I Shall Wear Midnight

Another swish in the air behind them made all three runners find redoubled strength, but she knew it couldn’t go on. Was that Preston she saw in the gloom ahead? Then who was the dark figure beside him, looking like an old witch in a pointy hat? Even as she stared at it, it faded away.

But suddenly fire burst up and Tiffany could hear the crackling as it spread like a sunrise across the field towards them, sparks filling the sky with extra stars. And the wind blew hard and she heard the stinking voice again: You will burn. You will burn!

And the wind gusted and the flames blew up, and now a wall of fire was racing through the stubbles as fast as the wind itself. Tiffany looked down and the hare was back, running along beside them without any apparent effort; she looked at Tiffany, flicked up her legs and ran, ran directly towards the fire now, seriously ran.

‘Run!’ Tiffany commanded. ‘The fire will not burn you if you do what I say! Run fast! Run fast! Roland, run to save Letitia. Letitia, run to save Roland.’

The fire was almost on them. I need the strength, she thought. I need the power. And she remembered Nanny Ogg saying: ‘The world changes. The world flows. There’s power there, my girl.’

Weddings and funerals are a time of power … yes, weddings. Tiffany grasped their two hands even tighter. And here it came. A crackling, roaring wall of flame …

‘Leap!’

And as they leaped, she screamed: ‘Leap, knave. jump, whore.’ She felt them lift as the fire reached them.

Time hesitated. A rabbit sped past beneath them, fleeing in terror from the flames. He will flee, she thought. He will run from the fire, but the fire will run to him. And the fire runs much faster than a dying body.

Tiffany floated in a ball of yellow flame. The hare drifted past her, a creature happy in her element. We are not as fast as you, she thought. We will get singed. She looked right and left at the bride and groom, who were staring ahead as if hypnotised, and pulled them towards her. She understood. I am going to marry you, Roland. I said I would.

She would make something beautiful out of this fire.

‘Back to the hells you came from, you Cunning Man,’ she yelled above the flames. ‘Leap, knave! jump, whore!’ she screamed again.

‘Be married now for ever more! ‘ And this is a wedding, she said to herself. A fresh start. And for a few seconds in the world, this is a place of power. Oh yes, a place of power.

They landed, rolling, behind the wall of fire. Tiffany was ready, stamping out embers and kicking the small flames that remained.

Preston was suddenly there too, picking up Letitia and carrying her out of the ash. Tiffany put an arm round Roland, who had had a soft landing (possibly on his head, part of Tiffany thought), and followed him.

‘Looks like very minor burns and some frizzled hair,’ said Preston, ‘and as for your old boyfriend, I think his mud is now baked on. How did you manage it?’

Tiffany took a deep breath. ‘The hare jumps through the flames so fast that she barely feels them,’ she said, ‘and when she lands, she lands on hot ash mostly. A grass fire burns out quickly under a strong wind.’

There was a scream from behind them, and she imagined a lumbering figure trying to outrun the wind-driven flames bearing down on it, and failing. She felt the pain of a creature that had twisted through the world for hundreds of years.

‘The three of you, stay right here. Do not follow me! Preston, look after them!’

Tiffany walked across the cooling ash. I have to see, she thought. I have to witness. I have to know what it is that I have done!

The dead man’s clothes were smouldering. There was no pulse. He did terrible things to people, she thought: things that made even the prison warders sick. But what was done to him first? Was he just a much worse version of Mr Petty? Could he ever have been good? How do you change the past? Where does evil begin?

She felt the words slide into her mind like a worm: Murderer, filth, killer! And she felt she should apologize to her ears for what they had to hear. But the voice of the ghost was weak and thin and querulous, sliding backwards into history.

You can’t reach me, she thought. You are used up. You are too weak now. How hard was it, forcing a man to run himself to death? You can’t get in. I can feel you trying. She reached down into the ash and picked up a lump of flint, still warm from the fire;

the soil was full of it, the sharpest of stones. Born in the chalk, and so in a way was Tiffany. Its smoothness was the touch of a friend.

‘You never learn, do you?’ she said. ‘You don’t understand that other people think too. Of course you wouldn’t run into the fire; but in your arrogance you never realized that the fire would run to you.’