The Wee Free Men

deep and complex. And Granny Aching wrapped this silence around herself and made room inside it for Tiffany. It was always too busy on the farm. There were a lot of people with a lot to do. There wasn’t enough time for silence. There wasn’t time for listening. But Granny Aching was silent and listened all the time.

    “What?” said Tiffany, blinking.
    “You just said, ‘Granny Aching listened to me all the time,’” said Miss Tick.
    Tiffany swallowed. “I think my grandmother was slightly a witch,” she said, with a touch of pride.
    “Really? How do you know.”
    “Well, witches can curse people, right?” said Tiffany.
    “So it is said,” said Miss Tick diplomatically.
    “Well, my father said Granny Aching cussed the sky blue,” said Tiffany.
    Miss Tick coughed. “Well, cussing, now, cussing isn’t like genuine cursing . Cussing’s more like dang and botheration and darned and drat , you know? Cursing is more on the lines of ‘I hope your nose explodes and your ears go flying away.’”
    “I think Granny’s cussing was a bit more than that,” said Tiffany, in a very definite voice. “And she talked to her dogs.”
    “And what kind of things did she say to them?” said Miss Tick.
    “Oh, things like ‘come by’ and ‘away to me’ and ‘that’ll do,’” said Tiffany. “They always did what she told them.”
    “But those are just sheepdog commands,” said Miss Tick dismissively. “That’s not exactly witchcraft.”
    “Well, that still makes them familiars, doesn’t it?” Tiffany retorted, feeling annoyed. “Witches have animals they can talk to, called familiars. Like your toad there.”
    “I’m not familiar,” said a voice from among the paper flowers. “I’m just slightly presumptuous.”
    “And she knew about all kinds of herbs,” Tiffany persisted. Granny Aching was going to be a witch even if Tiffany had to argue all day. “She could cure anything. My father said she could make a shepherd’s pie stand up and baa.” Tiffany lowered her voice. “She could bring lambs back to life ….”

    You hardly ever saw Granny Aching indoors in the spring and summer. She spent most of the year sleeping in the old wheeled hut, which could be dragged across the downs after the flocks. But the first time Tiffany could remember seeing the old woman in the farmhouse, she was kneeling in front of the fire, putting a dead lamb in the big black oven.
    Tiffany had screamed and screamed. And Granny had gently picked her up, a little awkwardly, and sat her on her lap and shushed her and called her “my little jiggit,” while on the floor her sheepdogs, Thunder and Lightning, watched her in doggish amazement. Granny wasn’t particularly at home around children, because they didn’t baa.
    When Tiffany had stopped crying out of sheer lack of breath, Granny had put her down on the rug and opened the oven, and Tiffany had watched the lamb come alive again.
    When Tiffany got a little older, she found out that jiggit meant “twenty” in the Yan Tan Tethera, the ancient counting language of the shepherds. The older people still used it when they were counting things they thought of as special. She was Granny Aching’s twentieth grandchild.
    And when she was older still, she also understood all about the warming oven, which never got more than, well, warm. Her mother would let the bread dough rise in it, and Ratbag the cat would sleep in it, sometimes on the dough. It was just the place to revive a weak lamb that had been born on a snowy night and was near death from the cold. That was how it worked. No magic at all. But that time it had been magic. And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.

    “Good, but still not exactly witchcraft,” said Miss Tick, breaking the spell again. “Anyway, you don’t have to have a witch ancestor to be a witch. It helps, of course, because of heredity.”
    “You mean like having talents?” said Tiffany, wrinkling her brow.
    “Partly, I suppose,” said Miss Tick. “But I was thinking of pointy hats, for example. If you have a grandmother who can pass on her pointy hat to you, that saves a great deal of expense. They are incredibly hard to come by, especially ones strong enough to withstand falling farmhouses. Did Mrs. Aching have anything like that?”
    “I don’t think so,” said Tiffany. “She hardly ever wore a hat except in the very cold weather. She wore an old grain sack as a sort of hood. Um…does