Wyrd Sisters

‘Which you will not possess much longer, my good woman, unless you tell us who else knows and indeed, assist us on a number of other matters,’ said the duchess grimly. ‘And you will do so, believe me. I am skilled in these things.’

Nanny glanced around the dungeon.^{33} It was beginning to get crowded. King Verence was bursting with such angry vitality that he was very nearly apparent, and was furiously trying to get a grip on a knife. But there were others behind—wavering, broken shapes, not exactly ghosts but memories, implanted in the very substances of the walls themselves by sheer pain and terror.

‘My own dagger! The bastards! They killed me with my own dagger,’ said the ghost of King Verence silently, raising his transparent arms and imploring the netherworld in general to witness this ultimate humiliation. ‘Give me strength …’

‘Yes,’ said Nanny. ‘It’s worth a try.’

‘And now we will commence,’ said the duchess.

——

‘What?’ said the guard.

‘I SAID,’ said Magrat, ‘I’ve come to sell my lovely apples. Don’t you listen?’

‘There’s not a sale on, is there?’ The guard was extremely nervous since his colleague had been taken off to the infirmary. He hadn’t taken the job in order to deal with this sort of thing.

It dawned on him.

‘You’re not a witch, are you?’ he said, fumbling awkwardly with his pike.

‘Of course not. Do I look like one?’

The guard looked at her occult bangles, her lined cloak, her trembling hands and her face. The face was particularly worrying. Magrat had used a lot of powder to make her face pale and interesting. It combined with the lavishly applied mascara to give the guard the impression that he was looking at two flies that had crashed into a sugar bowl. He found his fingers wanted to make a sign to ward off the evil eyeshadow.

‘Right,’ he said uncertainly. His mind was grinding through the problem. She was a witch. Just lately there’d been a lot of gossip about witches being bad for your health. He’d been told not to let witches pass, but no-one had said anything about apple sellers. Apple sellers were not a problem. It was witches that were the problem. She’d said she was an apple seller and he wasn’t about to doubt a witch’s word.

Feeling happy with this application of logic, he stood to one side and gave an expansive wave.

‘Pass, apple seller,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ said Magrat sweetly. ‘Would you like an apple?’

‘No, thanks. I haven’t finished the one the other witch gave me.’ His eyes rolled. ‘Not a witch. Not a witch, an apple seller. An apple seller. She ought to know.’

‘How long ago was this?’

‘Just a few minutes …’

Granny Weatherwax was not lost. She wasn’t the kind of person who ever became lost. It was just that, at the moment, while she knew exactly where SHE was, she didn’t know the position of anywhere else. Currently she had arrived in the kitchens again, precipitating a breakdown in the cook, who was trying to roast some celery. The fact that several people had tried to buy apples from her wasn’t improving her temper.

Magrat found her way to the Great Hall, empty and deserted at this time of day except for a couple of guards who were playing dice. They wore the tabards of Felmet’s own personal bodyguard, and stopped their game as soon as she appeared.

‘Well, well,’ said one, leering. ‘Come to keep us company, have you, my pretty.[12]’

‘I was looking for the dungeons,’ said Magrat, to whom the words ‘sexual harassment’ were a mere collection of syllables.

‘Just fancy,’ said one of the guards, winking at the other. ‘I reckon we can help you there.’ They got up and stood either side of her; she was aware of two chins you could strike matches on and an overpowering smell of stale beer. Frantic signals from outlying portions of her mind began to break down her iron-hard conviction that bad things only happened to bad people.

They escorted her down several flights of steps into a maze of dank, arched passageways as she sought hurriedly for some polite way of disengaging herself.

‘I should warn you,’ she said, ‘I am not, as I may appear, a simple apple seller.’

‘Fancy that.’

‘I am, in fact, a witch.’

This did not make the impression she had hoped. The guards exchanged glances.

‘Fair enough,’ said one. ‘I’ve always wondered what it was like to kiss a witch. Around here they do say you gets turned into a frog.’

The other guard nudged him. ‘I reckon, then,’ he said, in the slow, ripe tones of one who thinks that what he is about to say next is going to be incredibly funny, ‘you kissed one years ago.’

The brief guffaw was suddenly interrupted when Magrat was flung against the wall and treated to a close up view of the guard’s nostrils.

‘Now listen to me, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘You ain’t the first witch we’ve had down here, if witch you be, but you could be lucky and walk out again. If you are nice to us, d’you see?’

There was a shrill, short scream from somewhere nearby.

‘That, you see,’ said the guard, ‘was a witch having it the hard way. You could do us all a favour, see? Lucky you met us, really.’