The Wee Free Men

got,” explained Tiffany. “It said Jenny Green-Teeth has eyes the size of soup plates. There’s a picture, but it’s not a good one. So I measured a soup plate, so I could be exact.”
    Miss Tick put her chin on her hand and gave Tiffany an odd sort of smile.
    “That was all right, wasn’t it?” said Tiffany.
    “What? Oh, yes. Yes. Um…yes. Very…exact. Go on.”
    Tiffany told her about the fight with Jenny, although she didn’t mention Wentworth in case Miss Tick got funny about it. Miss Tick listened carefully.
    “Why the frying pan?” she said. “You could’ve found a stick.”
    “A frying pan just seemed a better idea,” said Tiffany.
    “Hah! It was . Jenny would’ve eaten you up if you’d used a stick. A frying pan is made of iron. Creatures of that kidney can’t stand iron.”
    “But it’s a monster out of a storybook!” said Tiffany. “What’s it doing turning up in our little river?”
    Miss Tick stared at Tiffany for a while and then said: “Why do you want to be a witch, Tiffany?”
    It had started with The Goode Childe’s Booke of Faerie Tales. Actually, it had probably started with a lot of things, but the stories most of all.
    Her mother had read them to her when she was little, and then she’d read them to herself. And all the stories had, somewhere, the witch. The wicked old witch .
    And Tiffany had thought, Where’s the evidence ?
    The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you had no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch.
    If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about “a handsome prince”…was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called him handsome? As for “a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long”…well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories didn’t want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told….
    And you were told that the old witch lived all by herself in a strange cottage that was made of gingerbread or ran around on giant hen’s feet, and talked to animals, and could do magic.
    Tiffany only ever knew one old woman who lived all alone in a strange cottage….
    Well, no. That wasn’t quite true. But she had only ever known one old woman who lived in a strange house that moved about , and that was Granny Aching. And she could do magic, sheep magic, and she talked to animals and there was nothing wicked about her. That proved you couldn’t believe the stories.
    And there had been the other old woman, the one who everyone said was a witch. And what had happened to her had made Tiffany very…thoughtful.
    Anyway, she preferred the witches to the smug handsome princes and especially to the stupid smirking princesses, who didn’t have the sense of a beetle. They had lovely golden hair, too, and Tiffany didn’t. Her hair was brown, plain brown. Her mother called it chestnut, or sometimes auburn, but Tiffany knew it was brown, brown, brown, just like her eyes. Brown as earth. And did the book have any adventures for people who had brown eyes and brown hair? No, no, no…it was the blond people with blue eyes and the redheads with green eyes who got the stories. If you had brown hair you were probably just a servant or a woodcutter or something. Or a dairymaid. Well, that was not going to happen, even if she was good at cheese. She couldn’t be the prince, and she’d never be a princess, and she didn’t want to be a woodcutter, so she’d be the witch and know things, just like Granny Aching—
    “Who was Granny Aching?” said a voice.

    Who was Granny Aching? People would start asking that now. And the answer was: What Granny Aching was, was there. She was always there. It seemed that the lives of all the Achings revolved around Granny Aching. Down in the village decisions were made, things were done, life went on in the knowledge that in her old wheeled shepherding hut on the hills Granny Aching was there, watching.
    And she was the silence of the hills. Perhaps that’s why she liked Tiffany, in her awkward, hesitant way. Her older sisters chattered, and Granny didn’t like noise. Tiffany didn’t make noise when she was up at the hut. She just loved being there. She’d watch the buzzards and listen to the noise of the silence.
    It did have a noise, up there. Sounds, voices, animal noises floating up onto the downs somehow made the silence