And so it was that when Lord Felmet came out of his bedroom he saw, coming along the passage towards him, a witch. There was no doubt about it. From the tip of her pointed hat to her boots, she was a witch. And she was coming for him.
Magrat slid helplessly down a bank. She was soaked to the skin and covered in mud. Somehow, she thought bitterly, when you read these spells you always think of it being a fine sunny morning in late spring. And she had forgotten to check what bloody kind of bloody fern it bloody was.
A tree tipped a load of raindrops on to her. Magrat pushed her sodden hair out of her eyes and sat down heavily on a fallen log, from which grew great clusters of pale and embarrassing fungus.
It had seemed such a lovely idea. She'd had great hopes of the coven. She was sure it wasn't right to be a witch alone, you could get funny ideas. She'd dreamed of wise discussions of natural energies while a huge moon hung in the sky, and then possibly they'd try a few of the old dances described in some of Goodie Whemper's books. Not actually naked, or sky clad as it was rather delightfully called, because Magrat had no illusions about the shape of her own body and the older witches seemed solid across the hems, and anyway that wasn't absolutely necessary. The books said that the old-time witches had sometimes danced in their shifts. Magrat had wondered about how you danced in shifts. Perhaps there wasn't room for them all to dance at once, she'd thought.
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.