The flint cobbles had melted like butter. They spluttered for a moment, then froze.

The fire went out.

Tiffany Aching looked up, into the eyes of the Wintersmith.

And up on the roof of the cart shed, the small voice belonging to Wee Dangerous Spike said, "Ach, crivens!"

All this hasn't happened yet. It might not happen at all. The future is always a bit wobbly. Any little thing, like the fall of a snowflake or the dropping of the wrong kind of spoon, can send it spinning off along a new path. Or perhaps not.

Where it all began was last autumn, on the day with a cat in it….

This is Tiffany Aching, riding a broomstick through the mountain forests a hundred miles away. It's a very old broomstick, and she's flying it just above the ground; it's got two smaller broomsticks stuck on the back like training wheels, to stop it from tipping over. It belongs, appropriately, to a very old witch called Miss Treason, who's even worse at flying than Tiffany and is 113 years old.

Tiffany is slightly more than one hundred years younger than that, taller than she was even a month ago, and not as certain of anything at all as she was a year ago.

She is training to be a witch. Witches usually wear black, but as far as she could tell, the only reason that witches wore black was that they'd always worn black. This did not seem a good enough reason, so she tended to wear blue or green. She didn't laugh with scorn at finery because she'd never seen any.

You couldn't escape the pointy hat, though. There was nothing magical about a pointy hat except that it said that the woman underneath it was a witch. People paid attention to a pointy hat.