‘Not quite dead enough as yet, despite your valiant efforts. Igor! On to Lancre.’
The coachman turned.
‘Meth, marthter.’
‘Oh, for the last time, man . . . is that any way to talk?’
‘It’th the only way I know, marthter,’ said Igor.
‘And I told you to take the plumes off the coach, you idiot.’
The coachman shifted uneasily.
‘Gotta have black plumeth, marthter. It’th tradithional.’
‘Remove them at once!’ Mother commanded. ‘What will people think?’
‘Yeth, mithtreth.’
The one addressed as Igor slammed the door and lurched back around to the horse. He
removed the plumes reverentially and placed them under his seat.
Inside the coach the vexed voice said, ‘Is Igor an evolutionary dead end too, Father?’
‘We can but hope, dear.’
‘Thod,’ said Igor to himself, as he picked up the reins.
The wording began:
‘You are cordially invited. . .’
. . . and was in that posh runny writing that was hard to read but ever so official.
Nanny Ogg grinned and tucked the card back on the mantelpiece. She liked the idea of ‘cordially’. It had a rich, a thick and above all an alcoholic sound.
She was ironing her best petticoat. That is to say, she was sitting in her chair by the fire while one of her daughters-in-law, whose name she couldn’t remember just at this moment, was doing the actual work. Nanny was helping by pointing out the bits she’d missed.
It was a damn good invite, she thought. Especially the gold edging, which was as thick as syrup. Probably not real gold, but impressively glittery all the same.
‘There’s a bit there that could do with goin’ over again, gel,’ she said, topping up her beer.
‘Yes, Nanny.’
Another daughter-in-law, whose name she’d certainly be able to recall after a few seconds’ thought, was buffing up Nanny’s red boots. A third was very carefully dabbing the lint off Nanny’s best pointy hat, on its stand.
Nanny got up again and wandered over to open the back door. There was little light left in the sky now, and a few rags of cloud were scudding over the early stars. She sniffed the air. Winter hung on late up here in the mountains, but there was definitely a taste of spring on the wind.
A good time, she thought. Best time, really. Oh, she knew that the year started on Hogswatchnight, when the cold tide turned, but the new year started now, with green shoots boring upwards through the last of the snow. Change was in the air, she could feel it in her bones.
Of course, her friend Granny Weatherwax always said you couldn’t trust bones, but Granny Weatherwax said a lot of things like that all the time.
Nanny Ogg closed the door. In the trees at the end of her garden, leafless and scratchy against the sky, something rustled its wings and chattered as a veil of dark crossed the world.
In her own cottage a few miles away the witch Agnes Nitt was in two minds about her new pointy hat. Agnes was generally in two minds about anything.
As she tucked in her hair and observed herself critically in the mirror she sang a song. She sang in harmony. Not, of course, with her reflection in the glass, because that kind of heroine will sooner or later end up singing a duet with Mr Blue Bird and other forest creatures and then there’s nothing for it but a flamethrower.
She simply sang in harmony with herself. Unless she concentrated it was happening more and more these days. Perdita had rather a reedy voice, but she insisted on joining in.
Those who are inclined to casual cruelty say that inside a fat girl is a thin girl and a lot of chocolate. Agnes’s thin girl was Perdita.
She wasn’t sure how she’d acquired the invisible passenger. Her mother had told her that when she was small she’d been in the habit of blaming accidents and mysteries, such as the disappearance of a bowl of cream or the breaking of a prized jug, on ‘the other little girl’.
Only now did she realize that indulging this sort of thing wasn’t a good idea when, despite yourself, you’ve got a bit of natural witchcraft in your blood. The imaginary friend had simply grown up and had never gone away and had turned out to be a pain.
Agnes disliked Perdita, who was vain, selfish and vicious, and Perdita hated going around inside Agnes, whom she regarded as a fat, pathetic, weak-willed blob that people would walk all over were she not so steep.
Agnes told herself she’d simply invented the name Perdita as some convenient label for all those thoughts and desires she knew she shouldn’t have, as a name for that troublesome little commentator that lives on everyone’s shoulder and sneers. But sometimes she thought Perdita had created Agnes for something to pummel.
Agnes tended to obey rules. Perdita didn’t. Perdita thought that not obeying rules was somehow cool. Agnes thought that rules like ‘Don’t fall into this huge pit of spikes’ were there for a purpose. Perdita thought, to take an example at random, that things like table manners were a stupid and repressive idea. Agnes, on the other hand, was against being hit by flying bits of other people’s cabbage.
Perdita thought a witch’s hat was a powerful symbol of authority. Agnes thought that a dumpy girl should not wear a tall hat, especially with black. It made her look as though someone had dropped a liquorice-flavoured icecream cone.
The trouble was that although Agnes was right, so was Perdita. The pointy hat carried a lot of weight in the Ramtops. People talked to the hat, not to the person wearing it. When people were in serious trouble they went to a witch.[2]
You had to wear black, too. Perdita liked black. Perdita thought black was cool. Agnes thought that black wasn’t a good colour for the circumferentially challenged . . . oh, and that ‘cool’ was a dumb word used only by people whose brains wouldn’t fill a spoon.
Magrat Garlick hadn’t worn black and had probably never in her life said ‘cool’ except when commenting on the temperature.
Agnes stopped examining her pointiness in the mirror and looked around the cottage that had been Magrat’s and was now hers, and sighed. Her gaze took in the expensive, gold-edged card on the mantelpiece.
Well, Magrat had certainly retired now, and had gone off to be Queen and if there was ever any doubt about that then there could be no doubt today. Agnes was puzzled at the way Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax still talked about her, though. They were proud (more or less) that she’d married the King, and agreed that it was the right kind of life for her, but while they never actually articulated the thought it hung in the air over their heads in flashing mental colours: Magrat had settled for second prize.
Agnes had almost burst out laughing when she first realized this, but you wouldn’t be able to argue with them. They wouldn’t even see that there could be an argument.
Granny Weatherwax lived in a cottage with a thatch so old there was quite a sprightly young tree growing in it, and got up and went to bed alone, and washed in the rain barrel. And Nanny Ogg was the most local person Agnes had ever met. She’d gone off to foreign parts, yes, but she always carried Lancre with her, like a’ sort of invisible hat. But they took it for granted that they were top of every tree, and the rest of the world was there for them to tinker with.
Perdita thought that being a queen was just about the best thing you could be.
Agnes thought the best thing you could be was far away from Lancre, and good second best would be to be alone in your own head.
She adjusted the hat as best she could and left the cottage.
Witches never locked their doors. They never needed to.
As she stepped out into the moonlight, two magpies landed on the thatch.
The current activities of the witch Granny Weatherwax would have puzzled a hidden observer.
She peered at the flagstones just inside her back door and lifted the old rag rug in front of it with her toe.
Then she walked to the front door, which was never used, and did the same thing there. She also examined the cracks around the edges of the doors.
She went outside. There had been a sharp frost during the night, a spiteful little trick by the dying winter, and the drifts of leaves that hung on in the shadows were still crisp. In the harsh air she poked around in the flowerpots and bushes by the front door.
Then she went back inside.
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.