Carpe Jugulum

of taking people out of themselves? Now shut up, ’cos I’m thinkin’.”
    Agnes looked down at the green ball in her hands. A glass fishing float, five hundred miles from the sea. An ornament, like a shell. Not a crystal ball. You could use it like a crystal ball but it wasn’t a crystal ball…and she knew why that was important.
    Granny was a very traditional witch. Witches hadn’t always been popular. There might even be times—there had been times, long ago—when it was a good idea not to advertise what you were, and that was why all these things on the table didn’t betray their owner at all. There was no need for that anymore, there hadn’t been in Lancre for hundreds of years, but some habits get passed down in the blood.
    In fact things now worked the other way. Being a witch was an honorable trade in the mountains, but only the young ones invested in real crystal balls and colored knives and dribbly candles. The old ones…they stuck with simple kitchen cutlery, fishing floats, bits of wood, whose very ordinariness subtly advertised their status. Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple-corer.
    A sound she hadn’t been hearing stopped abruptly, and the silence echoed.
    Nanny glanced up.
    “Clock’s stopped,” she said.
    “It’s not even telling the right time,” said Agnes, turning to look at it.
    “Oh, she just kept it for the tick,” said Nanny.
    Agnes put down the glass ball.
    “I’m going to look around some more,” she said.
    She learned to look around when she visited someone’s home, because in one way it was a piece of clothing and had grown to fit their shape. It might show not just what they’d been doing, but what they’d been thinking. You might be visiting someone who expected you to know everything about everything, and in those circumstances you took every advantage you could get.
    Someone had told her that a witch’s cottage was her second face. Come to think of it, it had been Granny.
    It should be easy to read this place. Granny’s thoughts had the strength of hammer blows and they’d pounded her personality into the walls. If her cottage had been any more organic it would have had a pulse.
    Agnes wandered through to the dank little scullery. The copper wash pot had been scoured. A fork and a couple of shining spoons lay beside it, along with the washboard and scrubbing brush. The slop bucket gleamed, although the fragments of a broken cup in the bottom said that the recent intensive housework hadn’t been without its casualties.
    She pushed open the door into the old goat shed. Granny was not keeping goats at the moment, but her homemade beekeeping equipment was neatly laid out on a bench. She’d never needed much. If you needed smoke and a veil to deal with your bees, what was the point of being a witch?
    Bees…
    A moment later she was out in the garden, her ear pressed against a beehive.
    There were no bees flying this early in the day, but the sound inside was a roar.
    “They’ll know,” said a voice behind her. Agnes stood up so quickly she bumped her head on the hive roof.
    “But they won’t say,” Nanny added. “She’d have told ’em. Well done for thinkin’ about ’em, though.”
    Something chattered at them from a nearby branch. It was a magpie.
    “Good morning, Mister Magpie,” said Agnes automatically.
    “Bugger off, you bastard,” said Nanny, and reached down for a stick to throw. The bird swooped off to the other side of the clearing.
    “That’s bad luck,” said Agnes.
    “It will be if I get a chance to aim,” said Nanny. “Can’t stand those maggoty-pies.”
    “‘One for sorrow,’” said Agnes, watching the bird hop along a branch.
    “I always take the view there’s prob’ly going to be another one along in a minute,” said Nanny, dropping a stick.
    “‘Two for joy’?” said Agnes.
    “It’s ‘two for mirth.’”
    “Same thing, I suppose.”
    “Dunno about that,” said Nanny. “I was joyful when our Jason was born, but I can’t say I was laughin’ at the time. Come on, let’s have another look.”
    Two more magpies landed on the cottage’s antique thatch.
    “That’s ‘three for a girl—’” said Agnes nervously.
    “‘Three for a funeral’ is what I learned,” said Nanny. “But there’s lots of magpie rhymes. Look, you take her broomstick and have a look over toward the mountains, and I’ll—”
    “Wait,” said Agnes.
    Perdita was screaming