Wintersmith

As Granny Weatherwax once said, if you wanted to walk around with your head in the air, then you needed to have both feet on the ground.

It was all about light and dark. If you could get down on paper the shadow and the shine, the shape that any creature left in the world, then you could get the thing itself.

People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.

What does a storm know of sorrow?

“If any ground is Consecrate, this ground is.

If any day is Holy, it is this day.”

“We are small people,” her father had said. “It ain’t wise to come to the attention of the gods.”

There is no name for what I want to be.

“Cackling,” to a witch, didn’t just mean nasty laughter. It meant your mind drifting away from its anchor. It meant you losing your grip. It meant loneliness and hard work and responsibility and other people’s problems driving you crazy a little bit at a time, each bit so small that you’d hardly notice it, until you thought that it was normal to stop washing and wear a kettle on your head. It meant you thinking that the fact you knew more than anyone else in your village made you better than them. It meant thinking that right and wrong were negotiable. And, in the end, it meant you “going to the dark,” as the witches said. That was a bad road. At the end of that road were poisoned spinning wheels and gingerbread cottages.

It wasn’t a spell, except in her own head, but if you couldn’t make spells work in your own head, you couldn’t make them work at all.

“But can’t you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?”
“The trouble is getting the magic to understand what dirt is,” said Tiffany, scrubbing hard at a stain. “I heard of a witch over in Escrow who got it wrong and ended up losing the entire floor and her sandals and nearly a toe.”
Mrs. Aching backed away. “I thought you just had to wave your hands about,” she mumbled nervously.
“That works,” said Tiffany, “but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush.”