“I’m sorry?” said Miss Tick, coldly.
“Ticks,” said Tiffany. “Sheep get them. But if you use turpentine—”
“I meant that it sounds like ‘mystic,’” said Miss Tick.
“Oh, you mean a pune, or play on words,” said Tiffany.* “In that case it would be even better if you were Miss Teak, a dense foreign wood, because that would sound like ‘mystique,’ or you could be Miss Take, which would—”
“I can see we’re going to get along like a house on fire,” said Miss Tick. “There may be no survivors.”
“You really are a witch?”
“Oh, puh-lease,” said Miss Tick. “Yes, yes, I am a witch. I have a talking animal, a tendency to correct other people’s pronunciation—it’s pun, by the way, not ‘pune’—and a fascination for poking my nose into other people’s affairs and, yes, a pointy hat.”
“Can I operate the spring now?” said the toad.
“Yes,” said Miss Tick, her eyes still on Tiffany. “You can operate the spring.”
“I like operating the spring,” said the toad, crawling around to the back of the hat.
There was a click, and a slow thwap-thwap noise, and the center of the hat rose slowly and jerkily up out of the paper flowers, which fell away.
“Er…” said Tiffany.
“You have a question?” said Miss Tick.
With a last thwop, the top of the hat made a perfect point.
“How do you know I won’t run away right now and tell the Baron?” said Tiffany.
“Because you haven’t the slightest desire to do so,” said Miss Tick. “You’re absolutely fascinated. You want to be a witch, am I right? You probably want to fly on a broomstick, yes?”
“Oh, yes!” She’d often dreamed of flying. Miss Tick’s next words brought her down to earth.
“Really? You like having to wear really, really thick pants? Believe me, if I’ve got to fly, I wear two pairs of woolen ones and a canvas pair on the outside which, I may tell you, are not very feminine no matter how much lace you sew on. It can get cold up there. People forget that. And then there’s the bristles. Don’t ask me about the bristles. I will not talk about the bristles.”
hat was the trouble. If you didn’t find some way of stopping it, people would go on asking questions.
The teachers were useful there. Bands of them wandered through the mountains, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth peddlers, fortune-tellers, and all the other travelers who sold things the people didn’t need every day but occasionally found useful.
They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travelers and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words, like corrugated iron. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the math teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure, and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.
People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing, after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens.
Today the brightly colored little booths and tents were pitched in a field just outside the village. Behind them small square areas had been fenced off with high canvas walls and were patrolled by apprentice teachers looking for anyone trying to overhear Education without paying.
The first tent Tiffany saw had a sign that read:
JOGRAFFY! JOGRAFFY! JOGRAFFY!
FOR TODAY ONLY: ALL MAJOR LAND MASSES AND OCEANS
PLUS EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNO ABOUT GLASSIERS!
ONE PENNY, OR ALL MAJOR VEJTABLES ACSEPTED!
Tiffany had read enough to know that, while he might be a whiz at major land masses, this particular teacher could have done with some help from the man running the stall next door:
THE WONDERS OF PUNCTUATION AND SPELLING