Granny Weatherwax awoke.
Her body did not move, but her gaze darted this way and that, sharply, and in the gloom her nose looked more hooked than normal. Then she settled back, and her shoulders lost the hunched, perching look.
After a while she stood up, stretched, and went to the doorway.
The night felt warmer. She could feel greenness in the ground, uncoiling. The year was past the edge, heading away from the dark . . . Of course, dark would come again, but that was in the nature of the world. Many things were beginning.
When at last she’d shut the door she lit the fire, took the box of candles out of the dresser and lit every single one and put them around the room, in saucers.
On the table the pool of water that had accumulated in the last two days rippled and rose gently in the middle. Then a drip soared upwards
and plopped into the damp patch in the ceiling.
Granny wound up the clock, and started the pendulum. She left the room for a moment and came back with a square of cardboard attached to a loop of elderly string. She sat down in the rocking chair and reached down into the hearth for a stick of half-burned wood.
The clock ticked as she wrote. Another drop left the table and plunged towards the ceiling.
Then Granny Weatherwax hung the sign around her neck and lay back with a smile. The chair rocked for a while, a counterpoint to the dripping of the table and the ticking of the clock, and then slowed.
The sign read:
still
I ^ ATE’NT DEAD
The light faded from can to can’t.
After a few minutes an owl woke up in a nearby tree and sailed out over the forests.
THE END