“We willnae be fooled again!” —Roger Daltrey, probably.
Summary
A witch named Perspicacia Tick notes that another world is brushing theirs, but that there’s a witch in the area where it’s occurring, though that seems unlikely to her because it’s an area full of chalk, which is bad for growing witches. She looks into the rainwater from her hat and sees a nine-year-old girl named Tiffany Aching, who sees a Nac Mac Feegle and isn’t afraid, and saves her brother from a monster in the water. Miss Tick decides the child needs watching. Tiffany heads home, reads from a fairy tale book, takes a frying pan back to the water’s edge and creates a trap using her baby brother as bait for the monster, Jenny Green-Teeth, who she hits with the pan. She finishes her chores in the dairy and goes into town for some education from a traveling group. She’s directed toward a new tent—Miss Tick. She figures out that the woman is a witch very quickly and learns that Jenny showed up because something bad is coming. She also tells Miss Tick that she’s sure her grandmother was a witch of a sort. The only other one presumed in the area was Mrs. Snapperly, who was left to die in the snow last winter because the baron believed she killed his twelve-year-old son when he got lost in the woods; the town burned her books and threw her out of her cottage and the baron forbade anyone from helping her.
Buy the Book
Mammoths at the Gates
Miss Tick tells Tiffany that she does like to help witches find their school, which is at a high point once you open you eyes twice. She also advises Tiffany that if she believes in her dreams and trusts in herself, she’ll still get beaten by people who put in hard work and learned. Then she kicks Tiffany out. Tiffany heads to the top of Arken Hill, but when she opens her eyes twice, she doesn’t find anything, so she heads home. Miss Tick leaves her toad and goes for help—all the monsters from children’s stories are coming and Tiffany can’t handle it alone (even if she seems to have the Nac Mac Feegle on her side). The Feegle watch Tiffany as she’s sleeping, not sure who the family witch is. Tiffany gets up and goes to the privy for some privacy, then hears the Feegle steal a sheep and try to do the same with their chicken egg. She tells them off and stops the egg theft, then tells the Feegle there will be a reckoning if they don’t return their sheep. They begin to help Tiffany with her chores and return the sheep. Wondering if they’re brownies, she leaves them a saucer of milk, but they are’t pleased. Tiffany comes upon a headless horseman, and when she tries to run, the Feegle instruct her to stay still and look it in the eye. She does and a Feegle named Big Yan trounces the thing, scaring it off. In town, she finds the educators gone, but the toad is there to give her information on everything she’s seeing, and to tell her that Miss Tick is coming back with help… eventually.
Tiffany comes home to find that Wentworth has disappeared and everyone is looking for him. She asks the toad how to get the Feegles’ help for this and is told to leave out liquor, which she does (it’s the special sheep liniment). The group come out of hiding, tell her that her brother has been taken by the Queen, and are shocked that she doesn’t know who that is—being Granny Aching’s kin, the new witch. Tiffany remembers when Granny Aching got the Baron to be kinder to the locals after saving his dog from being put to death after it killed a sheep on the chalk. Tiffany asks them to help her steal her brother back from the Queen, and that straightens things out, as Feegles do nothing but drink, steal, and fight. Rob Anybody and Daft Wullie strap themselves to the bottom of her boots and set off, stopping at the site of Granny Aching’s grave (where the iron wheels and potbellied stove from her old hut cart rest) to find and talk to Hamish, who arrives on a buzzard. He saw a woman carrying a boy on a black horse. Suddenly grimhounds appear and snow arrives—it’s the Queen’s land now, but Tiffany tricks one of the hounds off the snow where it becomes a normal dog she can defeat.
Tiffany learns that the Feegles believe they are dead and this is their afterlife for a life well-lived. (Anyone who “dies” has gone back to the land of the living, and gets another shot at coming back here once they’re dead.) They tell her that they had a deal with her grandmother to take a sheep or egg now and then in return for keeping their flock safe. She thinks of the shepherdess statue she won at a fair and gave to Granny Aching, and thinks perhaps she hurt her grandmother by giving her something that suggested she wasn’t right. The Feegles bring Tiffany to meet their kelda, in a room full of gold. She is fading, and knows Tiffany is a witch like her grandmother, and offers her the position as kelda until she gets her brother back from the Queen. The kelda’s daughter Fion is unhappy at this, even though their ways state that she must go search out a new clan in need of a kelda instead of becoming the kelda of hers. Tiffany talks to William, the kelda’s brother, who explains that they once served the Queen, who tricked them; they rebelled against her. Tiffany gives a letter to Hamish to fly home to her family, and finds that tradition insists she pick a warrior to marry and name the day. She picks Rob Anybody and names a day that will never come—when the bird at the end of the world wears down that mountain with its beak. Then she works out how to find the door to the Queen’s realm by thinking it out… which she thinks is cheating, but the Feegles assure her is how magic actually works. She steps through to a black-and-white landscape.
Commentary
And here is our introduction to Tiffany Aching, a child with plenty of siblings who still, nevertheless, reads like an only child.
I just have to call it out because even when he’s trying to create characters in large family schemas, Pratchett is still ultimately focusing on the character who has the interior world and self-sufficiency of an only child. And this is used partly because she’s becoming a witch, and witches are certainly apart in many senses from the traditional roles and expectations of family structures (though not entirely or always, as in Nanny Ogg’s case), but also because this is clearly the type of brain that makes sense to Pratchett as a person and he can’t stop himself from using that as a foundation in many of the personalities he creates.
It’s also relevant that I read so many of these books out of order, and it’s only just occurring to me now that the Tiffany Aching books are a little bit of a reply to the Potter books. The fact that Tiffany is getting excited over the prospect of the magical school that she’ll maybe get whisked away to by a unicorn—and promptly being told that no, it’s not that kind of magical school, that’s not how you make witches—it’s all very pointed. Tiffany is also pegged as a know-it-all by Miss Tick, which was the insult always leveled at Hermione Granger, but it’s instantly marked as a good thing here. And of course, there’s the remarks that dreams and hearts are great, but the way you achieve anything in life is through hard work, something that the Potter books are… less big on, let’s just put it that way.
And there’s the common thread that runs through the Witches books, being about how story works, how it exerts pressure over our lives, and how important it is to buck the arc of story in order to lead a good life. Or, as Tiffany notes:
The stories didn’t want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told…
As we get deeper into these stories and see those common threads, it’s incredible how the Discworld books manage to appreciate the importance of story in our lives, as a manner of shaping reality, but also explicitly acknowledge the way that the human capacity—and even need—to couch everything in narrative is not solely a good thing. As with most aspects of life, it comes with good and bad baked in. A witch in Tiffany’s village died because people believed in stories, and it’s not the first time we’ve seen this treatment toward a witch by the local population. Sometimes stories do harm, and it’s essential that we acknowledge the places where that occurs.
But at the core of this particular story is something much more human and painful: It’s the tale of a girl who is still mourning the loss of her grandmother, and learning to take up the position that the woman left behind for her. So many sections of this book amount to Tiffany thinking back on the magic of her grandmother, and also the ways in which they could and could not manage to communicate. They have witching and a love of comfortable silences in common. They are observers who have first sight and second thoughts. They are both intrinsically the flint born of chalk.
Yet Tiffany knows that there is so much of Granny Aching that she never understood. Words that the woman didn’t know how to use (whereas Tiffany wants all of the words and will read the dictionary to get them), lessons that Tiffany couldn’t pick up on in the moment for being too young, the fear that she hurt her grandmother by winning her a shepherdess statue that reflected nothing of the woman she knew. And the fact that this story is grounded in such palpable grief makes it so much more than a sharp, funny book about a young witch.
Asides and little thoughts:
- You know how you sometimes have moments where you know you’re going to like a character from a very specific cue? For me, it was Tiffany thinking about susurrus, “a word that not many people have thought about, ever.” Because I have, of course. A lot.
- The Feegle swords glow blue in the presence of lawyers, and Sting glows in the presence of orcs, so now I’m thinking about orc lawyers.
- Seems to me that all small folk on the Disc have the same method for teaching birds to do their bidding. Maybe they’ve got a club? I feel like Hamish and Buggy Swires would get along great.
Pratchettisms:
She cupped it in her hands to keep the raindrops out and listened to her eyes.
They went to sleep under the stars, which the math teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure, and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.
She’d watch the buzzards and listen to the noise of the silence.
But that time it had been magic. And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.
The stories weren’t real. But Mrs. Snapperly had died because of stories.
Nothing’s louder than the end of a song that’s always been there.
I never knew about all this. I never knew I lived in heaven, even if it’s only heaven to a clan of little blue men.
But she thought there should be a word meaning “a word that sounds like the noise a thing would make if that thing made a noise even though, actually, it doesn’t, but would if it did.”
Next week we’ll finish the book!
