The Wee Free Men

broomstick!”
    “It’s unfair to leave her alone with them,” said the toad.
    “She won’t be alone,” said Miss Tick. “She’ll have you.”
    “Oh,” said the toad.

    Tiffany shared a bedroom with Fastidia and Hannah. She woke up when she heard them come to bed, and she lay in the dark until she heard their breathing settle down and they started to dream of young sheep shearers with their shirts off.
    Outside, summer lightning flashed around the hills, and there was a rumble of thunder….

    Thunder and Lightning. She knew them as dogs before she knew them as the light and sound of a storm. Granny always had her sheepdogs with her, indoors and out. One moment they would be black-and-white streaks across the distant turf, and then they were suddenly there, panting, eyes never leaving Granny’s face. Half the dogs on the hills were Lightning’s puppies, trained by Granny Aching.
    Tiffany had gone with the family to the big Sheepdog Trials. Every shepherd on the Chalk went to them, and the very best entered the arena to show how well they could work their dogs. The dogs would round up sheep, separate them, drive them into the pens—or sometimes run off, or snap at one another, because even the best dog can have a bad day. But Granny never entered with Thunder and Lightning. She’d lean on the fence with the dogs lying in front of her, watching the show intently and puffing her foul pipe. And Tiffany’s father had said that after each shepherd had worked his dogs, the judges would look nervously across at Granny Aching to see what she thought. In fact all the shepherds watched her. Granny never, ever entered the arena, because she was the Trials. If Granny thought you were a good shepherd—if she nodded at you when you walked out of the arena, if she puffed at her pipe and said, “That’ll do”—you walked like a giant for a day, you owned the Chalk….
    When she was small and up on the wold with Granny, Thunder and Lightning would baby-sit Tiffany, lying attentively a few feet away as she played. And she’d been so proud when Granny had let her use them to round up a flock. She’d run about excitedly in all directions, shouting “Come by!” and “There!” and “Walk up!” and, glory be, the dogs had worked perfectly.
    She knew now that they’d have worked perfectly whatever she’d shouted. Granny was just sitting there, smoking her pipe, and by now the dogs could read her mind. They only ever took orders from Granny Aching….

    The storm died down after a while, and there was the gentle sound of rain.
    At some point Ratbag the cat pushed open the door and jumped onto the bed. He was big to start with, but Ratbag flowed. He was so fat that, on any reasonably flat surface, he gradually spread out in a great puddle of fur. He hated Tiffany but would never let personal feelings get in the way of a warm place to sleep.
    She must have slept, because she woke up when she heard the voices.
    They seemed very close but, somehow, very small.
    “Crivens! It’s a’ verra well sayin’ ‘find the hag,’ but what should we be lookin’ for, can ye tell me that? All these bigjobs look just the same tae me!”
    “Not-totally-wee Geordie doon at the fishin’ said she was a big, big girl!”
    “A great help that is, I dinna think! They’re all big, big girls!”
    “Ye paira dafties! Everyone knows a hag wears a pointy bonnet!”
    “So they canna be a hag if they’re sleepin’, then?”
    “Hello?” whispered Tiffany.
    There was silence, embroidered with the breathing of her sisters. But in a way Tiffany couldn’t quite describe, it was the silence of people trying hard not to make any noise.
    She leaned down and looked under the bed. There was nothing there but the guzunder.
    The little man in the river had talked just like that.
    She lay back in the moonlight, listening until her ears ached.
    Then she wondered what the school for witches would be like and why she hadn’t seen it yet.
    She knew every inch of the country for two miles around. She liked the river best, with the backwaters where striped pike sun-bathed just above the weeds and the banks where kingfishers nested. There was a heronry a mile or so upriver, and she liked to creep up on the birds when they came down here to fish in the reeds, because there’s nothing funnier than a heron trying to get airborne in a hurry.
    She drifted off to sleep again, thinking about the land around the farm. She knew all of it. There were no