“Her Majesty has gone to her bower,” he said.
“That being a nook or resting place?” said Tiffany.
The man nodded and said, “Correct again, Miss Tiffany.”
Don’t ask how he knows your name, Tiffany told herself.
“Thank you,” she said, and because she had been brought up to be polite, she added, “Best of luck with the nut cracking.”
“This one’s the toughest yet,” said the man.
Tiffany walked off, trying to look as if this collection of strange nearly-people was just another crowd. Probably the scariest ones were the big women, two of them.
Big women were valued on the Chalk. Farmers liked big wives. Farmwork was hard, and there was no call for a wife who couldn’t carry a couple of piglets or a bale of hay. But these two could have carried a horse each. They stared haughtily at her as she walked past.
They had tiny, stupid little wings on their backs.
“Nice day for watching nuts being cracked!” said Tiffany cheerfully as she went past. Their huge pale faces wrinkled, as if they were trying to work out what she was.
Sitting down near them, watching the nut cracker with an expression of concern, was a little man with a large head, a fringe of white beard, and pointy ears. He was wearing very old-fashioned clothes, and his eyes followed Tiffany as she went past.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Sneebs!” he said, and in her head appeared the words: “Get away from here!”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Sneebs!” said the man, wringing his hands. And the words appeared, floating in her brain: “It’s terribly dangerous!”
He waved a pale hand as if to brush her away. Shaking her head, Tiffany walked on.
There were lords and ladies, people in fine clothes and even a few shepherds. But some of them had a pieced-together look. They looked, in fact, like a picture book back in her bedroom.
It was made of thick card, its edges worn raggedy by generations of Aching children. Each page showed a character, and each was cut into four strips that could be turned over independently. The point of the whole thing was that a bored child could turn over parts of the pages and change the way the characters were dressed. You could end up with a soldier’s head on a baker’s chest wearing a maid’s dress and a farmer’s big boots.
Tiffany had never been bored enough. She considered that even things that spend their whole lives hanging from the undersides of branches would never be bored enough to spend more than five seconds with that book.
The people around here looked as though they’d either been taken from that book or had dressed for a fancy-dress party in the dark. One or two of them nodded to her as she passed but didn’t seem surprised to see her.
She ducked under a round leaf much bigger than she was and took out the toad again.
“Whap? It’s sti’ cooold,” said the toad, hunching down on her hand.
“Cold? The air’s baking!”
“There’s just snow,” said the toad. “Put me back, I’m freezing!”
Just a minute, thought Tiffany. “Do toads dream?” she said.
“No!”
“Oh…so it’s not really hot?”
“No! You just think it is!”
“Psst,” said a voice.
Tiffany put the toad away and wondered if she dared to turn her head.