Wintersmith

again!”

    With witches everything is a test. That’s why they tested Tiffany’s feet.
    I bet that I’m the only person in the world about to do this, she thought as she lowered both her feet into a tray of soil that Nanny had hastily shoveled up. Granny Weatherwax and Miss Tick were both sitting on bare wooden chairs, despite the fact that the gray cat Greebo was occupying the whole of one big saggy armchair. You didn’t want to wake up Greebo when he wanted to sleep.
    “Can you feel anything?” asked Miss Tick.
    “It’s a bit cold, that’s all—oh…something’s happening….”
    Green shoots appeared around her feet, and grew quickly. Then they went white at the base and gently pushed Tiffany’s feet aside as they began to swell.
    “Onions?” said Granny Weatherwax scornfully.
    “Well, they were the only seeds I could find quickly,” said Nanny Ogg, poking at the glistening white bulbs. “Good size. Well done, Tiff.”
    Granny looked shocked. “You’re not going to eat those, are you, Gytha?” she said accusingly. “You are, aren’t you? You’re going to eat them!”
    Nanny Ogg, standing up with a bunch of onions in each pudgy hand, looked guilty, but only for a moment.
    “Why not?” she said stoutly. “Fresh vegetables are not to be sneezed at in the winter. And anyway, her feet are nice and clean.”
    “It’s not seemly,” said Miss Tick.
    “It didn’t hurt,” said Tiffany. “All I had to do was put my feet on the tray for a moment.”
    “Yes, she says it didn’t hurt,” Nanny Ogg insisted. “Now, I think I might have some old carrot seeds in the kitchen drawer—” She saw the expressions on the faces of the others. “All right, all right, then. There’s no need to look like that,” she said. “I was just tryin’ to point out the silver lining, that’s all.”
    “Someone please tell me what is happening to me?” Tiffany wailed.
    “Miss Tick is going to give you the answer in some long words,” said Granny. “But they boils down to this: It’s the Story happening. It’s making you fit into itself.”
    Tiffany tried not to look like someone who didn’t understand a word that she had just heard.
    “I could do with a little bit of the fine detail, I think,” she said.
    “I think I’ll get some tea brewed,” said Nanny Ogg.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    On with the Dance
    T he Wintersmith and the Summer Lady…danced. The dance never ended.
    Winter never dies. Not as people die. It hangs on in late frost and the smell of autumn in a summer evening, and in the heat it flees to the mountains.
    Summer never dies. It sinks into the ground; in the depths, winter buds form in sheltered places and white shoots creep under dead leaves. Some of it flees into the deepest, hottest deserts, where there is a summer that never ends. To animals they were just the weather, just part of everything.
    But humans arose and gave them names, just as people filled the starry sky with heroes and monsters, because this turned them into stories. And humans loved stories, because once you’d turned things into stories, you could change the stories. And there was the problem, right there.
    Now the Lady and the Wintersmith danced around the year, changing places in the spring and autumn, and it had worked for thousands of years, right up until the time a girl couldn’t control her feet and had arrived in the dance at exactly the wrong time.
    But the Story had life, too. It was like a play now. It would roll on around the year, and if one of the players wasn’t the real actress but just some girl who’d wandered onto the stage, well, that was too bad. She’d have to wear the costume and speak the lines and hope that there was going to be a happy ending. Change the Story, even if you don’t mean to, and the Story changes you.
    Miss Tick used a lot more words than this, like “anthropomorphic personification,” but this was what ended up in Tiffany’s head.
    “So…I’m not a goddess?” she said.
    “Oh, I wish I had a blackboard.” Miss Tick sighed. “They really don’t survive the water, though, and of course the chalks get so soggy—”
    “What we think happened in the Dance,” Granny Weatherwax began in a loud voice, “is that you and the Summer Lady got…mixed up.”
    “Mixed up?”
    “You may have some of her talents. The myth of the Summer Lady says that flowers grow wherever she walks,” said Granny Weatherwax.
    “Where e’er,” said Miss Tick primly.
    “What?”