Tiffany couldn’t afford one. You could only trade witchcraft—you weren’t supposed to sell it. Miss Treason didn’t mind her selling cheeses, but even so paper was expensive up here, and the wandering peddlers never had very much to sell. They usually had an ounce or two of green copperas, though, which could make a decent ink if you mixed it with crushed oak galls or green walnut shells.
The diary was now as thick as a brick with extra pages Tiffany had glued in. She’d worked out that she could make it last two more years if she wrote small.
On the leather cover she had, with a hot skewer, drawn the words “Feegles Keep Out!!” It had never worked. They looked upon that sort of thing as an invitation. She wrote parts of the diary in code these days. Reading didn’t come naturally to the Chalk Hill Feegles, so surely they’d never get the hang of a code.
She looked around carefully, in any case, and unlocked the huge padlock that secured a chain around the book. She turned to today’s date, dipped her pen in the ink, and wrote: “Met t*.”
Yes, a snowflake would be a good code for the Wintersmith.
He just stood there, she thought.
And he ran away because I screamed.
Which was a good thing, obviously.
Um…
But…I wish I hadn’t screamed.
She opened her hand. The image of the horse was still there, as white as chalk, but there was no pain at all.
Tiffany gave a little shiver and pulled herself together. So? She had met the spirit of Winter. She was a witch. It was the sort of thing that sometimes happened. He’d politely given her back what was hers, and then he’d gone. There was no call to get soppy about it. There were things to do.
Then she wrote: “Ltr frm R.”
She very carefully opened the letter from Roland, which was easy because slug slime isn’t much of a glue. With any luck she could even reuse the envelope. She hunched over the letter so that no one could read it over her shoulder. Finally she said: “Miss Treason, will you get out of my face, please? I need to use my eyeballs privately.”
There was a pause and then a mutter from downstairs, and the tickling behind her eyes went away.
It was always…good to get a letter from Roland. Yes, they were often about the sheep, and other things of the Chalk, and sometimes there’d be a dried flower inside, a harebell or a cowslip. Granny Aching wouldn’t have approved of that; she always said that if the hills had wanted people to pick the flowers, they would have grown more of them.
The letters always made her homesick.
One day Miss Treason had said, “This young man who writes to you…is he your beau?” and Tiffany had changed the subject until she had time to look up the word in the dictionary and then more time to stop blushing.
Roland was…well, the thing about Roland was…the main thing about…well, the point was…he was there.
Okay, when she’d first really met him, he had been a rather useless, rather stupid lump, but what could you expect? He’d been the prisoner of the Queen of the Elves for a year, to start with, fat as butter and half crazy on sugar and despair. Besides, he’d been brought up by a couple of haughty aunts, his father—the Baron—being mostly more interested in horses and dogs.
He’d more and less changed since then: more thoughtful, less rowdy, more serious, less stupid. He’d also had to wear glasses, the first ever seen on the Chalk.
And he had a library! More than a hundred books! Actually, it belonged to the castle, but no one else seemed interested in it.
Some of the books were huge and ancient, with wooden covers and huge black letters and colored pictures of strange animals and far-off places. There was Waspmire’s Book of Unusual Days, Crumberry’s Why Things Are Not Otherwise, and all but one volume of the Ominous Encyclopaedia. Roland had been astonished to find that she could read foreign words, and she’d been careful not to tell him it was all done with the help of what remained of Dr. Bustle.
The thing was…the fact was…well, who else had they got? Roland couldn’t, just couldn’t have friends among the village kids, what with him being the son of the Baron and everything. But Tiffany had the pointy hat now, and that counted for something. The people of the Chalk didn’t like witches much, but