A Hat Full of Sky

Description

WE SEE YOU. NOW WE ARE YOU.

No real witch would casually step out of their body, leaving it empty.

Tiffany Aching does. And there’s something just waiting for a handy body to take over. Something ancient and horrible, which can’t die.

To deal with it, Tiffany has to go to the very heart of what makes her a witch . . .

‘Fantastically inventive’
Sunday Times“A passion for language, wordplay and puns bursts from the pages.”
—Daily TelegraphTerry Pratchett was the acclaimed creator of the global bestselling Discworld series, the first of which, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. In all, he was the author of over fifty bestselling books which have sold over 100 million copies worldwide. His novels have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he was the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal. He was awarded a knighthood for services to literature in 2009, although he always wryly maintained that his greatest service to literature was to avoid writing any.

www.terrypratchettbooks.com

When she’s not trying to take over the world or fighting sock-stealing monsters, Laura Ellen Anderson is a professional children’s book author and illustrator who lives in north London. The creator of Evil Emperor Penguin for the Phoenix comic, she is also the illustrator of Sibéal Pounder’s Witch Wars series and CBeebies presenter Cerrie Burnell’s picture books and Harper fiction series. Laura’s first author/illustrator picture book, I Don’t Want Curly Hair, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. She has also created new cover illustrations for Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series.

www.lauraellenanderson.co.uk
@Lillustrator

Chapter 1
LEAVING

It came crackling over the hills, like an invisible fog. Movement without a body tired it, and it drifted very slowly. It wasn’t thinking now. It had been months since it had last thought, because the brain that was doing the thinking for it had died. They always died. So now it was naked again, and frightened.

It could hide in one of the blobby white creatures that baa’d nervously as it crawled over the turf. But they had useless brains, capable of thinking only about grass and making other things that went baa. No. They would not do. It needed, needed something better, a strong mind, a mind with power, a mind that could keep it safe.

It searched . . .

The new boots were all wrong. They were stiff and shiny. Shiny boots! That was disgraceful. Clean boots, that was different. There was nothing wrong with putting a bit of a polish on boots to keep the wet out. But boots had to work for a living. They shouldn’t shine.

Tiffany Aching, standing on the rug in her bedroom, shook her head. She’d have to scuff the things as soon as possible.

Then there was the new straw hat, with a ribbon on it. She had some doubts about that, too.

She tried to look at herself in the mirror, which wasn’t easy because the mirror was not much bigger than her hand, and cracked and blotchy. She had to move it around to try and see as much of herself as possible and remember how the bits fitted together. But today . . . well, she didn’t usually do this sort of thing in the house, but it was important to look smart today, and since no one was around . . .

She put the mirror down on the rickety table by the bed, stood in the middle of the threadbare rug, shut her eyes and said:

‘See me.’

And away on the hills something, a thing with no body and no mind but a terrible hunger and a bottomless fear, felt the power.

It would have sniffed the air, if it had a nose.

It searched.

It found.

Such a strange mind, like a lot of minds inside one another, getting smaller and smaller! So strong! So close!

It changed direction slightly, and went a little faster. As it moved, it made a noise like a swarm of flies.

The sheep, nervous for a moment about something they couldn’t see, hear or smell, baa’d . . .
. . . and went back to chewing grass.

Tiffany opened her eyes. There she was, a few feet away from herself. She could see the back of her own head.

Carefully, she moved around the room, not looking down at the ‘her’ that was moving, because she found that if she did that then the trick was over.

It was quite difficult, moving like that, but at last she was in front of herself and looking herself up and down.

Brown hair to match brown eyes . . . there was nothing she could do about that. At least her hair was clean and she’d washed her face.

She had a new dress on, which improved things a bit. It was so unusual to buy new clothes in the Aching family that, of course, it was bought big so that she’d ‘grow into it’. But at least it was pale green, and it didn’t actually touch the floor. With the shiny new boots and the straw hat she looked . . . like a farmer’s daughter, quite respectable, going off to her first job. It’d have to do.

From here she could see the pointy hat on her head, but she had to look hard for it. It was like a glint in the air, gone as soon as you saw it. That’s why she’d been worried about the new straw hat, but it had simply gone through it as if the new hat wasn’t there.

This was because, in a way, it wasn’t. It was invisible, except in the rain. Sun and wind went straight through, but rain and snow somehow saw it, and treated it as if it were real. She’d been given it by the greatest witch in the world, a real witch with a black dress and a black hat and eyes that could go through you like turpentine goes through a sick sheep. It had been a kind of reward. Tiffany had done magic, serious magic. Before she had done it she hadn’t known that she could; when she had been doing it she hadn’t known that she was; and after she had done it she hadn’t known how she had. Now she had to learn how.

‘See me not,’ she said. The vision of her . . . or whatever it was, because she was not exactly sure about this trick . . . vanished.

It had been a shock, the first time she’d done this. But she’d always found it easy to see herself, at least in her head. All her memories were like little pictures of herself doing things or watching things, rather than the view from the two holes in the front of her head. There was a part of her that was always watching her.

Miss Tick – another witch, but one who was easier to talk to than the witch who’d given Tiffany the hat – had said that a witch had to know how to ‘stand apart’, and that she’d find out more when her talent grew, so Tiffany supposed the ‘see me’ was part of this. Sometimes Tiffany thought she ought to talk to Miss Tick about ‘see me’. It felt as if she was stepping out of her body, but still had a sort of ghost body that could walk around. It all worked as long as her ghost eyes didn’t look down and see that she was just a ghost body. If that happened, some part of her panicked and she found herself back in her solid body immediately. Tiffany had, in the end, decided to keep this to herself. You didn’t have to tell a teacher everything. Anyway, it was a good trick for when you didn’t have a mirror.

Miss Tick was a sort of witch-finder. That seemed to be how witchcraft worked. Some witches kept a magical lookout for girls who showed promise, and found them an older witch to help them along. They didn’t teach you how to do it. They taught you how to know what you were doing.
Witches were a bit like cats. They didn’t much like one another’s company, but they did like to know where all the other witches were, just in case they needed them. And what you might need them for was to tell you, as a friend, that you were beginning to cackle.

Witches didn’t fear much, Miss Tick had said, but what the powerful ones were afraid of, even if they didn’t talk about it, was what they called ‘going to the bad’. It was too easy to slip into careless little cruelties because you had power and other people hadn’t, too easy to think other people didn’t matter much, too easy to think that ideas like right and wrong didn’t apply to you. At the end of that road was you dribbling and cackling to yourself all alone in a gingerbread house, growing warts on your nose.

Witches needed to know other witches were watching them.

And that, Tiffany thought, was why the hat was there. She could touch it any time, provided she shut her eyes. It was a kind of reminder . . .

‘Tiffany!’ her mother shouted up the stairs. ‘Miss Tick’s here!’GB

Additional information

Dimensions	1.2500 × 5.4000 × 8.1000 in
Series	Discworld Novels
Imprint	Doubleday Childrens
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780857535467
ISBN-10	0857535463
Author	Terry Pratchett
Audience	Children
BISAC	JUV037000
Subjects	funny gifts, young adult fantasy, books for 11 year old boys, books for 12 year old boys, books for 11 year old girls, books for 10 year old boys, books for 8 year old boys, books for 8 year old girls, adventure books, fantasy novels, books for 14 year old girls, books for 13 year old girls, books for 12 year old girls, magic, kids books ages 9-12, young adult books, teen books, books for teen girls, books for teens, ya books, funny books, fantasy books, books for kids age 9 12, JUV037000, young adult, fantasy