Read Wintersmith for Free Online Page B

Tick dropped in sometimes to keep an eye on her. Not as a witch, obviously, because although she liked a cold dip in the morning, you could have too much of a good thing. She disguised herself as a humble apple seller, or a fortune-teller. (Witches don’t usually do fortune-telling, because if they did, they’d be too good at it. People don’t want to know what’s really going to happen, only that it’s going to be nice. But witches don’t add sugar.)
    Unfortunately the spring on Miss Tick’s stealth hat had gone wrong while she was walking down the main street and the point had popped up. Even Miss Tick hadn’t been able to talk her way out of that one. Oh well, she’d have to make other arrangements now. Witch finding was always dangerous. You had to do it, though. A witch growing up all alone was a sad and dangerous child….
    She stopped, and stared at the fire. Why had she just thought about Tiffany Aching? Why now?
    Working quickly, she emptied her pockets and started a shamble.
    Shambles worked. That was about all you could say about them for certain. You made them out of some string and a couple of sticks and anything you had in your pocket at the time. They were a witch’s equivalent of those knives with fifteen blades and three screwdrivers and a tiny magnifying glass and a thing for extracting earwax from chickens.
    You couldn’t even say precisely what they did, although Miss Tick thought they were a way of finding out what things the hidden bits of your own mind somehow knew. You had to make a shamble from scratch every time, and only from things in your pockets. There was no harm in having interesting things in your pockets, though, just in case.
    After less than a minute Miss Tick had crafted a shamble out of:
     One twelve-inch ruler
     One bootlace
     One piece of secondhand string
     Some black thread
     One pencil
     One pencil sharpener
     A small stone with a hole in it
     A matchbox containing a mealworm called Roger, along with a scrap of bread for him to eat, because every shamble must contain something living
     About half a packet of Mrs. Sheergold’s Lubricated Throat Lozenges
     A button
    It looked like a cat’s cradle, or maybe the tangled strings of a very strange puppet.
    Miss Tick stared at it, waiting for it to read her. Then the ruler swung around, the throat sweets exploded in a little cloud of red dust, the pencil shot away and stuck in Miss Tick’s hat, and the ruler was covered in frost.
    That was not supposed to happen.

    Miss Treason sat downstairs in her cottage and watched Tiffany sleeping in the low bedroom above her. She did this through a mouse, which was sitting on the tarnished brass bedstead. Beyond the gray windows (Miss Treason hadn’t bothered to clean them for fifty-three years, and Tiffany hadn’t been able to shift all the dirt), the wind howled among the trees, even though it was mid-afternoon.
    He’s looking for her, she thought as she fed a piece of ancient cheese to another mouse on her lap. But he won’t find her. She is safe here.
    Then the mouse looked up from the cheese. It had heard something.
    “I told yez! She’s here somewhere, fellas!”
    “I dinna see why we canna just talk tae the ol’ hag. We get along fine wi’ hags.”
    “Mebbe, but this one is a terrrrrible piece o’ work. They say she’s got a fearsome demon in her tattie cellar.”
    Miss Treason looked puzzled. “Them?” she whispered to herself. The voices were coming from beneath the floor. She sent the mouse scurrying across the boards and into a hole.
    “I dinna want to disappoint ye, but we’s in a cellar right here, and it’s full o’ tatties.”
    After a while a voice said: “So where izzit?”
    “Mebbe it’s got the day off?”
    “What’s a demon need a day off for?”
    “Tae gae an’ see its ol’ mam an’ dad, mebbe?”
    “Oh, aye? Demons have mams, do they?”
    “Crivens! Will ye