The Wee Free Men (Discworld 30)

“And then I’ll have to fill the log box in the scullery,” she said aloud. Well, it was worth a try.

She went back to the churning and didn’t bother to turn her head when she heard four more sloshes behind her. Nor did she look around when she heard little whooshwhoosh noises and the clatter of logs in the box. She turned to see only when the noise stopped.

The log box was full up to the ceiling, and all the buckets were full. The patch of flour was a mass of footprints.

She stopped churning. She had a feeling that eyes were watching her, a lot of eyes.

“Er…thank you,” she said. No, that wasn’t right. She sounded nervous. She let go of the butter paddle and stood up, trying to look as fierce as possible.

“And what about our sheep?” she said. “I won’t believe you’re really sorry until I see the sheep come back!”

There was a bleating from the paddock. She ran out to the bottom of the garden and looked through the hedge.

The sheep was coming back, backward and at high speed. It jerked to a halt a little way from the hedge and dropped down as the little men let it go. One of the red-headed men appeared for a moment on its head. He huffed on a horn, polished it with his kilt, and vanished in a blur.

Tiffany walked back to the dairy looking thoughtful.

When she got back, the butter had been churned. Not just churned, in fact, but patted into a dozen fat golden oblongs on the marble she used when she did it. There was even a sprig of parsley on each one.

Are they brownies? she wondered. According to the Faerie Tales, brownies hung around the house doing chores in exchange for a saucer of milk. But in the picture they’d been cheery little creatures with long pointy hoods. The red-haired men didn’t look as if they’d ever drunk milk in their lives, but perhaps it was worth a try.

“Well,” she said aloud, still aware of the hidden watchers. “That’ll do. Thank you. I’m glad you’re sorry for what you did.”

She took one of the cat’s saucers from the pile by the sink, washed it in the sink, filled it with milk from today’s churn, then put it down on the floor and stood back. “Are you brownies?” she said.

The air blurred. Milk splashed across the floor, and the saucer spun around and around.

“I’ll take that as a no, then,” said Tiffany. “So what are you?”

There were unlimited supplies of no answer at all.

She lay down and looked under the sink, and then peered behind the cheese shelves. She stared up into the dark, spidery shadows of the room. It felt empty.

And she thought: I think I need a whole egg’s worth of education, in a hurry.

Tiffany had walked along the steep track from the farm into the village hundreds of times. It was less than half a mile long, and over the centuries the carts had worn it down so that it was more like a gully in the chalk and ran like a milky stream in wet weather.

She was halfway down when the susurrus started. The hedges rustled without a wind. The skylarks stopped singing, and while she hadn’t really noticed their song, their silence was a shock. Nothing’s louder than the end of a song that’s always been there.

When she looked up at the sky, it was like looking through a diamond. It sparkled, and the air went cold so quickly that it was like stepping into an icy bath.

Then there was snow underfoot, snow on the hedges. And the sound of hooves.

They were in the field beside her. A horse was galloping through the snow, behind the hedge that was now, suddenly, just a wall of white.

The hoofbeats stopped. There was a moment of silence and then a horse landed in the lane, skidding on the snow. It pulled itself upright, and the rider turned it to face Tiffany.

The rider himself couldn’t face Tiffany. He had no face. He had no head to hang it on.

She ran. Her boots slipped on the snow as she moved, but suddenly her mind was cold as the ice.

She had two legs, slipping on ice. A horse had twice as many legs to slip. She’d seen horses try to tackle this hill in icy weather. She had a chance.

were no flying feathers, and nothing like the panic a fox would cause. But the chickens were clucking excitedly, and Prunes, the cockerel, was strutting nervously up and down. One of the hens looked a bit embarrassed. Tiffany lifted it up quickly.

There were two tiny blue, red-haired men underneath. They were each holding an egg clasped in their arms. They looked up with very guilty expressions.

“Ach, no!” said one. “It’s the bairn! She’s the hag…”