Carpe Jugulum

rules like “Don’t fall into this huge pit of spikes” were there for a purpose. Perdita thought, to take an example at random, that things like table manners were a stupid and repressive idea. Agnes, on the other hand, was against being hit by flying bits of other people’s cabbage.
    Perdita thought a witch’s hat was a powerful symbol of authority. Agnes thought that a dumpy girl should not wear a tall hat, especially with black. It made her look as though someone had dropped a licorice-flavored ice-cream cone.
    The trouble was that although Agnes was right, so was Perdita. The pointy hat carried a lot of weight in the Ramtops. People talked to the hat, not to the person wearing it. When people were in serious trouble they went to a witch. *
    You had to wear black, too. Perdita liked black. Perdita thought black was cool. Agnes thought that black wasn’t a good color for the circumferentially challenged…oh, and that “cool” was a dumb word only used by people whose brains wouldn’t fill a spoon.
    Magrat Garlick hadn’t worn black and had probably never in her life said “cool” except when commenting on the temperature.
    Agnes stopped examining her pointiness in the mirror and looked around the cottage that had been Magrat’s and was now hers, and sighed. Her gaze took in the expensive, gold-edged card on the mantelpiece.
    Well, Magrat had certainly retired now, and had gone off to be Queen and if there was ever any doubt about that then there could be no doubt today. Agnes was puzzled at the way Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax still talked about her, though. They were proud (more or less) that she’d married the King, and agreed that it was the right kind of life for her, but while they never actually articulated the thought it hung in the air over their heads in flashing mental colors: Magrat had settled for second prize.
    Agnes had almost burst out laughing when she first realized this, but you wouldn’t be able to argue with them. They wouldn’t even see that there could be an argument.
    Granny Weatherwax lived in a cottage with a thatch so old there was quite a sprightly young tree growing in it, and got up and went to bed alone, and washed in the rain barrel. And Nanny Ogg was the most local person Agnes had ever met. She’d gone off to foreign parts, yes, but she always carried Lancre with her, like a sort of invisible hat. But they took it for granted that they were top of every tree, and the rest of the world was there for them to tinker with.
    Perdita thought that being a queen was just about the best thing you could be.
    Agnes though the best thing you could be was far away from Lancre, and good second best would be to be alone in your own head.
    She adjusted the hat as best she could and left the cottage.
    Witches never locked their doors. They never needed to.
    As she stepped out into the moonlight, two magpies landed on the thatch.

The current activities of the witch Granny Weatherwax would have puzzled a hidden observer.
    She peered at the flagstones just inside her back door and lifted the old rag rug in front of it with her toe.
    Then she walked to the front door, which was never used, and did the same thing there. She also examined the cracks around the edges of the doors.
    She went outside. There had been a sharp frost during the night, a spiteful little trick by the dying winter, and the drifts of leaves that still hung on in the shadows were crisp. In the harsh air she poked around in the flowerpots and bushes by the front door.
    Then she went back inside.
    She had a clock. Lancrastrians liked clocks, although they didn’t bother much about actual time in any length much shorter than an hour. If you needed to boil an egg, you sang fifteen verses of “Where Has All the Custard Gone?” under your breath. But the tick was a comfort on long evenings.
    Finally she sat down in her rocking chair and glared at the doorway.
    Owls were hooting in the forest when someone came running up the path and hammered on the door.
    Anyone who hadn’t heard about Granny’s iron self-control, which you could bend a horseshoe round, might just have thought they heard her give a tiny sigh of relief.
    “Well, it’s about time—” she began.

The excitement up at the castle was just a distant hum down here in the mews. The hawks and falcons sat hunched on their perches, lost in some inner world of stoop and updraft. There was the occasional clink of a chain or flutter of a