To smell the trees! To feel the pull of the ground! To be solid! To feel the darkness behind your eyes and know it was you! To be—and know yourself to be—a man!

He had never felt like this before. It was exhilarating. There was so much of…of everything, coming at him from every direction. The thing with the ground, for example. It tugged, all the time. Standing upright took a lot of thinking about. And the birds! The Wintersmith had always seen them as nothing more than impurities in the air, interfering with the flow of the weather, but now they were living things just like him. And they played with the tug of the wind, and owned the sky.

The Wintersmith had never seen before, never felt before, never heard before. You could not do those things unless you were…apart, in the dark behind the eyes. Before, he hadn't been apart; he'd been a part, a part of the whole universe of tug and pressure, sound and light, flowing, dancing. He'd run storms against mountains forever, but he'd never known what a mountain was until today.

The dark behind the eyes…what a precious thing. It gave you your…you-ness. Your hand, with those laughable waggly things on it, gave you touch; the holes on either side of your head let in sound; the holes at the front let in the wonderful smell. How clever of holes to know what to do! It was amazing! When you were an elemental, everything happened all together, inside and outside, in one big…thing.

Thing. That was a useful word…thing. Thing was anything the Wintersmith couldn't describe. Everything was…things, and they were exciting.

It was good to be a man! Oh, he was mostly made of dirty ice, but that was just better-organized dirty water, after all.

Yes, he was human. It was so easy. It was just a matter of organizing things. He had senses, he could move among humans, he could…search. That was how to search for humans. You became one! It was so hard to do it as an elemental; it was hard even to recognize a human in the churning thing-ness of the physical world. But a human could talk to other humans with the holes for the sound. He could talk to them and they would not suspect!

And now that he was human, there would be no going back. King Winter!

All he needed was a queen.

Tiffany woke up because someone was shaking her.

"Tiffany!"

She'd gone to sleep in Nanny Ogg's cottage with her head against the Cornucopia. From somewhere close there was a strange pif noise, like a dry drip. Pale-blue snowlight filled the room.

As she opened her eyes, Granny Weatherwax was gently pushing her back into her chair.

"You've been sleeping since nine o'clock, my girl," she said. "Time to go home, I think."

Tiffany looked around. "I am here, aren't I?" she said, feeling dizzy.

"No, this is Nanny Ogg's house. And this is a bowl of soup—"

Tiffany woke up. There was a blurry bowl of soup in front of her. It looked…familiar.

"When did you last sleep in a bed?" said a wavering, shadowy figure.

Tiffany yawned. "What day is this?"

"Tuesday," said Granny Weatherwax.

"Mmm…what's a Tuesday?"

Tiffany woke up for the third time and was grabbed and pulled upright.

"There," said the voice of Granny Weatherwax. "This time stay awake. Drink soup. Get warm. You need to go home."

This time Tiffany's stomach took control of a hand and a spoon and, by degrees, Tiffany warmed up.

Granny Weatherwax sat opposite, the kitten You on her lap, watching Tiffany until the soup was gone.

"I expected too much from you," she said. "I'd hoped that as the days grew longer, you'd find more power. That ain't no fault of yours."

The pif noises were getting more frequent. Tiffany looked down and saw barley dripping out of the Cornucopia. The number of grains increased even as she watched.

"You set it on barley before you fell asleep," said Granny. "It slows right down when you're tired. Just as well, really, otherwise we'd have been eaten alive by chickens."

"It's about the only thing I've got right," said Tiffany.

"Oh, I don't know. Annagramma Hawkin seems to be showing promise. Lucky in her friends, from what I hears." If Miss Treason had tried to play poker against Granny Weatherwax's face, she would have lost.

The patter of the new grains suddenly became much louder in the silence.

"Look, I—" Tiffany began.

Granny sniffed. "I'm sure no one has to explain themselves to me," she said virtuously. "Will you promise me that you'll go home? A couple of coaches got through this morning, and I hear it's not too bad yet, down on the plains. You go back to your Chalk country. You're the only witch they've got."

Tiffany sighed. She did want to go home, more than anything. But it would be like running away.

"It might be like running to," said Granny, picking up her old habit of replying to something that hadn't actually been said.

"I'll go tomorrow then," said Tiffany.

"Good." Granny stood up. "Come with me. I wants to show you something."

Tiffany followed her through a snow tunnel that came out near the edge of the forest. The snow had been packed down here by people dragging firewood home, and once you got a little way from the edge of the forest, the drifts weren't too bad; a lot of snow hung in the trees, filling the air with cold blue shadows.

"What are we looking for?" asked Tiffany.

Granny Weatherwax pointed.

There was a splash of green in the white and gray. It was young leaves on an oak sapling a couple of feet high. When Tiffany crunched her way through the snow crust and reached out to touch it, the air felt warm.

"Do you know how you managed that?" asked Granny.

"No!"

"Me neither. I couldn't do it. You did, girl. Tiffany Aching."

"It's just one tree," said Tiffany.

"Ah, well. You have to start small, with oak trees."

They stared in silence at the tree for a few moments. The green seemed to reflect off the snow around it. Winter stole color, but the tree glowed.

"And now we've all got things to do," said Granny, breaking the spell. "You, I believe, would normally be heading for Miss Treason's old place about now. I'd expect no less of you…."

There was a coaching inn. It was busy, even at this time in the morning. The Fast Mail coach had made a quick stop for fresh horses after the long haul into the mountains, and another one, bound for down on the plains, was waiting for the passengers. The breath of horses filled the air with steam. Drivers stamped their feet. Sacks and packages were being loaded. Men bustled around with nosebags. Some bandy-legged men just hung around, smoking and gossiping. In fifteen minutes the inn's yard would be empty again, but for now everyone was too busy to pay much attention to one more stranger.

Afterward they all told different stories, contradicting one another at the tops of their voices. Probably the most accurate account came from Miss Dymphnia Stoot, the innkeeper's daughter, who was helping her father serve breakfast:

"Well, he, like, came in, and right there I could see he was odd. He walked funny, you know, lifting his legs like a trotting horse does. Also, he was kind of like shiny. But we get all sorts here, and it does not pay to make pers'nal remarks. We had a bunch of werewolves in here last week and they were just like you and me except we had to put their plates on the floor…. All right, yes, this man…well, he sat down at a table and said: ‘I am a human just like you!' He came out with it, just like that!

"Of course, no one else paid attention, but I told him I was glad to hear it and what did he want to eat, because the sausages was particular fine this morning, and he said he could only eat cold food, which was funny 'cuz everyone was grumbling about how cold it was in the room now, and it's not like there wasn't a big fire burning. Anyway…actually we did have some cold sausage left in the pantry and they were a bit on the turn, if you know what I mean, so I gave them to him, and he chewed one for a bit and then he says, with his mouth full if you please, ‘This is not what I expected. What do I do now?' and I said you swallow and he said, ‘Swallow?' and I said, yes, you swallow it down into your stomach, right, and he said, spraying bits of sausage all over the place, ‘Oh, a hollow bit!' and sort of like wavers and then he says, ‘Ah, I am a human. I have successfully eaten human sausages!' and I said there was no need to be like that, they were made of mostly pig, same as always.