A Hat Full Of Sky

dropped. The rain stopped. “No, not yet,” she went on as peace once again descended. “It’s not attackin’ yet. Don’t you think that’s odd? It’d be licking its wounds, if it had a tongue. And you’re not ready yet, whatever you thinks. No, we’ve got somethin’ else to do, haven’t we?”
    Tiffany was speechless. The tide of outrage inside her was so hot that it burned her ears. But Mistress Weatherwax was smiling. The two facts did not work well together.
    Her First Thoughts were: I’ve just had a blazing row with Mistress Weatherwax! They say that if you cut her with a knife, she wouldn’t bleed until she wanted to! They say that when some vampires bit her , they all started to crave tea and sweet biscuits. She can do anything, be anywhere! And I called her an old woman!
    Her Second Thoughts were: Well, she is.
    Her Third Thoughts were: Yes, she is Mistress Weatherwax. And she’s keeping you angry. If you’re full of anger, there’s no room left for fear.
    “You hold that anger,” Mistress Weatherwax said, as if reading all of her mind. “Cup it in your heart, remember where it came from, remember the shape of it, save it until you need it. But now the wolf is out there somewhere in the woods, and you need to see to the flock.”
    It’s the voice, Tiffany thought. She really does talk to people like Granny Aching talked to sheep, except she hardly cusses at all. But I feel…better.
    “Thank you,” she said.
    “And that includes Mr. Weavall.”
    “Yes,” said Tiffany. “I know.”

CHAPTER 10
    The Late Bloomer
    I t was an…interesting day. Everyone in the mountains had heard of Mistress Weatherwax. If you didn’t have respect, she said, you didn’t have anything. Today she had it all. Some of it even rubbed off on Tiffany.
    They were treated like royalty—not the sort who get dragged off to be beheaded or have something nasty done with a red-hot poker, but the other sort, when people walk away dazed saying, “She actually said hello to me, very graciously! I will never wash my hand again!”
    Not that many people they dealt with washed their hands at all, Tiffany thought with the primness of a dairy worker. But people crowded around outside the cottage doors, watching and listening, and they sidled up to Tiffany to say things like “Would she like a cup of tea? I’ve cleaned our cup!” And in the garden of every cottage they passed, Tiffany noticed, the beehives were suddenly bustling with activity.
    She worked away, trying to stay calm, trying to think about what she was doing. You did the doctoring work as neatly as you could, and if it was on something oozy, then you just thought about how nice things would be when you’d stopped doing it. She felt Mistress Weatherwax wouldn’t approve of this attitude. But Tiffany didn’t much like hers either. She lied all the—She didn’t tell the truth all the time.
    For example, there was the Raddles’ privy. Miss Level had explained carefully to Mr. and Mrs. Raddle several times that it was far too close to the well, and so the drinking water was full of tiny, tiny creatures that were making their children sick. They’d listened very carefully, every time they heard the lecture, and still they never moved the privy. But Mistress Weatherwax told them it was caused by goblins who were attracted to the smell, and by the time they left that cottage, Mr. Raddle and three of his friends were already digging a new well the other end of the garden.
    “It really is caused by tiny creatures, you know,” said Tiffany, who’d once handed over an egg to a traveling teacher so she could line up and look through his “ **A STOUNDING M IKROSCOPICAL D EVICE ! A Z OO IN E VERY D ROP OF D ITCHWATER !** ” She’d almost collapsed the next day from not drinking. Some of those creatures were hairy.
    “Is that so?” said Mistress Weatherwax sarcastically.
    “Yes. It is. And Miss Level believes in telling them the truth!”
    “Good. She’s a fine, honest woman,” said Mistress Weatherwax. “But what I say is you have to tell people a story they can understand. Right now I reckon you’d have to change quite a lot of the world, and maybe bang Mr. Raddle’s stupid fat head against the wall a few times, before he’d believe that you can be sickened by drinking tiny invisible beasts. And while you’re doing that, those kids of theirs will get sicker. But goblins, now, they makes sense today . A story gets things done. And when I see Miss