I Shall Wear Midnight

‘Well, it’s not too far by broomstick, after all,’ said Tiffany.

Preston’s expression changed as he reached into his pocket and pulled out something wrapped in fine tissue, which he handed to her without saying a word.

Tiffany unwrapped it, knowing — absolutely knowing — that it would be the golden hare. There was no possibility in the world that it wouldn’t have been. She tried to find the words, but Preston always had an adequate supply.

He said, ‘Miss Tiffany, the witch … would you be so good as to tell me: what is the sound of love?’

Tiffany looked at his face. The noise from the tug-of-war was silenced. The birds stopped singing. In the grass, the grasshoppers stopped rubbing their legs together and looked up. The earth moved slightly as even the chalk giant (perhaps) strained to hear, and the silence flowed over the world until all there was was Preston, who was always there.

And Tiffany said, ‘Listen.’

A FEEGLE GLOSSARY

adjusted for those of a delicate disposition

(A Work In Progress By Miss Perspicacia Tick, witch)

Bigjobs: human beings

Big Man: chief of the clan (usually the husband of the kelda)

Blethers: rubbish, nonsense

Boggin: to be desperate, as in ‘I’m boggin for a cup of tea’

Bunty: a weak person

Carlin: old woman

Cludgie: the privy

Crivens!: a general exclamation that can mean anything from ‘My goodness!’ to ‘I’ve just lost my temper and there is going to be trouble’

Dree your/my/his/her weird: facing the fate that is in store for you/me/him/her

Een: eyes

Eldritch: weird, strange; sometimes means oblong too, for some reason

Fash: worry, upset

Geas: a very important obligation, backed up by tradition and magic. Not a bird

Gonnagle: the bard of the clan, skilled in musical instruments, poems, stories and songs

Hag: a witch, of any age

Hag o’ hags: a very important witch

Hagging/Haggling: anything a witch does

Hiddlins: secrets

Kelda: the female head of the clan, and eventually the mother of most of it. Feegle babies are very small, and a kelda will have hundreds in her lifetime

Lang syne: long ago

Last World: the Feegles believe that they are dead. This world is so nice, they argue, that they must have been really good in a past life and then died and ended up here. Appearing to die here means merely going back to the Last World, which they believe is rather dull

Mudlin: useless person

Pished: I am assured that this means ‘tired’

Schemie: an unpleasant person

Scuggan: a really unpleasant person

Scunner: a generally unpleasant person

Ships: woolly things that eat grass and go baa. Easily confused with the other kind

Spavie: see Mudlin

Special Sheep Liniment: probably moonshine whisky, I am very sorry to say. No one knows what it’d do to sheep, but it is said that a drop of it is good for shepherds on a cold winter’s night and for Feegles at any time at all. Do not try to make this at home

Spog: a small leather bag at the front of a Feegle’s kilt, which covers whatever he presumably thinks needs to be hidden, and generally holds things like something he is halfway through eating, something he’d found that now therefore belongs to him, and quite often — because even a Feegle can catch a cold — it might hold whatever he was using as a handkerchief, which might not necessarily be dead

Steamie: only found in the big Feegle mounds in the mountains, where there’s enough water to allow regular bathing; it’s a kind of sauna. Feegles on the Chalk tend to rely on the fact that you can only get so much dirt on you before it starts to fall off of its own accord

Waily: a general cry of despair

AUTHOR’S NOTE

My job is to make things up, and the best way to make things up is to make them out of real things …

When I was a small boy, just after the last Ice Age, we lived in a cottage that Tiffany Aching would recognize: we had cold water, no electricity, and took a bath once a week, because the tin bath had to be brought in from its nail, which was outside on the back of the kitchen wall; and it took a long time to fill it, when all my mother had to heat water with was one kettle. Then I, as the youngest, had the first bath, followed by Mum and then Dad, and finally the dog if Dad thought it was getting a bit niffy.

There were old men in the village who had been born in the Jurassic period and looked, to me, all the same, with flat caps and serious trousers held up with very thick leather belts. One of them was called Mr Allen, who wouldn’t drink water from a tap because, he said, ‘It’s got neither taste nor smell.’ He drank water from the roof of his house, which fed a rain barrel.