The Wee Free Men (Discworld 30)

Tiffany ran through the garden, catching her nightdress on pea sticks and gooseberry bushes, and flung open the henhouse door.

o;So they canna be a hag if they’re sleepin’, then?”

“Hello?” whispered Tiffany.

There was silence, embroidered with the breathing of her sisters. But in a way Tiffany couldn’t quite describe, it was the silence of people trying hard not to make any noise.

She leaned down and looked under the bed. There was nothing there but the guzunder.

The little man in the river had talked just like that.

She lay back in the moonlight, listening until her ears ached.

Then she wondered what the school for witches would be like and why she hadn’t seen it yet.

She knew every inch of the country for two miles around. She liked the river best, with the backwaters where striped pike sun-bathed just above the weeds and the banks where kingfishers nested. There was a heronry a mile or so upriver, and she liked to creep up on the birds when they came down here to fish in the reeds, because there’s nothing funnier than a heron trying to get airborne in a hurry.

She drifted off to sleep again, thinking about the land around the farm. She knew all of it. There were no secret places that she didn’t know about.

But maybe there were magical doors. That’s what she’d make, if she had a magical school. There should be secret doorways everywhere, even hundreds of miles away. Look at a special rock by, say, moonlight, and there would be yet another door.

But the school, now, the school. There would be lessons in broomstick riding and how to sharpen your hat to a point, and magical meals, and lots of new friends.

“Is the bairn asleep?”

“Aye, I canna hear her movin’.”

Tiffany opened her eyes in the darkness. The voices under the bed had a slightly echoey edge. Thank goodness the guzunder was nice and clean.

“Right, let’s get oot o’ this wee pot, then.”

The voices moved off across the room. Tiffany’s ears tried to swivel to follow them.

“Hey, see here, it’s a hoose! See, with wee chairies and things!”

They’ve found the doll’s house, Tiffany thought.

It was quite a large one, made by Mr. Block the farm carpenter when Tiffany’s oldest sister, who already had two babies of her own now, was a little girl. It wasn’t the most fragile of items. Mr. Block did not go in for delicate work. But over the years the girls had decorated it with bits of material and some rough-and-ready furniture.

By the sound of it the owners of the voices thought it was a palace.

“Hey, hey, hey, we’re in the cushy stuff noo! There’s a beid in this room. Wi’ pillows!”

“Keep it doon—we don’t want any o’ them to wake up!”

“Crivens, I’m as quiet as a wee moose! Aargh! There’s sojers!”

“Whut d’ye mean, sojers?”

“There’s redcoats in the room!”

They’ve found the toy soldiers, thought Tiffany, trying not to breathe loudly.

Strictly speaking, they had no place in the doll’s house, but Wentworth wasn’t old enough for them, and so they’d got used as innocent bystanders back in those days when Tiffany had made tea parties for her dolls. Well, what passed for dolls. Such toys as there were in the farmhouse had to be tough to survive intact through the generations and didn’t always manage it. Last time Tiffany had tried to arrange a party, the guests had been a rag doll with no head, two wooden soldiers, and three quarters of a small teddy bear.

Thuds and bangs came from the direction of the doll’s house.

“I got one! Hey, pal, can yer mammie sew? Stitch this! Aargh! He’s got a heid on him like a tree!”