'Hodgesaargh?'
'Yes, miss?'
'I'm not an expert, of course, but I seem to recall that according to the commonly accepted legend of the phoenix it would never see its parent. You can only have one phoenix at a time. It's automatically an orphan. You see?'
'Um, may I add something?' said Oats. 'Miss Nitt is right, I have to say. The phoenix builds a nest and bursts into flame and the new bird arises from the ashes. I've read that. Anyway, it's an allegory.'
Hodgesaargh looked at the puppet phoenix on his arm and then looked bashfully at his feet.
'Sorry about that, miss.'
'So, you see, a phoenix can never see another phoenix,' said Agnes.
'Wouldn't know about that, miss,' said Hodgesaargh, still staring at his boots.
An idea struck Agnes. Hodgesaargh was always out of doors. 'Hodgesaargh?'
'Yes, miss?'
'Have you been out in the woods all morning?'
'Oh, yes, miss.'
'Have you seen Granny Weatherwax?'
'Yes, miss.'
'You have?'
'Yes, miss.'
'Where?'
'Up in the woods over towards the border, miss. At first light, miss.'
'Why didn't you tell me?'
'Er... did you want to know, miss?'
'Oh. Yes, sorry... What were you doing up there?'
Hodgesaargh blew a couple of quacks on his phoenix lure by way of explanation.
Agnes grabbed the priest again.
'Come on, let's get to the road and find Nanny-'
Hodgesaargh was left with his glove puppet and his lure and his knapsack and a deeply awkward feeling. He'd been brought up.to respect witches, and Miss Nitt was a witch. The man with her hadn't been a witch, but his manner fitted him into that class of people Hodgesaargh mentally pigeonholed as 'my betters', although in truth this was quite a large category. He wasn't about to disagree with his betters. Hodgesaargh was a one-man feudal system.
On the other hand, he thought, as he packed up and prepared to move on, books that were all about the world tended to be written by people who knew all about books rather than all about the world. All that stuff about birds hatching from ashes must have been written by someone who didn't know anything about birds. As for there only ever being one phoenix, well, that'd obviously been written down by a man who ought to get out in the fresh air more and meet some ladies. Birds came from eggs. Oh, the phoenix was one of those creatures that had learned to use magic, had built it right into its very existence, but magic was tricky stuff and nothing used any more of it than it needed to. So there'd be an egg, definitely. And eggs needed warmth, didn't they?
Hodgesaargh had been thinking about this a lot during the morning, as he tramped through damp bushes making the acquaintance of several disappointed ducks. He'd never bothered much about history, except the history of falconry, but he did know that there were once places - and in some cases still were - with a very high level of background magic, which made them rather exciting and not a good place to raise your young.
Maybe the phoenix, whatever it really looked like, was simply a bird who'd worked out a way of making incubation work very, very fast.
Hodgesaargh had actually got quite a long way, and if he'd had a bit more time he'd have worked out the next step, too.
It was well after noon before Granny Weatherwax came off the moor, and a watcher might have wondered why it took such a long time to cross a little patch of moorland.