“But you can't hear truly,” said Diamanda, drifting forward. “The iron makes you deaf.”
Shawn was not yet used to thinly clad young women approaching him with a dreamy look on their faces. He fervently wished he could take the Path of the Retreating Back.
He glanced sideways.
There was a tall skinny shape outlined in the open cell doorway. It was standing very carefully, as if it wanted to keep as far away from its surroundings as possible.
Diamanda was smiling at him in a funny way.
He ran.
Somehow, the woods had changed. Ridcully was certain that in his youth they'd been full of bluebells and primroses and - and bluebells and whatnot and so on. Not bloody great briars all over the place. They snagged at his robe and once or twice some tree-climbing equivalent knocked his hat off.
What made it worse was that Esme Weatherwax seemed to avoid all of them.
“How do you manage that?”
“I just know where I am all the time,” said Granny.
“Well? I know where I am, too.”
“No you don't. You just happen to be present. That's not the same.”
“Well, do you happen to know where a proper path is?”
“This is a short cut.”
“Between two places where you're not lost, d'you mean?”
“I keep tellin' you, I ain't lost! I'm . . . directionally challenged.”
“Hah!”
But it was a fact about Esme Weatherwax, he had to admit. She might be lost, and he had reason to suspect this was the case now, unless there were in this forest two trees with exactly the same arrangement of branches and a strip of his robe caught on one of them, but she did have a quality that in anyone not wearing a battered pointy hat and an antique black dress might have been called poise. Absolute poise. It would be hard to imagine her making an awkward movement unless she wanted to.
He'd seen that years ago, although of course at the time he'd just been amazed at the way her shape fitted perfectly into the space around it. And-
He'd got caught up again.
“Wait a minute!”
“Entirely the wrong sort of clothes for the country!”
“I wasn't expecting a hike through the woods! This is ceremonial damn costume!”
“Take it off, then.”
“Then how will anyone know I'm a wizard?”
“I'll be sure to tell them!”
Granny Weatherwax was getting rattled. She was also, despite everything that she'd said, getting lost. But the point was that you couldn't get lost between the weir at the bottom of the Lancre rapids and Lancre town itself. It was uphill all the way Besides, she'd walked through the local forests all her life. They were her forests.
She was pretty sure they'd passed the same tree twice. There was a bit of Ridcully's robe hanging on it.
It was like getting lost in her own garden.
She was also sure she'd seen the unicorn a couple of times. It was tracking them. She'd tried to get into its mind. She might as well have tried to climb an ice wall.