“She went out to the orchard,” said Gulta. “Again.”

“Go and fetch her in, then, and be off.”

“But it’s cold!”

“It’s going to snow again!”

“It’s only a mile and the road is clear enough and who was so keen to be out in it when we had the first snowfall? Go on with you, and don’t come back till you’re in a better temper.”

They found Esk sitting in a fork of the big apple tree. The boys didn’t like the tree much. For one thing, it was so covered in mistletoe that it looked green even in midwinter, its fruit was small and went from stomach-twisting sourness to wasp-filled rottenness overnight, and although it looked easy enough to climb it had a habit of breaking twigs and dislodging feet at inconvenient moments. Cern once swore that a branch had twisted just to spill him off. But it tolerated Esk, who used to go and sit in it if she was annoyed or fed up or just wanted to be by herself, and the boys sensed that every brother’s right to gently torture his sister ended at the foot of its trunk. So they threw a snowball at her. It missed.

“We’re going to see old Weatherwax.”

“But you don’t have to come.”

“Because you’ll just slow us down and probably cry anyway.”

Esk looked down at them solemnly. She didn’t cry a lot, it never seemed to achieve much.

“If you don’t want me to come then I’ll come,” she said. This sort of thing passes for logic among siblings.

“Oh, we want you to come,” said Gulta quickly.

“Very pleased to hear it,” said Esk, dropping on to the packed snow.

They had a basket containing smoked sausages, preserved eggs and—because their mother was prudent as well as generous—a large jar of peach preserve that no one in the family liked very much. She still made it every year when the little wild peaches were ripe, anyway.

The people of Bad Ass had learned to live with the long winter snows and the roads out of the village were lined with boards to reduce drifting and, more important, stop travellers from straying. If they lived locally it wouldn’t matter too much if they did, because an unsung genius on the village council several generations previously had come up with the idea of carving markers in every tenth tree in the forest around the village, out to a distance of nearly two miles. It had taken ages, and re-cutting markers was always a job for any man with spare time, but in winters where a blizzard could lose a man within yards of his home many a life had been saved by the pattern of notches found by probing fingers under the clinging snow.

It was snowing again when they left the road and started up the track where, in summer, the witch’s house nestled in a riot of raspberry thickets and weird witch-growth.

“No footprints,” said Cern.

“Except for foxes,” said Gulta. “They say she can turn herself into a fox. Or anything. A bird, even. Anything. That’s how she always knows what’s going on.”

They looked around cautiously. A scruffy crow was indeed watching them from a distant tree stump.

“They say there’s a whole family over Crack Peak way that can turn themselves into wolves,” said Gulta, who wasn’t one to leave a promising subject, “because one night someone shot a wolf and next day their auntie was limping with an arrow wound in her leg, and ….

“I don’t think people can turn themselves into animals,” said Esk, slowly.

“Oh yes, Miss Clever?”

“Granny is quite big. If she turned herself into a fox what would happen to all the bits that wouldn’t fit?”

“She’d just magic them away,” said Cern.

“I don’t think magic works like that,” said Esk. “You can’t just make things happen, there’s a sort of—like a seesaw thing, if you push one end down, the other end goes up . . . .” Her voice trailed off.

They gave her a look.

“I can’t see Granny on a seesaw,” said Gulta. Cern giggled.

“No, I mean every time something happens, something else has to happen too—I think,” said Esk uncertainly, picking her way around a deeper than usual snowdrift. “Only in the . . . opposite direction.”

“That’s silly,” said Gulta, “because, look, you remember when that fair came last summer and there was a wizard with it and he made all those birds and things appear out of nothing? I mean it just happened, he just said these words and waved his hands, and it just happened. There weren’t any seesaws.”

“There was a swing,” said Cern. “And a thing where you had to throw things at things to win things.”

“And you didn’t hit anything, Gul.”

“Nor did you, you said the things were stuck to the things so you couldn’t knock them off, you said . . . .”

Their conversation wandered away like a couple of puppies. Esk listened with half an ear. I know what I mean, she told herself. Magic’s easy, you just find the place where everything is balanced and push. Anyone could do it. There’s nothing magical about it. All the funny words and waving the hands is just . . . it’s only for….

She stopped, surprised at herself. She knew what she meant. The idea was right up there in the front of her mind. But she didn’t know how to say it in words, even to herself.

It was a horrible feeling to find things in your head and not know how they fitted. It….

“Come on, we’ll be all day.”

She shook her head and hurried after her brothers.

The witch’s cottage consisted of so many extensions and lean-tos that it was difficult to see what the original building had looked like, or even if there had ever been one. In the summer it was surrounded by dense beds of what Granny loosely called “the Herbs”—strange plants, hairy or squat or twining, with curious flowers or vivid fruits or unpleasantly bulging pods. Only Granny knew what they were all for, and any woodpigeon hungry enough to attack them generally emerged giggling to itself and bumping into things (or, sometimes, never emerged at all.

Now everything was deep under the snow. A forlorn windsock flapped against its pole. Granny didn’t hold with flying but some of her friends still used broomsticks.

“It looks deserted,” said Cem.

“No smoke,” said Gulta.

The windows look like eyes, thought Esk, but kept it to herself.

“It’s only Granny’s house,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong.”

The cottage radiated emptiness. They could feel it. The windows did look like eyes, black and menacing against the snow. And no one in the Ramtops let their fire go out in the winter, as a matter of pride.

Esk wanted to say “Let’s go home,” but she knew that if she did the boys would run for it. Instead she said, “Mother says there’s a key on a nail in the privy,” and that was nearly as bad. Even an ordinary unknown privy held minor terrors like wasps’ nests, large spiders, mysterious rustling things in the roof and, one very bad winter, a small hibernating bear that caused acute constipation in the family until it was persuaded to bed down in the haybam. A witch’s privy could contain anything.

“I’ll go and look, shall I?” she added.

“If you like,” said Gulta airily, almost successfully concealing his relief.

In fact, when she managed to get the door open against the piled snow, it was neat and clean and contained nothing more sinister than an old almanac, or more precisely about half an old almanac, carefully hung on a nail. Granny had a philosophical objection to reading, but she’d be the last to say that books, especially books with nice thin pages, didn’t have their uses.

The key shared a ledge by the door with a chrysalis and the stump of a candle. Esk took it gingerly, trying not to disturb the chrysalis, and hurried back to the boys.

It was no use trying the front door. Front doors in Bad Ass were used only by brides and corpses, and Granny had always avoided becoming either. Around the back the snow was piled in front of the door and no one had broken the ice on the water butt.