Excerpt from A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Then everyone apart from the cheeses and the cat stood at the gate and waved to her and Miss Tick—well, except for the sheep, too—until they’d gone nearly all the way down the chalky-white lane to the village.

And then there was silence except for the sound of their boots on the flinty surface and the endless song of the skylarks overhead. It was late August and very hot, and the new boots pinched.

"I should take them off, if I was you," said Miss Tick after a while.

Tiffany sat down by the side of the lane and got her old boots out of the case. She didn’t bother to ask how Miss Tick knew about the tight new boots. Witches paid attention. The old boots, even though she had to wear several pairs of socks with them, were much more comfortable and really easy to walk in. They’d been walking since long before Tiffany was born, and knew how to do it.

"And are we going to see any . . . little men today?" Miss Tick went on, once they were walking again.

"I don’t know, Miss Tick," said Tiffany. "I told them a month ago I was leaving. They’re very busy at this time of year. But there’s always one or two of them watching me."

Miss Tick looked around quickly. "I can’t see anything," she said. "Or hear anything."

"No, that’s how you can tell they’re there," said Tiffany. "It’s always a bit quieter if they’re watching me. But they won’t show themselves while you’re with me. They’re a bit frightened of hags—that’s their word for witches," she added quickly. "It’s nothing personal."

Miss Tick sighed. "When I was a little girl, I’d have loved to see the pictsies," she said. "I used to put out little saucers of milk. Of course, later on I realized that wasn’t quite the thing to do."

"No, you should have used strong licker," said Tiffany.

She glanced at the hedge and thought she saw, just for the snap of a second, a flash of red hair. And she smiled, a little nervously.




Tiffany had been, if only for a few days, the nearest a human being can be to a queen of the fairies. Admittedly, she’d been called a kelda rather than a queen, and the Nac Mac Feegle should only be called fairies to their faces if you were looking for a fight. On the other hand the Nac Mac Feegle were always looking for a fight, in a cheerful sort of way, and when they had no one to fight they fought one another, and if one was all by himself he’d kick his own nose just to keep in practice.

Technically they had lived in Fairyland but had been thrown out, probably for being drunk. And now, because if you’d ever been their kelda they never forgot you . . .

. . . they were always there.

There was always one somewhere on the farm, or circling on a buzzard high over the chalk downs. And they watched her, to help and protect her, whether she wanted them to or not. Tiffany had been as polite as possible about this. She’d hidden her diary all the way at the back of a drawer and blocked up the cracks in the privy with wadded paper, and done her best with the gaps in her bedroom floorboards, too. They were little men, after all. She was sure they tried to remain unseen so as not to disturb her, but she’d got very good at spotting them.

They granted wishes—not the magical fairy-tale three wishes, the ones that always go wrong in the end, but ordinary, everyday ones. The Nac Mac Feegle were immensely strong and fearless and incredibly fast, but they weren’t good at understanding that what people said often wasn’t what they meant. One day, in the dairy, Tiffany had said, "I wish I had a sharper knife to cut this cheese," and her mother’s sharpest knife was quivering in the table beside her almost before she’d got the words out.

From A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett.  Copyright © 2004 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett.  All rights reserved.  Reproduced by permission of Harper Collins Publishers.