A Hat Full Of Sky

unconscious most of the time. A sudden meeting with the Nac Mac Feegle when they’re feeling edgy can do that to a person. Of course, without anyone actually lying, everyone at home had come to believe that he had rescued her . A nine-year-old girl armed with a frying pan couldn’t possibly have rescued a thirteen-year-old boy who’d had a sword.
    Tiffany hadn’t minded that. It stopped people from asking too many questions she didn’t want to answer or even know how to. But he’d taken to…hanging around. She kept accidentally running into him on walks more often than was really possible, and he always seemed to be at the same village events she went to. He was always polite, but she couldn’t stand the way he kept looking like a spaniel that had been kicked.
    Admittedly—and it took some admitting—he was a lot less of a twit than he had been. On the other hand, there had been such a lot of twit to begin with.
    And then she thought, Horse, and wondered why until she realized that her eyes had been watching the landscape while her brain stared at the past.
    “I’ve never seen that before,” said Miss Tick.
    Tiffany welcomed it as an old friend. The Chalk rose out of the plains quite suddenly on this side of the hills. There was a little valley cupped into the fall of the down, and there was a carving in the curve it made. Turf had been cut away in long flowing lines, so that the bare chalk made the shape of an animal.
    “It’s the White Horse,” said Tiffany.
    “Why do they call it that?” said Miss Tick.
    Tiffany looked at her.
    “Because the chalk is white?” she said, trying not to suggest that Miss Tick was being a bit dense.
    “No, I meant why do they call it a horse? It doesn’t look like a horse. It’s just…flowing lines….”
    …that look as if they’re moving, Tiffany thought.
    It had been cut out of the turf way back in the old days, people said, by the folk who’d built the stone circles and buried their kin in big earth mounds. And they’d cut out the Horse at one end of this little green valley, ten times bigger than a real horse and, if you didn’t look at it with your mind right, the wrong shape, too. Yet they must have known horses, owned horses, seen them every day, and they weren’t stupid people just because they lived a long time ago.
    Tiffany had once asked her father about the look of the Horse, when they’d come all the way over here for a sheep fair, and he told her what Granny Aching had told him when he was a little boy. He passed on what she said word for word, and Tiffany did the same now.
    “’Taint what a horse looks like,” said Tiffany. “It’s what a horse be .”
    “Oh,” said Miss Tick. But because she was a teacher as well as a witch, and probably couldn’t help herself, she added, “The funny thing is, of course, that officially there is no such thing as a white horse. They’re called gray.” *
    “Yes, I know,” said Tiffany. “This one’s white,” she added, flatly.
    That quietened Miss Tick down for a while, but she seemed to have something on her mind.
    “I expect you’re upset about leaving the Chalk, aren’t you?” she said as the cart rattled on.
    “No,” said Tiffany.
    “It’s okay to be,” said Miss Tick.
    “Thank you, but I’m not really,” said Tiffany.
    “If you want to have a bit of a cry, you don’t have to pretend you’ve got some grit in your eye or anything—”
    “I’m all right, actually,” said Tiffany. “Honestly.”
    “You see, if you bottle that sort of thing up, it can cause terrible damage later on.”
    “I’m not bottling, Miss Tick.”
    In fact, Tiffany was a bit surprised at not crying, but she wasn’t going to tell Miss Tick that. She’d left a sort of space in her head to burst into tears in, but it wasn’t filling up. Perhaps it was because she’d wrapped up all those feelings and doubts and left them on the hill by the potbellied stove.
    “And if, of course, you were feeling a bit downcast at the moment, I’m sure you could open the present he—” Miss Tick tried.
    “Tell me about Miss Level,” Tiffany said quickly. The name and address were all she knew about the lady she was going to stay with, but an address like “Miss Level, Cottage in the Woods Near the Dead Oak Tree in Lost Man’s Lane, High Overhang, If Out Leave Letters in Old Boot by Door” sounded promising.
    “Miss Level, yes,” said Miss Tick, defeated. “Er, yes. She’s not really very old, but she