A Hat Full Of Sky

want a balloon , Annagramma?” said Tiffany, sliding off the table.
    “No! Please!” Annagramma took another step back, holding her arms in front of her face, and fell over a bench. Tiffany picked her up and patted her cheerfully on a cheek.
    “Then I shan’t buy you one,” she said. “But please learn what literally really means, will you?”
    Annagramma smiled in a frozen kind of way. “Er, yes,” she managed.
    “Good. And then we will be friends.”
    She left the girl standing there and went back to pick up the hat.
    “Um, you’re probably still a bit woozy,” said Petulia. “You probably don’t understand.”
    “Ha, I wasn’t actually frightened, you know,” said Annagramma. “It was all for fun, of course.” No one paid any attention.
    “Understand what?” said Tiffany.
    “It’s her actual hat !” the girls chorused.
    “It’s like, if that hat could talk, what stories it would have to, you know, tell,” said Lucy Warbeck.
    “It was just a joke,” said Annagramma to anyone who was listening.
    Tiffany looked at the hat. It was very battered, and not extremely clean. If that hat could talk, it would probably mutter.
    “Where’s Granny Weatherwax now?” she said.
    There was a gasp from the girls. This was nearly as impressive as the hat.
    “Um…she doesn’t mind you calling her that?” said Petulia.
    “She invited me to,” said Tiffany.
    “Only we heard you had to have known her for, like, a hundred years before she let you call her that…” said Lucy Warbeck.
    Tiffany shrugged. “Well, anyway,” she said, “do you know where she is?”
    “Oh, having tea with the other old witches and yacking on about chutney and how witches today aren’t what they were when she was a girl,” said Lulu Darling.
    “What?” said Tiffany. “Just having tea ?”
    The young witches looked at one another in puzzlement.
    “Um, there’s buns too,” said Petulia. “If that’s important.”
    “But she opened the door for me. The door into—out of the…the desert! You can’t just sit down after that and have buns !”
    “Um, the ones I saw had icing on them,” Petulia ventured nervously. “They weren’t just homemade—”
    “Look,” said Lucy Warbeck, “we didn’t really, you know, see anything? You were just standing there with this like glow around you and we couldn’t get in and then Gran—Mistress Weatherwax walked up and stepped right in and you both, you know, stood there? And then the glow went zip and vanished and you, like, fell over.”
    “What Lucy’s failing to say very accurately,” said Annagramma, “is that we didn’t actually see you go anywhere. I’m telling you this as a friend, of course. There was just this glow, which could have been anything .”
    Annagramma was going to be a good witch, Tiffany considered. She could tell herself stories that she literally believed. And she could bounce back like a ball.
    “Don’t forget, I saw the horse,” said Harrieta Bilk.
    Annagramma rolled her eyes. “Oh yes, Harrieta thinks she saw some kind of horse in the sky. Except it didn’t look like a horse, she says. She says it looked like a horse would look if you took the actual horse away and just left the horsiness, right, Harrieta?”
    “I didn’t say that!” snapped Harrieta.
    “Well, pardon me . That’s what it sounded like.”
    “Um, and some people said they saw a white horse grazing in the next field, too,” said Petulia. “And a lot of the older witches said they felt a tremendous amount of—”
    “Yes, some people thought they saw a horse in a field, but it isn’t there anymore,” said Annagramma in the singsong voice she used when she thought it was all stupid. “That must be very rare in the country, seeing horses in fields. Anyway, if there really was a white horse, it was gray.”
    Tiffany sat on the edge of the table, staring at her knees. Anger at Annagramma had jolted her to life, but now the tiredness was creeping back again.
    “I suppose none of you saw a little blue man, about six inches high, with red hair?” she said quietly.
    “Anyone?” said Annagramma with malicious cheerfulness. There was a general mumbling of “no.”
    “Sorry, Tiffany,” said Lucy.
    “Don’t worry,” said Annagramma. “He probably just rode away on his white horse!”
    This is going to be like Fairyland all over again, thought Tiffany. Even I can’t remember if it was real. Why should anyone believe me? But she had to try.
    “There was a