Granny froze for a second.
‘What? No! Er . . . how do you know the name?’
‘Why, she passed through here, what, fifty years ago. We met briefly, and then she cut off my head and stuck a stake in my heart.’ The Count sighed happily. ‘A very spirited woman. You’re a relative, I presume? I lose track of generations, I’m afraid.’
‘Granddaughter,’ said Granny weakly.
‘There’s a phoenix outside the castle, Igor tells me. . .’
‘It’ll leave, I expect.’
The Count nodded. ‘I’ve always rather liked them,’ he said wistfully. ‘There were so many of them when I was young. They made the nights . . . pretty. So pretty. Everything was so much simpler then . . .’ His voice trailed off, and then came back louder. ‘But now, apparently, we’re in modern times.’
‘That’s what they say,’ murmured Granny.
‘Well, madam, I’ve never taken too much notice of them. Fifty years later they never seem so modern as all that.’ He shook the younger vampires like dolls. ‘I do apologize for my nephew’s behaviour. Quite out of keeping for a vampire. Would you people from Escrow like to kill these two? It’s the least I could do.’
‘Ain’t they your relatives?’ said Nanny Ogg, as the crowd surged forward.
‘Oh, yes. But we’ve never been much of a species for playing happy families.’
Vlad looked imploringly at Agnes, and reached out to her.
‘You wouldn’t let them kill me, would you? You wouldn’t let them do this to me? We could have . . . we might. . . you wouldn’t, would you?’
The crowd hesitated. This sounded like an important plea. A hundred pairs of eyes stared at Agnes.
She took his hand. I suppose we could work on him, said Perdita. But Agnes thought about Escrow, and the queues, and the children playing while they waited, and how evil might come animal sharp in the night, or greyly by day on a list. . .
‘Vlad,’ she said gently, looking deep into his eyes, ‘I’d even hold their coats.’
‘A fine sentiment but that ain’t happenin’,’ said Granny, behind her. ‘You take ’em away, Count. Teach ’em the old ways. Teach ’em stupidity.’
The Count nodded and grinned toothily.
‘Certainly. I shall teach them that to live you have to rise again-‘
‘Hah! You don’t live, Count. The phoenix lives. You just don’t know you’re dead. Now get along with you!’
There was another moment sliced out of time and then a flock of magpies rose up from where the three vampires had been, screaming and chattering, and disappeared in the darkness of the roof.
‘There’s hundreds of them!’ said Agnes to Nanny.
‘Well, vampires can turn into things,’ said Nanny. ‘Everyone knows that, who knows anything about vampires.’
‘And what do three hundred magpies mean?’
‘They mean it’s time to put covers on all the furniture,’ said Nanny. ‘And that it’s time for me to have a very big drink.’
The crowd began to break up, aware that the big show was over.
‘Why didn’t she just let us wipe them out?’ hissed Piotr by Agnes’s ear. ‘Death’s too good for them!’
‘Yes,’ said Agnes. ‘I suppose that’s why she didn’t let them have it.’
Oats hadn’t moved. He was still staring straight ahead of him, but his hands were shaking. Agnes led him gently to a bench and eased him down.
‘I killed him, didn’t I?’ he whispered.
‘Sort of,’ said Agnes. ‘It’s a bit hard to tell with vampires.’
‘There was just nothing else to do! Everything just went . . . the air just went gold, and there was just this one moment to do something-‘
‘I don’t think anyone’s complaining,’ said Agnes. You’ve got to admit he’s quite attractive, whispered Perdita. If only he’d do something about that boil. . .
Magrat sat down on the other side of Oats, clutching the baby. She breathed deeply a few times.
‘That was very brave of you,’ she said.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Oats hoarsely. ‘I thought Mistress Weatherwax was going to do something. . .’
‘She did,’ said Magrat, shivering. ‘Oh, she did.’
Granny Weatherwax sat down on the other end of the bench and pinched the bridge of her nose.
‘I just want to go home now,’ she said. ‘I just want to go home and sleep for a week.’ She yawned. ‘I’m dyin’ for a cuppa.’
‘I thought you’d made one!’ said Agnes. ‘You had us slavering for it!’
‘Where’d I get tea here? It was just some mud in water. But I know Nanny keeps a bag of it somewhere on her person.’ She yawned again. ‘Make the tea, Magrat.’
Agnes opened her mouth, but Magrat waved her into silence and then handed her the baby.
‘Certainly, Granny,’ she said, gently pushing Agnes back into her seat. ‘I’ll just find out where Igor keeps the kettle, shall I?’
Mightily Oats stepped out on to the battlements. The sun was well up and a breeze was blowing in over the forests of Uberwald. A few magpies chattered in the trees nearest the castle.
Granny was leaning with her elbows on the wall, staring out over the thinning mists.
‘It looks like it’s going to be a fine day,’ said Oats happily. And he did feel happy, to his amazement. There was sharpness to the air, and the sense of the future brimming with possibilities. He remembered the moment when he’d swung the axe, when both of him had swung it together. Perhaps there was a way . . .
‘There’s a storm coming down from the Hub later,’ said Granny.
‘Well . . . at least that’ll be good for the crops, then,’ said Oats.
Something flickered overhead. In the new daylight the wings of the phoenix were hard to see, mere yellow shimmers in the air, with the tiny shape of the little hawk in the centre as it circled high over the castle.
‘Why would anyone want to kill something like that?’ said Oats.
‘Oh, some people’ll kill anything for the fun of it.’
‘Is it a true bird or is it something that exists within a-‘
‘It’s a thing that is,’ said Granny sharply. ‘Don’t go spilling allegory all down your shirt.’
‘Well, I feel . . . blessed to have seen it.’
‘Really? I genially feel the same about the sunrise,’ said Granny. ‘You would too, at my time of life.’ She sighed, and then seemed to be speaking mainly to herself. ‘She never went to the bad, then, whatever people said. And you’d have to be on your toes with that of vampire. She never went to the bad. You heard him say that, right? He said it. He didn’t have to.’
‘Er . . . yes.’
‘She’d have been older’n me, too. Bloody good witch was Nana Alison. Sharp as a knife. Had her funny little ways, o’ course, but who hasn’t?’
‘No one I know, certainly.’
‘Right. You’re right.’ Granny straightened up. ‘Good,’ she said.
‘Er. . .’
‘Yes?’
Oats was looking down at the drawbridge and the road to the castle.
‘There’s a man in a nightshirt covered in mud and waving a sword down there,’ he said, ‘followed by a lot of Lancre people and some . . . little blue men. . .’
He looked down again. ‘At least it looks like mud,’ he added.
‘That’ll be the King,’ said Granny. ‘Big Aggie’s given him some of her brose, by the sound of it. He’ll save the day.’
‘Er . . . hasn’t the day been saved?’
‘Oh, he’s the King. It looks like it might be a nice day, so let him save it. You’ve got to give kings something to do. Anyway, after a drink from Big Aggie he won’t know what day it is. We’d better get down there.’
‘I feel I should thank you,’ said Oats, when they reached the spiral staircase.
‘For helping you across the mountains, you mean?’
‘The world is . . . different.’ Oats’s gaze went out across the haze, and the forests, and the purple mountains. ‘Everywhere I look I see something holy.’
For the first time since he’d met her he saw Granny Weatherwax smile properly. Normally her mouth went up at the corners just before something unpleasant was going to happen to someone who deserved it, but this time she appeared to be pleased with what she’d heard.
‘That’s a start, then,’ she said.
The Magpyrs’ coach had been righted and dragged up to the castle. Now it returned, with Jason Ogg at the reins. He was concentrating on avoiding the bumps. They made his bruises tender. Besides, the royal family was on board and he was feeling extremely loyal at the moment.
Jason Ogg was very big and very strong and, therefore, not a violent man, because he did not need to be. Sometimes he was summoned down to the pub to sort out the more serious fights, which he usually did by picking up both contestants and holding them apart until they stopped struggling. If that didn’t work, he’d bang them together a few times, in as friendly a way as possible.