'Gosh!'
'And now,' said the duke, his voice dripping across the Fool like treacle over a pudding, 'tell me about witches . . .'
That night the Fool slept on good royal flagstones in the whistling corridor above the Great Hall instead of the warm stuffy straw of the stables.
idea,' said Granny firmly, and stood up. 'Come, Nanny Ogg,' she snapped. 'It's been a long day and we're all rather tired.'
Magrat heard them bickering as they wandered down the path.
She sat rather sadly amidst the coloured candles, holding a small bottle of extremely thaumaturgical incense that she had ordered from a magical supplies emporium in faraway Ankh-Morpork. She had been rather looking forward to trying it. Sometimes, she thought, it would be nice if people could be a bit kinder . . .
She stared at the ball.
Well, she could make a start.
'He will make friends easily,' she whispered. It wasn't much, she knew, but it was something she'd never been able to get the hang of.
Nanny Ogg, sitting alone in her kitchen with her huge tomcat curled up on her lap, poured herself a nightcap and through the haze tried to remember the words of verse seventeen of the Hedgehog song. There was something about goats, she recalled, but the details eluded her. Time abraded memory.
She toasted the invisible presence.
'A bloody good memory is what he ought to have,' she said.
'He'll always remember the words.'
And Granny Weatherwax, striding home alone through the midnight forest, wrapped her shawl around her and considered. It had been a long day, and a trying one. The theatre had been the worst part. All people pretending to be other people, things happening that weren't real, bits of countryside you could put your foot through . . . Granny liked to know where she stood, and she wasn't certain she stood for that sort of thing. The world seemed to be changing all the time.
It didn't use to change so much. It was bewildering.
She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it.
'Let him be whoever he minks he is,' she said. 'That's all anybody could hope for in this world.'
Like most people, witches are unfocused in time. The difference is that they dimly realise it, and make use of it. They cherish the past because part of them is still living there, and they can see the shadows the future casts before it.
Granny could feel the shape of the future, and it had knives in it.
It began at five the next morning. Four men rode through the woods near Granny's cottage, tethered the horses out of earshot, and crept very cautiously through the mists.
The sergeant in charge was not happy in his work. He was a Ramtops man, and wasn't at all certain about how you went about arresting a witch. He was pretty certain, though, that the witch wouldn't like the idea. He didn't like the idea of a witch not liking the idea.
The men were Ramtoppers as well. They were following him very closely, ready to duck behind him at the first sign of anything more unexpected than a tree.
Granny's cottage was a fungoid shape in the mist. Her unruly herb garden seemed to move, even in the still air. It contained plants seen nowhere else in the mountains, their roots and seeds traded across five thousand miles of the Discworld, and the sergeant could swear that one or two blooms turned towards him. He shuddered.
'What now, sarge?'
'We – we spread out,' he said. 'Yes. We spread out, That's what we do.'
They moved carefully through the bracken. The sergeant crouched behind a handy log, and said, 'Right. Very good. You've got the general idea. Now let's spread out again, and this time we spread out separately.'
The men grumbled a bit, but disappeared into the mist. The sergeant gave them a few minutes to take up positions, then said, 'Right. Now we—'
He paused.
He wondered whether he dared shout, and decided against it.
He stood up. He removed his helmet, to show respect, and sidled through the damp grass to the back door. He knocked, very gently.