulled out a struggling bee. She blew on it and shooed it out of the window.
    For a moment her eyes seemed to have many facets, just like a bee’s.
    “So,” she said. “She’s learned how to Borrow, has she? Or she’s been Borrowed!”

    Annagramma fainted. Zakzak stared, too afraid to faint.
    “You see,” said Tiffany, while something in the air went gloop , gloop above them, “a frog weighs only a few ounces, but Brian weighs, oh, about a hundred and twenty pounds, yes? So to turn someone big into a frog, you’ve got to find something to do with all the bits you can’t fit into a frog, right?”
    She bent down and lifted up the pointy wizard’s hat on the floor.
    “Happy, Brian?” she asked. A small frog, squatting in a heap of clothes, looked up and said, “Erk!”
    Zakzak didn’t look at the frog. He was looking at the thing that went gloop, gloop . It was like a large pink balloon full of water, quite pretty really, wobbling gently against the ceiling.
    “You’ve killed him!” he mumbled.
    “What? Oh, no. That’s just the stuff he doesn’t need right now. It’s sort of… spare Brian.”
    “Erk,” said Brian. Gloop went the rest of him.
    “About this discount—” Zakzak began hurriedly. “Ten percent would be—”
    Tiffany waved the wand. Behind her, the whole display of crystals rose in the air and began to orbit one another in a glittering and, above all, fragile way.
    “That wand shouldn’t do that!” he said.
    “Of course it can’t. It’s rubbish. But I can,” said Tiffany. “Ninety percent discount, did I hear you say? Think quickly, I’m getting tired. And the spare Brian is getting…heavy.”
    “You can keep it all!” Zakzak screamed. “For free! Just don’t let him splash! Please!”
    “No, no, I’d like you to stay in business,” said Tiffany. “A ninety percent discount would be fine. I’d like you to think of me as…a friend….”
    “Yes! Yes! I am your friend! I’m a very friendly person! Now please put him baaack! Please!” Zakzak dropped to his knees, which wasn’t very