Wintersmith

She took a deep breath and held out her hands on either side of her, palms up. On her right hand a white scar glowed.

"Thunder on my right hand," she said. "Lightning in my left hand. Fire behind me. Frost in front of me."

She stepped forward until she was only a few inches away from the snowbank. She could feel its coldness already pulling the heat out of her. Well, so be it. She took a few deep breaths. This I choose to do….

"Frost to fire," she whispered.

In the yard, the fire went white and roared like a furnace.

The snow wall spluttered and then exploded into steam, sending chunks of snow into the air. Tiffany walked forward slowly. Snow pulled back from her hands like mist at sunrise. It melted in the heat of her, becoming a tunnel in the deep drift, fleeing from her, writhing around her in clouds of cold fog.

Yes! She smiled desperately. It was true. If you had the perfect center, if you got your mind right, you could balance. In the middle of the seesaw is a place that never moves….

Her boots squelched over warm water. There was fresh green grass under the snow, because the awful storm had been so late in the year. She walked on, heading to where the lambing pens were buried.

Her father stared at the fire. It was burning white-hot, like a furnace, eating through the wood as if driven by a gale. It was collapsing into ashes in front of his eyes….

Water was pouring around Tiffany's boots now.

Yes! But don't think about it! Hold the balance! More heat! Frost to fire!

There was a bleat.

Sheep could live under the snow, at least for a while. But as Granny Aching used to say, when the gods made sheep, they must've left their brains in their other coat. In a panic, and sheep were always just an inch from panicking, they'd trample their own lambs.

Now ewes and lambs appeared, steaming and bewildered as the snow melted around them, as if they were sculptures left behind.

Tiffany moved on, staring straight ahead of her, only just aware of the excited cries of the men behind her. They were following her, pulling the ewes free, cradling the lambs….

Her father yelled at the other men. Some of them were hacking at a farm cart, throwing the wood down into the white-hot flames. Others were dragging furniture up from the house. Wheels, tables, straw bales, chairs—the fire took everything, gulped it down, and roared for more. And there wasn't any more.

No red coat. No red coat! Balance, balance. Tiffany waded on, water and sheep pouring past her. The tunnel ceiling fell in a splashing and slithering of slush. She ignored it. Fresh snowflakes fell down through the hole and boiled in the air above her head. She ignored that, too. And then, ahead of her…a glimpse of red.

Frost to fire! The snow fled, and there he was. She picked him up, held him close, sent some of her heat into him, felt him stir, whispered: "It weighed at least forty pounds! At least forty pounds!"

Wentworth coughed and opened his eyes. Tears falling like melting snow, she ran over to a shepherd and thrust the boy into his arms.

"Take him to his mother! Do it now!" The man grabbed the boy and ran, frightened of her fierceness. Today she was their witch!

Tiffany turned back. There were more lambs to be saved.

Her father's coat landed on the starving flames, glowed for a moment, then fell into gray ashes. The other men were ready; they grabbed the man as he went to jump after it and pulled him back, kicking and shouting.

The flint cobbles had melted like butter. They spluttered for a moment, then froze.

The fire went out.

Tiffany Aching looked up, into the eyes of the Wintersmith.

And up on the roof of the cart shed, the small voice belonging to Wee Dangerous Spike said, "Ach, crivens!"

All this hasn't happened yet. It might not happen at all. The future is always a bit wobbly. Any little thing, like the fall of a snowflake or the dropping of the wrong kind of spoon, can send it spinning off along a new path. Or perhaps not.

Where it all began was last autumn, on the day with a cat in it….

This is Tiffany Aching, riding a broomstick through the mountain forests a hundred miles away. It's a very old broomstick, and she's flying it just above the ground; it's got two smaller broomsticks stuck on the back like training wheels, to stop it from tipping over. It belongs, appropriately, to a very old witch called Miss Treason, who's even worse at flying than Tiffany and is 113 years old.

Tiffany is slightly more than one hundred years younger than that, taller than she was even a month ago, and not as certain of anything at all as she was a year ago.

She is training to be a witch. Witches usually wear black, but as far as she could tell, the only reason that witches wore black was that they'd always worn black. This did not seem a good enough reason, so she tended to wear blue or green. She didn't laugh with scorn at finery because she'd never seen any.