Wintersmith

get at the cheeses and then it would all go dark.
    That was because Horace was a cheese.
    Tiffany knew that Lancre Blue cheeses were always a bit on the lively side, and sometimes had to be nailed down, but…well, she was highly skilled at cheese making, even though she said it herself, and Horace was definitely a champion. The famous blue streaks that gave the variety its wonderful color were really pretty, although Tiffany wasn’t sure they should glow in the dark.
    She prodded the shadows with the end of the broom. There was a crack, and when she pulled the stick out again, two inches were missing from the end. Then there was a ptooi! noise and the missing piece of handle bounced off the wall on the other side of the room.
    “No more milk for you, then,” said Tiffany, straightening up, and she thought:
    He came to give me the horse back. The Wintersmith did that.
    Um…
    That is quite…impressive, when you think about it.
    I mean, he’s got to organize avalanches and gales and come up with new shapes for snowflakes and everything, but he spared a bit of time just to come and give me my necklace back. Um…
    And he just stood there.
    And then he just vanished—I mean vanished even more.
    Um…
    She left Horace muttering under the sink and made tea for Miss Treason, who was back at her weaving. Then she quietly went up to her room.
    Tiffany’s diary was three inches thick. Annagramma, another local trainee witch and one of her friends (more or less), said that she should really call it her Book of Shadows and write it on vellum using one of the special magical inks sold at Zakzak Stronginthearm’s Magical Emporium at Popular Prices—at least, prices that were popular with Zakzak.
    Tiffany couldn’t afford one. You could only trade witchcraft—you weren’t supposed to sell it. Miss Treason didn’t mind her selling cheeses, but even so paper was expensive up here, and the wandering peddlers never had very much to sell. They usually had an ounce or two of green copperas, though, which could make a decent ink if you mixed it with crushed oak galls or green walnut shells.
    The diary was now as thick as a brick with extra pages Tiffany had glued in. She’d worked out that she could make it last two more years if she wrote small.
    On the leather cover she had, with a hot skewer, drawn the words “Feegles Keep Out!!” It had never worked. They looked upon that sort of thing as an invitation. She wrote parts of the diary in code these days. Reading didn’t come naturally to the Chalk Hill Feegles, so surely they’d never get the hang of a code.
    She looked around carefully, in any case, and unlocked the huge padlock that secured a chain around the book. She turned to today’s date, dipped her pen in the ink, and wrote: “ Met t* .”
    Yes, a snowflake would be a good code for the Wintersmith.
    He just stood there, she thought.
    And he ran away because I screamed.
    Which was a good thing, obviously.
    Um…
    But…I wish I hadn’t screamed.
    She opened her hand. The image of the horse was still there, as white as chalk, but there was no pain at all.
    Tiffany gave a little shiver and pulled herself together. So? She had met the spirit of Winter. She was a witch. It was the sort of thing that sometimes happened. He’d politely given her back what was hers, and then he’d gone. There was no call to get soppy about it. There were things to do.
    Then she wrote: “Ltr frm R.”
    She very carefully opened the letter from Roland, which was easy because slug slime isn’t much of a glue. With any luck she could even reuse the envelope. She hunched over the letter so that no one could read it over her shoulder. Finally she said: “Miss Treason, will you get out of my face, please? I need to use my eyeballs privately.”
    There was a pause and then a mutter from downstairs, and the tickling behind her eyes went away.
    It was always…good to get a letter from Roland. Yes, they were often about the sheep, and other things of the Chalk, and sometimes there’d be a dried flower inside, a harebell or a cowslip. Granny Aching wouldn’t have approved of that; she always said that if the hills had wanted people to pick the flowers, they would have grown more of them.
    The letters always made her homesick.
    One day Miss Treason had said, “This young man who writes to you…is he your beau?” and Tiffany had changed the subject until she had time to look up the word in the dictionary and then more time to stop