What she hadn’t expected was a couple of crochety old women who were barely civil at the best of times and simply didn’t enter into the spirit of things. Oh, they’d been kind to the baby, in their own way, but she couldn’t help feeling that if a witch was kind to someone it was entirely for deeply selfish reasons.
And when they did magic, they made it look as ordinary as housekeeping. They didn’t wear any occult jewellery. Magrat was a great believer in occult jewellery.
It was all going wrong. And she was going home.
She stood up, wrapped her damp dress around her, and set off through the misty woods . . .
. . . and heard the running feet. Someone was coming through them at high speed, without caring who heard him. and over the top of the sound of breaking twigs was a curious dull jingling. Magrat sidled behind a dripping holly bush and peered cautiously through the leaves.
It was Shawn, the youngest of Nanny Ogg’s sons, and the metal noise was caused by his suit of chain mail, which was several sizes too big for him. Lancre is a poor kingdom, and over the centuries the chain mail of the palace guards has had to be handed down from one generation to another, often on the end of a long stick. This one made him look like a bulletproof bloodhound.
She stepped out in front of him.
‘Is that you, Mss Magrat?’ said Shawn, raising the flap of mail that covered his eyes. ‘It’s mam!’
‘What’s happened to her?’
‘He’s locked her up! Said she was coming to poison him! And I can’t get down to the dungeons to see because there’s all new guards! They say she’s been put in chains—’ Shawn frowned – ‘and that means something horrible’s going to happen. You know what she’s like when she loses her temper. We’ll never hear the last of it, miz.’
‘Where were you going?’ demanded Magrat.
To fetch our Jason and our Wane and our Darron and our—’
‘Wait a moment.’
‘Oh, Mss Magrat, suppose they try to torture her? You know what a tongue she’s got on her when she gets angry—’
‘I’m thinking,’ said Magrat.
‘He’s put his own bodyguards on the gates and everything—’
‘Look, just shut up a minute, will you, Shawn?’
‘When our Jason finds out, he’s going to give the duke a real seeing-to, miz. He says it’s about time someone did.’
Nanny Ogg’s Jason was a young man with the build and, Magrat had always thought, the brains of a herd of oxen. Thick-skinned though he was, she doubted whether he could survive a hail of arrows.
‘Don’t tell him yet,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘There could be another way . . .’
‘I’ll go and find Granny Weatherwax, shall I, miz?’ said Shawn, hopping from one leg to another. ‘She’ll know what to do, she’s a witch.’
Magrat stood absolutely still. She had thought she was angry before, but now she was furious. She was wet and cold and hungry and this person – once upon a time, she heard herself thinking, she would have burst into tears at this point.
‘Oops,’ said Shawn. ‘Um. I didn’t mean. Whoops. Um . . .’ He backed away.
‘If you happen to see Granny Weatherwax,’ said Magrat slowly, in tones that should have etched her words into glass, ‘you can tell her that I will sort it all out. Now go away before I turn you into a frog. You look like one anyway.’
She turned, hitched up her skirts, and ran like hell towards her cottage.
Lord Felmet was one of nature’s gloaters. He was good at it.
‘Quite comfortable, are we?’ he said.
Nanny Ogg considered this. ‘Apart from these stocks, you mean?’ she said.
‘I am impervious to your foul blandishments,’ said the duke. ‘I scorn your devious wiles. You are to be tortured, I’ll have you know.’
This didn’t appear to have the required effect. Nanny was staring around the dungeon with the vaguely interested gaze of a sightseer.
‘And then you will be burned,’ said the duchess.
‘Okay,’ said Nanny.
‘Okay?’
‘Well, it’s bloody freezing down here. What’s that big wardrobe thing with the spikes?’
The duke was trembling. ‘Aha,’ he said. ‘Now you realise, eh? That, my dear lady, is an Iron Maiden. It’s the latest thing. Well may you—’
‘Can I have a go in it?’
‘Your pleas fall on deaf . . . ‘ The duke’s voice trailed off. His twitch started up.
The duchess leaned forward until her big red face was inches away from Nanny’s nose.
‘This insouciance gives you pleasure,’ she hissed, ‘but soon you will laugh on the other side of your face!’
‘It’s only got this side,’ said Nanny.
The duchess fingered a tray of implements lovingly. ‘We shall see,’ she said, picking up a pair of pliers.
‘And you need not think any others of your people will come to your aid,’ said the duke, who was sweating despite the chill. ‘We alone hold the keys to this dungeon. Ha ha. You will be an example to all those who have been spreading malicious rumours about me. Do not protest your innocence! I hear the voices all the time, lying . . . ‘
The duchess gripped him ferociously by the arm. ‘Enough,’ she rasped. ‘Come, Leonal. We will let her reflect on her fate for a while.’
‘. . .the faces . . . wicked lies . . . I wasn’t there, and anyway he fell . . . my porridge, all salty . . .’ murmured the duke, swaying.
The door slammed behind them. There was a click of locks and a thudding of bolts.
Nanny was left alone in the gloom. A flickering torch high on the wall only made the surrounding darkness more forbidding. Strange metal shapes, designed for no more exalted purpose than the destruct-testing of the human body, cast unpleasant shadows. Nanny Ogg stirred in her chains.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I can see you. Who are you?’
King Verence stepped forward.
‘I saw you making faces behind him,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘All I could do to keep a straight face myself.’
‘I wasn’t making faces, woman, I was scowling.’
Nanny squinted. ‘Ere, I know you,’ she said. ‘You’re dead.’
‘I prefer the term “passed over”,’ said the king.
‘I’d bow[11],’ said Nanny. ‘Only there’s all these chains and things. You haven’t seen a cat around here, have you?’
‘Yes. He’s in the room upstairs, asleep.’
Nanny appeared to relax. ‘That’s all right, then,’ she said. ‘I was beginning to worry.’ She stared around the dungeon again. ‘What’s that big bed thing over there?’
‘The rack,’ said the king, and explained its use. Nanny Ogg nodded.
‘What a busy little mind he’s got,’ she said.
‘I fear, madam, that I may be responsible for your present predicament,’ said Verence, sitting down on or at least just above a handy anvil. ‘I wished to attract a witch.’
‘I suppose you’re no good at locks?’
‘I fear they would be beyond my capabilities as yet . . . but surely—’ the ghost of the king waved a hand in a vague gesture which encompassed the dungeon, Nanny and the manacles – ‘to a witch all this is just so much—’
‘Solid iron,’ said Nanny. ‘You might be able to walk through it, but I can’t.’
‘I didn’t realise,’ said Verence. ‘I thought witches could do magic.’
‘Young man,’ said Nanny, ‘you will oblige me by shutting up.’
‘Madam! I am a king!’
‘You are also dead, so I wouldn’t aspire to hold any opinions if I was you. Now just be quiet and wait, like a good boy.’
Against all his instincts, the king found himself obeying. There was no gainsaying that tone of voice. It spoke to him across the years, from his days in the nursery. Its echoes told him that if he didn’t eat it all up he would be sent straight to bed.
Nanny Ogg stirred in her chains. She hoped they would turn up soon.
‘Er,’ said the king uneasily. ‘I feel I owe you an explanation . . .’
‘Thank you,’ said Granny Weatherwax, and because Shawn seemed to be expecting it, added, ‘You’ve been a good boy.’
‘Yes’m,’ said Shawn. ‘M’m?’
‘Was there something else?’
Shawn twisted the end of his chain-mail vest out of embarrassment. ‘It’s not true what everyone’s been saying about our mam, is it, m’m?’ he said. ‘She doesn’t go round putting evil curses on folk. Except for Daviss the butcher. And old Cakebread, after he kicked her cat. But they wasn’t what you’d call real curses, was they, m’m?’
‘You can stop calling me m’m.’
‘Yes, m’m.’
‘They’ve been saying that, have they?’
‘Yes, m’m.’
‘Well, your mam does upset people sometimes.’
Shawn hopped from one leg to another.
‘Yes, m’m, but they says terrible things about you, m’m, savin’ your presence, m’m.’