I Shall Wear Midnight

Some of them would follow her, of course, she thought. They always did. She went back up to the hall and sat down as close as possible to the huge fire. Even in late summer, the hall was cold. It was hung with tapestries as insulation from the chill of the stone walls. They were the usual sort of thing: men in armour waving swords and bows and axes at other men in armour. Given that battle is very fast and noisy, they presumably had to stop fighting every couple of minutes to give the ladies who were making the tapestry a little time to catch up. Tiffany knew the one nearest the fire by heart. All the kids did. You learned your history off the tapestries, if there was some old man around to explain what was going on. But generally, when she was a lot younger, it had been more fun to make up stories about the different knights, like the one who was desperately running to catch up with his horse, and the one who had been thrown by his horse, and, because he had a helmet with a point on it, was now upright head first in the ground, which, even as children, they had recognized was not a good position to be in on the battle-field. They were like old friends, frozen in a war whose name nobody on the Chalk could remember.

And … suddenly there was another one, one that had never been there before, running towards Tiffany through the battle. She stared at him, her body demanding that she get some sleep right now, and whatever bits were still working in her brain insisting that she did something. In the middle of this her hand gripped a log on the edge of the fire and she raised it purposefully towards the tapestry.

The cloth had practically crumbled with age as it was. It would burn like dry grass.

The figure was walking cautiously now. She couldn’t see any details yet and didn’t want to. The knights on the tapestry had been woven in without any perspective; they were as flat as a child’s nursery painting.

But the man in black, who had begun as a distant streak, was getting bigger as he approached and now … She could see the face and the empty eyeholes, which even from here changed colour as he walked past the painted armour of knight after knight, and now he had started running again, getting bigger. And the smell was oozing towards her again … How much was the tapestry worth? Did she have any right to destroy it? With that thing stepping out of it? Oh yes, oh yes!

Wouldn’t it be nice to be a wizard and to conjure up those knights to fight one last battle!

Wouldn’t it be nice to be a witch who wasn’t here! She raised the crackling log and glared into the holes where the eyes should be. You had to be a witch to be prepared to stare down a stare that wasn’t there, because somehow you felt that it was sucking your own eyeballs out of your head.

Those tunnels in the skull were hypnotic, and now he moved from side to side slowly, like a snake.

‘Please don’t.’

She wasn’t expecting that; the voice was urgent but quite friendly – and it belonged to Eskarina Smith.

The wind was silver and cold.

Tiffany, lying on her back, looked up into a white sky; at the edge of her vision, dried grasses shook and rattled in the wind but, curiously, behind this little bit of countryside there was the big fireplace and the battling knights.

‘It is really quite important that you don’t move,’ said the same voice behind her. ‘The place where you are now has been, as we say, cobbled together for this conversation and did not exist until you arrived here, and will cease to exist the moment you leave. Strictly speaking, by the standards of most philosophical disciplines, it cannot be said to have any existence at all.’

‘So it’s a magic place, yes? Like the Unreal Estate?’

‘Very sensible way of putting it,’ said the voice of Eskarina. ‘Those of us who know about it call it the travelling now. It’s an easy way to talk to you in private; when it closes, you will be exactly where you were and no time will have passed. Do you understand?’

‘No!’

Eskarina sat down on the grass next to her. ‘Thank goodness for that. It would be rather disturbing if you did. You are, you know, an extremely unusual witch. As far as I can tell, you have a natural talent for making cheese, and as talents go, it is a pretty good talent to have. The world needs cheese-makers. A good cheese-maker is worth her weight in, well, cheese. So you were not born with a talent for witchcraft.’

Tiffany opened her mouth to reply before she had any idea what she was going to say, but that is not unusual among human beings. The first thing to push through the throng of questions was: ‘Hang on, I was holding a burning brand. But now you have brought me here, wherever here is exactly. What happened?’ She looked at the fire. The flames were frozen. ‘People will notice me,’ she said, and then, given the nature of the situation, she added, ‘Won’t they?’