You can dress however you like to do the job, but you really should have a good pair of trompy old boots.
Summary
Once in the Queen’s kingdom, the Feegle explain that this is Fairyland to Tiffany. More grimhounds approach, but William plays them off with special pipes that hurt their ears. Rob explains that if her brother stays for too long, he’ll come back the same age, but he might never be able to properly wake to reality again. Tiffany begins to get frightened at her surroundings, and she wakes up suddenly in her home and goes to the kitchen where her mother had left a bowl on porridge for her. As she’s trying to tell herself it had all been a dream, the Feegle suddenly pour in from everywhere and tell her not to eat, while heading to fight a screaming monster that emerges from the oven. Tiffany wakes and learns that she’d been trapped by a drome, who puts you in dreams and eats you after you’ve starved to death. They continue on, Tiffany incensed now at the idea of the Queen taking her brother and having creatures that mimic her home (they are hers), but a bunch of small fairies show up to fight and it’s Not-as-big-as-Medium-Sized-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock who drives them off with terrible poetry. The Feegle explain that Fairyland has gotten worse because the Queen used to have a King, but they had a falling out.
They run into Roland, the baron’s son, who threatens Tiffany, so the Feegle cut the straps to his horse saddle. They’re taken by a drome again into a dream with a ball, and Tiffany almost eats cheese. She finds the drome disguised as Roland and kills it, which frightens the real Roland and sends him running. Tiffany is out of the dream, but the Feegle didn’t make it, so she finds she’s being herded by more drome, but walks into it knowingly. She finds Roland in there again, who tells her about the Queen’s realm, and finally, she finds Wentworth. The Queen appears and tells Tiffany that she cannot save her brother and that she wasn’t a monster for wanting company. Tiffany remembers when Granny Aching leveraged what she’d done for the Baron to protect a woman who was mentally ill in their village, and manages to tell the Queen off, make her angry and hit her with the frying pan. She runs with Wentworth and can just about make out Feegle voices. She tells Roland to crack the nut that’s about to be cracked in the dream and realizes something about the Queen: She is, in many ways, just a child who got old. The Feegle pour out of the cracked nut to defend her.
The Queen runs at the sight of them; they tell Tiffany to find the door so they can leave this place, picking up Roland to take along with them. The Queen sends nightmares after them, and the Feegle tell Tiffany to make a run for it while they hold them off, but she orders them to carry her to the trees so she can get them all out alive. They run to a drome and Tiffany creates her own dream from the Jolly Sailor tobacco that Granny Aching favored. They pile into a boat by the sea and head for the lighthouse. There’s a whale then, and it comes to swallow them, but the Jolly Sailor’s ship shows up so they can chase each other, just like Granny Aching said. Tiffany insists that the Feegle not kill the drome to get out because it seems happy here and she always wakes when she goes into the lighthouse. But the tide goes out and there’s wrecked ships calling to the Feegle with treasure and Tiffany realizes that the Queen is trying to trap them. She exits the dream and finds herself back in the Queen’s realm, but she sees the door. She drags Roland through it to the real world, but the door breaks, and the Queen is there. She tells Tiffany that she’s failed and would be better off dead.
Tiffany almost gives in, but she remembers her grandmother and her duty. She realizes that her selfishness can be a powerful weapon. She calls the specters of Granny Aching’s dogs to her and they herd the Queen’s storm. When they return, they are looking behind her, so Tiffany steels herself and turns to find Granny Aching… dressed in the shepherdess statue’s finery (except the boots), beaming at her. She disappears and the Queen is still there, but then the Feegle and Wentworth arrive with seawater and a dead shark, but the Queen sets a lawyer on the Nac Mac Feegle—which likely would have worked if it hadn’t turned out that Miss Tick’s toad definitely used to be a lawyer as well. As they argue, they vanish and the Queen tries to cow Tiffany again, but this time it doesn’t work. Tiffany can feel the power of her grandmother and the land around her, and she knows that the Queen cannot touch anything that’s hers. She also knows that she’ll never feel like this again, and she carries the Queen back to her realm and warns her to never return. She lets the Feegle heads off, sends Roland back with her brother, and Hamish drops in to let her know she’s got visitors… on broomsticks. She meets Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, who are deeply impressed and tell her that once she’s old enough to leave home, she can learn a bit from witches by staying with them for a while as a “maid” and such. The Baron is convinced that his son did all the rescuing; when Roland comes to visit, Tiffany makes it clear that she won’t tell anyone the truth—but this is her land, and she’ll always be watching it and him.
Commentary
This one makes me sob ugly tears at the end, full disclosure. I thought maybe I’d be spared this time around, but no.
Part of that is down to how well it comes together story-wise and emotionally, but the other part is just in being aware of how much like Tiffany I was as a child (aside from the ugly sobbing, of course). I’m sure anyone with a similar younger disposition will feel this. Tiffany uses her anger to help her get past fear for one, which is something I used all the time as a kid when I was frightened. It’s also something that Pratchett himself pointedly felt all the time; friends of his have talked about him having that well within, about how he claimed to use it as a fuse to power his work, and he imbues many of his best characters with that trait specifically. Tiffany has it, Sam Vimes has it, Granny has it.
But it also really resonated with me this time around that Pratchett is using witching as a sideways metaphor for neurodivergence as well. And this has a metatextual aspect because women who were pegged as witches were always somehow outside of accepted roles given by society. Some of them were women’s doctors, some of them were simply unmarried women with no family, and some were very likely neurodivergent individuals, or any combination of a number of these traits and more. So it’s literal while also being metaphorical.
The reason why I’m zeroing in on it this time was because this segment hit me like a truck this time around, being the Queen trying to tear down Tiffany in a very personal way:
“You dream that you are strong, sensible, logical… the kind of person who always has a bit of string. But that’s just your excuse for not being really, properly human. You’re just a brain, no heart at all. You didn’t even cry when Granny Aching died.”
And this is wrong, of course, because as I mentioned last week, this book is a half a treatise on the grief Tiffany is still feeling over Granny Aching’s death. Grief is one of those emotions that processes entirely differently for every person, and crying is not a prerequisite to feeling it whatsoever.
But also… that description sure sounds close to how some people on the autism spectrum are often described by the medical establishment, doesn’t it?
And Tiffany’s internal monologue absolutely aligns with this reading to my mind: She’s aware of the fact that the way she thinks and feels about others is “wrong” and the book keeps offering the little button of it being true because… she’s a witch. But it’s not just that. She feels that way because that’s how she feels. She’s different. And some of those things that are different seem easy to label as wrong or bad—not really loving your little brother for example. But, in point of fact, Tiffany does care for him in her own manner. She merely reframes that care as selfishness because her way of enacting care is not like the people around her.
It’s maybe more like Granny Aching’s way.
For Tiffany, she can’t say that what she feels for Wentworth is love because her irritation with Wentworth frequently overpowers any other emotion she has for him. But when she thinks of Wentworth as belonging to her, that feeling changes:
The turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours!
This story is about Tiffany grieving for her grandmother and taking up her mantle, but it is also a story about Tiffany learning how to use her way of being to her advantage. If what you feel is possessiveness, let that guide you to protect what’s yours and safeguard it against harm. If you don’t feel affection, let duty guide you. And don’t let anyone tell you that thinking about how you think (about how you think) is somehow a lesser way of being. It’s perfectly good and you are perfectly capable. You know that the gift of having power is giving it back, and you know it at the tender age of nine, because that’s what being different allotted to you.
And if I’m feeling some kind of ways about that, it’s only because I really wish I’d had this book when I was smaller. They are things I still need to hear now, but if I’d read this book at Tiffany’s age… I can’t imagine what kind of person I would have become.
Asides and little thoughts:
- To my mind, a lot of the dreams in Fairyland seem reminiscent of other fantasy narratives: The ballroom sequence feels very Labyrinth sans David Bowie, and the nut-breaking dream has a lot of Alice in Wonderland vibes, and so on.
- Okay, but I truly appreciate the realism of Tiffany asking for a sword in the dream and immediately getting one that’s too heavy to hold. People don’t realize how heavy broadswords are, and she’s only nine on top of it.
- I do love the seeding that the toad is a lawyer all the way through, with the constant streams of annoyance at how things are being run unsafely, bits of legal jargon…
Pratchettisms:
There was a sugary yellow teddy bear in the snow, made of 100% Artificial Additives.
Her Second Thoughts said: Let’s all calm down, please, because this is quite a small head.
He urged the horse forward with a jerk, and there there was one of those long moments, a moment when the whole universe said, “Uh-oh” and, still holding the dagger, the boy swiveled around the horse and landed in the snow.
This wasn’t food—it was what food became if it had been good and had gone to heaven.
The Queen glared, as people without a sense of humor do when they’re confronted with a smile.
Pictsies seemed very hard to kill. Perhaps believing you were already dead made you immune.
Is there any me at all? Or do my thoughts just dream of me?
She leaned down, and centuries bent with her.
Next week we start Monstrous Regiment. We’ll read up to:
“All smart, all neat, all legal. Go on, Perks, I gave you an order.”
