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

Tiffany could actually see the cart coming up the road when she heard the hoofbeats coming across the green. She turned, and her heart seemed to leap and sink at the same time.

It was Roland, the baron’s son, on a fine black horse. He leaped down before the horse had stopped, and then stood there looking embarrassed.

"Ah, I see a very fine and interesting example of a....a....a big stone over there," said Miss Tick in a sticky-sweet voice. "I’ll just go and have a look at it, shall I?"

Tiffany could have pinched her for that.

"Er, you’re going, then," said Roland as Miss Tick hurried away.

"Yes," said Tiffany.

Roland looked as though he was going to explode with nervousness.

"I got this for you," he said. "I had it made by a man, er, over in Yelp." He held out a package wrapped in soft paper.

Tiffany took it and put it carefully in her pocket.

"Thank you," she said, and dropped a small curtsy. Strictly speaking, that’s what you had to do when you met a nobleman, but it just made Roland blush and stutter.

"O-open it later on," said Roland. "Er, I hope you’ll like it."

"Thank you," said Tiffany sweetly.

"Here’s the cart. Er . . . you don’t want to miss it."

"Thank you," said Tiffany, and curtsied again, because of the effect it had. It was a little bit cruel, but sometimes you had to be.

Anyway, it would be very hard to miss the cart. If you ran fast, you could easily overtake it. It was so slow that "stop" never came as a surprise.

There were no seats. The carrier went around the villages every other day, picking up packages and, sometimes, people. You just found a place where you could get comfortable among the boxes of fruit and rolls of cloth.

Tiffany sat on the back of the cart, her old boots dangling over the edge, swaying backward and forward as the cart lurched away on the rough road.

Miss Tick sat beside her, her black dress soon covered in chalk dust to the knees.

Tiffany noticed that Roland didn’t get back on his horse until the cart was nearly out of sight.

And she knew Miss Tick. By now she would be just bursting to ask a question, because witches hate not knowing things. And sure enough, when the village was left behind, Miss Tick said, after a lot of shifting and clearing her throat:

"Aren’t you going to open it?"

"Open what?" asked Tiffany, not looking at her.

"He gave you a present," said Miss Tick.

"I thought you were examining an interesting stone, Miss Tick," said Tiffany accusingly.

"Well, it was only fairly interesting," said Miss Tick, completely unembarrassed. "So . . . are you?"

"I’ll wait until later," said Tiffany. She didn’t want a discussion about Roland at this point or, really, at all.

She didn’t actually dislike him. She’d found him in the land of the Queen of the Fairies and had sort of rescued him, although he had been unconscious most of the time. A sudden meeting with the Nac Mac Feegle when they’re feeling edgy can do that to a person. Of course, without anyone actually lying, everyone at home had come to believe that he had rescued her. A nine-year-old girl armed with a frying pan couldn’t possibly have rescued a thirteen-year-old boy who’d had a sword.

Tiffany hadn’t minded that. It stopped people from asking too many questions she didn’t want to answer or even know how to. But he’d taken to . . . hanging around. She kept accidentally running into him on walks more often than was really possible, and he always seemed to be at the same village events she went to. He was always polite, but she couldn’t stand the way he kept looking like a spaniel that had been kicked.

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.