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There is an old story about a girl who fell in love with an elf.
Or, no. That’s wrong. You wouldn’t fall in love with an elf, would you? Not for long, not after you realized — no. He wasn’t an elf, but he had been stolen away by elves, who wanted him because he was healthy, or pretty, or important, or there. Elves don’t need reasons for the things they do. Elves aren’t good at reasons, or logic. They’re good at wanting and taking. Elves wanted this boy and so they took him, but the thing they forgot, or perhaps the thing they never knew, is that human beings are very good at wanting and taking too, and the girl in the story wasn’t about to let elves and fairies take what was hers by right.
The elves turned the young man into all manner of fell and wild thing — and Tiffany laughs at this, now, when she thinks of it. You can turn a man into something much smaller than a man, but not so cleanly. The mass that’s left over has to go somewhere, even if you’re an elf. Stories are like that; the only people who make up stories about magic are people who have very definite ideas about what magic should be like, and very few definite facts about what it is like.
(But the stories tell people what magic should look like, and the story-magic becomes bigger and realer than real magic, truer than the truth, and then the world isn’t quite the same place it was before the words were said. That’s a kind of magic in itself, a kind of magic that makes even Granny Weatherwax a little nervous. Stories change the world, even if you think you aren’t listening to them. They turn brown-haired girls into witches, and then sometimes they kill little old ladies… The words you use are a sort of magic, too, because Tiffany’s thinking about all the problems with the story but she’s also thinking about the words “fell and wild”; she’s tucking them into the back of her mind, and thinking that in her next letter to Preston she’ll give those words to him. When he writes back he will say it sounds like wolves in the snow, or something else she could never have thought of, which will be exactly right in the way Preston’s ideas are always exactly right, exactly what she hadn’t known she’d always wanted to hear.)
Around Tiffany, the light is fading, and the night is growing cold; she begins to walk faster.
The girl in the story held onto her lover through all the changes, and she wasn’t afraid, she loved him enough and held him tight enough that he changed back into himself, and the Queen of the Fairies was defeated.
That story is not Tiffany’s story. But it might be a cousin to Tiffany’s. Tiffany has faced a Queen of the Fairies, and she has no reason to believe it wasn’t the same one. And Tiffany knows something about finding what you want, and knowing what’s yours, and grabbing, and holding on. You don’t wait for the power to come to you. You find the power, and you make it do what you want. You find the power in your own mind and arms and heart. It’s an approach that’s never failed Tiffany before.
But it’s one that only works if you know for certain what it is you want. Tiffany is not used to not being certain what she wants. She knows that Preston is dedicated and enthusiastic and cleverer than is good for him, that he cares about words and her. She thinks perhaps she could talk to him forever —
Tiffany Aching has spoken to her future self. That is: she has spoken to an old woman with a nice smile, and she has discovered that it is much easier to stand and talk to the woman you will become than it is to wake up the next morning and begin the long slow process of becoming her. She would, in the secret heart of her, really prefer to have been given some details, some kind of a map. If it were a matter of holding fast to Preston and saving him from the fairies, she thinks, she could do that. She would do it gladly, and she would know exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it. What she’s actually doing is something far simpler, and far more difficult. There’s no magic for this, and there’s no map.
I never had a map before, she thinks. I had my land, and I knew what I wanted — I made choices and some of them were right and some of them were wrong and it always worked out —
But now, ever since Preston, ever since meeting her future self, Tiffany has felt the future weighing on her.
She’s a busy woman. Usually she doesn’t have time, to think like this. She is a witch, and if a witch is to do any good at all she must spend very little time thinking about herself, and a great deal of time bustling about doing what needs doing. But sometimes, times like now, on the way home from seeing to a splint for little Tarantella Johnson’s arm1, she can steal a few minutes to spend in thought.
Tiffany closes her eyes, and she remembers…
She remembers a warm bright day when she was quite young indeed, a day when the wandering teachers had set up shop and she went into town to get a bit of education. One of the teachers that day had been a skinny bearded man — probably a wizard, she’d thought later — whose sign offered lessons in Chronometry and Chronology, not even spelled wrong. In exchange for three eggs and a carrot, he’d given Tiffany a lecture on something he called the Trousers of Time. He’d patiently explained that history was always splitting in two, like the legs of a pair of trousers, that anyone’s choices decided which leg she ended up in. He drew lots of diagrams. And what it all means is: there are a thousand Tiffany Achings, in a thousand universes. Some of them aren’t witches, probably. Probably some of them are married to Roland, right now. Tiffany wonders, sometimes, if they’re happy. If they think they made the right choices —
They aren’t bothering her today, though. Today, what’s bothering her is which Tiffany she’s going to become. She feels the weight of all the possibilities, all the Tiffanys she can grow into given time. Some of them look a little like Miss Tick, a little like Granny Weatherwax or Granny Aching, even a little like Nanny Ogg, but they all look like Tiffany, too. And if she says yes to one of them, she has to say no to all the others —
Tiffany Aching stands still, and she thinks for a moment that she can see the futures spreading around her. This is what witchcraft is, she thinks: standing still, and seeing. She thinks, for a moment, that she could reach out and — choose. There’s always a choice, she thinks. There will always be a choice. Close your eyes, and reach out and look at that, all those lives, so close you could almost touch them — and then —
Tiffany Aching is almost seventeen years old. She is smart, and she is busy, and she is brave. She knows how to make good cheese, and she knows her own mind. She does not believe in fate. She knows how to work hard, and how to hold onto what’s hers. She knows that magic is still magic when you know how it’s done.
She knows how magic is done. No, more: she knows how she does magic.
Chalk hills, Tiffany thinks, flint bones. And: if there is a price, then I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. And: every step is a first step.
And: listen.
And: the same trick never works twice —
Tiffany Aching opens her eyes, and she steps into the future.
1 Tarantella seems determined to live up to her name, and Tiffany thinks that eventually she may be able to do so without self-injury.