Read Online I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online

and accusing you of the theft of a pair of shoes – although, of course, you could probably outrun them owing to their lack of footwear. But she understood what the proverb actually meant, and here was a man one breath away from death. She had no option, no option at all. She had to give him that breath, for the sake of a handful of nettles; something inside the wretched hulk had still managed to be good. It was a tiny spark, but it was there. And there was no argument.
    Hating herself deep down for being so soppy, she nodded at the Big Man of the Feegle clan. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Try not to hurt him too much.’
    The sword sparkled; and the cut was made with the delicacy of a surgeon, although the surgeon would have washed his hands first.
    The rope actually sprang out as the Feegle severed it, and shot away as though it was a serpent. Petty gasped air so hard that the candle flame by the door seemed to flatten for a moment.
    Tiffany got up off her knees and brushed herself down. ‘What did you come back for?’ she said. ‘What were you looking for? What did you expect to find?’
    Mr Petty lay there. There wasn’t even a grunt in reply. It was hard to hate him now, wheezing on the floor.
    Being a witch meant you had to make choices, usually the choices that ordinary people did not want to make or even to know about. So she washed his face with a bit of torn cloth moistened from the pump outside and wrapped the dead child in the rather larger and cleaner bit of cloth that she had brought for the purpose. It wasn’t the best of shrouds, but it was honest and civilized. She reminded herself, in a dreamy kind of way, that she needed to build up her store of makeshift bandages and realized how grateful she should be. ‘Thank you, Rob,’ she said. ‘I don’t I think I could have managed by myself.’
    ‘I reckon that maybe ye could,’ said Rob Anybody, while they both knew that she couldn’t. ‘It just so happened that I was passing by, ye ken, and not following ye at all. One of them coincidences.’
    ‘There have been a lot of those coincidences lately,’ said Tiffany.
    ‘Aye,’ said Rob, grinning, ‘it must be another coincidence.’
    It was impossible to embarrass a Feegle. They just couldn’t grasp the idea.
    He was watching her. ‘What happens now?’ he said.
    That was the question, wasn’t it. A witch needed to make people believe she knew what to do next, even if she didn’t. Petty was going to live, and the poor child was not going to stop being dead. ‘I’ll take care of things,’ she said. ‘It’s what we do.’
    Only it’s just me; there is no ‘us’, she thought as she flew through the mists of morning to the place of flowers. I wish, I wish there was.
    In the hazel woods there was a clearing of flowers from early spring to late autumn. There was meadowsweet and foxglove and old man’s trousers and Jack-jump-into-bed and ladies’ bonnets and three-times-Charlie and sage and southernwood and pink yarrow and ladies’ bedstraw and cowslips and primroses and two types of orchid.
    It was where the old lady that they had called the witch was buried. If you knew where to look, you could see what little was left of her cottage underneath all that greenery, and if you really knew where to look, you could see the place where she had been buried. If you really and truly knew where to look, you could find the spot where Tiffany had buried the old lady’s cat too; there was catnip growing on it.
    Once upon a time, the rough music had come for the old woman and her cat, oh yes it had, and the people walking to its drumming had dragged her out into the snow and pulled down the rickety cottage and burned her books because they had pictures of stars in them.
    And why? Because the Baron’s son had gone missing and Mrs Snapperly had no family and no teeth and, to be honest, cackled a bit as well. And that made her a witch, and the people of the Chalk didn’t trust witches, so she was pulled