‘But… I thought there were rules!’ said Tiffany, getting up and hurrying forward, all tiredness suddenly gone. Even a tired body wants to survive.

‘Oh? Really?’ said Granny. ‘Did you sign anything? Did you take any kind of oath? No? Then they weren’t your rules! Quickly, now! And you, Mr Anyone!’

Rob Anybody jumped onto her boot just before she pulled it away. The door shut with another click, disappeared and left them in… dead light, it seemed, a space of grey air.

‘Won’t take long,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘It doesn’t usually. It’s the world getting back into line. Oh, don’t look like that. You showed it the Way, right? Out of pity. Well, I know this path already. You’ll tread it again, no doubt, for some other poor soul, open the door for them as can’t find it. But we don’t talk about it, understand?’

‘Miss Level never—’

‘We don’t talk about it, I said,’ said Granny Weatherwax. ‘Do you know what a part of being a witch is? It’s making the choices that have to be made. The hard choices. But you did… quite well. There’s no shame in pity.’

She brushed some grass seed off her dress.

‘I hope Mrs Ogg has arrived,’ she said. ‘I need her recipe for apple chutney. Oh… when we arrive you might feel a bit dizzy. I’d better warn you.’

‘Granny?’ said Tiffany, as the light began to grow brighter. It brought back tiredness with it, too.

‘Yes?’

‘What exactly happened just then?’

‘What do you think happened?’

Light burst in upon them.

Someone was wiping Tiffany’s forehead with a damp cloth.

She lay, feeling the beautiful coolness. There were voices around her, and she recognized the chronic-complainer’s tones of Annagramma:

‘…And she was really making a fuss in Zakzak’s. Honestly, I don’t think she’s quite right in the head! I think she’s literally gone cuckoo! She was shouting things and using some kind of, oh, I don’t know, some peasant trick to make us think she’d turned that fool Brian into a frog. Well, of course, she didn’t fool me for one minute—’

Tiffany opened her eyes and saw the round pink face of Petulia, screwed up with concern.

‘Um, she’s awake!’ said the girl.

The space between Tiffany and the ceiling filled up with pointy hats. They drew back, reluctantly, as she sat up. From above, it must have looked like a dark daisy, closing and opening.

‘Where is this?’ she said.

‘Um, the First Aid and Lost Children’s Tent,’ said Petulia. ‘Um… you fainted when Mistress Weatherwax brought you back from… from wherever you’d gone. Everyone’s been in to see you!’

‘She said you’d, like, dragged the monster into, like, the Next World!’ Lucy Warbeck said, her eyes gleaming. ‘Mistress Weatherwax told everyone all about it!’

‘Well, it wasn’t quite—’ Tiffany began. She felt something prod her in the back. She reached behind her, and her hand came back holding a pointy hat. It was almost grey with age and quite battered. Zakzak wouldn’t have dared try to sell something like this, but the other girls stared it like starving dogs watching a butcher’s hand.

‘Um, Mistress Weatherwax gave you her hat,’ breathed Petulia. ‘Her actual hat.’

‘She said you were a born witch and no witch should be without a hat!’ said Dimity Hubbub, watching.

‘That’s nice,’ said Tiffany. She was used to secondhand clothes.

‘It’s only an old hat,’ said Annagramma.

Tiffany looked up at the tall girl and let herself smile slowly.

‘Annagramma?’ she said, raising a hand with the fingers open.

Annagramma backed away. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Don’t you do that! Don’t you do that! Someone stop her doing that!’

‘Do you want a balloon, Annagramma?’ said Tiffany, sliding off the table.

‘No! Please!’ Annagramma took another step back, holding her arms in front of her face, and fell over a bench. Tiffany picked her up and patted her cheerfully on a cheek.

‘Then I shan’t buy you one,’ she said. ‘But please learn what “literally” really means, will you?’

Annagramma smiled in a frozen kind of way. ‘Er, yes,’ she managed.

‘Good. And then we will be friends.’

She left the girl standing there, and went back to pick up the hat.

‘Um, you’re probably still a bit woozy,’ said Petulia. ‘You probably don’t understand.’

‘Ha, I wasn’t actually frightened, you know,’ said Annagramma. It was all for fun, of course.’ No one paid any attention.

‘Understand what?’ said Tiffany.

‘It’s her actual hat!’ the girls chorused.

‘It’s, like, if that hat could talk, what stories it would have to, you know, tell,’ said Lucy Warbeck.

‘It was just a joke,’ said Annagramma to anyone who was listening.

Tiffany looked at the hat. It was very battered, and not extremely clean. If that hat could talk, it would probably mutter.

‘Where’s Granny Weatherwax now?’ she said.

There was a gasp from the girls. This was nearly as impressive as the hat.

‘Um… she doesn’t mind you calling her that?’ said Petulia.

‘She invited me to,’ said Tiffany.

‘Only we heard you had to have known her for, like, a hundred years before she let you call her that…’ said Lucy Warbeck.

Tiffany shrugged. ‘Well, anyway,’ she said. ‘Do you know where she is?’

‘Oh, having tea with the other old witches and yakking on about chutney and how witches today aren’t what they were when she was a girl,’ said Lulu Darling.

‘What?’ said Tiffany. ‘Just having tea?’

The young witches looked at one another in puzzlement.

‘Um, there’s buns too,’ said Petulia. ‘If that’s important.’

‘But she opened the door for me. The door into—out of the… the desert! You can’t just sit down after that and have buns!’

‘Um, the ones I saw had icing on,’ Petulia ventured, nervously. ‘They weren’t just homemade—’

‘Look,’ said Lucy Warbeck, ‘we didn’t really, you know, see anything? You were just standing there with this, like, glow around you and we couldn’t get in and then Gran—Mistress Weatherwax walked up and stepped right in and you both, you know, stood there? And then the glow went zip and vanished and you, like, fell over.’

‘What Lucy’s failing to say very accurately,’ said Annagramma, ‘is that we didn’t actually see you go anywhere. I’m telling you this as a friend, of course. There was just this glow, which could have been anything.’

Annagramma was going to be a good witch, Tiffany considered. She could tell herself stories that she literally believed. And she could bounce back like a ball.

‘Don’t forget, I saw the horse,’ said Harrieta Bilk.

Annagramma rolled her eyes. ‘Oh yes, Harrieta thinks she saw some kind of horse in the sky. Except it didn’t look like a horse, she says. She says it looked like a horse would look if you took the actual horse away and just left the horsiness, right, Harrieta?’

‘I didn’t say that!’ snapped Harrieta.

‘Well, pardon me. That’s what it sounded like.’

‘Um, and some people said they saw a white horse grazing in the next field, too,’ said Petulia. ‘And a lot of the older witches said they felt a tremendous amount of—’

‘Yes, some people thought they saw a horse in a field but it isn’t there any more,’ said Annagramma in the singsong voice she used when she thought it was all stupid. ‘That must be very rare in the country, seeing horses in fields. Anyway, if there really was a white horse, it was grey.’

Tiffany sat on the edge of the table, staring at her knees. Anger at Annagramma had jolted her to life, but now the tiredness was creeping back.

‘I suppose none of you saw a little blue man, about six inches high, with red hair?’ she said quietly.

‘Anyone?’ said Annagramma, with malicious cheerfulness. There was a general mumbling of ‘no’.