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

Admittedly—and it took some admitting—he was a lot less of a twit than he had been. On the other hand, there had been such a lot of twit to begin with.

And then she thought, Horse, and wondered why until she realized that her eyes had been watching the landscape while her brain stared at the past.

"I’ve never seen that before," said Miss Tick.

Tiffany welcomed it as an old friend. The Chalk rose out of the plains quite suddenly on this side of the hills. There was a little valley cupped into the fall of the down, and there was a carving in the curve it made. Turf had been cut away in long flowing lines, so that the bare chalk made the shape of an animal.

"It’s the White Horse," said Tiffany.

"Why do they call it that?" said Miss Tick.

Tiffany looked at her.

"Because the chalk is white?" she said, trying not to suggest that Miss Tick was being a bit dense.

"No, I meant why do they call it a horse? It doesn’t look like a horse. It’s just . . . flowing lines . . ."

. . . that look as if they’re moving, Tiffany thought.

It had been cut out of the turf way back in the old days, people said, by the folk who’d built the stone circles and buried their kin in big earth mounds. And they’d cut out the Horse at one end of this little green valley, ten times bigger than a real horse and, if you didn’t look at it with your mind right, the wrong shape, too. Yet they must have known horses, owned horses, seen them every day, and they weren’t stupid people just because they lived a long time ago.

Tiffany had once asked her father about the look of the Horse, when they’d come all the way over here for a sheep fair, and he told her what Granny Aching had told him when he was a little boy. He passed on what she said word for word, and Tiffany did the same now.

"’Taint what a horse looks like," said Tiffany. "It’s what a horse be."

"Oh," said Miss Tick. But because she was a teacher as well as a witch, and probably couldn’t help herself, she added, "The funny thing is, of course, that officially there is no such thing as a white horse. They’re called gray."

She had to say that because she was a witch and a teacher, and that’s a terrible combination. They want things to be right. They like things to be correct. If you want to upset a witch, you don’t have to mess around with charms and spells—you just have to put her in a room with a picture that’s hung slightly crooked and watch her squirm.

"Yes, I know," said Tiffany. "This one’s white," she added, flatly.

That quietened Miss Tick down for a while, but she seemed to have something on her mind.

"I expect you’re upset about leaving the Chalk, aren’t you?" she said as the cart rattled on.

"No," said Tiffany.

"It’s okay to be," said Miss Tick.

"Thank you, but I’m not really," said Tiffany.

"If you want to have a bit of a cry, you don’t have to pretend you’ve got some grit in your eye or anything—"

"I’m all right, actually," said Tiffany. "Honestly."

"You see, if you bottle that sort of thing up, it can cause terrible damage later on."

"I’m not bottling, Miss Tick."

In fact, Tiffany was a bit surprised at not crying, but she wasn’t going to tell Miss Tick that. She’d left a sort of space in her head to burst into tears in, but it wasn’t filling up. Perhaps it was because she’d wrapped up all those feelings and doubts and left them on the hill by the potbellied stove.

"And if, of course, you were feeling a bit downcast at the moment, I’m sure you could open the present he—" Miss Tick tried.

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.