I Shall Wear Midnight

‘Well, saving your honour’s presence, miss, I thought that’s what witches do, miss – nasty things, miss, earwigs and all that.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Can’t rightly say,’ said the coachman. ‘It’s just sort of … you know, what everybody knows.’

Tiffany placed her fingers carefully, found the jumping bone, said, ‘This might smart a little,’ and pushed the bone back into place. The coachman screamed again.

His horses tried to bolt, but their legs were not doing business as usual, not with the word still ringing in their ears. Tiffany had felt ashamed at the time, a year ago, when she had acquired the knowing of the horseman’s word; but then again, the old blacksmith she had helped to his death, with kindness and without pain, well, he had felt ashamed that he had nothing with which to pay her for her painstaking work, and you had to pay the witch, the same as you had to pay the ferryman, and so he had whispered into her ear the horseman’s word, which gave you the control of any horse that heard it. You couldn’t buy it, you couldn’t sell it, but you could give it away and still keep it, and even if it’d been made of lead it would have been worth its weight in gold. The former owner had whispered in her ear, ‘I promised to tell no man the word, and I ain’t!’ And he was chuckling as he died, his sense of humour being somewhat akin to that of Mr Carpetlayer.

Mr Carpetlayer was also pretty heavy, and had slipped gently down the side of the coach and—

‘Why are you torturing that old man, you evil witch? Can you not see that he’s in dreadful pain?’

Where had he come from? A shouting man, his face white with fury, his clothes as dark as an unopened cave or – and the word came to Tiffany suddenly – as a crypt. There had been no one around, she was sure of it, and no one on either side except the occasional farmer watching the stubbles burn as they cleared the land.

But his face was now a few inches from hers. And he was real, not some kind of monster, because monsters don’t usually have little blobs of spittle on their lapel. And then she noticed – he stank. She’d never smelled anything so bad. It was physical, like an iron bar, and it seemed to her that she wasn’t smelling it with her nose, but with her mind. A foulness that made the average privy as fragrant as a rose.

‘I’m asking you politely to step back, please,’ said Tiffany. ‘I think you might have got hold of the wrong idea.’

‘I assure you, fiendish creature, that I have only the right idea! And that is to return you to the miserable and stinking hell from which you spawned!’

All right, a madman, thought Tiffany, but if he—

Too late. The man’s waggling finger got too close to her nose, and suddenly the empty road contained a lifetime’s supply of Nac Mac Feegles. The man in black flailed at them, but that sort of thing does not work very well with a Feegle. He did manage, despite the Feegle onslaught, to shout, ‘Be gone, nefarious imps!’

Every Feegle head turned hopefully when they heard this. ‘Oh aye,’ said Rob Anybody. ‘If there’s any imps aboot, we are the boys to deal with them! Your move, mister!’ They leaped at him and ended up in a heap on the road behind him, having passed straight through. They automatically punched one another as they staggered up, on the basis that if you’re having a good fight you don’t want to spoil the rhythm.

The man in black glanced at them and then paid them no attention whatsoever.

Tiffany stared down at the man’s boots. They gleamed in the sunlight, and that was wrong. She had been standing in the dust of the road for only a few minutes and her boots were grey. And there was the ground that the man was standing on, and that was wrong too. Very wrong, on a hot, cloudless day. She glanced at the horses. The word was holding them, but they were trembling with fear, like rabbits in the gaze of a fox. Then she closed her eyes and looked at him with First Sight, and saw. And said, ‘You cast no shadow. I knew something wasn’t right.’

And now she looked directly into the man’s eyes, almost hidden under the wide hat brim and … he … had … no eyes. The understanding dawned on her like ice melting … No eyes at all, not ordinary eyes, not blind eyes, no eye sockets … just two holes in his head: she could see right through to the smouldering fields beyond. She didn’t expect what happened next.

The man in black glared at her again and hissed, ‘You are the witch. You are the one. Wherever you go, I will find you.’

And then he vanished, leaving only a pile of fighting Feegles in the dust.