She had a clock. Lancrastians liked clocks, although they didn't bother much about actual time in any length much shorter than an hour. If you needed to boil an egg, you sang fifteen verses of 'Where Has All The Custard Gone?' under your breath. But the tick was a comfort on long evenings.
Finally she sat down in her rocking chair and glared at the doorway.
Owls were hooting in the forest when someone came running up the path and hammered on the door.
Anyone who hadn't heard about Granny's iron selfcontrol, which you could bend a horseshoe round, might just have thought they heard her give a tiny sigh of relief.
'Well, it's about time-' she began.
The excitement up at the castle was just a distant hum down in the mews. The hawks and falcons sat hunched on their perches, lost in some inner world of stoop and updraught. There was the occasional clink of a chain or flutter of a wing.
Hodgesaargh the falconer was getting ready in the tiny room next door when he felt the change in the air. He stepped out into a silent mews. The birds were all awake, alert, expectant. Even King Henry the eagle, whom Hodgesaargh would only go near at the moment when he was wearing full plate armour, was peering around.
You got something like this when there was a rat in the place, but Hodgesaargh couldn't see one. Perhaps it had gone.
For tonight's event he'd selected William the buzzard, who could be depended upon. All Hodgesaargh's birds could be depended upon, but more often than not they could be depended upon to viciously attack him on sight. William, however, thought that she was a chicken, and she was usually safe in company.
But even William was paying a lot of attention to the world, which didn't often happen unless she'd seen some corn.
Odd, thought Hodgesaargh. And that was all.
The birds went on staring up, as though the roof simply was not there.
Granny Weatherwax lowered her gaze to a red, round and worried face.
'Here, you're not-' She pulled herself together. 'You're the Wattley boy from over in Slice, aren't you?'
'Y'g't...' The boy leaned against the doorjamb and fought for breath. 'You g't--'
'Just take deep breaths. You want a drink of water?'
'You g't t'-'
'Yes, yes, all right. Just breathe...'
The boy gulped air a few times.
'You got to come to Mrs Ivy and her baby missus!'
The words came out in one quick stream.
Granny grabbed her hat from its peg by the door and pulled her broomstick out of its lodging in the thatch.
'I thought old Mrs Patternoster was seeing to her,' she said, ramming her hatpins into place with the urgency of a warrior preparing for sudden battle.
'She says it's all gone wrong miss!'
Granny was already running down her garden path.
There was a small drop on the other side of the clearing, with a twenty-foot fall to a bend in the track. The broom hadn't fired by the time she reached it but she ran on, swinging a leg over the bristles as it plunged.
The magic caught halfway down and her boots dragged across the dead bracken as the broom soared up into the night.
The road wound over the mountains like a dropped ribbon. Up here there was always the sound of the wind.
The highwayman's horse was a big black stallion. It was also quite possibly the only horse with a ladder strapped behind the saddle.
This was because the highwayman's name was Casanunda, and he was a dwarf. Most people thought of dwarfs as reserved, cautious, law-abiding and very reticent on matters of the heart and other vaguely connected organs, and this was indeed true of almost all dwarfs. But genetics rolls strange dice on the green baize of life and somehow the dwarfs had produced Casanunda, who preferred fun to money and devoted to women all the passion that other dwarfs reserved for gold.