Wintersmith

say for herself.
    And on top of everything else, it was her day to visit Annagramma. Tiffany sighed deeply. She’d probably get that wrong too.
    Slowly, astride her broomstick, she disappeared among the trees.
    After a minute or two, a green shoot thrust up from the patch of soil that she had breathed on, grew to a height of about six inches, and put out two green leaves.
    Footsteps approached. They were not as crunchy as footsteps on frozen snow usually are.
    There was a crunch now, though, of someone kneeling on the frosted leaves.
    A pair of skinny but powerful hands gently dragged and sculpted the snow and leaves together to make a tall, thin wall around the shoot, enclosing it and protecting it from the wind like a soldier in a castle.
    A small white kitten tried to nuzzle at it and was carefully lifted out of the way.
    Then Granny Weatherwax walked back into the woods, leaving no footprints. You never teach anyone else everything you know.

    Days went by. Annagramma learned, but it was a struggle. It was hard to teach someone who wouldn’t admit that there was anything she didn’t know, so there were conversations like this:
    “You know how to prepare placebo root, do you?”
    “Of course. Everyone knows that.” And this was not the time to say, “Okay then, show me,” because she’d mess around for a while and then say she had a headache. This was the time to say, “Good, watch me to see if I’m doing it right,” and then do it perfectly. And you’d add things like: “As you know, Granny Weatherwax says that practically anything works instead of placebo root, but it’s best to use the real thing if you can get it. If prepared in syrup, it’s an amazing remedy for minor illnesses, but of course you already know this.”
    And Annagramma would say: “Of course.”
    A week later, in the forests, it was so cold some older trees exploded in the night. They hadn’t seen that for a long time, the older people said. It happened when the sap froze, then tried to expand.
    Annagramma was as vain as a canary in a room full of mirrors and panicked instantly when faced with anything she didn’t know, but she was sharp at picking things up, and very good at appearing to know more than she really did, which is a valuable talent for a witch. Once, Tiffany noticed the Boffo catalogue open on the table with some things circled. She asked no questions. She was too busy.
    A week after that, wells froze.
    Tiffany went around the villages with Annagramma a few times and knew that she would make it, eventually. She’d got built-in Boffo. She was tall and arrogant and acted as if she knew everything even when she didn’t have a clue. That would get her a long way. People listened to her.
    They needed to. There were no roads open now; between cottages, people had cut tunnels full of cold blue light. Anything that needed to be moved was moved by broomstick. That included old people. They were lifted, bedclothes, walking sticks, and all, and moved into other houses. People packed together stayed warmer, and could pass the time by reminding one another that, however cold this was, it wasn’t as cold as the cold you got when they were young.
    After a while, they stopped saying that.
    Sometimes it would thaw, just a little, and then freeze again. That fringed every roof with icicles. At the next thaw, they stabbed the ground like daggers.
    Tiffany didn’t sleep; at least, she didn’t go to bed. None of the witches did. The snow got trampled down into ice that was like rock, so a few carts could be moved about, but there still weren’t enough witches to go around or enough hours in the day. There weren’t enough hours in the day and the night put together. Petulia had fallen asleep on her stick and ended up in a tree two miles away. Tiffany slid off once and landed in a snowdrift.
    Wolves entered the tunnels. They were weak with hunger, and desperate. Granny Weatherwax put a stop to them and never told anyone how she’d done it.
    The cold was like being punched, over and over again, day and night. All over the snow were little dark dots that were dead birds, frozen out of the air. Other birds had found the tunnels and filled them with twittering, and people fed them scraps because they brought a false hope of spring to the world…
    …because there was food. Oh, yes, there was food. The Cornucopia ran day and night.
    And Tiffany thought: I should have said no to snowflakes….

    There was a shack, old and