from the
Tiffany Aching
series of “Stories of Discworld®”
by
Terry Pratchett

And finally there was The Goode Childe’s Booke of Faerie Tales, so old that it belonged to an age when there were far more e’s around.

“Once you learn about magic, I mean really learn about magic, learn everything you can learn about magic, then you’ve got the most important lesson still to learn,” said Miss Tick.

“What’s that?”

“Not to use it.”

“Now . . . if you trust in yourself . . .”

“Yes?”

“. . . and believe in your dreams . . .”

“Yes?”

“. . . and follow your star . . .” Miss Tick went on.

“Yes?”

“. . . you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”

Tiffany knew it was gibbous because she’d read in the Almanack that gibbous meant what the moon looked like when it was just a bit fatter than half full, and so she made a point of paying attention to it around those times just so that she could say to herself: “Ah, I see the moon’s very gibbous tonight . . .”

It’s possible that this tells you more about Tiffany than she would want you to know.

Tiffany was on the whole quite a truthful person, but it seemed to her that there were times when things didn’t divide easily into “true” and “false,” but instead could be things that people needed to know at the moment and things that they didn’t need to know at the moment.

“As soon as we see somethin’, we’ll attack it. Right?”

This caused a cheer.

“Ach, ’tis a good plan,” said Daft Wullie.

“On your honor as a drunken rowdy thief?” said Tiffany.

Rob Anybody beamed. “Aye!” he said. “An’ I got a lot of good big reputation to protect there!”

“Onomatopoeic,” she’d discovered in the dictionary, meant words that sounded like the noise of the thing they were describing, like cuckoo. But she thought there should be a word meaning a word that sounds like the noise a thing would make if that thing made a noise even though, actually, it doesn’t, but would if it did.

Glint, for example. If light made a noise as it reflected off a distant window, it’d go glint!

“Them as can do has to do for them as can’t. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.”

“There’s nothing we canna get in or oot of.”

“Except maybe pubs,” said Big Yan.

“Oh, aye,” said Rob Anybody cheerfully. “Gettin’ oot o’ pubs sometimes causes us a cerrrtain amount o’ difficulty, I’ll grant ye that.”

“I told yez the wee skull on it meant we shouldna touch it!”

“Big Yan said that showed it wuz strong stuff! An’ things ha’ come to a pretty pass, ye ken, if people are going to leave stuff like that aroound where innocent people could accidentally smash the door doon and lever the bars aside and take the big chain off ’f the cupboard and pick the lock and drink it!”

I’ll never again feel as tall as the sky and as old as the hills and as strong as the sea. I’ve been given something for a while, and the price of it is that I have to give it back.

And the reward is giving it back, too. No human could live like this. You could spend a day lookin’ at a flower to see how wonderful it is, and that wouldn’t get the milking done. No wonder we dream our way through our lives. To be awake, and see it all as it really is . . . no one could stand that for long.

“You can’t give lessons on witchcraft. Not properly. It’s all about how you are . . . you, I suppose.”

“Nicely said,” said Mistress Weatherwax. “You’re sharp. But there’s magic, too. You’ll pick that up. It don’t take much intelligence, otherwise wizards wouldn’t be able to do it.”

Witches didn’t fear much, Miss Tick had said, but what the powerful ones were afraid of, even if they didn’t talk about it, was what they called “going to the bad.” It was too easy to slip into careless little cruelties because you had power and other people hadn’t, too easy to think other people didn’t matter much, too easy to think that ideas like right and wrong didn’t apply to you.

He had mastered the first two rules of writing, as he understood them.

Unfortunately there was more to it than that.

He hadn’t been a husband for very long, but upon marriage men get a whole load of extra senses bolted into their brain, and one is there to tell a man that he’s suddenly neck deep in real trouble.

“What do you do with all that food?”

“Store it,” said Miss Level.

“But you—”

“I store it in other people. It’s amazing what you can store in other people.” Miss Level laughed at Tiffany’s expression. “I mean, I take what I don’t need around to those who don’t have a pig, or who’re going through a bad patch, or who don’t have anyone to remember them.”

“But that means they’ll owe you a favor!”

“Right! And so it just keeps on going around. It all works out.”

“Really, you might make an effort. Honestly, I don’t know what’s the matter with all of you!”

I do, Tiffany thought. You’re like a dog worrying sheep all the time. You don’t give them time to obey you, and you don’t let them know when they’ve done things right. You just keep barking.

“It was the owl that actually ate them.”

“Technic’ly, yes,” Mistress Weatherwax admitted. “But if you think you’ve been eating voles all night, you’d be amazed how much you don’t want to eat anything the next morning. Or ever again.”

“Thank you,” said Tiffany as she got up, because it always pays to mind your manners around invisible people.

“Rain don’t fall on a witch if she doesn’t want it to, although personally I prefer to get wet and be thankful.”

“Thankful for what?” said Tiffany.

“That I’ll get dry later.”

First Sight and Second Thoughts, that’s what a witch had to rely on: First Sight to see what’s really there, and Second Thoughts to watch the First Thoughts to check that they were thinking right. Then there were the Third Thoughts, which Tiffany had never heard discussed and therefore kept quiet about; they were odd, seemed to think for themselves, and didn’t turn up very often.

Some people think that “coven” is a word for a group of witches, and it’s true that’s what the dictionary says. But the real word for a group of witches is an “argument.”

Tiffany had looked up “strumpet” in the Unexpurgated Dictionary, and found it meant “a woman who is no better than she should be” and “a lady of easy virtue.” This, she decided after some working out, meant that Mrs. Gytha Ogg, known as Nanny, was a very respectable person. She found virtue easy, for one thing. And if she was no better than she should be, then she was just as good as she ought to be.

She had a feeling that Miss Treason hadn’t meant this, but you couldn’t argue with logic.

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.

People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.

“But can’t you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?”

“The trouble is getting the magic to understand what dirt is,” said Tiffany, scrubbing hard at a stain. “I heard of a witch over in Escrow who got it wrong and ended up losing the entire floor and her sandals and nearly a toe.”

Mrs. Aching backed away. “I thought you just had to wave your hands about,” she mumbled nervously.

“That works,” said Tiffany, “but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush.”