Wintersmith

wondered if she was imagining them.
    There was the thud of a drumbeat: bom … bom … bom .
    It went on for half a minute or so, and then stopped. But in the silence of the cold woods the beat went on inside Tiffany’s head, and perhaps that wasn’t the only head it thundered in, because the men were gently nodding their heads, to keep the beat.
    They began to dance.
    The only noise was of their boots hitting the ground as the shadow men wove in and out. But then Tiffany, her head full of the silent drum, heard another sound. Her foot was tapping, all by itself.
    She’d heard this beat before; she’d seen men dancing like this. But it had been on warm days in bright sunshine. They’d worn little bells on their clothes.
    “This is a Morris dance!” she said, not quite under her breath.
    “Shush!” hissed Miss Treason.
    “But this isn’t the right—”
    “Be silent!”
    Blushing and angry in the dark, Tiffany took her eyes off the dancers and defiantly looked around the clearing. There were other shadows crowding in, human or at least human shaped, but she couldn’t see them clearly and maybe that was just as well.
    It was getting colder, she was sure. White frost was crackling across the leaves.
    The beat went on. But it seemed to Tiffany that it wasn’t alone now, but had picked up other beats, and echoes from inside her head.
    Miss Treason could shush all she liked. It was a Morris dance. But it was out of time!
    The Morris men came to the village sometime in May. You could never be sure when, because they had to call at lots of villages along the Chalk, and every village had a pub, which slowed them down.
    They carried sticks and wore white clothes with bells on them, to stop them from creeping up on people. No one likes an unexpected Morris dancer. Tiffany would wait outside the village with the other children and dance behind them all the way in.
    And then they used to dance on the village green to the beat of a drum, banging their sticks together in the air, and then everyone would go to the pub and summer would come.
    Tiffany hadn’t been able to work out how that last bit happened. The dancers danced, and then summer came—that was all anybody seemed to know. Her father said that there had once been a year when the dancers hadn’t turned up, and a cold wet spring had turned into a chilly autumn, with the months between being filled with mists and rain and frosts in August.
    The sound of the drums filled her head now, making her feel dizzy. They were wrong; there was something wrong—
    And then she remembered the seventh dancer, the one they called the Fool. He was generally a small man, wearing a battered top hat and bright rags sewn all over his clothes. Mostly he wandered around holding out the hat and grinning at people until they gave him money for beer. But sometimes he’d put the hat down and whirl off into the dancers. You’d expect there to be a massive collision of arms and legs, but it never happened. Jumping and twirling among the sweating men, he always managed to be where the other dancers weren’t.
    The world was moving around her. She blinked. The drums in her head were like thunder now, and there was one beat as deep as oceans. Miss Treason was forgotten. So was the strange, mysterious crowd. Now there was only the dance itself.
    It twisted in the air like a living thing. But there was a space in it, moving around. It was where she should be, she knew it. Miss Treason had said no, but that had been a long time ago and how could Miss Treason understand? What could she know? When did she last dance? The dance was in Tiffany’s bones now, calling to her. Six dancers were not enough!
    She ran forward and jumped into the dance.
    The eyes of the dancing men glared at her as she skipped and danced between them, always being where they weren’t. The drums had her feet, and they went where the beat sent them.
    And then……there was someone else there.
    It was like the feeling of someone behind her—but it was also the feeling of someone in front of her, and beside her, and above her, and below her, all at once.
    The dancers froze, but the world spun. The men were just black shadows, darker outlines in the darkness. The drumbeats stopped, and there was one long moment as Tiffany turned gently and silently, arms out, feet not touching the ground, her face turned toward stars that were as cold as ice and sharp as needles. It felt…wonderful.
    A voice said: “Who Are You?” It