Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron Read online

  ALSO EDITED BY JONATHAN STRAHAN

  Best Short Novels (2004 through 2007)

  Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005

  Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005

  The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volumes 1–5

  Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Volumes 1–4)

  The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows

  Life on Mars: Tales of New Frontiers

  Godlike Machines

  Engineering Infinity

  Cyberpunk

  WITH LOU ANDERS

  Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

  WITH CHARLES N. BROWN

  The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction

  WITH JEREMY G. BYRNE

  The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1

  The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 2

  Eidolon 1

  WITH JACK DANN

  Legends of Australian Fantasy

  WITH GARDNER DOZOIS

  The New Space Opera

  The New Space Opera 2

  WITH KAREN HABER

  Science Fiction: Best of 2003

  Science Fiction: Best of 2004

  Fantasy: Best of 2004

  WITH MARIANNE S. JABLON

  Wings of Fire

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the authors’ imaginations and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Compilation and introduction copyright © 2012 by Jonathan Strahan

  Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Michael Wagner

  “Stray Magic” copyright © 2012 by Diana Peterfreund. “Payment Due” copyright © 2012 by Frances Hardinge. “A Handful of Ashes” copyright © 2012 by Garth Nix. “Little Gods” copyright © 2012 by Holly Black. “Barrio Girls” copyright © 2012 by Charles de Lint. “Felidis” copyright © 2012 by Tanith Lee. “Witch Work” copyright © 2012 by Neil Gaiman. “The Education of a Witch” copyright © 2012 by Ellen Klages. “The Threefold World” copyright © 2012 by Ellen Kushner. “The Witch in the Wood” copyright © 2012 by Delia Sherman. “Which Witch” copyright © 2012 by Patricia A. McKillip. “The Carved Forest” copyright © 2012 by Tim Pratt. “Burning Castles” copyright © 2012 by M. Rickert. “The Stone Witch” copyright © 2012 by Isobelle Carmody. “Andersen’s Witch” copyright © 2012 by Jane Yolen. “B Is for Bigfoot” copyright © 2012 by Jim Butcher. “Great-Grandmother in the Cellar” copyright © 2012 by the Avicenna Development Corporation. “Crow and Caper, Caper and Crow” copyright © 2012 by Margo Lanagan.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Under my hat : tales from the cauldron / edited by Jonathan Strahan. — 1st ed.

  v. cm.

  Summary: An anthology of short fiction about witches.

  Contents: Stray magic / Diana Peterfreund — Payment due / Frances Hardinge — A handful of ashes / Garth Nix — Little gods / Holly Black — Barrio girls / Charles de Lint — Felidis / Tanith Lee — Witch work / Neil Gaiman — The education of a witch / Ellen Klages — The threefold world / Ellen Kushner — The witch in the wood / Delia Sherman — Which witch / Patricia A. McKillip — The carved forest / Tim Pratt — Burning castles / M. Rickert — The stone witch / Isobelle Carmody — Andersen’s witch / Jane Yolen — B is for bigfoot / Jim Butcher — Great-grandmother in the cellar / Peter S. Beagle — Crow and caper, caper and crow / Margo Lanagan.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89881-5

  1. Witches—Juvenile fiction. 2. Children’s stories. [1. Witches—Fiction. 2. Short stories.] I. Strahan, Jonathan.

  PZ5.U573 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011031253

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  FOR MY TWO FAVORITE WITCHES,

  JESSICA AND SOPHIE,

  WHO MAKE EVERY ADVENTURE MORE MAGICAL

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION: LOOKING UNDER THE HAT

  JONATHAN STRAHAN

  STRAY MAGIC

  DIANA PETERFREUND

  PAYMENT DUE

  FRANCES HARDINGE

  A HANDFUL OF ASHES

  GARTH NIX

  LITTLE GODS

  HOLLY BLACK

  BARRIO GIRLS

  CHARLES DE LINT

  FELIDIS

  TANITH LEE

  WITCH WORK

  NEIL GAIMAN

  THE EDUCATION OF A WITCH

  ELLEN KLAGES

  THE THREEFOLD WORLD

  ELLEN KUSHNER

  THE WITCH IN THE WOOD

  DELIA SHERMAN

  WHICH WITCH

  PATRICIA A. MCKILLIP

  THE CARVED FOREST

  TIM PRATT

  BURNING CASTLES

  M. RICKERT

  THE STONE WITCH

  ISOBELLE CARMODY

  ANDERSEN’S WITCH

  JANE YOLEN

  B IS FOR BIGFOOT

  JIM BUTCHER

  GREAT-GRANDMOTHER IN THE CELLAR

  PETER S. BEAGLE

  CROW AND CAPER, CAPER AND CROW

  MARGO LANAGAN

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  INTRODUCTION: LOOKING UNDER THE HAT

  JONATHAN STRAHAN

  THE STORIES ALL start with a hat, specifically a tall, black, pointy hat. It may all be headology, or it might be something more than that, but we all know that a tall, black, pointy hat is important because of what you find under it.1 Young or old, male or female, good or evil, the person under the hat is always a witch. But what kind of witch?

  A witch, my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary tells me not very helpfully, is “a woman practicing sorcery.” The OED doesn’t clearly define sorcery, either, though it does talk about magic, which it says is the “supposed art of influencing [the] course of events by occult control of nature or of spirits, witchcraft.” That’s a definition of sorts, I suppose, but it’s not the best path to understanding who or what you’ll find under a tall, black, pointy hat come Halloween.

  Wikipedia is much more helpful—perhaps too helpful, in fact. It doesn’t define what a witch is, but it does say that “a witch differs from a sorcerer in that they do not use physical tools or actions to curse; their maleficium is perceived as extending from some intangible inner quality, and the person may be unaware that they are a witch, or may have been convinced of their own evil nature by the suggestion of others.”2 So a witch’s magic comes from within him or herself, and she may not even know she is a witch!

  Now, this will all sound familiar, especially if you’ve read Terry Pratchett’s stories of Tiffany Aching and the Discworld, where most witches are women, sometimes girls, who are more midwives, doctors, psychiatrists, and moral enforcement o
fficers than studiers of spells. Wikipedia goes on at very great length about the history of European witchcraft. Witches and witchcraft of some kind are found in almost every culture on earth, and they are usually very different from the witches we find walking the streets in search of candy come All Hallows’ Eve. Throughout Asia and Africa, for example, witches are equally likely to be men or women. In Japan they have fox witches: the kitsune-mochi and the tsukimono-suji. And almost none of them have a hat, never mind a nice black pointy one. Those witches are European, and possibly mostly British.

  According to ethnographer Éva Pócs, there are three different types of witch: the neighborhood witch or social witch, who curses a neighbor after some conflict; the magical or sorcerer witch, who is either a professional healer, sorcerer, seer, or midwife, or a person who has through magic increased her fortune to the perceived detriment of a neighboring household; and the supernatural or night witch, portrayed in court narratives as a demon appearing in visions and dreams.

  You may also have heard of Wiccans, witches who might well live somewhere near you. A Wiccan is someone who practices Wicca, a neopagan religion and a form of modern witchcraft. Wicca is often referred to as Witchcraft or the Craft, and its adherents are commonly called Wiccans, Witches, or Crafters. Developed in England in the first half of the twentieth century, Wicca is a duotheistic religion in which a goddess and a god, traditionally viewed as the Triple Goddess and the Horned God, are worshipped. As you can see in Holly Black’s story, Wiccans don’t wear black hats, but they do practice magic.

  And what of the hat? While modern witches don’t wear pointy black hats—or any hats in particular, really—there is surprisingly little agreement on the history of witches’ hats. One theory, described to me by a friendly witch, is that:

  the hat originated in Italy in the thirteenth century, where city fashion included tall, elaborate, pointy hats on women (with veils). There were even some with two horns. This fashion filtered through the European upper classes to Britain, and then from upper class to lower classes. By the time it was so out of fashion that it had become a legal dunce’s hat in street punishment, country folk had begun wearing felt pointy hats. In Italy, country people were called pagani and many still practiced elements of pre-Christian religion, especially magic and medicine. Eventually, only benign country wisewomen (who practiced magic, medicine, midwifery, etc.) were still wearing the old pointy hats, with a rim to make them more stable. By the time the Church became paranoid about witchcraft, they were likening the point to the devil’s horns.3 Still, as good as the theory is, hats on accused witches in European or British art vary from caps and bonnets to pointy or cut-off Puritan styles, so the truth is elusive. However, we do know that by the time illustrated fairy tales started to be published in the nineteenth century, the pointy hat had been popularized by the Victorians and was firmly attached to the image of the witch.4

  Stories of witches, though, go back to the Bible and probably earlier. There are references to witches and witchcraft in both the Old and New Testaments, and in Hindu, Jewish, and other religious texts. Countless witches appear prominently in literature, but the earliest “classical witch” is probably Baba Yaga, an old hag from Slavic folklore who flies around on a giant mortar (using a pestle as the rudder), lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs, and sometimes kidnaps small children. She was followed by other weird literary sisters such as Morgan le Fay, the powerful sorceress from Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and the three witches from Macbeth, who spend their time cackling around a cauldron.

  The witches we know best date to the rise of children’s literature in the nineteenth century, first in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and others, then in novels such as L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and more recently in books such as Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. While Lewis’s White Witch Jadis, Murphy’s Mildred Hubble, and Rowling’s Hermione Granger (who might be a touch more wizard than witch) are among the most popular of modern witches, the most iconic is surely Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West. Her appearance in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, where she is played with panache by Margaret Hamilton, is the definitive evil wearer of black hats, and her cry “I’ll get you, my pretty … and your little dog, too!” is justifiably famous.

  Lovers of witches know, though, that Elphaba, as the Wicked Witch of the West was named by Gregory Maguire in his novel Wicked, is not the only witchy option. Whether it be Hayao Miyazaki and Eiko Kadano’s delightful Kiki or the studious but bungling Mildred Hubble, the industrious Hermione Granger or Diana Wynne Jones’s rather wicked Gwendolyn Chant, the happily suburban Samantha from Bewitched or the darkly evil Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, a witch could be anyone.

  And so we come to Under My Hat, which started life several years ago as a gift for my two daughters, Jessica and Sophie. Some time ago Sophie, my younger daughter, asked if there was one of my books that she could read. As I looked at the book I’d just completed, I realized I didn’t have one that was anywhere near suitable for, let alone interesting to, an eight-year-old girl, and so I set out to create a book just for Sophie and her sister. They were raised on Kiki’s Delivery Service, Bewitched, and the great Disney witches. Each year, when I would travel to the United States at Halloween to attend the annual World Fantasy Convention, I would bring hats, wands, and other paraphernalia home to Australia for them, which were always met with delight. So this book is very much for Jessica and Sophie. I would also be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching, who inspired the title for this book, and all of the writers who ultimately gave Jessica, Sophie, and I such wonderful stories. I hope you enjoy these stories as much as my daughters and I have, and that we might even get a chance to meet again around another cauldron of tales sometime in the future.

  Jonathan Strahan

  Perth, Western Australia

  April 2011

  NOTES

  1. Taken from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, headology is a sort of folk psychology that can be summed up as “if people think you’re a witch, you might as well be one.” For instance, a witch could, if she wished, curse people. However, it is simpler for her to say she has cursed them, and let them assume that she is responsible for the next bit of bad luck that happens to befall them. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2. Maleficium is a Latin term meaning “wrongdoing” or “mischief” and is used to describe malevolent, dangerous, or harmful magic, evildoing or malevolent sorcery. In general, the term applies to any magical act intended to cause death or harm. (Source: Wikipedia)

  3. Witches have often been subject to persecution. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries there was a widespread hysterical belief that malevolent Satanic witches were operating as an organized threat to Christianity. Many people were accused of being witches and put on trial. Witch trials originated in southeastern France during the fourteenth century, before spreading through central Europe and then into other parts of the continent and into European colonies in North America.

  4. This theory on the origin of the black hat was provided by Jilli Roberts, a real practicing witch. I have quoted her pretty much verbatim and would like to acknowledge her gracious assistance.

  STRAY MAGIC

  DIANA PETERFREUND

  YOU CAN’T HAVE this job unless you love animals, but if you love animals, it’s hard to have this job. We’re a no-kill shelter, but all that means is that there are some animals who are stuck here for life, wasting away in their little cages. And sometimes we’re too full and we have to turn animals away, knowing they’ll be taken to the county shelter, where they’ll be put down after seventy-two hours.

  Three days. That’s how long they give them at county. Three days for their owners to find them if they’re lost (which, trust me, they usually aren’t), or for them to find a new home. Jeremy, my buddy over there, sends me likely candidates for adoption
whenever we have space. Good dogs, adorable puppies that all have the potential to be great companions, if only they get the chance to try.

  I don’t know what he’s thinking with this latest one, though. There has to be some sort of mix-up. Jeremy’s voice mail described her as a young golden retriever mix, but when I arrive at the shelter, the crate waiting for me outside the back door does not have a golden inside. What it contains is the most bedraggled, patchy-coated, pathetic creature I’ve ever seen. The dog’s twelve if she’s a day. What’s left of her fur is a stained and dingy white. Her eyes are bloodshot, her chocolate-and-pink nose is dry and cracked, some kind of mite’s been gnawing on her floppy ears, and she’s got a big old infected scrape on her belly oozing pus into the remaining mats of her hair.

  Adoptable? Not in this state. I wonder what Jeremy was thinking, sending along a hopeless case like her.

  I grab a leash and open up the crate door. “So you’re the one who they caught out wandering on the highway, huh?”

  Highway dogs are the worst. This one was probably dumped by her owner because she was too old, or because she was diagnosed with some terminal illness and they didn’t have the heart or the money to watch her get put down. Happens all the time out here. I guess people just delude themselves into thinking their pets are going to live out their days in a nice country farmhouse. People think this is the land of milk and honey for unwanted dogs.

  Wrong. It’s the land of roadkill and pound euthanasia.

  The dog crushes itself against the far corner of the crate. Typical. I see a dozen cases like this a week. Usually they’re terrified, and they have a right to be.

  “I’m just going to take you inside and get you some nice kibble.” I grab her by the scruff of the neck and tug her out into the light.

  And darn it if she’s not a golden retriever. I’m so shocked, I let go of her, and she shoots off. Or tries to, anyway, as I know that trick well. I snatch up the end of the leash before it disappears, and her flight stops short. She whimpers as I haul her back, and I blink my eyes to clear them, for she’s the old white dog again. Strangest thing ever.