The Wee Free Men

mystery voice, this time from her hat.
    “I know!” snapped Miss Tick.
    “And she just hauled off and hit it!”
    “Yes. I know .”
    “Just like that!”
    “Yes. Very impressive,” said Miss Tick. She was getting out of breath. Besides, they were already on early slopes of the downs now, and she wasn’t good on chalk. A wandering witch likes firm ground under her, not a rock so soft you could cut it with a knife.
    “Impressive?” said the voice. “She used her brother as bait !”
    “Amazing, wasn’t it?” said Miss Tick. “Such quick thinking…oh, no…” She stopped running and leaned against a field wall as a wave of dizziness hit her.
    “What’s happening? What’s happening?” said the voice from the hat. “I nearly fell off!”
    “It’s this wretched chalk! I can feel it already! I can do magic on honest soil, and rock is always fine, and I’m not too bad on clay, even…but chalk’s neither one thing nor the other! I’m very sensitive to geology, you know.”
    “What are you trying to tell me?” said the voice.
    “Chalk…is a hungry soil. I don’t really have much power on chalk.”
    The owner of the voice, who was hidden, said: “Are you going to fall over?”
    “No, no! It’s just the magic that doesn’t work.”
    Miss Tick did not look like a witch. Most witches don’t, at least the ones who wander from place to place. Looking like a witch can be dangerous when you walk among the uneducated. And for that reason she didn’t wear any occult jewelry, or have a glowing magical knife or a silver goblet with a pattern of skulls all around it, or carry a broomstick with sparks coming out of it, all of which are tiny hints that there may be a witch around. Her pockets never carried anything more magical than a few twigs, maybe a piece of string, a coin or two, and, of course, a lucky charm.
    Everyone in the country carried lucky charms, and Miss Tick had worked out that if you didn’t have one, people would suspect that you were a witch. You had to be a bit cunning to be a witch.
    Miss Tick did have a pointy hat, but it was a stealth hat and pointed only when she wanted it to.
    The one thing in her bag that might have made anyone suspicious was a very small, grubby booklet entitled An Introduction to Escapology, by the Great Williamson . If one of the risks of your job is being thrown into a pond with your hands tied together, then the ability to swim thirty yards underwater, fully clothed, plus the ability to lurk under the weeds breathing air through a hollow reed, count as nothing if you aren’t also amazingly good with knots.
    “You can’t do magic here?” said the voice in the hat.
    “No, I can’t,” said Miss Tick.
    She looked up at the sounds of jingling. A strange procession was coming up the white road. It was mostly made up of donkeys pulling small carts with brightly painted covers on them. People walked alongside the carts, dusty to the waist. They were all men, they wore bright robes—or robes, at least, that had been bright before being trailed through mud and dust for years—and every one of them wore a strange black square hat.
    Miss Tick smiled.
    They looked like tinkers, but there wasn’t one among them, she knew, who could mend a kettle. What they did was sell invisible things. And after they’d sold what they had, they still had it. They sold what everyone needed but often didn’t want. They sold the key to the universe to people who didn’t even know it was locked.
    “I can’t do ,” said Miss Tick, straightening up. “But I can teach!”

    Tiffany worked for the rest of the morning in the dairy. There was cheese that needed doing.
    There was bread and jam for lunch. Her mother said, “The teachers are coming to town today. You can go, if you’ve done your chores.”
    Tiffany agreed that, yes, there were one or two things she’d quite like to know more about.
    “Then you can have half a dozen carrots and an egg. I daresay they could do with an egg, poor things,” said her mother.
    Tiffany took them with her after lunch and went to get an egg’s worth of education.
    Most boys in the village grew up to do the same jobs as their fathers or, at least, some other job somewhere in the village where someone’s father would teach them as they went along. The girls were expected to grow up to be somebody’s wife. They were also expected to be able to read and write, those being considered soft indoor jobs that were too fiddly for the