The Wee Free Men

you think?” she said.
    “I might,” said Tiffany.
    “Do you want any help?”
    “If it’s my trouble, I’ll get out of it,” said Tiffany. She wanted to say: Yes, yes! I’m going to need help! I don’t know what’s going to happen when my father gets here! The Baron’s probably gotten really angry! But I don’t want them to think I can’t deal with my own problems. I ought to be able to cope.
    “That’s right,” said Mistress Weatherwax.
    Tiffany wondered if the witch could read minds.
    “Minds? No,” said Mistress Weatherwax, climbing onto her broomstick. “Faces, yes. Come here, young lady.”
    Tiffany obeyed.
    “The thing about witchcraft,” said Mistress Weatherwax, “is that it’s not like school at all. First you get the test, and then afterward you spend years findin’ out how you passed it. It’s a bit like life in that respect.” She reached out and gently raised Tiffany’s chin so that she could look into her face.
    “I see you opened your eyes,” she said.
    “Yes.”
    “Good. Many people never do. Times ahead might be a little tricky, even so. You’ll need this.”
    She stretched out a hand and made a circle in the air around Tiffany’s head, then brought her hand up over the head while making little movements with her forefinger.
    Tiffany raised her hands to her head. For a moment she thought there was nothing there, and then they touched…something. It was more like a sensation in the air; if you weren’t expecting it to be there, your fingers passed straight through.
    “Is it really there?” she said.
    “Who knows?” said the witch. “It’s virtually a pointy hat. No one else will know it’s there. It might be a comfort.”
    “You mean it just exists in my head?” said Tiffany.
    “You’ve got lots of things in your head. That doesn’t mean they aren’t real. Best not to ask me too many questions.”
    “What happened to the toad?” said Miss Tick, who did ask questions.
    “He’s gone off with the Wee Free Men,” said Tiffany. “It turned out he used to be a lawyer.”
    “You’ve given a clan of the Nac Mac Feegle their own lawyer?” said Mrs. Ogg. “That’ll make the world tremble. Still, I always say the occasional tremble does you good.”
    “Come, sisters, we must away,” said Miss Tick, who had climbed on the other broomstick behind Mrs. Ogg.
    “There’s no need for that sort of talk,” said Mrs. Ogg. “That’s theater talk, that is. Cheerio, Tiff. We’ll see you again.”
    Her stick rose gently into the air. From the stick of Mistress Weatherwax, though, there was merely a sad little noise, like the thwop of Miss Tick’s hat point. The broomstick went kshugagugah .
    Mistress Weatherwax sighed. “It’s them dwarfs,” she said. “They say they’ve repaired it, oh yes, and it starts first time in their workshop—”
    They heard the sound of distant hooves. With surprising speed, Mistress Weatherwax swung herself off the stick, grabbed it firmly in both hands, and ran away across the turf, skirts billowing behind her.
    She was a speck in the distance when Tiffany’s father came over the brow of the hill on one of the farm horses. He hadn’t even stopped to put the leather shoes on it; great slices of earth flew up as hooves the size of large soup plates, * each one shod with iron, bit into the turf.
    Tiffany heard a faint kshugagugahvvvvvoooom behind her as he leaped off the horse.
    She was surprised to see him laughing and crying at the same time.

    It was all a bit of a dream.
    Tiffany found that a very useful thing to say. It’s hard to remember, it was all a bit of a dream. It was all a bit of a dream, I can’t be certain.
    The overjoyed Baron, however, was very certain. Obviously this—this Queen woman, whoever she was, had been stealing children but Roland had beaten her, oh yes, and helped these two young children to get back as well.
    Her mother had insisted on Tiffany’s going to bed, even though it was broad daylight. Actually, she didn’t mind. She was tired, and lay under the covers in that nice pink world halfway between asleep and awake.
    She heard the Baron and her father talking downstairs. She heard the story being woven between them as they tried to make sense of it all. Obviously the girl had been very brave (this was the Baron speaking), but well, she was nine, wasn’t she? And didn’t even know how to use a sword! Whereas Roland had had fencing lessons at his school…
    And so it went on. There were