Wintersmith

him…
    … iron enough to make a nail …. The words hung around in her head as the stick flew on and she remembered the old rhyme she’d heard years ago, when the wandering teachers came to the village. Everyone seemed to know it:
Iron enough to make a nail,
Lime enough to paint a wall,
Water enough to drown a dog,
Sulfur enough to stop the fleas,
Poison enough to kill a cow,
Potash enough to wash a shirt,
Gold enough to buy a bean,
Silver enough to coat a pin,
Lead enough to ballast a bird,
Phosphor enough to light the town,
    And on, and on…
    It was a kind of nonsense, the sort that you never remember being taught but always seem to have known. Girls skipped to it, kids dib-dibbed it to see who was O-U-T out.
    And then one day a traveling teacher, who like all the others would teach for eggs, fresh vegetables, and clean used clothing, found he got more to eat by teaching things that were interesting rather than useful. He talked about how some wizards had once, using very skillful magic, worked out exactly what a human being was made of. It was mostly water, but there were iron and brimstone and soot and a pinch of just about everything else, even a tiny amount of gold, but all cooked up together somehow.
    It made as much sense to Tiffany as anything else did. But she was certain of this: If you took all that stuff and put it in a big bowl, it wouldn’t turn into a human no matter how much you shouted at it.
    You couldn’t make a picture by pouring a lot of paint into a bucket. If you were human, you knew that.
    The Wintersmith wasn’t. The Wintersmith didn’t….
    He didn’t know how the song ended, either.
    The words went around and around her mind as the borrowed broom plunged onward. At one point Dr. Bustle turned up, with his reedy, self-satisfied voice, and gave her a lecture on the Lesser Elements and how, indeed, humans were made up of nearly all of them but also contained a lot of narrativium, the basic element of stories, which you could detect only by watching the way all the others behaved….
    You run, you flee. How do you like this, sheep girl? You stole him from me. Is he all that you hoped for? The voice came out of the air right beside her.
    “I don’t care who you are,” muttered Tiffany, too cold to think straight. “Go away….”
    Hours went by. The air down here was a bit warmer, and the snow not so fierce, but the cold still got through, no matter how much clothing you wore. Tiffany fought to stay awake. Some witches could sleep on a broomstick, but she didn’t dare try in case she dreamed she was falling and woke up to find that it was true but soon wouldn’t be.
    But now there were lights below, fitful and yellow. It was probably the inn at Twoshirts, an important navigation point.
    Witches never stayed at inns if they could help it, because in some areas that could be dangerous, and in any case most of them inconveniently required you to pay them money. But Mrs. Umbridge, who ran the souvenir shop opposite the inn, had an old barn around the back and was what Miss Tick called FTW, or Friendly To Witches. There was even a witch sign, scratched on the barn wall where no one who wasn’t looking for it would find it: a spoon, a pointy hat, and one big schoolmistressy checkmark.
    A pile of straw had never seemed more wonderful, and inside two minutes Tiffany was inside the straw. At the other end of the little barn Mrs. Umbridge’s pair of cows kept the air warm and smelling of fermented grass.
    It was a dark sleep. She dreamed of Annagramma taking off the De-Luxe Mask and revealing her face, and then taking her face off to show Granny Weatherwax’s face underneath….
    And then: Was it worth a dance, sheep girl? You have taken my power and I am weak. The world will become frost. Was it worth a dance?
    She sat up in the pitch-black barn and thought she saw a writhing glow in the air, like a snake. Then she fell back into the darkness and dreamed of the Wintersmith’s eyes.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Even Turquoise
    C lang-clonk!
    Tiffany sat bolt upright, straw tumbling off her. But it was only the sound of a handle clanging on the side of a metal pail.
    Mrs. Umbridge was milking her cows. Pale daylight shone through the cracks in the walls. She looked up when she heard Tiffany.
    “Ah, I thought one of my ladies must’ve arrived in the night,” she said. “Want some breakfast, dear?”
    “Please!”
    Tiffany helped the old woman with her buckets, helped make some butter, patted