Wintersmith Read Online Free PDF Page B

left it behind. Tiffany was glad of the cloak, even if it was black.
    She trudged on, taking different tracks when Miss Treason told her to, until she saw firelight through the trees, in a little dip in the land.
    “Stop here and help me down, girl,” said the old witch. “And listen carefully. There are rules. One, you will not talk; two, you will look only at the dancers; three, you will not move until the dance is finished . I will not tell you twice!”
    “Yes, Miss Treason. It’s very cold up here.”
    “And will get colder.”
    They headed for the distant light. What good is a dance you can only watch? Tiffany wondered. It didn’t sound like much fun.
    “It isn’t meant to be fun,” said Miss Treason.
    Shadows moved across the firelight, and Tiffany heard the sound of men’s voices. Then, as they reached the edge of the sunken ground, someone threw water over the fire.
    There was a hiss, and a cloud of smoke and steam rose among the trees. It happened in a moment and left a shock behind. The only thing that had seemed alive here had died.
    Dry fallen leaves crunched under her feet. The moon, in a sky swept clean now of clouds, made little silver shapes on the forest floor.
    It was some time before Tiffany realized that there were six men standing in the middle of the clearing. They must have been wearing black; against the moonlight they looked like man-shapedholes into nothing. They were in two lines of three, facing each other, but were so still that after a while Tiffany wondered if she was imagining them.
    There was the thud of a drumbeat: bom … bom … bom .
    It went on for half a minute or so, and then stopped. But in the silence of the cold woods the beat went on inside Tiffany’s head, and perhaps that wasn’t the only head it thundered in, because the men were gently nodding their heads, to keep the beat.
    They began to dance.
    The only noise was of their boots hitting the ground as the shadow men wove in and out. But then Tiffany, her head full of the silent drum, heard another sound. Her foot was tapping, all by itself.
    She’d heard this beat before; she’d seen men dancing like this. But it had been on warm days in bright sunshine. They’d worn little bells on their clothes.
    “This is a Morris dance!” she said, not quite under her breath.
    “Shush!” hissed Miss Treason.
    “But this isn’t the right—”
    “Be silent!”
    Blushing and angry in the dark, Tiffany took her eyes off the dancers and defiantly looked around the clearing. There were other shadows crowding in, human or at least human shaped, but she couldn’t see them clearly and maybe that was just as well.
    It was getting colder, she was sure. White frost was crackling across the leaves.
    The beat went on. But it seemed to Tiffany that it wasn’t alone now, but had picked up other beats, and echoes from inside her head.
    Miss Treason could shush all she liked. It was a Morris dance. But it was out of time!
    The Morris men came to the village sometime in May. You could never be sure when, because they had to call at lots of villages along the Chalk, and every village had a pub, which slowed them down.
    They carried sticks and wore white clothes with bells on them, to stop them from creeping up on people. No one likes an unexpected Morris dancer. Tiffany would wait outside the village with the other children and dance behind them all the way in.
    And then they used to dance on the village green to the beat of a drum, banging their sticks together in the air, and then everyone would go to the pub and summer would come.
    Tiffany hadn’t been able to work out how that last bit happened. The dancers danced, and then summer came—that was all anybody seemed to know. Her father said that there had once been a year when the dancers hadn’t turned up, and a cold wet spring had turned into a chilly autumn, with the months between being filled with mists and rain and frosts in August.
    The sound of the drums filled her head